Impeachment Predictions   When future scholars ponder our Impeachment Year, it's likely that they'll view it quite differently from most of us today. All the fury over Clinton's sex disfunction, Monica's dress, even Starr's inquisition will fade into history's trivia; what remains will be the story of two powerful groups that dishonestly manipulated events to promote their own agendas.

The most obvious villian is the GOP -- a party bereft in recent years of any platform except for its ceaseless attack upon Bill Clinton. As the Monitor explained in our overview of 1998 overlooked stories, Clinton-bashing was a cheap way for them to pander to their Christian Right shock troops, which have reliably marched to the polls and voted against Demos. After a year of intensive hammering on Clinton-sex, the GOP was confident before the November election that they would take firm control of both the House and Senate.

It didn't turn out that way, of course. Barely over half of the 1998 religious crew voted Repub, with a third voting Demo. As a result, it appears that the GOP is quickly backing away from their message of rigid intolerance. As we predicted in December, the impeachment trial would allow them to have it both ways. They would toady to the Christian Right by taking a moral absolutist stance in the 1998 House, but then posture as sensible moderates in the 1999 Senate.

The GOP alone wasn't alone responsible for our Impeachment Year, however; in fact, they wouldn't have gotten very far without substantial help from another group that exploited the events -- the American press.

Both print and broadcast media embraced the story for the same reason as the Republicans: sex excites. If the GOP hoped reaction to Monica Lewinsky might bring more voters out on election day, media directors and publishers knew that the President's maybe-lover would help them sell more papers or draw more viewers.

There surely was no true conspiracy, no cabal between House Republicans and the editorial board of major American media to promote and prolong the story; but there was a symbiotic relationship between those who wanted to destroy Clinton and those who needed a daily helping of Clinton scandal to keep circulation or viewership from dropping. And this sordid little descent to the gutter was led not by the supermarket tabloids, not by the Internet's Matt Drudge, but by the most influential newspapers in America -- The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post.

While their coverage offered by those papers didn't approach the reckless claims found in right-wing bastions like the Washington Times, they weren't that far behind, either. The Post led the pack in quoting anonymous sources. In an excellent Time magazine summary of the rumors surrounding "Monica's Love Dress," it was shown how desperately the Post was overreaching for anything that looked like news:

On Jan. 27 the Washington Post reported that a "person who saw Clinton over the weekend" told a friend that Clinton had said on the subject, "There is no dress." It was unclear, the Post said, "whether the President was referring to reports of a dress containing incriminating evidence or a dress he reportedly gave Lewinsky as a gift."

But as months passed, a far more troubling pattern emerged at one major newspaper. Here bias surfaced in the omissions. Never were Clinton's critics given the scrutiny deserved, and never were the critics of the critics given fair hearing. The newspaper was The New York Times.

We first noticed this exactly a year ago, at the end of February 1998, when the Monitor editorial, "Counting Lewinskys" appeared. It accurately forecast what was to come. On February 19 -- a day when there was little to report on the story -- we found Lewinsky's name appeared 22 times in the front section of The New York Times. It was this constant attention, with nearly a daily item on the story in the respectable Times, that lent a stolid credibility to the Lewinsky matter, and thus legitimatized Kenneth Starr's creepshow.

The clearest examples of Times bias can be found as the election neared, with the GOP loudly pounding the drums for impeachment. In the September 6 edition -- with its mammoth Sunday readership -- the New York Times Magazine profiled Kenneth Starr, painting the Independent Counsel as a wee bit naive (not "streetwise," the author wrote), but an earnest judge who agonizes over finding The Truth. It quoted a speech he had recently made that urged lawyers to be take "the moral high ground of Atticus Finch," the country lawyer from the famous novel "To Kill a Mockingbird" who defended a black man charged with murder in the racist South.

Then the next Sunday, square in the middle of the Times front page, was a puff piece on Henry Hyde, chair of the House Judiciary Committee who would play a key role in the House impeachment debate and later Senate trial. The Times called Hyde a "...golden-tounged lawmaker [who] has alternately frustrated, infuriated, and trumped his peers with his ideological ferocity. But he has also earned their universal respect...." Monitor countered with a feature article: "The Ethics of Henry Hyde" that showed Hyde was hardly the "widely respected conservative" the Times touted. To the contrary: The Illinois Representative is better known as a vindictive, right-wing ideologue who has abused his considerable power repeatedly. Were it a just world, it would be Hyde facing the thumbscrews of a Senate trial.

For brevity's sake, let's flash ahead to mid-January, as the Senate was about to begin the trial of President Clinton. Incredibly, the Times ran another glowing piece about Hyde, again on the mega-readership Sunday front page. This time, the article explained how "the famously fair-minded and genteel gentleman from Illinois... became convinced that he had no choice but to push forward and impeach the President..."

Also near this time is an example of selective coverage from the Times newsroom. Widely reported nationally was that porn publisher Larry Flynt offered rewards for anyone with evidence of a Congressional sexual dalliance. He struck paydirt with Georgia Rep. Bob Barr, one of the House managers about to present the case to the Senate. Barr, it was revealed, took the fifth amendment about questions of adultery during his divorce from wife #2. Hardly the sort of man to argue that Clinton used legal foofraw to hide from the revealing sexual misdeeds.

But no mention of Flynt's apt point appeared in the Times' news sections, and only one op-ed discussed this controversial story. It fell to the January 17 (another Sunday -- of course) for the Times to actually mention any of this. In the "Week in Review" section, Felicity Barringer explained:

Joseph Lelyveld, the executive editor of The New York Times, sent no reporter to the Flynt press conference. "This is the only area of news where I can't imagine wanting to be first," he said. When it comes to covering the sex lives of public figures, he added, "I need not just an excuse to do it. I need to be deprived of my last excuse not to do it." The Times made a passing reference to allegations about Mr. Barr's "past" in its impeachment coverage on Thursday.

Likewise The Wall Street Journal demonstrated its hypocrisy by boycotting the Flynt story. The same Jan. 17 Times story quoted the Journal's Washington bureau head Alan Murray, saying he was content to be in "a race to be last" with sexual revelations about public figures. But Murray sang differently a year earlier, when he boasted on a TV news show that the Journal had scooped other media on the "Secret Service Agent Saw Them Do It" story -- another anonymous whisper which turned out to be untrue.

Now that the impeachment trial is over, it's clear that considerable damage has been done. Harmed is not "the office of the Presidency" or "Rule of Law," as pundits claim. What's more worrisome is what the Impeachment Year might have unleashed in the people who believed it was truly significant, and would end in some sort of vindication.

Listen to your local Hate Radio station for a bit; there's certainly one in your community. From the callers you'll hear bitterness and fury. To them, if any allegation against Clinton were true, then all allegations must have been true. If Clinton had diddled with Monica, then surely he had ordered cabinet member Ron Brown murdered in a jet crash, and Hillary personally shot out the brains of her jilted-lover Vince Foster. It's nuts.

Likewise considerable risk remains for the GOP. Having whipped their hardest-core followers into a Monica frenzy, they may lose in the Y2000 elections if this vengeful hardcore will bolt to a third party. Surely many party leaders must now worry that they could follow the fate of Robespierre, who led the French mobs during the Reign of Terror before falling victim himself. (February 26, 1999)

Olympic Scandals   Sometimes a news story comes along that gives an editor fits. Such was the case with the Olympics bribery scandal, when Utah officials were discovered to have given members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) more than $1 million as they successfully made their bid to host the 2002 Winter Games. But was it a sports story or a news story? If the latter, was it international news (bribed IOC officials), regional news (Salt Lake City boosters making payoffs), or a national story (U.S. city buys corrupt officials)? In the end, some of the best commentary appeared on the sports pages, while stories with the important details about the affair staggered around different parts of the news section.

As of this writing, it's been discovered that 24 of the 125-member IOC took lavish gifts from the generous Utah Committee or their friends. The bribes were astonishingly brazen. Besides the usual cash and first-class plane tickets, there was a joint $70,000 bank account with a IOC member, a $5,000 monogramed rifle, and almost $110,000 to the daughter of an IOC member for tuition and living expenses -- they even helped her break a lease so that she could move to a tony apartment.

But the most shocking bit of news appears to be lost in the shuffle: That the Utah Committee reportedly kept a dossier on the sexual orientation of IOC members.

This shocking news came from Tom Godfrey, a former Salt Lake city councilman, who told USA TODAY that someone spilled the beans at a 1995 dinner party in Budapest, two days before Salt Lake was awarded the Games. "In a dinner one night ... [former Committee vice president] Dave Johnson's wife told me that Dave had files on all the IOC members, even down to their sexual preferences," Godfrey said. "I didn't think anything of it -- it didn't come back until all this other stuff started to break and I thought, 'Gosh, would we have used that bit of information to try to sway votes or not?'"

The Johnson's lawyer immediately suggested that the councilman's memory might be lacking. "One of the European bid cities had such information in those files. Maybe he heard a discussion about the European city." But another former Salt Lake City politician confirmed that Godfrey had told him about the conversation at the time.

Yet this part of the story was dropped; there were no followup questions about the ugly little possibility that there might have been plans for extortion of IOC members by the gung-ho Committee. That it disappeared can likely be blamed on the same lack of editorial direction that kept the overall story wandering; the few sports / news reporters assigned to the story seemed overwhelmed just following the details about the financial bribes that tumbled out daily.

If Utah did compile records on the sexual orientation and preferences of the IOC, it wouldn't have been the first time. It was discovered that in the 1993 competition to host the Y2000 games, the Berlin Committee had dossiers on members' sexuality as well as drug and alcohol use. (February 10, 1999)

Pharmaceutical Fraud   While the Olympic scandal reporting suffered because of shuffling between news and sports, other stories don't find readership because they stay compartmentalized. In recent months, for example, there's been good coverage of lawsuits charging drug makers with price gouging. But these stories are appearing only in the business sections of U.S. newspapers, even though it deserves to be in a general news section where it can be seen by all consumers.

In mid-February, 19 pharmaceutical makers agreed to pay $176 million to settle a price gouging suit where high-volume HMOs were paying pennies for the same pills that cost drug stores a few bucks.

Although the companies settled, it's not expected to change business practices. "The settlement is no damn good because it does nothing to alter the behavior of the drug companies," Fred Mayer, past president of the California Public Health Association griped to the business reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. "It represents a cheap settlement for the drug companies and they'll go on, business as usual, ripping off the public."

But the biggest single story is about Mylan Laboratories Inc., a leading generic pharmaceutical manufacturer. In December, the FTC charged that the company captured the entire market for two anxiety drugs widely prescribed to the elderly. Mylan, the government said, locked up the supply of key ingredients, then jacked up the price. The wholesale cost for one bottle of pills zoomed from $7.30 to $190. Increases for another drug was even higher: the price went from $11.36 to $377.

The media's failure wasn't just that the Mylan scandal appeared only in business sections, or that there were less than a total of two dozen stories nationwide (and half of them came from a single newspaper: the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, in Mylan's hometown). No, the media's shame is that these types of stories rarely appear at all -- read on for another example. (February 18, 1999)

Nestle Ethics   The Mylan case illustrates a point we've made often in the Monitor: The average large-city American newspaper doesn't care much for its readers. Stories warning of rip-offs by corporations such as Mylan are rare. Why is that? Partly because there's no advocate for consumers in the newsroom. While the business desk has a full-time staff, it's unusual to find a single reporter watching for consumer-interest news.

Another reason is that corporate newspapers don't like to embarass advertisers. Mylan spends about $11 million per year on ads and promotions, but that's beans compared to the $$ spent by drug store chains buying newspaper inserts and full page ads. (And those ads frequently boost generic drugs -- pills that the chain is marking up scandalously, sometimes more than 2,000 percent above their cost.) Do you think it likely that the editorial department considered the possible embarassment that the Mylan story could bring these major advertisers? Likely so: Recall that a few years ago, the San Jose Mercury News lost about $1 million in revenue when a group of big advertisers boycotted the paper to protest a story unflattering to their industry. As we've editorialized before, ads and journalism are a dangerous mix.

If there's any question that American newspapers avoid embarassing corporate news, consider this case: Not a single paper carried the news earlier this month that Nestle -- the world's largest food company -- was found guilty of making fraudulent claims.

Old-timers will remember that the transnational corporation was the target of a worldwide boycott two decades ago. The World Health Organization and others found that Nestle was using aggressive and unethical means to push its expensive infant formula in the Third World; among their favorite tricks was distributing free samples just long enough for the mother's breast milk to stop. In 1981, the World Health Assembly adopted a code to ensure that mothers are protected from "inappropriate promotional activities" of companies like Nestle, requiring them to supply information that breast feeding provides the best nutrition.

In 1996, Nestle began running ads boasting of their high principles. "Even before the World Health Organization's International Code of Marketing Breast-Milk Substitutes was introduced in 1981 Nestle marketed infant formula ethically and responsibly and has done so ever since," the print ads read. "Naturally they (Nestle employees) do not provide free supplies to hospitals for use with healthy infants."

Um... no. As was reported in the Monitor in 1997, the Swiss corporation continued to violate the baby milk agreement in principle, and was actively pushing formula on new mothers in countries like China as late as 1994. In early February, England's official Advertising Standards Authority ruled that the Nestle ads were unethical because they implied such practices had ended "a very long time" ago. The censure was covered in the British and Canadian press, but completely ignored in the U.S.

Perhaps even sadder, the watchdog group that's dogged Nestle on this issue, Baby Milk Action, was also ignored when they were awarded the Swedish government's coveted Right Livelihood Award, widely nicknamed the "Alternative Nobel." The group won a share of $230,000 awarded to individuals or groups with "a vision of one humanity, a science of permanence, and an ethic of justice and sustainability which accepts our role as caretakers of the planet." But not a single American newspaper mentioned anything of that, either -- to honor Baby Milk Action would be to shame Nestle. (February 24, 1999)