Reply #22: Olson admitted he 'misspoke' to senate during solicitor general

[bobbieinok]

nomination hearing.......he said he had nothing to do with the Arkansas Project (the project to destroy Clinton; they tried to take him out b/c he was the 'best' candidate against Poppy

later he admitted he did work on the project

see Lyons and Conason The Hunting of the President: The Ten Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton

first reader review at amazon.com

ginning in late 1993, I began to read news reports in my local newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News, which contained serious but unsubstantiated allegations about an Arkansas land deal known as Whitewater and the possible criminality of the President and his wife. There seemed to be quite a few of these "news articles" and I began to wonder if all of that smoke did not have a substantial fire at its center. Four years later, I start "pulling" the articles on Whitewater and by now, the numerous "Gates" being investigated and reported on in the daily newspapers, from the archives of the Mercury News and about twenty other Knight-Ridder newspapers across the country. One of the things I learned that a large proportion of these stories were by four reporters -- Jeff Gerth and Stephen Labaton of the New York Times, Michael Isikoff and Susan Schmidt of the Washington Post.

This was an interesting experience, and can be duplicated by anyone reading these words. This is what I discovered: In the San Jose Mercury News alone from October 31 1993 to March 31, 1994, there were a total of 163 stories. Of these, 158 had been published in a 106-day span of time from December 16, 1993 to the end of March, about 1.5 stories a day or two stories every three days. It became even more interesting when I "pulled" the "Whitewater" and "Madison Guaranty" stories from twenty Knight-Ridder newspapers in the 62 days from October 31,1993 to December 31, 1993. There were no less than 83 unique items, about 1.3 items a day, and of course many of the newspapers were publishing identical stories during this time. When you look at the coverage in this way, it looks more like indoctrination rather than reporting.

What were the sources of these unsubstantiated allegations? Joe Conason and Gene Lyons describe these sources in The Hunting of the President as a loose cabal of "longtime Clinton adversaries," "defeated politicians, disappointed office seekers, right-wing pamphleteers, wealthy eccentrics, zany private detectives, religious fanatics," and in my view, the primary culprit -- "die-hard segregationists. . . . " Here, as in the rest of the book, Conason and Lyons restrain themselves from going beyond what they can prove or substantiate from sources -- a demonstration of journalism as it should be practised in this age of "infotainment."

But this cabal had a powerful effect on this country and its politics because as Conason and Lyons tell us in detail, the once-respected New York Times and Washington Post not only published unsubstantiated allegation after unsubstantiated allegation, they also withheld any exculpatory information. Like sheep, the rest of Mainstream Media passively followed.

And here is the real danger the authors expose. The cabal was the source of the allegations which acted as toxins poisoning political discourse in this country. But the Mainstream Media was continuously pumping these toxins into the blood stream of America. Without the criminal carelessness and disregard of the Mainstream Media, the press, the TV, and talk radio, the cabal would have affected only a small hate-filled audience on the right. Instead the poison was spread throughout the country, and into every metropolitan area, city and small town.