Call Guys
All three majors working the weekend agree on today's lead: the decision by
Janet Reno to begin the investigative process that could result in appointing
an independent counsel to investigate President Clinton's 1996 election
fund-raising activities. This news comes on the heels of Reno's decision two
weeks ago to take the same look at Al Gore.
The Washington Post says the decision is based on new
information developed by federal investigators that Clinton may have made
campaign fund solicitation calls from the White House, and reports that the
White House response is two-pronged: Clinton says he doesn't remember making
such calls, and there is no clear legal precedent to show that they would be
illegal anyway.
The New York Times
calls the Reno decision a "potential turning point" in that "until now, the
investigation buffeting the administration had swirled around the Oval Office
but had not touched Clinton personally...."
The new evidence apparently includes solicitation call sheets that were
prepared for Clinton, for calls to fat cats who indisputably gave money to the
DNC. What's in dispute is whether Clinton actually made the calls. The NYT
refers to a call sheet for beer baron August Busch IV. The WP opts
instead for ones for a Maryland businessman and for Frank Zappa's widow Gail.
The natural assumption that all the papers had access to the same call sheets
leads to a homework assignment: Does the WP or Newsweek or any
Post company television station carry Busch product ads?
Only the Los Angeles Times makes the observation that puts this
development in the proper context: Clinton has already been under the scrutiny
of a special prosecutor for three years. (Remember Whitewater?)
Clinton wasn't informed until Saturday--he was in California on his way to a
$1 million fund-raiser (!)--which meant that the story was kept out of Friday
headlines and newscasts. But what's the gain? It's dominating the Sunday
papers, which in turn set the agenda for the Sunday political talk shows.
There's just no escaping the news cycle anymore.
The NYT runs a front-page explanatory piece on last week's Teamster
guilty pleas. Worth doing, because the case could well lead to deeper trouble
for the DNC. Unfortunately, the piece doesn't excel at explanation. True, it
has the understandable problem of trying to be clear about describing schemes
that were designed to be murky, but it doesn't help that the story doesn't even
begin to explain until the 26th paragraph why the Teamster fund-raising deals
in question were illegal, and even then none too clearly. Isn't the relevant
law that the union can't donate money to either candidate, and hence can't
create schemes that do that while appearing to be donations from somebody else?
And shouldn't the Times just say so?
The WP runs a piece about the decline in the accuracy of directory
assistance information, saying that the trend arises from increased competition
and hence decreased cooperation between local phone companies and AT&T.
They used to freely share numbers, but now they charge each other through the
nose. The result is that AT&T and many regional phone companies are now
attempting to compile their own data bases from other sources, like credit card
files, DMV records, etc.--with decidedly mixed results.
The NYT 's "Editorial Notebook" item about Chelsea Clinton's arrival
at Stanford makes a good point. If the Clintons are so concerned that the media
respect Chelsea's privacy at school, then perhaps they should have let Chelsea
arrive on her own "attended perhaps by a handful of Secret Service agents
rather than arriving in a Presidential motorcade and trailed by hundreds of
reporters and cameramen...."
