Brox Crox Redux!
Turns out David Brock's recent Esquire confessional didn't quite
confess to everything. In Esquire , Brock writes that "a major
contributor to Newt Gingrich's GOPAC" introduced him to the "gothic world of
anti-Clintonism." Why would Brock, in his tell-all, decline to name this "major
contributor?" Now we know. Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times reported
this week that the "contributor," a Chicago investment banker named Peter
Smith, did more than introduce Brock to the anti-Clinton world. He paid
Brock $5,000 for "research expenses." ... What's wrong with a reporter taking
money like that? Nothing, at least in Chatterbox's book. Brock apparently
wasn't a full-time employee of the American Spectator at the time. So
someone who wants a story written paid him to research the story. When the Ford
Foundation does the same thing, they call it a prestigious fellowship! ... But
if Brock thought it was OK to take the money, why did he seemingly hide
that fact in Esquire ? And why did it apparently take Smith showing the
cancelled $5,000 check to Sweet to get Brock to fess up? In the New York
Post , Brock is quoted as saying "I didn't immediately remember, but I never
denied it. ... I said if [Smith] has the documentation, I'd be happy to confirm
it." Do you believe Brock didn't remember getting $5,000 from a secretive
anti-Clinton operative? Private citizens don't run around offering that kind of
money to freelance journalists every day, at least that has (unfortunately)
been Chatterbox's experience. It's especially implausible that Brock "didn't
remember" the payment when he had just finished writing what was supposed to be
a confessional article detailing his own journalistic missteps in the service
of the Clinton-haters--an article that included criticism of "the GOPAC
moneyman" (Smith) for offering to give "legal expense" checks to the
anti-Clinton troopers. But if Brock is dissembling about his memory of the
$5,000, what else is he dissembling about? .... Brock didn't return a phone
call asking for comment. Here Chatterbox goes the extra mile to be fair, and
look what happens! ...
Follow-Up on the News!: As predicted in yesterday's Chatterbox, the
relatively good news contained in the overall admissions figures for the entire
8-campus University of California system--which showed black and Hispanic
admissions dropping by only 17 and 7 percent, respectively, in the wake of
Prop. 209's rollback of race preferences--was either ignored or buried by the
press. Neither the New York Times or Washington Post carried the
story. The Los Angeles Times ran a below-the-fold piece on page A3, the
headline and lead paragraphs of which discussed the non-news that UC plans, as
it always does, to offer qualified students rejected by their chosen campuses
spots somewhere in the UC system. Only in the fourth paragraph does
education writer Kenneth Weiss note the "figures released Thursday showing that
blacks and Latinos systemwide did not fare as badly as they had at the
university's most competitive campuses." Contrast this with the front-page
treatment given two days earlier in the LAT , New York Times and
Washington Post to the bad news about the large drops in black and
Latino admissions at those two most-competitive campuses, Berkeley and UCLA.
Chatterbox's paranoid fears have been borne out! This will only encourage him.
...
Some readers wondered why Chatterbox made such a big deal about the delayed
release of the UC systemwide figures, since the figures for each of the eight
individual UC campuses were available earlier, and indeed were printed on the
back page of the New York Times in a chart accompanying the April 1
story about the grim Berkeley and UCLA results. Couldn't any intelligent
reader--or Chatterbox--have just added up the figures from the 8 campuses to
get the systemwide total? The answer is no. If you did that, you'd double-count
a student who was accepted, say, to both UCLA and San Diego. Only when the
university itself recalculated the 8-campus figures to eliminate this
duplication were accurate systemwide results available to the press. Too bad
they didn't get reported. ...
