Free Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! by Andrew Breitbart

back and said, ‘We talked to her, she denied everything. We believe her.’ Or they said, ‘We questioned her. She sounds like a flake. We are dropping the whole investigation.’ Then we would have been irresponsible to write a wildfire story about sex in the White House.” At 4:45 p.m. ET on Saturday, Editor in Chief Richard Smith said that
Newsweek
was going to hold the story pending further investigation.
    All of this reeked of Clinton-defending, even the tone of the comments. Whitaker characterized the Lewinsky scandal as “a story about sex in the White House,” which it wasn’t—it was a story about the president of the United States committing perjury. Isikoff was acting as though journalistic standards were the same as jury standards—beyond a reasonable doubt, when he could simply have run with the story and let the world know that there were tapes of a White House intern talking about giving the president of the United States blow jobs in the Oval Office. That’s a story in itself.
    The Clinton-defending carried over the next morning on ABC’s
This Week
with Sam Donaldson.
Weekly Standard
editor Bill Kristol brought up the story on the panel, freaking out everybody else there: “The story in Washington this morning is that
Newsweek
magazine was going to go with a big story based on tape-recorded conversations, which a woman who was a summer intern at the White House, an intern of Leon Panetta’s—” 2
    Immediately, ABC commentator and former Clinton flack George Stephanopoulos jumped in, stating that the Drudge Reporthad been “discredited.” This was a position crafted by the Clinton White House—Stephanopoulos had in fact called up the White House that morning and spoken with John Podesta, Clinton’s chief of staff, who told him, “The only way you can respond to it is to say, ‘This is Drudge, he’s a rumormonger… and you can’t believe what you read in the
Drudge Report
.” 3
    Kristol responded, “No, no, no! They had screaming arguments in
Newsweek
magazine yesterday. They finally didn’t go with the story. It’s going to be a question of whether the media is now going to report what are pretty well-validated charges of presidential behavior in the White House—” At which point Sam Donaldson intervened and said that he didn’t think anyone should comment on the Drudge Report story until
Newsweek
had a chance to explain why it killed the story. 4
    It was typical baffling-with-bullshit from the Democrat-Media Complex. Stephanopoulos, by the way, has now been rewarded by ABC News, his employer, with the false label of a neutral, objective reporter—not once, but twice—for thwarting legitimate stories. Early in the 1990s, Stephanopoulos acted to prevent the #1
New York Times
bestselling author Gary Aldrich from talking about what life was like coordinating FBI efforts to vet employees under Clinton. (Aldrich basically said it was like trying to vet a druggie fraternity house—a test I would have failed, but then, no sane person would have nominated me.) Sam Donaldson was saying it wasn’t even worth discussing until
Newsweek
got a chance to explain itself. The Democrat-Media Complex protects its own—and in the case of Stephanopoulos, it rewards former political hacks with journalistic firewall status. They get to pretend to be independent-minded people while actually acting as barbed-wire fences protecting their masters from insurgent campaigns from the right.
    With
This Week
, the blackout had begun. Doyle McManus,Washington bureau chief of the
Los Angeles Times
, said, “I looked at [the Drudge Report] and thought, ‘If Isikoff wants to pursue that story, he’s welcome to it.’ ” 5 On CBS’s
Face the Nation
and NBC’s
Meet the Press
, lawyers appeared to talk about Paula Jones’s legal strategy—and nobody mentioned the Drudge story. Tim Russert refused to touch it because, “There’s not enough there.” He asked James Carville, Clinton’s attack dog, whether