In the late 1990s, President Bill Clinton was accused of selling burial plots at Arlington National Cemetery. The scandal made front page news all over the country. The problem: none of it was true. Lanny Davis, Clinton’s former special counsel, explains why this happened in part two of this exclusive interview for The Good, The Bad, The Spin.

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LANNY DAVIS is former special counsel to President Bill Clinton. While in the White House from 1996 through 1998, Davis was assigned the difficult tasks of handling negative allegations against the President. He had to seemingly work against the formal machinations of the White House in order to give the President credibility in the face of, at times, bizarre allegations of impropriety. His experience is chronicled in his 2003 book, Truth To Tell: Tell It Early, Tell It All, Tell It Yourself: Notes from My White House Education.

Truth To Tell presents an inside view of media relations at the highest political level and soundly presents the story behind the stories. Davis’ latest book, Scandal: How “Gotcha” Politics Is Destroying America, sets America’s scandal culture in a much broader context by presenting the history of American political scandals through today’s 24-7 news cycle and the resulting extreme partisanship we see today. In the end, Davis presents a voice for commonality among political views. He now works as a litigator focusing on crisis management in Washington, D.C.

This is the second installment in a multi-part interview with Davis about crises and media relations. The first is posted here. Please check back for future installments. Better yet, click the Subscribe link at right to get new posts by email or into your feed reader.

Has today’s scandal-laden culture influenced newsroom ethics as you see it?

LANNY DAVIS: It goes back to Federalism and the Jeffersonians, which I start my book out with. There always has been scandal and there has always been journalism that isn’t fact-based but is more innuendo-based. There’s nothing really new here. What happened since Watergate is the invention of the Internet, the 24-7 news cycle and hyper-partisanship that really makes the Federalists and the Jeffersonians look tame.

You put those three things together and throw into the cauldron the independent counsel statute, which thankfully is no longer with us, and you have the most destructive and powerful scandal machine operating all at once, altogether during the Clinton years. But it’s just a difference by degree. It’s pretty common for this kind of scandal-mongering to go on in American politics since Hamilton and Jefferson hated each other so much.

The recent trend is to counter allegations within scandals is for a person or organization to post their side of the story on their own Web site. Some recent examples are the Transportation Security Administration and General Motors. It seems to me some of these tactics are seen with mixed success. It appears that those who respond quickly and aggressively to allegations either tend to kill or minimize inaccurate and damaging claims. Obviously the Internet has helped organizations to be more transparent and be quicker to publicly respond under the organization’s own rules—not the news media’s.

LD: There’s no doubt that there’s a great plus and a great minus to Internet and to the blogosphere, but I fear the great minus is being underappreciated.

The great plus is the democratization of information. The monopoly held by a few networks and a few editors–literally probably a dozen people up until the 1990s–controlled the agenda of news. For example, the New York Times front-page editor, deciding what to put on the front page, may have been the second most powerful person in the country because, based on that decision, every major network would decide what stories to lead with.

Those decisions by the networks were made by a handful of people. There were no cable competitors. There were just three or four network newscasts, and that’s the way people got their information every night. So if you look at a very elite and very powerful, small group of people making decisions setting news agendas, versus now which is if not chaos at least anarchy in the good sense of where information can be gotten from and who’s making decisions as to what is on the agenda, it is now a much broader, more democratic process. That’s all for the good.

What about the negative?

The negative is very understated because there’s such a bias in favor of all those positive words I just used. What’s unbelievably dangerous is the acceptance of garbage, innuendo, vicious, personal attacks and most importantly, journalism cloaked as journalism that is in fact nothing more than innuendo dressed up as journalism posted on some Web site or blog. People don’t note the difference between someone posting on a blog site versus somebody who has adult supervision and has to have facts to support what they write. That’s what most editors in most major newspapers require. We’ve lost some of that. Admittedly, facts are no longer the test of what gets published, but at least that’s a Columbia journalism goal.

It’s very, very dangerous. People believe what they read on the Web and on these blog sites. They think they are facts because they are repeated so often. The Googlization of the search engine culture that we’re in means that you go searching for a term, you pick up 28 different mentions of a particular, asserted fact, it looks true and you believe it. It gains conventional truth by repetition, when in fact it’s completely false or completely made up or a character assassination that can be repeated on Youtube 2 million times. I call it a new form of McCarthyism that is now more virulent on the left than it is on the right, which I used to think was not possible. I write about it in my book, whether it’s left or right, it’s very, very dangerous as the dominant form of the political dialogue on the blogosphere.

The rule of journalism used to be that you don’t write anything other than verified facts. It’s not a fact because somebody else said it. At the Clinton Whitehouse, I’d have reporters telling me, “Well, I can write this because it’s out there.” Starting with Watergate, the school of Columbia and Northwestern kind of journalism, where you only write facts, was already in decline. An example: The Arlington Cemetery story got picked up and written on the front page of every major newspaper in the United States. The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times … everyone of them would say they followed Northwestern-Columbia rules. When I asked them, “But have you verified that Clinton sold burial sites at Arlington?” They said they verified it. In fact, documents were repeated all over the place. “But have you verified it?” I asked. “Well, no, but it’s already out there.”

The blogosphere’s really taken it one step further. It doesn’t even have to be out there. It can be invented, it gets picked up on Google and it gets repeated, whether its Rush Limbaugh or the Daily Kos. Same thing. It doesn’t matter whether it’s true.

So the democratization of information, which sounded like such a great thing when I talked about how positive the Internet is, I think has humongous dangers going right back to Joseph McCarthy in the ’50s, who could ruin lives just by headline.

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