Richard Mellon Scaife, “With Michael Isikoff”?

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I found this article on Richard Mellon Scaife’s newfound admiration for the Clinton’s via tristero. It’s a remarkable article, in that it frames Scaife’s purported admiration for the Clinton’s against the background of Scaife’s smear factory from the nineties, all told in a pseudo-objective omniscient third person voice.

Scaife was no run-of-the-mill Clinton hater. In the 1990s, the heirto the Mellon banking fortune contributed millions to efforts to dig updirt on President Clinton. He backed the Clinton-bashing AmericanSpectator magazine, whose muckrakers produced lurid stories aboutClinton’s alleged financial improprieties and trysts. Scaife alsofinanced a probe called the Arkansas Project that tried, among otherthings, to show that Clinton, while Arkansas governor, protected drugrunners.

The Arkansas Project largely came up empty,and most of the stories were ignored by all but the most avid Clintonantagonists. But one Scaife-backed conspiracy theory got widespreadattention. In 1993, White House aide and Clinton friend Vince Fosterwas found dead of a gunshot wound in a park outside Washington, D.C.Three official investigations concluded the death was a suicide. YetScaife dollars helped promote assertions that Foster had beenmurdered—the not-so-subtle subtext being that the Clintons hadsomething to do with it. Scaife hired Christopher Ruddy,a reporter who doggedly pursued the conspiracy theory in a Scaifenewspaper, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Though discredited, the storyresonated with people who believed Clinton was hiding dark secrets.Scaife and Ruddy later started Newsmax, a Web site and magazine thatattacks their enemies and lauds their heroes.

All presented as if a reporting team that includes Michael Isikoff would need to do any actual reporting to tell the story of the smear campaigns directed at the Clintons. And note: Isikoff does not include himself in his little narrative of his former life, nor does anyone admit that much of the vocabulary used here–Ruddy as "a dogged reporter"?–makes a pretty bold value judgment coming from someone deeply involved in this swamp, particularly given that Ruddy is pretty clearly the source of the "scoop."

And then the actual scoop–that Scaife recently donated money to Clinton’s AIDS in Africa program–is introduced with Newsweek’s pseudo-impersonal "NEWSWEEK has learned." To be fair, that’s a structure Hosenball and Isikoff use regularly. But in this case, it deserves attention for the way it obscures the most important information about the story: who got the scoop (Hosenball or Isikoff?), whether it was peddled (Scaife to Isikoff, who then had Hosenball do an "objective" report on it?) or whether any actual reporting was involved. "NEWSWEEK has learned" in a sort of immaculate conception style or reporting.

Now add to this pseudo-objective structure the designated authorship of the article. This is Isikoff and Hosenball’s weekly article. Yet Hosenball gets the byline; Isikoff is relegated to a note at the end, "With Michael Isikoff." That’s remarkable particularly since a lot of Hosenball and Isikoff’s stories are clearly one or the other of the partner’s. Yet normally, they give both full credit, even if one is working harder than the other in a given week.

All I’m saying, I guess, is the article is as remarkable for its narrative evasions as it is for the actual news it reports: that the Clintons are making nice with yet another institution of Right Wing smear.

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  1. Anonymous says:

    Shorter Sneaky Mikey: â€If I leave my name off the byline, they’ll never find my fingerprints.â€

  2. earlofhuntingdon says:

    Queen Hillary’s attempt at a permanent, corporatist majority. Progressives need to remind her, or whomever wins the nod, what it means to be a Democrat. Most especially, they need to do a thorough house cleaning of machine politicians, sending them off without their public employment contracts to work in the real world.

  3. Sally says:

    â€â€¦that the Clintons are making nice with yet another institution of Right Wing smear.â€

    It may also be that the right-wing Clinton smearers are making nice with the Clintons. And that may be the reason Isikoff doesn’t want much credit for the article.

  4. emptywheel says:

    I actually mean to return to the thaw between the Clintons and their critics. I think they’re all three (Scaife, Drudge, and Murdoch) different issues. But one thing I found amusing about this story is it claimed, twice, that this was a mutual thaw and respect. But they didn’t apparently talk to the Clenis–they just assumed his meeting with Scaife was proof that he respected him.

  5. Sally says:

    â€But they didn’t apparently talk to the Clenis–they just assumed his meeting with Scaife was proof that he respected him.â€

    Yep, the MSM authoritatively assumes so much that is just plain wrong. A fly on the wall during the Clinton-Scaife meeting would probably have a much different take on it all. Remember when Bill met Fox’s Chris? The Clinton-Scaife meeting was probably a repeat of that.

  6. Anonymous says:

    I wouldn’t necessarily take Clinton meeting with Scaife as any sign of respect. More likely, he was happy to help Scaife part with some money, especially if it were going to a Clinton charity, and a chance to size up and get a bead on a perceived threat to his wife’s potential presidency. Say what you will about Bill Clinton, he is not afraid of the asswipes. He will walk right in and look them in the eye; that is one reason they hate him so much. Who knows what Scaife is really thinking, but my guess is that Bill Clinton simply wants the best personal read he can get on it and to try to play it to his advantage, however that may be.

  7. emptywheel says:

    bmaz

    You crack me up–the image of Bubba looking the asswipes in the eye–that’s very potent.

  9. Sally says:

    Contrast/compare. Scaife does his dirty work by other means and Clinton is credited with walking in and looking Scaife and his ilk right in the eye. I half wish Clinton were vindictive but haven’t seen much sign of that.

  10. Anonymous says:

    With the Clintons, if you’ve got money, they can always be friendly. Amazing what medicinal qualities the Clintons believe money has. Cures all ills.

  11. Sally says:

    We all know that for most of their married life the Clintons’ main goal in life was to acquire money. They probably could have become wealthy in the private sector but instead took the public service route where Bills’ governorship of Arkansas made them both quite wealthy.

  12. Anonymous says:

    Why does it seem that the Clinton’s are most vindictive to those in their own party then they are to Republicans?

  13. Jodi says:

    Currently, the only way the Republicans can win is to run against the Clintons. She and he would galvanize the Republicans out of their holes of despair and recrimination for the war.

  14. Anonymous says:

    Yeah. Of course. Because the Republicans have had such great luck in beating the Clintons at everything. Bill Clinton has taken the best shots you twits have to offer and kicked your ass every time; clearly your best strategy is to run against â€himâ€. Same goes for Hillary; remember how running against her was the GOP dream hope of picking up a Senate seat in New York? That sure worked out well. What does it tell you when your â€only way to win†is to run against the people that have been kicking your ass up one side of Pennsylvania Avenue, and down the other, for two decades? Morons.

  17. Sara says:

    Well on this one I again dip back into history. Yes, some of the Scaife Money is the Mellon Bank, but much of it is from Oil — in particular Oil from Africa, Nigeria and Angola, and a couple of other places. Scaife started his career doing this and that back in the 70’s when he bought out assets from the Nixon era CIA in Europe, which he then used to campaign for Euro-American protection of his assets in several parts of Africa.

    So I see this in a little different light. Right now, there are no Republicans, period, who can get any traction in Africa. But if Bill Clinton shows up with his AIDS medications, millions come out to cheer him on. Perhaps aside from Michael Jordan, Bill Clinton is the only American who can achieve any sort of popular response. Clinton can gain an audience with any African Leader he wants — in power and out. My guess is that Scaife is ultimately a rather practical businessman, and as he reads the winds, the Clintons will be back, and he needs access. I suspect Bill took advantage of this, and suggested a nice little buy-in in the form of support for AIDS treatments for Africans. I suspect the Dick and Bill conversation might have been just a little bit about keeping the Oil sector in Nigeria rather secure, and a lot about Bill playing the Baptist Missionary on the glory of providing AIDS pills. Bill might have mentioned how counter-productive supporting a sleeze machine had proved to be, and how more productive association with Life-saving medications might be.

    I suspect the meaning of the story is that Dickie Scaife is paying his access fees.

  18. Anonymous says:

    This couldn’t possibly be the same Clinton who exploited sleazy â€fast-track†procedures (avoidance of standard requirement for 2/3 Senate majority approval for international treaties) and heavy petting with Bob Dole to get the WTO treat and NAFTA passed, could it?

  19. Shit Stain Remover says:

    galvanize the Republics out of their holes of despair
    Posted by: Shit Stain Jodi | November 11, 2007 at 16:49

    The proverbial holes of despair

  20. ecoast says:

    I agree with Sara and add this. Besides this being that Scaife is paying his access fee to Clintons and doing some good in Africa on the side, this is also Clintons shutting up Scaife and veering him away from the right wing media machine. Without Scaife’s money, the noise machine croaks and that is what Clintons are doing – systematically bringing the machine down from within. They are doing the same with Murdoch.
    Next up, Bill’s lunch with GE/NBC bosses.

  21. CaseyL says:

    Without Scaife’s money, the noise machine croaks and that is what Clintons are doing – systematically bringing the machine down from within.

    Well, if it works, it’ll sure be a lot more effective than anything anyone else has tried.

    So let’s see if: 1) the tactic works, in terms of shutting down the Mighty Wurlitzer; and 2) if anyone gets to benefit from that besides the Clintons.