In his upcoming book, A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Knopf, June 2007), Carl Bernstein repeatedly criticizes the media's coverage of the Clinton presidency as, at various times, “overzealous,” “misleading,” “factually off-base,” and a “free-for-all” that lacked “restraint.” Given the widespread media coverage that Bernstein's book has, and will undoubtedly, receive, will the media address Bernstein's claims?

On Page 233 of an advance copy of A Woman in Charge obtained by Media Matters for America, Bernstein notes that the Clintons “complained bitterly” that they had been “victimized” by “an overzealous press.” Bernstein writes that "[t]here is little question that they were treated more harshly, and often pursued with different standards and more relentlessly -- during virtually the whole of their occupancy of the White House -- than any president and his wife of the twentieth century." Bernstein faults the media -- specifically The New York Times and The Washington Post -- for their reporting on the Whitewater controversy, which he writes was based on “assumptions” and “assertions” that “were often contextually misleading, exaggerated in significance, and sometimes factually off-base.” From A Woman in Charge:

Later, the Clintons, seared and scarred by the press and opposition party for their own ethical lapses, complained bitterly that from their first days in office they had been singled out and judged by harsher standards than any of their predecessors, and victimized by a consortium of enemies and an overzealous press. There is little question that they were treated more harshly, and often pursued with different standards and more relentlessly -- during virtually the whole of their occupancy of the White House -- than any president and his wife of the twentieth century. Moreover, the underlying assumptions of some of the basic charges and assertions that fueled the unceasing investigation -- most notably those related to the so-called Whitewater matter, beginning with a series of stories in the New York Times and others covering similar ground in the Washington Post -- were often contextually misleading, exaggerated in significance, and sometimes factually off-base.

On Pages 205-206, Bernstein notes that the media consistently repeated a specific quote from Sen. Clinton (D-NY) without providing the full context, “as evidence of radical feminist disdain for traditional values.” According to Bernstein:

The next morning, Hillary and Bill were at the Busy Bee Coffee Shop in Chicago, working the breakfast crowd, when a group of reporters walked in. They began asking him about Hillary's job at the Rose Law Firm -- whether there were inherent conflicts of interest in being a partner of a law firm that did business with the state. Hillary was behind him, drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup. When one of the journalists asked if it was okay to speak directly to her, Bill said, “Sure. Ask her anything you want.” NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell asked the first lady of Arkansas whether it was ethical for a governor's wife to work in a law firm whose clients did business with state agencies. Hillary had been waiting for such a question. “I suppose I could have stayed home, baked cookies, and had teas,” she said memorably. Later, that quotation often stood alone in the press, seemingly indicating only her contempt for housewives, absent her words that followed: “The work that I've done as a professional, as a public advocate, has been aimed in part to assure that women can make the choices that they should make -- whether it's a full-time career, full-time motherhood, some combination, depending on what stage of life they are at -- and I think that is still difficult for people to understand right now, that it is a generational change.”

The abbreviated version, in sound bite form, permeated TV and radio news for days, and columnists cited her remarks as evidence of radical feminist disdain for traditional values. William Safire wrote in the New York Times that Bill had a “Hillary problem,” and called her words the “second outbreak of foot-in-mouth disease,” the first one being her Tammy Wynette remark.

Bernstein lays specific blame at the feet of then-New York Times investigative reporter Jeff Gerth -- co-author of the soon-to-be-released book Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Little, Brown & Co., June 2007) -- for omitting a key fact in the initial Whitewater story. Gerth's article, which appeared in the March 8, 1992, edition of the Times concerned a 1978 real estate deal involving the Clintons. From Pages 204-205 of A Woman in Charge:

On March 8, the New York Times published a story on its front page headlined, “Clintons Joined S&L Operator in an Ozark Real Estate Venture.” The Clintons had known for at least a month that reporter Jeff Gerth had been looking into their 1978 land deal with Susan and James McDougal, a fifty-fifty partnership in which the two couples had bought land along the White River in Arkansas in hopes of dividing it into forty-two lots and selling them for vacation homes. Bill and Hillary had resigned themselves to seeing the land deal as an unfortunate venture in which they had lost money. The Times saw something sinister: conflicts of interest and insider deals to line Hillary's and Bill's pockets. Susan Thomases -- officially in charge of the campaign's scheduling but, in fact, Hillary's political deputy and troubleshooter -- and the campaign's counsel had met with Gerth the week before Super Tuesday, desperately trying to persuade him to run the story after the primaries that day. Thomases told Gerth that there were documents that would vindicate the Clintons -- but, for the moment at least, they were missing. This added to the brew of suspicion, and rather than delay publication, the suggestion that records may have been removed was now part of the story. Gerth's story reported that the Rose Law Firm had performed legal work for [James B.] McDougal's savings and loan company while Bill was attorney general and governor -- but the Times failed to note that McDougal was not yet in the S&L business when the Clintons bought the land.

Bernstein offers further detail on Gerth's story in a footnote on Page 353:

Jeff Gerth's original Whitewater story in the New York Times, on March 8, 1992, had raised the obvious conflict of interest questions, including whether the governor should have been a partner in a land deal with someone whose business was regulated by the state -- though in fact McDougal had not been in the S&L business when the Whitewater partnership was formed -- and whether it was proper for Hillary to have been paid legal fees for the work she did for Madison Guaranty. The story also said that the Clintons had “improperly” deducted about $5,000 on their personal tax returns in 1984 and 1985 “for interest paid on a portion of at least $30,000 in bank loan payments” that had actually been paid from a business account in the name of their Whitewater partnership with the McDougals. It was the kind of accounting error often made innocently, and sometimes not. The deductions saved the Clintons perhaps $1,000 in taxes, but since the error had occurred more than three years before the story ran, “Internal Revenue Service regulations [did] not require the Clintons to pay.”

Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign had been able to challenge the perception that Bill and Hillary had done something wrong in relation to their Whitewater investment by releasing an independent audit that showed they had ultimately lost about $69,000 on the deal.

In the second paragraph of his 1992 Times article, Gerth mentioned that Clinton and McDougal entered into the real estate deal in 1978, and in the 16th paragraph that McDougal “bought control of a small savings and loan association” after he “left government in 1979.” But, as Bernstein notes, nowhere in the article did Gerth point out that McDougal was not “in the S&L business when the Whitewater partnership was formed.” Indeed (in addition to the false headline), the lead sentence suggested the opposite: “Bill Clinton and his wife were business partners with the owner of a failing savings and loan association that was subject to state regulation early in his tenure as Governor of Arkansas, records show.”

Bernstein also criticizes The Washington Post's Whitewater coverage, specifically that of staff writer Susan Schmidt. On Page 351, Bernstein notes that “Whitewater had reappeared in the news in a major way on October 31 [1993] in the form of a story by Washington Post reporter Susan Schmidt.” Bernstein goes on to write: “Schmidt's initial story (as opposed to some of her later ones, based uncritically on leaks from the office of Independent Counsel Ken Starr) was real news.”

On Page 349, Bernstein offers his take on the “overblown” Whitewater story and writes that even Gerth himself did not believe Whitewater deserved to be the subject of a years-long independent counsel investigation:

In truth, the “Whitewater story” became overblown almost from the moment the New York Times first wrote about it, during the campaign, in a series of articles and editorials that were increasingly long on innuendo, short on context, and in some important ways unfair to the Clintons. The Clintons' response was not straightforward, and served only to create more suspicion. The initial Times story was a model of restraint compared with the coverage of “Whitewater” that followed in the press free-for-all during the next eight years.

Mark Fabiani, the presidential lawyer entrusted by Hillary with the rapid press-response capability for the White House in 1995 and 1996, understood the entire nature of Whitewater as well as anyone in the administration. Fabiani said he was told by Jeff Gerth, the Times reporter who wrote the first Whitewater story, that Gerth believed it was a good “campaign story” that “never deserved to be the subject of years of long independent counsel work.”