So the hardworking staff at Campaign Outsider trooped over to the International House of Politics in Cambridge to catch the Shorenstein Center‘s annual Theodore H. White Lecture on Press and Politics, along with the David Nyhan Prize for Political Journalism.
The latter – and better – first. The award went this year to the redoubtable Nat Hentoff, who’s always full of doubt. Hentoff wasn’t able to attend the gala event, so he appeared by satellite – directly above the the head of Shorenstein head Alex Jones as he introduced the 84-year-old Hentoff, who looked for all the world like a bed-headed Big Brother.
Hentoff spoke briefly about his career and his love of politics and jazz and the First Amendment. As a grace note, he asked the crowd to buck the current White House as – not a quote here, but close – Barack Obama continues the Bush-Cheney assault on the constitution and sometimes goes beyond them.
(Insert gasp from audience here.)
Enter Taylor Branch, bestselling Pulitzer-Prize-winning author whose new book, The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President, “is based on 79 conversations between Branch and Clinton, in the White House, between 1993 and 2001.”
The topic of Branch’s lecture was “Disjointed History: Modern Politics and the Media,” and it was indeed the most disjointed Teddy White Lecture I’ve heard (which is a lot).
It was also off-point. Branch’s real subject turned out to be – wait for it – Bill Clinton, and his subtext was twofold:
1) Bill Clinton done been wronged.
2) It was the New York Times that done him.
I’ll spare you the gory details, but suffice it to say that Branch has gone native after 79 sit-downs with Clinton. That’s rich since Branch now excoriates the Times for going native in its Wen Ho Lee coverage and becoming a federal government sock puppet.
To their credit, both Alex Jones and Sorenstein founding father Marvin Kalb pressed Branch on why he excluded Monica Lewinsky from his Clinton Chronicles of Woe.
Regardless, Branch laid most of the blame for “degrading our sense of the presidency” at the news media’s door.
Wrong door, Mr. Branch. Wrong door.
Campaign Outsider 
Except that, you know, Branch is largely correct, especially as regards the NYT, which chased every story sold to them by every con-man in Arkansas, launching it all with a POS from Jeff Gerth about Whitewater that got almost everything wrong. (Gene Lyons put that one in a sack in Harper’s 15 years ago.) The coverage of the Clinton Administration by the elite press — and the subsequent coverage of the Gore Campaign — was a decade-long outbreak of journalistic malpractice.
I don’t disagree that the media did a miserable job of covering the Clinton presidency, Charlie. But Clinton did a miserable job of conducting his presidency. Branch is too busing playing Clinton’s steno to acknowledge that.