Copyright © 1998 by the Boston Phoenix, Inc. All rights reserved.

This Just In: Media

Howard Kurtz on the limits of spin

By Dan Kennedy

Senior White House officials spending half their day -- and more -- schmoozing reporters. White House press secretary Mike McCurry and designated "shit catcher" Lanny Davis holding furtive discussions over which journalists to screw and which to reward. Combative Clinton loyalist Rahm Emanuel lunching regularly with combative Clinton-loather Michael Kelly, hoping to persuade the then-New Republic editor to slip an occasional policy nugget into his scandal-obsessed "TRB" column.

Is this any way to run a presidency? As depicted in Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz's book Spin Cycle: Inside the Clinton Propaganda Machine (Free Press, 324 pages, $25), it's the only way. As scandals mount around Bill Clinton, his advisers conclude -- with shocking cynicism and some measure of idealism -- that the only way the Big Guy can govern is if they take unprecedented steps to neutralize the media.

Anyone who wants to know how Clinton's been surviving the Lewinsky ordeal will find the answer here. Kurtz recounts a June 1997 attempt by White House lawyer David Kendall to talk the media into going after independent counsel Kenneth Starr's "plain violations of grand jury secrecy." It didn't work then; yet Kendall's success pushing that spin in the Lewinsky affair was perhaps the key to Clinton's turnaround.

The White House's tactics are sheer hardball. Take, for example, Boston Globe reporter Michael Kranish's discovery of a memo from fundraising-scandal figure John Huang, in which it appears that the questionable contributions Huang raised helped buy a change in immigration policy. The story made it onto CNN, but Emanuel and McCurry's frantic disinformation campaign (Emanuel called the story "bullshit," and McCurry, at a briefing, intoned, "The Boston Globe is just wrong") prevented it from spreading. And when it was over? "That night," Kurtz writes, "McCurry gave Kranish a call. 'I'm sorry I dumped on you,' he said. It was all in a day's work."

Other White House dealings with the Globe are more benign. Kurtz writes of efforts to reach out to friendlys such as Tom Oliphant, David Shribman, and Ann Scales, and of releasing Jack Farrell from a confidentiality pledge so that he could write an account of Al Gore's appearance at a Buddhist temple corroborating the vice president's contention that he didn't realize it was a fundraising event.

Not that the reporters themselves come out covered in glory. Kurtz recounts an occasion when McCurry, at a news conference, bullied New York Post reporter Deborah Orin after she asked a question about Gary Aldrich's 1995 anti-Clinton book, Unlimited Access, and challenged her colleagues to come to her defense. None did. One reporter told her later, "I didn't want to use up any chits for your story."

The book's most sympathetic character, surprisingly, is the hyperaggressive Emanuel, who comes across as righteously angered by an elitist, out-of-touch Washington media's refusal to take seriously family-friendly policy initiatives that resonate with middle America. Also surprisingly, McCurry, a major Kurtz source, ends up looking self-obsessed and too cute for his own good. Early reviews of Spin Cycle have focused on the crude joke McCurry tells reporters at Hillary Clinton's expense. It's telling: there are times when McCurry just can't resist the urge to puff himself up by putting his boss down.

Kurtz offers mountains of detail, at times overwhelming the reader with endless accounts of turf wars and crisis-of-the-day battles while he loses sight of the big picture. But a big picture emerges anyway, and it's a disturbing one: that there is no big picture. For most journalists, nothing matters but that day's story, and how they can use it to feed their own egos. For the White House, each day is a matter of sheer survival.