John LeBoutillier
Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2001

All three witnesses also have apparently passed lie detector tests.

Assuming this story does break in the coming week, it will be instructive to watch the reaction and subsequent behavior of the so-called mainstream media.

Will the media – the Big Three TV networks plus CNN and the weekly magazines and big newspapers – give this story credence?

Or will they behave as they did almost exactly nine years ago when the Star broke the Gennifer Flowers-Bill Clinton affair story? Do you remember what happened then? The Star even had audio phone tapes of Clinton talking to Flowers about New York Governor Mario Cuomo being a sort of "Mafioso" type. If such taped phone conversations did not prove a close relationship, then what did?

Of course, the Clinton War Room went into overdrive with George Stephanopoulous barraging the mainstream media with threatening phone calls all denying that any affair ever took place between Governor Clinton and state worker Gennifer Flowers. As for the phone tapes? The Clinton Team argued they were a ‘fabrication’ and were ‘selectively edited.’ And they tried to discredit Flowers through the fact that the Star paid her for the story.

(Well, we have since learned that all the media pay sources – all the time.)

Thus, on this basis, the Star story was discredited and thus discounted by the mainstream news media. Clinton wiggled off the hook and went on to the White House.

In other words, the story did not cross the invisible – but present – threshold between ‘tabloid’ news and ‘credible’ news.

Nine years later we are about to see if this threshold still exists – and whether the same standards apply to GOP offenders.

We know that it has been reported since the Florida recount story that the mainstream weekly magazines and some newspapers were ‘sniffing around’ the Bush-Harris story but nothing had yet been published. Now the question is this: What happens after the Star/Enquirer story breaks?

Do the media try to knock it down – as they did nine years ago? Do they still recognize that ‘threshold’?

Or do they dust off whatever reporting they, too, have done on this story and feel ‘free’ to publish it now because the story has ‘broken’ elsewhere?

And, of course, does the fact that the alleged "affair" this time is between two Republicans intricately involved in one of our time’s biggest news stories impact the leftist media’s decision on how to handle this story?

Don’t you just know that the media are going to want to savage the Bushes and the Republicans for being hypocrites and phonies for condemning Clinton for having an affair while in office and then defending a GOP governor who does the same?

And how are Bush and GOP officials going to handle this soon-to-break story?

This next week leading into Inauguration Day ain’t going to be pretty.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Daily Political Diary
Presidential Race 2000
Clinton Scandals