Censorship: Text of Attack on the Internet by Clinton's Press Secretary

Text of Attack on the Internet by Clinton's Press Secretary

Courtesy of The Campaign for Radical Truth in History
Online at http://www.hoffman-info.com

Q: Mike, this 300-page report that Fabiani and DNC put together -- what was the purpose of it? Why would the White House waste its time putting together this "media food chain" theory?

MR. MCCURRY: It's not a waste of time. We were actually responding to requests. This is the document we gave, Wolf, CNN back in 1995, so you've had it for about over a year now. (Laughter.) About every news organization in this room, in fact, we've provided these materials because we wanted to refute some of the very aggressive charges being made fallaciously against the President, most often on the Internet coming from a variety of kind of crazy, right-wing sources.

Now, what you're talking about is, in fact, a two-and-a-half page cover sheet attached to about 300-plus pages of information, most of them news clips written by news organizations represented in this room, and also that the DNC research staff prepared and passed out at press conferences that most of your news organizations attended.

Q: Let me see if I can clear something up. Does this purport to show a conspiracy on the part of the news media?

MR. MCCURRY: No, absolutely not. It purports to show that the conspiracy theorists who are very active on the subject of Whitewater and other subjects very often plant their stories, plant their information in various places, and then we kind of give you a theory of how things get picked up and translated and moved through what we call "the media food chain," or what others have called "the media food chain." A good example of this: the Wall Street editorial page carries a column that mentions this deep, dark secret 330-page report that then gets picked up by The Washington Times and written, and then gets asked here in the press briefing room. So, in other words, in this Fellini-like manner, what we are doing right now is proof positive of the kind of cycle that we're talking about.

Q: So you're employing the very tactics that you say the right-wing think-tanks employ to get stories in the mainstream media?

MR. MCCURRY: You're suggesting that we planted this in the Wall Street Journal editorial page so we could draw some attention to the material that we're using to refute some of the fallacious charges. That's an interesting theory. I don't know that I buy that theory.

Q: Like what, what particularly? What are the fallacious charges?

MR. MCCURRY: They talk about stuff about some of the work of a couple of so-called "media centers," a couple of wealthy philanthropists that subsidize the work of organizations that present themselves as news organizations -- they write stories, they get picked up elsewhere on the Internet. Sometimes they get picked up overseas, typically in London, typically by one particular reporter, that stuff then gets fed back into news organizations here. There's one news organization here in town that likes to -- they won't attach their own bylines and their own names of their own reporters to the stories they write, but they'll pick up stories, they'll put them in their pages here, and then that triggers additional inquiries.

So what they did was, they basically took -- in response to inquiries we got -- we got a lot of inquiries back in the summer of '95 on the general subject of how does the Internet -- the arrival of the Internet and discussions on the Internet, how does that fuel the Whitewater story. And, in fact, we used to get a lot of inquiries in Mark Fabiani's shop from news organizations that heard this story that they really want to check out and want a White House response to. And we say, wait a minute, this is the same crazy rumor that's now chased itself all the way around in a circle, and let us show you how this circle works so you can understand the genesis of some of these stories.

So this is an effort, I think, that dates back now almost July, August of 1995, an effort by Mark's shop to really help journalists understand that they shouldn't be used by those who are really concocting their own conspiracies and their own theories and then peddling them elsewhere.

Q: Mike, let me see if I understand. You believe this is an accurate portrayal of the way the media food chain works? Is that correct? You believe this is an accurate description --

MR. MCCURRY: I think it is accurate to say that there area lot of groups that fund -- groups that are positioned on the far right of the political spectrum that fund people who peddle conspiracy theories, and that those then sometimes show up in publications that represent themselves to be bonified sources of news; that those then get picked up on the Internet; people start recycling the material on the Internet; that sometimes we have instances -- and we've had several just recently of one particular reporter, one particular paper in London who writes things that are just not true; in fact, in one case just recently who had to be formally retracted -- that that then gets picked up and reprinted here in the United States and then becomes the basis of inquiries that some of you make here. So, in a sense, you get misled and misused by people who really start off as -- with the goal of actually planting information to do political damage to the President.

Q: With all due respect, I don't think I got an answer to my question, which is, do you believe this is an accurate portrayal of --

MR. MCCURRY: Do I believe what I just said is an accurate portrayal of how this works? Yes.

Courtesy of The Campaign for Radical Truth in History

Online at http://www.hoffman-info.com