Like one of those in-bred attack dogs, Steven Brill simply cannot relax his jaws once he bites. In his errorridden article "Pressgate" in the inaugural issue of his magazine, Brill's Content, he took after Jackie Judd of ABC News for her reporting in January that Monica Lewinsky had a dress and that it was . . . well, you know. Brill made Judd out to be a credulous partisan, eager to report any rumor that the Starr-Tripp-Goldberg axis fed her.
Judd, of course, was correct about the dress, and she was brave in refusing to waver in the face of the ridicule worked up by Brill. Yet Brill is hardly a gracious loser. Asked recently about his criticism of Judd, he said, "I think it's more news today than it was back in January, where we didn't know whether [Monica Lewinsky] was going to testify. . . . Just because it wasn't ripe and necessarily appropriate to report it in January doesn't mean you just stay off it. And you know, now it seems like there may be something there, and that's completely appropriate. . . . I mean, because the issue is timing."
So Brill -- who has anointed himself journalism's sage of sages -- prefers that a story be over a half a year late.
Brill has been trotting out another spin, too: that he never objected to Judd's reporting about the existence of the dress; only to her "implication" that Monica and her mother had removed the evidence from it. But this, as ABC producer Chris Vlasto says, is "sheer revisionism."
Judd had that story dead to rights. Brill portrayed her as a fool because of it. But it's not Judd who's the fool. You would think that, instead of perpetuating his defamation, Brill would apologize. But he is apparently no more capable of doing that than is the object of his campaign contributions -- Bill Clinton.