Last week's Washington Post interview with independent counsel Robert Ray has occasioned a torrent of chatter: about Ray's active consideration of criminal charges against Bill Clinton once he leaves office, about the propriety of such charges, about the possibility that Al Gore might pardon his predecessor. And so on.
What has not inspired much talk are the failings of the Post story, the paper's April 11 lead, as a piece of journalism. It was 22 paragraphs long. Paragraphs seven and eight, appearing right after the "jump" to an inside page, contained the story's lone quotation from anyone other than Ray. This much was not unusual. The solitary "Greek chorus" quotation is a standard convention of newspaper interviews: the device by which reporters and editors signal their readers how an ordinary, sensible fellow -- if he were better informed -- would and should react to the surrounding disclosures. Here the Post's chosen Greek chorister described Ray's potential indictment of Clinton as a regrettable symptom of prosecutorial neurosis:
"I believe the great majority of Americans fervently wish that this matter was behind them and they will be chagrined by the news," one Reid Weingarten told the Post. "I, however, have a great deal of experience with independent counsels, and I am not the least bit surprised that this one, like so many others, has great difficulty in closing the book."
The Post identified Weingarten only as a "former senior trial attorney in the Justice Department's public integrity section" who is now "a Washington defense attorney."
Except that Weingarten -- described with greater precision -- is actually a member of the highly organized army of lawyers who make handsome fortunes defending Bill Clinton's allied Democratic nightcrawlers against persistent criminal charges. Among Weingarten's former or current clients are Charlie Trie, Teamsters ex-president Ron Carey, the family of late commerce secretary Ron Brown, mystery donor Pauline Kanchanalak, and . . .
And former agriculture secretary Mike Espy, whom Robert Ray once helped prosecute. Reid Weingarten, in other words, gets paid to criticize the likes of Robert Ray.
THE SCRAPBOOK can't decide which is more embarrassing: that the Post felt Weingarten's stand-alone views were appropriate for inclusion in the Ray story in the first place -- or that, having made that questionable decision, the paper declined to reveal to its readers Weingarten's patent bias.
John Cleese, quoted in the London, Daily Telegraph, April 3, 2000