Hillary and Her Goons
By Nicholas Stix
April 21, 2000
A Different Drummer/Stix and Stones
Hillary Clinton likes her journalists in a prone position, and apparently, that's fine by them. That's the upshot of a story out of New York that Hillary's media minions have tried to kill. But the story just won't die.
It seems that during the New York's March 17 St. Patrick's Day Parade, Hillary Clinton's Secret Service detail assaulted six journalists who tried to ask the First Lady questions. This is a major news story; an even bigger bombshell is the refusal, by all major news outlets, to run the story.
The story initially broke the same day, on WABC-AM (770), and at newsmax.com, an Internet news service owned by [Republican] investigative reporter Chris Ruddy that specializes in publishing stories the mainstream media doesn't want told. And let me tell ya,' business is booming!
As NewsMax's Carl Limbacher and staff detailed that day, WABC's Glen Shuck reported on Sean Hannity's call-in talk show, "Secret Service agents literally are pushing press to the ground.... The Secret Service just lost their minds, in my opinion. I mean, they just started pushing and shoving; female camera people five feet tall were getting thrown to the ground, cameras flying. Myself, I was grabbed by the shoulder, I was thrown back over. I think somebody from [WB] Channel 11 landed on my back. From that point, it really didn't get any better.
"Minutes after Shuck's interview with Hannity, WABC's in-studio reporter George Weber announced, 'Hillary Clinton's Secret Service agents today roughed up several members of the news media trying to cover the St. Patrick's Day Parade. At least six reporters, including WABC's Glen Shuck, were pushed and tossed to the ground as they tried to get quotes from Mrs. Clinton.
With one exception, the media response to the March 17 WABC and NewsMax stories was ... silence. Nada. Nichts. Nothing. And the exception was a case of an influential columnist who ridiculed the story, while refusing to tell its news source.
Consider that when Mrs. Clinton was waffling about announcing her candidacy late last year, New York reporters and editorialists claimed that she would have a tough time of it with New York's give-no-quarter press corps. Puppy dogs is more like it. A rabid media pack that has gone into attack mode on every unsubstantiated claim or oh-so-biased charge made against Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, especially the Big Lie asserting that the NYPD "profiles" black men, has spent its time sleeping on Hillary Clinton's lap, when it hasn't been licking her hand.
The title of NewsMax's follow-up story, on March 19 (a third story ran on March 21), said it all: "Media Silent on St. Pat's Day Assault by Hillary's Goons." "It was the ugliest public incident in the entire, seven-plus year history of the Clinton administration; certainly ugly enough to fatally wound any candidate's bid for higher office.
"But 48 hours after United States Senate candidate Hillary Clinton's security entourage attacked at least six reporters during New York City's St. Patrick's Day Parade -- throwing some out of the way, pushing others to the ground -- not a single mainstream media outlet has reported the assaults....
The report continued, that Glen Shuck was the only one of the six assaulted journalists to go public. "Newsmax.com has been unable to learn the identity of the female camera operator attacked by Clinton's goons -- nor the whereabouts of whatever film she shot.
"Though local WABC newsman George Weber covered the Secret Service violence at every newsbreak -- at one point even contrasting their use of force with Mrs. Clinton's own stands against police brutality -- none of Shuck's account made it to his own network's 6:00 p.m. report. ABC News failed to mention the assault of their own reporter -- even on their own website.
Mrs. Clinton's Secret Service detail has a history, going at least as far back as 1996, of intimidating reporters covering the First Lady.
When I asked WNBC-TV News Director Paula Madison about the Secret Service assaults, she told me, "I don't think I know about that." Madison thought again, and reiterated, "I have no knowledge of it." Repeated calls to WABC-Radio News Director Phil Boyce, however, went unanswered, despite the assurance of a station employee that she had given Boyce my messages. Remember, Glen Shuck was one of Boyce's people. Likewise, Karen Scott, the news director at Channel 11, one of whose journalists had also reportedly been assaulted, had not responded to repeated calls, as ADD went to web. At NY1's news scoops number, no one was answering the telephone all afternoon, and no one from NY1 responded to ADD's email inquiries. Mayor Giuliani's press representative, Julianna Glover-Weiss, first told me, "I have not heard anything about that, but let me look into that." Later, she told ADD, "I've got the research people looking into it.”
I only stumbled onto the story, in the first place. Newsday columnist and editorial board member Marie Cocco had done a hit on the American Enterprise Institute/frontpagemag-sponsored conference, "The Legacy and Future of Hillary Rodham Clinton." While omitting the date and location of the conference, and all but one of the panelist's names, Cocco slathered on the ridicule, describing the confab as a grouphate of psychotic, Republican Hillary-bashers. Check out her first three paragraphs:
"THIS IS HOW IT LOOKS, from the belly of the beast.
"A columnist for a conservative Internet site rises to charge, with perfect sobriety, that during last month's St. Patrick's Day Parade, U.S. Secret Service agents assigned to first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton 'assaulted and manhandled' members of the press, including cameramen.
"This does not, at the American Enterprise Magazine's (sic) daylong conference on ‘The Legacy and Future of Hillary Clinton,’ elicit skepticism.”
Unlike the confabs of multiculturalists, who refuse to invite any speakers who don't toe the politically-correct party line, these days conservatives often invite their enemies to their conferences. I suppose this has something to do with being out of power -- one tends to be on one's best behavior. Conversely, those in power feel no such compunctions.
Professionalism required that Cocco mention that half of the conference speakers (and spectators) were confirmed lefties, who themselves described Hillary's critics in the same, derisive terms Cocco used: born-again Clintonite David Brock; Newsweek magazine's White House mascot, Eleanor Clift; communist/feminist Betty Friedan; New York activist Karen Burstein; and token, leftwing Clinton-critic, Christopher Hitchens. Cocco chose instead to mention only one panelist -- Hillary Clinton's conservative critic, Joyce Milton, author of The First Partner: Hillary Rodham Clinton. Professionalism also required that she name the "columnist" -- Richard Poe -- and the "conservative Internet site" -- www.newsmax.com. And professionalism required that Cocco admit that she'd hunted down Richard Poe, interviewed him at length, and assured him that she was "curious about delving into the facts" of the "Hillary's Goons" story. Marie Cocco has had bouts of professionalism in the past. But I guess she's gotten over that.
Contrast Cocco's April 13 rendering of the conference (which is available online at frontpagemag.com) with Poe's NewsMax story the previous day, "The Hillary Conspiracy":
"Who is Juanita Broaddrick? I've never heard of her!' cried Betty Friedan, the founder of modern feminism. Friedan's outburst came at last Friday's conference, entitled 'The Legacy and Future of Hillary Rodham Clinton.' Held at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., the event offered a chilling microcosm of an angry, divided America.
"For nearly an hour, a five-woman panel had been debating whether Hillary qualified as a 'feminist heroine.' I thought Broaddrick's claim of having been raped by Hillary's husband had some bearing on this point, so I broached the subject during the question-and-answer period. Friedan's dyspeptic denial followed.
"David Brock, author of The Seduction of Hillary Clinton, opined that 'Clinton-hating' was 'a realm for psychology, frankly... A lot of the venom is projection.' Eleanor Clift was even blunter. When confronted by hostile questioners, the Newsweek pundit snapped, "You all belong in a support meeting for the anti-Hillary frustrated minority!
“These cracks drew a few laughs. But the anti-Hillary panelists reminded us that more serious issues were afoot. Left-wing journalist Christopher Hitchens, author of No One Left to Lie to, warned that the Clintons were presiding over 'the transformation of the American democracy, the American republic, into a banana republic.' He pointed to the strange timidity of the press as one symptom. 'It is amazing that the New York press should congratulate itself on being so fierce and unappeasable and brave and searching when it has so far not asked [Mrs. Clinton] one single tough question.”
Amazing, indeed.
Cocco's hit achieved two ends: it made it all but impossible for civilians to find the Secret Service story, and in case it did somehow leak out, she slimed the story's messengers as a bunch of fruitcakes: ‘Yeah, right. Are you gonna believe these characters?’
Richard Poe's story on the conference is available online at newsmax.com, and archived at his own site, richardpoe.com. Poe, by the way, is a veteran journalist and New York Times-bestselling author (Black Spark, White Fire).
With a reticence that his ruthless peer lacked, Richard Poe did not wish to attack Marie Cocco when we spoke for the first time -- "She's a colleague." He did grant, during a later interview, however, that in ridiculing the journalists telling the story of Hillary Clinton's Secret Service goons, "She's trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube.”
Well, the toothpaste is out to stay.
No comments:
Post a Comment