. The articles on Broaddrick often devote more words to doubting her truthfulness than they do to describing what she said. This is carried to ridiculous extremes.
My local newspaper, the Bloomington Herald Times, editorialized, on page 8 of February 27, 1999:
``We're not even going to get into the allegations and their plausibility or theorize about the president's guilt or innocence. It serves no purpose. The president has survived impeachment. Nor could he ever be prosecuted on the allegations now, even if demonstrably true; the statute of limitations is past.
What we can address with relevance is the current state of reportage in which everything is fair game and nothing seems to be off-limits.''
That astounded me. The clear implication is: ``It doesn't matter if the President committed violent rape. First of all, the impeachment process showed that it doesn't matter if commits crimes. Second, even tho it was a crime, he can't be prosecuted for technical reasons, and so nobody should care about it. And it's a shame people talk about personal matters like whether a person is a rapist or not. ''
The Los Angeles Times story of February 20 was on page A13. It had six short paragraphs. The first two were about presidential denials. The third was about what Broaddrick was saying. The fourth was another White House attack on the story. The fifth and sixth attacked Broaddrick's credibility. The only sentence in the entire story that told the reader what was going on was ``Broaddrick said Clinton forced her to have sex when they went to her hotel room for coffee.'' Even that manages to imply that the sex was really consensual.
The Boston Globe story of February 22, their first, was longer, but similar in tone. The only sentence which came close to telling the accusation said, [of the WSJ story three days earlier] ``In it, Broaddrick gave, with chilling details, her account of the alleged 1978 sexual assault when Clinton was Arkansas attorney general.'' But the Boston Globe's readers never got any details, chilling or not, in the newstory. Instead, the Globe wrote about how newspapers and TV didn't cover the story, and said that the public doesn't care about this kind of thing any more.
The first New York Times story on Broaddrick in February 1999 is quite curious too. At that point, the Times had to mention the story while explaining to its readers why it hadn't reported it earlier.
It would be worth comparing coverage with that of the Jefferson story, which was soon exploded as a distortion of the scientific evidence.
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