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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
The press has also been hesitant to discuss, or dissect, Bossie's current role. For instance, during the controversy surrounding the release of "Fahrenheit 9/11," many news outlets, including the New York Times in a June 27 article, simply identified Bossie as the president of Citizens United. But the Times is well acquainted with Bossie's modus operandi; he has boasted about feeding information to its reporters, especially Jeff Gerth, every step of the way in their ill-advised, and since discredited, Whitewater investigation. "We have worked closer [on Whitewater] with the New York Times than the Washington Times," Bossie's colleague Brown once bragged to the Columbia Journalism Review.
And as the Washington Times noted, Bossie made a deal to leak the Senate Whitewater Committee's final report to the New York Times. Yet years later, when Bossie reemerges in the news as a critic of "Fahrenheit 9/11," to unsuspecting Times readers he's described simply as another grass-roots Republican activist.
"At the very least, you'd expect viewers and readers to learn Bossie was fired for doctoring tapes," says David Brock, the president and CEO of Media Matters for America, a liberal online research and monitoring organization. "That doesn't seem like the type of person whose words are worth much."
"As a principle I'd agree readers ought to know where particular sources are coming from," says Newsweek's Michael Isikoff, who has dealt with Bossie for many years. "On the other hand, I don't think David Bossie makes any secret about what his agenda is and where he's coming from."
In the past, reporters who fed off Bossie's wayward leaks were reluctant to shed light on his ability to engineer stories behind the scenes. In the early 1990s, the press printed and broadcast verbatim the Whitewater allegations being leveled by Citizens United and its ready-made press packets. Yet reporters rarely made public the source of their Whitewater leads. As the Columbia Journalism Review noted at the time, the press "has shamelessly taken the hand-outs dished up by a highly partisan organization without identifying the group as the source of their information."
"There's no doubt journalists have been compromised by [Bossie]," says Begala. "Once [they] make a commitment to somebody like that, they stick with him through thick and thin."
Adds Ivey: "If you look at how the press covered Bossie's ethical lapses and compare it with how they covered ethical issues raised about the Clinton administration, he really got kid gloves -- because reporters were the ones he had been feeding information to."
Bossie has generated unusual loyalty from some in the press corps. "Dave Bossie has never lied to me, and the Clinton White House has lied to me," ABC News producer Chris Vlasto notoriously told the Washington Post in one of its several Bossie profiles in the 1990s. Vlasto, who did not return a call for comment for this story, made that statement in 1997, five years after the accusations about Whitewater were first raised and two years after the Clintons were exonerated by the Resolution Trust Corp., whose conclusions were confirmed by every subsequent official investigation. "On this record," the RTC reported, "there is no basis to charge the Clintons with any kind of primary liability for fraud or intentional misconduct ... It is recommended no further resources need be expended on the Whitewater part of this investigation." Yet those reporters who subsisted on Bossie's handouts, including some at the New York Times, the Washington Post and ABC News, did not report the RTC's vindication of the Clintons. ABC's Vlasto, who had invested mightily in the Whitewater story, insisted in '97, "If it comes down to a question of whom do you believe, I'd believe Bossie any day."
Reporters weren't the only ones who paid a price for cozying up to Bossie. During the 1990s he worked most closely with four members of Congress investigating Whitewater and other Clinton-related matters: Sen. Lauch Faircloth, R-N.C.; Sen. Alfonse D'Amato, R-N.Y.; Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind.; and Rep. Jim Leach, R-Iowa. Bossie served as Faircloth's personal aide on the Senate Whitewater Committee and later as Burton's chief investigator on the Government Reform Committee. He was also a key source of Whitewater allegations for Leach's press spokesman, Joe Pinder, and personally funneled information to D'Amato. None of these four politicians survived their reliance on Bossie with their political reputations unblemished, and two -- Faircloth and D'Amato -- were voted out of office in 1998.
The truth is that Democrats saw Bossie as something of an insurance policy during Whitewater and subsequent Clinton hearings, because with him onboard the inquiries would never be taken completely seriously. After all, it was reportedly Bossie who urged Burton to reenact the death of former White House deputy counsel Vince Foster by shooting bullets into a melon in the backyard of the congressman's Indiana home.
Bossie's habit of shooting himself in the foot, or at least his political allies' feet, persists to this day. Despite his prediction on the eve of its release that "Fahrenheit 9/11" would "go nowhere," the movie became the most successful documentary ever made and is likely to be one of the summer season's most profitable films. Of the movie's historic $24 million take during its first weekend in theaters, one could argue that some large portion may be the result of Bossie's publicity campaign against it, which in many news accounts was rendered in the shorthand "Group tries to censor anti-Bush movie." Moore has promised to send Bossie a holiday card later this year to express his gratitude for Bossie's help in creating a bonanza for the film.
