Evans-Pritchard on Media/Government Tie

[Alex Linder]

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard talks about secret life of Bill Clinton - author of 'The Secret Life of Bill Clinton' - includes biographical information - Interview
Insight on the News, Dec 15, 1997 by John Berlau

This British investigative reporter says the trouble with American newsman is that they have accepted a liberal consensus that doesn't always fit the truth. But one man's truth is another man's balderdash.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard may be back in England, but his recently published book The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, currently No. 10 on the UPI/Ingram Books hardcover best-seller list, is causing controversy on this side of the Atlantic. As Washington bureau chief of the London Sunday Telegraph from 1992 to 1997, Evans-Pritchard doggedly pursued allegations about the Clinton administration and federal law enforcement that most American journalists wouldn't touch. His book raises many questions about the investigations of the death of former deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster and possible prior knowledge by government officials concerning in Oklahoma City.

In the Weekly Standard, a journal of conservative opinion, Newsweek reporter Michael Iskoff calls Evans-Pritchard's stories "little more than wild flights of conspiratorial fancy coupled with outrageous and wholly uncorroborated allegations" from dubious sources. But syndicated columnist and veteran newsman Robert Novak recently wrote that "Evans-Pritchard is no conspiracy-theory lunatic.... [H]e was known in Washington for accuracy, industry and courage."


In interviews with Insight in Washington and in subsequent telephone conversations from his home in London, Evans-Pritchard talked about his adventurous life, interests and opinions of American politics and culture. He tells Insight that like the hero of the 19th-century novels Rene and Atala by his favorite author, Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, he sees himself as "an aristocrat who goes off to America and explores the hinterland... I don't consider myself really a journalist. I'm kind of an amateur. I like traveling and experiencing life and I have to make a living somehow."

Insight: Why do you think there's a reluctance among reporters to probe into some of these things you've written about concerning Oklahoma City and the death of Vincent Foster?

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: I think the American press is very deferential to power -- more so than people think. The Watergate story was an aberration. It was very special circumstances, and American journalists normally are not like that....

The big problem with the Whitewater and Clinton stories is that few reporters have gone out and talked to ordinary people, many of whose stories I tell in this book.... The reporters are prisoners of their sources in Washington. They're very apt to regard official sources -- people with titles in government positions -- as being credible, and ordinary citizens as having no credibilities whatsoever. I think that is getting everything completely the wrong way around. Ordinary people have less incentive to lie, and furthermore they're less adept at spinning the media. Government officials do it the whole damn time. So I think they've got it upside down....

What radicalized me was my experiences in Central America, particularly in Nicaragua, because I could see that what the press was writing was not true about the Sandinistas.

Insight: What were they writing that wasn't true?

AEP: Well, they had a love affair with the revolution. They were all sitting around Managua and going to parties with Sandinista officials. There was a very romantic side to it all. But out there in the countryside, the Sandinistas were doing horrible things to the campesinos. They were rounding them up in collectives. Anybody who resisted was very harshly punished, and people were being killed in quite large numbers.

I wandered around. I spent ages up in the mountains just talking to people. It was clear very bad things were going on, and it wasn't being reported. For the first time in my life I realized that what you read in the papers is not true, and this quite shocked me. I started writing from a different point of view, and I found myself very quickly in a big dispute with my colleagues, and it never ended.

Insight: Is this similar to how they're covering the Clinton administration?

AEP: Right. The way they cover Arkansas is exactly the way they covered Nicaragua, which is they didn't go out into the hills and talk to the ordinary people. They wouldn't find out what was going on. They would just talk to a limited circle.

Insight: You have said that if the kind of things going on now with the Clinton administration were going on in Britain, France or Italy, where they have an adversary press, the general public would know more about it because the press would be more vigilant.

AEP: I think so, because you've got a much more diversified press. In Britain, you've got very dynamic papers across the spectrum. You don't have this completely lopsided press that you have in America, where you've got one sort of smothering consensus.

[In America,] you do have a few people sort of valiantly fighting--the Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal and some of the magazines--to maintain an alternative position, but they really can't get traction. While they're very good at writing opinion from a conservative perspective and commenting on liberal news, they find it very difficult to generate conservative news, which is to simply say, "To hell with your agenda. This is what we're going to write about." That's what the Telegraph does in Britain. We're not looking over our shoulder at what the [left-wing] Guardian's doing. If they do something big, we're aware of it, but we do our story. We're not running around doing the same damn thing.

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articl...13/ai_20083166

[Hugh Lincoln]

Originally Posted by Alex Linder

I think the American press is very deferential to power -- more so than people think....

The big problem with the Whitewater and Clinton stories is that few reporters have gone out and talked to ordinary people, many of whose stories I tell in this book.... The reporters are prisoners of their sources in Washington. They're very apt to regard official sources -- people with titles in government positions -- as being credible, and ordinary citizens as having no credibilities whatsoever.

Yes, Noam Chomsky calls journalists the "servants of power" in America, which is pretty accurate. This manifests itself in specific and repeating patterns, as I observe it. Journalists have certain narratives stuck in their heads that they use as a track to guide their reporting and writing: the businessman as evil, the illegal alien as good, etc. It's really just laziness, I'd say. But the rigidity with which they stick to these narratives is unbelievable. You will just NEVER see anything in an American newspaper or mainstream magazine that violates the narrative.

I can't count how many times I've seen this "journalism" formula:

1. Social problem (usually caused by naturally nigger behavior, but take your pick)
2. Anecdotes about the suffering caused
3. Chorus of "experts" discussing the social problem
4. Ending quote from social activist: "the solution to this is to increase government spending on this problem."

Then the journalists congratulate themselves when the government passes a bill funding the "problem." Or, they'll consider themselves big fucking crusaders by pestering Peter Politician about why the government hasn't "addressed" this problem. This is just from my earlier libertarian perspective, but it's a good example, I think.

As for race and Jews, well, God. The rigidity turns to something nuclear.

Evans-Pritchard is half-right to say ordinary folks aren't talked to... believe me, journalists are happy to talk to niggers at the mall for a quote, because (trust me here), niggers never hesitate to talk to white, liberal newspaper reporters. The figure the press is on their side, and they're right.

ORDINARY WHITES, however, clam up when reporters come around. Again, personal experience here. It always torqued me and I vaguely, lightly thought, "man, those uptight white people..." But in retrospect the instinct was good. They knew damn well the press hated them, and me trying to get "their side" was nothing more than very grudging attempts to look "balanced." The main thrust of journalism is anti-white: The blackies are suffering because evil whitey won't fork over enough taxes. The blackies are being hounded by the evil whites. The blackies' neighborhood is crappy because evil white businessmen are putting in big box stores. Etc. So what it becomes is, ordinary whites are ignored.

For instance. The Washington Post does a pretty much fucking DAILY story about the joys of Mexishits flooding into the D.C. area. The stories are veritable lacucuracha fests of Manuel this and Rosa that happily exclaiming how great they are, and (boo hoo!) how they wish they were better accommodated. "Life Changes in Prince William County," the headline will go.

But changes for whom? How about the WHITE PEOPLE ALREADY IN PRINCE WILLIAM COUNTY? How do they feel about all this? As Peter Brimelow has also noted, you will never see them quoted. Because to the Jewish-run press, they are "unpersons."