c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. His home page on the World Wide Web is at http://www.agreeley.com. Or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)

(UNDATED) You read it here first: President Clinton will be elected by roughly the same margin as he was in 1992, somewhere between 6 and 9 percentage points. Democrats will regain control of Congress, though by smaller majorities than they enjoyed before 1994. Nothing much will have changed since 1992. The Republican revolution will be dead and gridlock will be alive and well. Again. Still. Maybe always.

I also predict that Hillary Rodham Clinton will be indicted sometime next year. The charge will be dubious and probably would not stand up in court under ordinary circumstances. But Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr has to show something for the millions of dollars of taxpayer’s money he has spent on the Whitewater investigation. Clearly, he hasn’t found anything yet or he would have indicted the President and/or Mrs. Clinton by now.

The so-called”Clinton scandals”will someday be judged one of the great disgraces in American history _ not the scandals themselves, but the fact that they were in large part created by the national media who set out to destroy the President.

I base this assertion on a Gene Lyons’ remarkable new book,”Fools for Scandal: How the Media Created Whitewater,”(Franklin Square Press). Lyons, an Arkansas political columnist, was a prime critic of Clinton when he was governor. He does not so much defend the President as he defends his state against sloppy reporting on Arkansas in the national media.

His thesis is simple and sweeping: The national press created Whitewater through incompetent, mendacious reporting. One need only compare the long memos sent to New York Times correspondent Jeff Gerth by Arkansas Securities Commissioner Beverly Bassett-Schaffer with the articles Gerth had written on the subject to conclude that Gerth was either stupid, incompetent, or willfully distorted the truth in his stories. Moreover, Lyons’ description of Congressional hearings on Whitewater chaired by New York Sen. Alfonse D’Amato’s compared with what was reported in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek and other national media show that a”get Clinton”mindset had blinded the press to the facts and to the most elementary ethics of reporting.

Astonishingly, the most accurate reporting of Watergate has been in the news pages of the Wall Street Journal, whose editorial pages, which are separate from the news division, routinely attack the President.

Lyons shows how Nightline correspondent Jeff Greenfield twisted the meaning of one of Hillary Clinton’s statements on Whitewater by editing out 39 crucial words. He points out a falsehood in James Stewart’s recent book,”Blood Sport,”in which Stewart accuses the Clintons of failing to”abide by financial requirements in obtaining mortgage loans,”which Stewart said was a crime. In fact, Lyons writes, if Stewart had merely turned over the page in the application he would have seen that Mrs. Clinton had supplied all the information which he had accused her of fudging.”Fools for Scandal”is filled with such stories. Anyone who reads it with an open mind will wonder why it has not been refuted, why the national media continue to pretend even to themselves that Whitewater (and all related scandals) are the real thing instead of diseased fantasy.

Thus they spread the story early in the Clinton administration that the President had closed down Los Angeles International Airport for an hour so that he might get a haircut as his plane waited on the runway. The story turned out to be false, but only Newsweek backed off from it. To me, that was the tipoff that accuracy and ethics would not stop the national media from trying to destroy Clinton’s presidency.

One can understand Lyons’ rage. Whenever the national media try to cover my hometown of Chicago, they almost always get it wrong. The New York Times informed its readers last week that Mayor Richard Daley had”festooned”the city with signs that say”This is Daley Country”_ a total falsehood.

The reader of”Fools for Scandal”will conclude that the media have been guilty, in effect, of a big lie. They have borne false witness against Bill and Hillary Clinton, badly tarnishing their own reputations in the process. And they show no sign of stopping. The book is scary: it proves how much power the media have to distort the truth beyond recognition.

There is more opportunity for distortion in recent revelations about former Clinton advisor Dick Morris, who resigned Thursday after a supermarket tabloid reported Morris’ involvement with a Washington prostitute. Many in the press have concluded that the Morris scandal had made the Democratic convention a failure. I don’t think so.

However much damage the press may have done to the President and the presidency, it has not destroyed him. Not yet. He will probably have the last laugh.

Clinton should bear in mind the old Irish political proverb:”Half the lies they tell about us aren’t true.”JC END GREELEY