The Database Double Standard

The newest manufactured brouhaha – over the National Security Agency creating a database of phone records to track terrorist phone patterns -- was just the latest in a long string of stories trumped up to make Bush look not just incorrect, but dictatorial, even evil. USA Today hyped the story, and the media pack lapped it up, but it failed the first test of newsworthiness: is it new? No. USA Today’s scoop was mostly a retelling of what the New York Times reported last Christmas Eve, that the phone companies had given the NSA “access to streams of international and domestic communications.”

Ten years ago, when the Clinton administration was rifling through the FBI files of former Republican officials, it was extremely distasteful to object. Here is Brian Williams in June of 1996, after the White House admitted collecting FBI reports on 338 GOP officials (later revised upward to more than 900), and after Bob Dole compared it to Nixon’s enemies list: "The politics of Campaign '96 are getting very ugly, very early. Today Bob Dole accused the White House of using the FBI to wage war against its political enemies, and if that sounds like another political scandal, that's the point."

At that time, Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz admitted the press blew the FBI-files story. Why? There was a "feeling that...a political snooping operation was not the kind of thing they expected from the Clinton White House, whereas if hundreds of files had been obtained by Ed Meese in the Reagan administration on Democrats, I think this story would have rocketed to the front page."