When I rejoined Salon as an investigative editor in early 1998, it had been almost a decade since I had left the Center for Investigative Reporting.
During that period, I had added radio, TV and the web to my print journalism experience and I was beginning to appreciate the unique strengths and weaknesses of those various forms of media.
What was exciting about the Salon job was the opportunity to do investigative reporting on the web. With the ability to link to our source material, we now could be much more transparent with our audiences about our methods and our documentation.
We also could potentially involve our audiences in the investigation by issuing call-outs for tips, sources and leads.
At Salon we did all of this, which led to dozens of promising tips, one of which would lead us to Salon’s biggest story as well as a remarkable moment in U.S. political history. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves; first there was much work to do.
I had almost (but not quite) forgotten that investigative reporters could be difficult to manage. There was the usual stuff — big egos, fights over wording, the density of fact-laden stories — but also the gnarly business of exposing powerful figures at the risk of massive lawsuits that could tie you up for years.
It was high-stress work but for some reason people thought I was good at it.
Salon’s corps of muckrakers included a freelancer named Murray Waas, who was almost single-handedly countering the Republican-led effort to undermine President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary with what was broadly known as the Whitewater Scandal.
This involved some real estate purchases by the Clintons in Arkansas. The scandal deepened when early in the Clinton presidency, Vincent W. Foster Jr., a close friend of the Clintons and a deputy White House counsel, was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head in a Civil War park maintained by the National Park Service just outside the District of Columbia.
As outlandish theories about Whitewater and Foster’s suicide proliferated on the right, Waas and Salon responded by systematically rebutting all the allegations dogging the Clintons and documenting what Hillary called a “vast right-wing conspiracy” to undermine her husband’s presidency.
The first lady was widely mocked in the mainstream media for this claim, but at Salon we documented that conspiracy piece by piece.
Leading the charge against the Clintons was special prosecutor Kenneth W. Starr, a former federal appeals court judge and a harsh critic of Bill Clinton.
In addition , the Republican-controlled Senate appointed a Special Whitewater Committee to conduct a wide-ranging probe that merged with Starr’s and eventually morphed into an investigation of allegations that Bill Clinton had engaged in various sexual improprieties and infidelities.
That would become the biggest sex scandal in American political history, and we at Salon found ourselves smack dab in the middle of it.
(To be continued.)
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