Uncovering Biden

Michael Isikoff wrote Uncovering Clinton (1999) in the aftermath of the exposure of the Lewinsky affair. Isikoff had the Lewinsky story — he had written it up — but his editors at Newsweek spiked it. The story was then leaked to Drudge. Après Drudge, as they say, le deluge.

I bought Isikoff’s book and read it from cover to cover as soon as it was published. It’s an excellent book. The title is a pun. It implies that the press had left Clinton’s compromising escapades uncovered while roughly speaking every reporter who covered Clinton from the time of his 1992 presidential campaign on knew about them. Isikoff goes into some detail on this point. It also implies that the ultimate disclosure of the story uncovered the escapades and related measures Clinton undertook to suppress their exposure.

Incidentally, I was subsequently told by a prominent reporter who “covered” Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign what he saw of Clinton’s way with women in front of others on the campaign trail that year. He never mentioned it in his own reportage. He was one of the many who “uncovered” Clinton.

As with the media noncoverage of Clinton’s escapades, so with Hunter Biden and the Biden family business. Here we have only the first meaning of Isikoff’s pun in play. This was the point I left more or less implicit in yesterday’s post “Inside the Biden family business (or not).” Brendan O’Neill lays out the nonfeasance of the press in the Spiked [!] column “Hunter Biden and the corruption of the liberal media.”

The media component of the scandal is open and obvious and par for the course, but it doesn’t mean we should forego notice. O’Neill notices.