WASHINGTON – If you want to learn what Hillary Clinton meant by “the vast right-wing conspiracy,” part of the extensive collection of dossiers the Clinton White House kept on its media enemies was released Friday by the Clinton Library.
The most important of the documents, “The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce,” originally some 331 pages, was reduced to only 28 pages in the sanitized and heavily redacted version posted by the presidential library.
“The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce refers to the mode of communication employed by the right wing to convey their fringe stories into legitimate subjects of coverage by the mainstream media,” explains the report. “This is how the stream works: Well-funded right wing think tanks and individuals underwrite conservative newsletters and newspapers such as the Western Journalism Center, the American Spectator and the Pittsburgh Tribune Review. Next, the stories are reprinted on the Internet where they are bounced into the mainstream media through one of two ways: 1) the story will be picked up by the British tabloids and covered as a major story, from which the American right-of-center mainstream media, (i.e. the Wall Street Journal, Washington Times and New York Post) will then pick the story up; or 2) The story will be bounced directly from the Internet to the right-of-center mainstream American media. After the mainstream right-of-center media covers the story, congressional committees will look into the story. After Congress looks into the story, the story now has the legitimacy to be covered by the remainder of the American mainstream press as a ‘real’ story.”
The operation launched by the Clinton administration in response to this conspiracy theory was designed to prevent so-called “mainstream media” from picking up such stories. That effort came in several parts:
- The original 331-page report was distributed by the White House and the Democratic National Committee to select reporters in an effort to discredit those behind the critical reports on the Clinton White House – namely billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, journalist Joseph Farah, political activist Floyd Brown and the American Spectator.
- Hillary Clinton’s public relations effort to vilify what she called “the cast right-wing conspiracy.”
- A pattern of politically motivated audits of individuals and organizations by the Internal Revenue Service.
“It’s quite an amazing story,” said Farah, founder and editor of WND whose Western Journalism Center was audited after the White House sent a letter from a constituent calling for an investigation to the IRS. “It may all have a familiar ring to the tea party groups of the 21st century. Clinton got away with it, so it was bound to happen again – and it most assuredly has.”
The document dump Friday included some 7,500 pages in all, but the focus of attention has been the mysterious Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce, as it was dubbed by the Clinton White House.
Most notable in the sections of the report released publicly is the concern the White House had for the impact of the new media, hearkening back to Hillary Clinton’s concern about the Internet that there were “no gatekeepers.”
“The Internet has become one of the major and most dynamic modes of communication,” the report warns. “The Internet can link people, groups and organizations together instantly. Moreover, it allows an extraordinary amount of unregulated data and information to be located in one area and available to all. The right wing has seized upon the Internet as a means of communicating its ideas to people. Moreover, evidence exists that Republican staffers surf the Internet, interacting with extremists in order to exchange ideas and information.”
Four of the 28 pages in the redacted report released Friday focus on Farah – his history running daily newspapers, his religious views and his investigations into official corruption.
“Some time back in 1994 or 1995, Bill and Hillary Clinton had what I would now describe as ‘a prophetic nightmare.’” explains Farah. “Everyone who was conscious back then will remember Hillary talking about this bad dream in a television interview in which she explained that her husband’s problems were all manufactured by ‘a vast right-wing conspiracy.’ This nightmare is chronicled the complete version of the Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce, which I intend to publish later this year in its entirety. This was a report distributed to select U.S. reporters in an effort to discredit a new breed of investigative journalism into what was, until now, already emerging as the most scandal-plagued administration in the history of the United States.”
Farah points out that this concern by the White House was very early in the history of the Internet.
“No one had yet heard of Matt Drudge,” Farah says. “No one knew about the ‘blue dress.’ This was before WND, or WorldNetDaily as it was originally known 17 years ago. To keep things in perspective, I think Monica Lewinsky was a teenage undergraduate student at the time.”
Farah notes the concern expressed in the report about “unregulated data.”
“That’s Hillary, right there,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she wrote that section herself. A few years later she deplored the fact that the Internet lacks ‘any kind of editing function or gatekeeping function.’”
To put things in perspective, when this report was distributed to a few dozen key reporters by the White House, there were approximately 1 million computers connected to the Internet.
“I think the Clintons saw what was coming and feared it,” said Farah. “The free market, working through the Internet was addressing longstanding institutional problems in the media, as well as exposing fraud, waste, corruption and abuse at the highest levels of government. This was a crisis for them.”
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