Isikoff: I Had 'Certain Homicidal Tendencies' After Drudge Scooped the Lewinsky Story

In Newsweek's final print edition, Michael Isikoff writes about when the magazine decided to hold the story of Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky. "The decision was final: Newsweek would hold the story," Isikoff writes, saying that "the brass wanted more work" done on the story before going to print with it.

A few days later, the story of the decade would be broken by the Drudge Report. "It didn’t take long, of course, for it to explode," writes the former Newsweek writer. "Early Sunday morning, Internet scribe Matt Drudge popped his screaming 'World Exclusive': 'NEWSWEEK KILLS STORY ON WHITE HOUSE INTERN ... SEX RELATIONSHIP WITH PRESIDENT.'"

Isikoff confesses that he had "certain homicidal tendencies" after being scooped. "As the truth began to unfold, and Newsweek’s insider knowledge became clear, The New York Times asked if I was suicidal when the story was spiked," he writes. "I don’t know about suicidal, I replied."

Isikoff says he told those who asked about whether he was suicidal, "I won’t deny certain homicidal tendencies."

It would be a mistake to assume that Republican Senators would have convicted but stopped short due to threats.

Instead the culture of Washington privilege is ingrained in them as in their Democrat counterparts. They told the House Managers that they wouldn’t view the special evidence files set up for them and they wouldn’t convict. Guys like Stevens were adamant that this was their consensus.

“Harrison Bounel”

That’s one I had to Google, to refresh my memory.

Wow, the 0bummer-criminal’s trail is long, convoluted scrubbed and sanitized.

I suspect we’ll never know The Truth, about him.

Getting scooped is the least that should happen to these Liberal scumbags who think “Freedom of the Press” is the freedom to choose sides and lie.

Getting scooped is exactly what should happen to “objective” journalists who elect to spike an obviously significant story.
Of course, getting scooped implies competition. And it is no accident, comrade, that Newsweek was scooped by an internet site. The Associated Press newswire is a continuous, 24/7 virtual “meeting” of all the large journalism outlets. The result of that “meeting” is precisely as Adam Smith would have predicted:
"People of the same trade seldom meet together even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or some contrivance to raise prices."
The effect of continuous meeting is of course a complete absence of ideological competition amongst journalists. You can have all the independence you want among editorial pages, and still have no ideological competition among the “objective” reporters.
The reason wire service journalism - grievously misnamed “the MSM” - is socialist is actually quite simple. In order to not be socialist, you must respect “the man in the arena” above “the critic.” All socialist rhetoric actually boils down to the conceit that criticism is superior to execution. Surprisingly enough, journalists - who after all consider it their job to report bad news and ignore the good - want to criticize everyone else’s execution. But let them - and note well, Lenin and Mussolini were both journalists - obtain power, and suddenly criticism of their execution is uncalled for, because their motives are above questioning.

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