During his June jaunt through New Hampshire, Speaker Newt Gingrich visited Manchester’s Union-Leader newspaper and signed reporter Jim Schaufenbil’s copy of our story about Newt’s shady book deal with Rupert Murdoch (May/June). “He just smiled and nodded,” Schaufenbil reports.
We can only imagine what he was really thinking. We had just excerpted a leaked document outlining Newt’s televised college class (“Will Newt Fall?” July/August). That document has since been included in the House Ethics Committee’s probe into Newt’s finances. The outline for the “nonpartisan” course credits “powerful institutions such as the big-city machines, the labor unions, and the left-wing activist groups (including trial lawyers and gays)” for keeping the Democrats in power. The course outline proposes political countermeasures for the GOP.
Still, few in the press have reported much on Newt’s political machine and how he spent the at least $10 million in undisclosed donations to GOPAC, his political action committee. Meanwhile, they’ve focused on the approximately $100,000 at stake in the Clintons’ fishy Whitewater investment. Even before the Senate’s Whitewater hearings began, there was a clear disparity between the numbers of stories published on each scandal:
| Whitewater | GOPAC | |
| New York Times | 754 | 61 |
| Los Angeles Times | 531 | 33 |
| Washington Post | 827 | 87 |
| Wall Street Journal | 534 | 40 |
Source: Lexis-Nexis; Dow Jones News Retrieval
