Everyone's favorite Hollywood bad guy/private eye, Anthony Pellicano, is back in the news this week, making for the usual colorful coverage. But why has the mainstream media continued to ignore the alleged links between the P.I. and Sen. Hillary Clinton? 

By Thomas Lipscomb 

(March 15, 2006) -- The New York Times began the week with a delicious glimpse of Hollywood Babylon, “A Studio Boss and a Private Eye Star in a Bitter Hollywood Tale” by David M. Halbfinger and Allison Hope Weiner.  This is yet another tale of everyone’s’ favorite rogue, real-life Hollywood P.I., Anthony Pellicano.  He was private eye to such touchy stars as Tom Cruise, John Travolta  and Michael Jackson.  He handled his cases with all the subtlety of the baseball bat he bragged about keeping handy in the trunk of his car. The news that Pellicano finally got himself busted for possession of illegal explosives was accompanied by the legal explosion of champagne corks all over Tinsel Town. After finishing a two and a half year sentence last month, to Hollywood’s vast relief, he was immediately hit with a wiretap charge.

But as amusing as Pellicano’s role in the hairpulling between a fourth-magnitude star like Gary Shandling, a sell-by-date endangered paramour, and a sticky fingers Hollywood climber who has just ascended a studio throne might be, it was just another of many available Pellicano peccadilloes.  Maybe in the hands of Armistead Maupin or John Berendt literary gold can be spun from this glitz, but it sure wasn’t news.  So what was it doing on page one? And why did the story so studiously ignore and fail to explore far more newsworthy material on the same subject?

Pellicano is, after all, the private eye whose tough guy tactics have directly threatened more reporters, from Vanity Fair to The Los Angeles Times, than any other in the past two decades. His work for The National Enquirer in the early 1990s brought him quickly to media attention as an intimidator of sources and competition as well. 

He also had a long and close association with the Clinton White House beginning in the presidential campaign in 1992.  In an attempt to combat the “bimbo eruption” that occurred during the first Clinton campaign, Pellicano surfaced evidence that the Gennifer Flowers tapes of her long-term boyfriend Bill Clinton’s phone calls were doctored.  Pellicano's evidence was subsequently demolished, but the damage to Flowers’s credibility was done.  Then, within four days of Matt Drudge’s 1998 revelations about Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton’s relationship, Pellicano found Andy Bleiler.  Lewinsky’s former drama coach gave the world a blow by blow account of how Lewinsky had told him she wanted a job as a White House intern so she could earn her “presidential kneepads.” 

In 2003 a man who had also worked for both The National Enquirer and the Clinton White House, David Kendall, dismissed any connection 
between the Clintons and Pellicano as “politically motivated and demonstrably false.”  But when Pellicano was directly asked by Newsweek if he was working for the Clintons, he had “no comment.”

Kendall is a charming man whose ability to parse words as White House counsel served the Clintons well during their darkest days while Bill was still struggling over the meaning of “is” and got himself convicted of perjury, and disbarred. And of course a lot of the attempts at Pellicano-Clinton connections were, are, and will continue to be politically motivated.

Nevertheless “enquiring minds want to know”-- and with Hillary Clinton as the front-running Democratic Presidential candidate so should any decent newsperson. And yet in all the coverage of the Pellicano travails of the past four years not one Mainstream Media organization has bothered to look into any of this, from The New York Times to The Los Angeles Times.

Numerous unbiased accounts of the Clintons have repeatedly stressed the importance of Hillary’s role in having the good sense to understand the danger the “bimbo eruptions” represented to her blasé husband and to deal with them before they got out of hand. And there were a lot of strange
occurrences surrounding the Paula Jones case, Kathleen Willey’s dead cat and the alleged Brodderick rape case. Did the current front-running Democratic Presidential contender Hillary Clinton hire or direct any or all of Anthony Pellicano’s activities in her particular known area of interest?

You have to totally lack journalistic curiosity or be brain dead to miss an opportunity like this. And those are the more attractive possibilities. After all, if reporters continue to dance around such an obvious matter with a presidential election looming every time another Pellicano story comes up, one would think an editor somewhere would set them straight. So far none have. Do a Lexis search for all the Pellicano stories in MSM. Now do a Google search on Pellicano and Hillary Clinton. Try to match them. Sad, isn’t it?

There can be few more glaring examples of why media are losing markets and hundreds of jobs than the Pellicano story the mainstream media have yet to cover. It is lousy journalism, it is just plain lazy, and worst of all, it is suicidally bad business.

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Thomas Lipscomb is an investigative reporter, a Senior Fellow at the Annenberg Center for the Digital Future (USC), and the founder of Times Books.  But, his favorite post is as the Berlin Bureau Chief for Oregon Magazine.  

© 2006 Thomas Lipscomb