The narrative about Bill and Hillary Clinton began in 1992 and the media has never let up, no matter the lack of evidence. It decided Bill was guilty of having an affair with Gennifer Flowers, concluded the Clintons were trailer trash unlike the high-and-mighty bespoke-suit-wearing persons all journalists were, and has been on the hunt ever since. Even when the accusations have been proven false, retractions have been few and far between and appeared usually on page 17 (the allegations were always Page One news, of course).

The New York Times’ Jeff Gerth was the first to pounce on Whitewater, the non-scandal that triggered the Clintons-are-duplicitous meme, and though, according to Joe Conason and longtime political reporter and erstwhile Clinton defender Gene Lyons, Gerth had exculpating evidence, he apparently chose not to include it. He was, one imagines, doing his best Woodward/Bernstein impression, with the Clintons standing in for Nixon.

This is how Lyons put it in a 1994 Harper’s magazine article:

Absent the near-talismanic role of The New York Times in American journalism, the whole complex of allegations and suspicions subsumed under the word ‘Whitewater’ might never have made it to the front page, much less come to dominate the national political dialogue for months at a time. It is all the more disturbing, then, that most of the insinuations in Gerth’s reporting are either highly implausible or demonstrably false.

This is why you get stories similar to this from the Washington Post last week, claiming there were 147 FBI agents looking into Secretary Clinton’s emails. That number should have triggered the BS monitor of any reporter; for one thing, the FBI doesn’t deploy that kind of resources for anything short of violent revolution. But it was what the press wanted to believe, so it went into the story, leaked from an “unnamed” lawmaker who claimed to have been briefed by the Director of the FBI. That, by the way, should have triggered the BS monitor again; Director Comey briefs Congress in hearings; I doubt he does so in private phone calls.

The number got knocked down to “under 50” agents and the Post issued a retraction. The next day another source told MSNBC the number of agents was about twelve. A far cry from 147, no? But the original Post reporter, Robert O’Harrow Jr., couldn’t be bothered to fact-check. A hundred and forty-seven agents would grab the headlines and the clicks, and to hell with whether it made sense or not.

That’s the quality of “journalism” the Clintons have faced since they arrived in Washington in 1992.