Two years ago, Gene Lyons, a professional writer and semi-professional Arkansan, tried to throw retardant on the great Whitewater conflagration by contending that the scandal was a non-scandal -- a concoction created by tendentious reporting, inflated and prolonged by partisanship. His article, in the October 1994 Harper's Magazine, generated a flurry of interest; Harper's arranged a symposium, there was muttering on the Internet, and The New York Times, Lyons's chief target, responded by saying, essentially, "See here, old chap, we don't do that sort of thing." But the fire smoldered on, fueled by new rounds of congressional hearings, by the explorations of two successive special prosecutors, by two long trials in Little Rock, and above all by generous attention in the news media, even when polls showed that the public had wearied.

Lyons's new tract is a reworking of his 1994 article, expanded to incorporate developments through the first third of 1996 and to scrutinize other segments of the national press. His message remains the same: "Far from being the result of muckraking reporting by a vigorous and independent press, what 'the Clinton scandals' amount to is possibly the most politically charged case of journalistic malpractice in recent American history." The news media (see his subtitle) "invented" Whitewater.

This is far too ambitious a proposition to sustain by Lyons's methods, which rely a great deal on counterassertion. The reader will no doubt accept or reject the larger thesis according to previous beliefs and convictions. But setting the grander contentions aside, the essay is worth reading as a simple critique of the press.

The Times remains Exhibit A. Its labors on Whitewater began with Jeff Gerth's now-fabled story of March 8, 1992, in which he revealed the Clintons' involvement in the Whitewater land investment and asked "whether a governor should be involved in a business deal with the owner of a business regulated by the state and whether, having done so, the governor's wife through her law firm should be receiving legal fees for work done for the business." Gerth was eventually joined by a crew of other Whitewater-parsers -- notably Stephen Engelberg, Dean Baquet, and Stephen Labaton. (Gerth's story and three later items are reprinted as an appendix, with other supporting materials.)

A representative example of Lyons's approach is his critique of the Times's coverage of the reports prepared by the law firm of Pillsbury Madison & Sutro for the Resolution Trust Corporation to determine whether anybody should be sued as a result of Whitewater or the troubles of the two institutions with which it was entangled, Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan and the Rose Law Firm. The findings turned out to be so unexpectedly favorable to the Clintons that the administration has seized on the reports as exoneration.

The first of these reports, made available in the summer of 1995, was seen in The Wall Street Journal's news columns as "corroborat[ing] most of the President and Mrs. Clinton's assertions about their Whitewater real estate investment." No such thing in the Times, where a story of 1,762 words, signed by Gerth and Engelberg, found that the major point of the report was not exoneration but the disparity of investment in Whitewater between the Clintons and their partner, James B. McDougal, a difference of some $116,000 in a total outlay of $200,000 that the headline writer called a "Vast Benefit." Only somewhere past the twentieth paragraph did the story say that the report supported the Clintons' claim that they were "passive investors" in Whitewater, and by implication McDougal's victims.

A supplemental Pillsbury report issued in December 1995 received similar treatment. The Times story, by Stephen Labaton, said that the RTC had decided not to sue to recover losses caused by Madison Guaranty, but it conspicuously omitted the report's conclusion that the Clintons had little or no control over the Whitewater enterprise.

 When he comes to the final Pillsbury report, issued in February 1996, Lyons is guilty of an omission. He does not seem to be aware of the reasonably well-balanced story by Neil A. Lewis in the Times of March 1. Moreover, Lyons wrongly states that there was no mention in any newspaper of the report's conclusion that Hillary Clinton earned at best $20 a month from representing Madison Guaranty. Lewis includes this fact.

 Not until June 1996 -- too late for Lyons to include -- did a Times news story, under the byline of Stephen Labaton, unambiguously state that the "report found no evidence that President Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton or others had been involved in improperly diverting money from an ailing savings association into the Whitewater land venture." But that statement was tucked into a story that was designed largely to undermine the findings of the report. Labaton quoted a letter from Kenneth W. Starr, the Whitewater special prosecutor, to an unnamed person quoting an unnamed deputy as saying, "We would not agree with all their conclusions. We do have some facts that they apparently did not have." Labaton found in this "a tantalizing new clue about the direction of [Starr's] secretive inquiry." Overall, Lyons is persuasive on this topic, and he makes a convincing case as well that Times coverage of the Senate Whitewater hearings was unbalanced in favor of the accusers.

Well and good; he scores points. But the problem with Lyons, still, is that he damages himself by claiming too much and then bolstering his case with bluster. To compare a Times story to "a Pravda article on the Hitler-Stalin pact" is not only excessive but distasteful. However deserving of criticism, James B. Stewart, author of Blood Sport, should not be called, with cheap sarcasm, "Mr. Pulitzer Prize." Most disturbing, there is an undertone in Lyons's criticism that hints at willful wrongdoing -- that the newspapers and the reporters are not merely misguided but corrupt.

Setting aside the grander theses, there is a humbler essay buried within, a lesson in how strongly the investigative mode sways even the grandest institutions of journalism, how the hope of scoring a coup leads journalists to feed on tidbits from the prosecutorial side and to neglect the rights of the accused, how long the press can maintain an exposŽ stance without revealing anything particularly new or significant.

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