How the conventional media creates its heroes and villains

Sam Smith - In recent days I found myself taking another look at two stories from the past that I had followed closely but had failed to see the connection.

The first was DC Mayor Marion Barry's drug arrest in 1990 and other stories about his drug use during that period.

The other was Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton's reported drug use in the same period as well as his look-the-other-way oversight of a state that had become one of the nation's largest drug trading centers. Among the accounts:

Arkansas becomes a major center of gun-running, drugs and money laundering. The IRS warns other law enforcement agencies of the state's "enticing climate." According to Clinton biographer Roger Morris, operatives go into banks with duffel bags full of cash, which bank officers then distribute to tellers in sums under $10,000 so they don't have to report the transaction.

Historian Roger Morris, in his book ''Partners in Power,'' quotes several law enforcement officials who say they had seen and knew of Clinton's drug use. One-time apartment manager Jane Parks claims that in 1984 she could listen through the wall as Bill and Roger Clinton, in a room adjoining hers, discussed the quality of the drugs they were taking.

Journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard will describe the Arkansas of this period as a "major point for the transshipment of drugs" and "perilously close to becoming a 'narco-republic' -- a sort of mini-Columbia within the borders of the United States." There is "an epidemic of cocaine, contaminating the political establishment from top to bottom," with parties "at which cocaine would be served like hors d'oeuvres and sex was rampant." Clinton attends some of these events.

And in the year that Marion Barry was arrested:

 Sharlene Wilson tells a US grand jury investigating drugs in Arkansas that she provided cocaine to Clinton during his first term and that once the governor was so high he fell into a garbage can. The federal drug investigation is shut down within days of her testimony. Wilson flees, terrified of the state prosecuting attorney -- her former lover, and Clinton ally, Dan Harmon. She will be eventually arrested by Harmon himself and sent up for 31 years on a minor drug charge

Mayor Barry would go to prison for his failings in 1991. One year later, Governor Clinton would become president of the United States.Thanks in no small part to a mainstream media that picks and chooses which stories it will cover and which it will pretend never happened.