Chris Lehane is an American political consultant who served as a lawyer and spokesperson for the Clinton White House. This article has been adapted from Masters of Disaster: The Ten Commandments of Damage Control, by Chris Lehane, Mark Fabiani and Bill Guttentag.

Of the thousands of Clinton presidential records released to the public last week, one among them has received of the bulk of attention: a 332-page memo from 1995. The memo, which offers an in-depth analysis of the right-wing media, describes how conservative conspiracy theories about the Clintons passed from the fringes to the mainstream.

The excitement over the report, it seems to me, comes for two reasons: one, the supposed mystery of its author and two, its very premise, which has been vigorously criticized by—you guessed it—the right-wing media.


To the first question, I would respectfully suggest folks acquaint themselves with a function available on all computers, tablets and mobile devices that support the Internet—a function known as “search,” by which you will easily discover that I was the proud author—a fact that was reported the first time this memo made a splash, back in 1997, and that has been publicly documented numerous times since, not to mention in the book I co-wrote in 2013. As for the premise of the memo, I absolutely stand by it. Not only was it right about the right wing then, it is more accurate than ever today.

Let’s go all the way back to the summer of 1995.

At the time, my then colleague (and current business partner) Mark Fabiani and I were working at the White House as lawyers in the counsel’s office and began to receive calls from mainstream media outlets asking us to respond to various bizarre items related to the late Vince Foster, a fellow White House lawyer who had tragically taken his own life in the summer of 1993. At first, we ignored the calls, as there was nothing to the story beyond the terrible loss of one of the president and first lady’s friends. However, as the calls continued without letup, and the nature of the questions became even more bizarre—to the point where we were asked to comment on alleged eyewitness sightings of Foster—we knew we had to get to the heart of the matter and began asking the reporters the basis for their questions.

All roads led to a mysterious source—the newly exploding Internet.

One Saturday morning in the midst of an oppressively hot D.C. summer weekend, Mark and I found ourselves squirreled away in a stuffy room on the fourth floor of the Old Executive Office Building, where there was a bank of computers from which you could access the “World Wide Web.” Remember—this was the pre-Blackberry, pre-Google, dial-up world of 1995, when only around 10 percent of the public had Internet access and the White House had just barely launched its own web page.

Eight hours later, we emerged from our warren of cubicles having seemingly been transported to a parallel universe. Online we found early versions of chat rooms, postings and other information showing there was an entire cottage industry devoted to discussing conspiracy theories relating to Foster’s death, including numerous online reports of people claiming to have seen him. Those reports would be picked up by so-called news sources that most Americans at the time had never heard of—conservative outlets such as Eagle Publishing’s Human Events or Richard Mellon Scaife’s the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. From there, the story would migrate to right-leaning outlets we were familiar with, such as the New York Post, the Washington Times and the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal—all before eventually ending up in the mainstream press.

What we learned in those eight hours became the basis for our 332-page report, written so that those of us in Clinton White House responsible for fielding questions about these bizarre rumors could apprise mainstream reporters of what we called the “media food chain”—basically, so that we could show them how such a wacky conspiracy theory like the supposed murder of Vince Foster had even become a news “story” at all. We would simply hand the memo to the reporter asking questions, tell him to review it and to come back to us with any remaining questions. Few did.

But we also realized that this was just the beginning. Like the scene in Bugsy where Warren Beatty, playing the mobster Bugsy Siegel, arrives in the Nevada desert and the sees the future of gambling (modern Las Vegas), those eight hours in the White House computer room were our eureka moment about the future of media and politics. We saw the transition from an electorate that passively consumed the information put before it (a joke at the time was that a political rally was a family watching a political commercial on television) to an electorate that could use technology to actively engage in the creation, distribution and self-selection of information.

(Of course, had we been just a little more business-savvy, we would have immediately relocated to Silicon Valley instead of writing that report.)

***

When the memo was released last week, some characterized it as fanciful—a “Clinton conspiracy theory of conspiracy theories.” But in fact, it’s clear today, 20 years later, that we were exactly right—more than we could have imagined!

The technology that seemed so novel in 1995 has spread to where anyone with a Wi-Fi connection is able to select from whom, how, where and when they receive information and then leverage it. News no longer comes from three networks and the morning paper, but from tens of thousands of potential sources. By using Google, Bing or other search engines, it is possible to instantaneously seek information and swiftly make decisions based on sources the user selects. People can—and certainly do—opt out of receiving information from specific media outlets while opting in to others. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, trust in information conveyed through self-selected social media sites—social networking sites, content-sharing platforms, blogs and micro-blogs—surged 75 percent between 2011 and 2012 alone.

It’s not just a few people on the Web spewing Vince Foster-sightings anymore. Today, thanks to this opt in/opt out dynamic, ever-larger segments of the population can believe in completely ungrounded conspiracy theories—such as that President Obama was not born in the United States—despite a massive trove of assiduously documented evidence to the contrary. Take, for example, Fox News’s non-stop coverage of the supposed cover-up surrounding the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, which at times has veered into self-parody—segments hyping shoddy reports produced by the very same people who believe Obama was born in Kenya. Or its coverage of IRS-gate, Solyndra or any other number of fever-swamp-driven pseudo-scandals that mainstream outlets have looked into and found rather less scandalous. And all of these nothingburger stories get duly hyped on zillions of right-wing websites, on conservative talk radio and on the Drudge Report, which boasts more traffic than ever, though it looks pretty much the same as it did during the Clinton years.

What’s going on here? It’s not a conspiracy. America has become a nation that self-segregates not just technologically but also physically. As detailed by former columnist Bill Bishop and sociologist Robert Cushing in their 2008 book The Big Sort, people self-select “their neighborhoods and their churches, to be around others who live like they do and think like they do—and, every four years, vote like they do.” In 1976, the authors claim, 26.8 percent of people lived in so-called landslide counties, where the voters voted for either the Democratic nominee (Jimmy Carter) or the Republican nominee (Gerald Ford) by 20 percent or more. By 2008, more than 47 percent of the country resided in landslide counties.

We live in a red and blue America—as much by neighborhood as by state. And in these different neighborhoods the public consumes information from vastly different news sources. Just watch Fox News and MSNBC cover the same political story—you don’t need a sociology degree to understand that the self-selection of information is a very real phenomenon.

A generation ago, we had “turn on, tune in, drop out.” Today, we have “tune out, search in, opt out.” You get the information you want and rarely have to hear a dissenting voice. Maybe I should write another memo.