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A spring Tuesday during primary season: normally campaign coverage would dominate the day's headlines as Barack Obama hopes that a win in the Mississippi Democratic primary will dampen the surge Hillary Rodham Clinton enjoyed last week after her wins in Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island. Not this time. The politics of New York State were Story of the Day instead as the second day of Gov Eliot Spitzer's sex scandal unfurled. The three network anchor desks, as on Monday, were occupied by a trio of Today alumnae. CBS' Katie Couric was joined by substitutes Ann Curry at NBC and Elizabeth Vargas at ABC. Curry and Couric led with Spitzer. Vargas chose a trading day of heavy buying on Wall Street, before introducing a pair of Spitzer packages.

There were three strands to the Spitzer story: the politics, the prosecution and the morality. CBS assigned a reporter to all three; ABC chose politics and morality; NBC concentrated on the prosecution. Monday, when the call girl scandal was revealed, Mike Taibbi on NBC had a different take from his rival networks. He reported that the feds were investigating the Emperor's Club VIP prostitution ring when its wiretap stumbled on Client #9, who happened to be the Governor. There is "no indication Spitzer was a target of the investigation," Taibbi told us then.

Now Taibbi changes his mind. Without retraction of, or even reference to, his Monday story, his new version is that Spitzer was the feds' target all along. The Governor's bank alerted the Internal Revenue Service to suspicious funds transfers and that triggered an "investigation not about using prostitutes--no one was thinking that--but of possible political corruption." Taibbi did not report on the feds' rationale for pursuing the case even after they failed to find the corruption they were looking for. Instead he simply stated that "wiretaps and e-mail traces produced a startling conclusion that the 38-year-old Spitzer…was apparently a repeat customer of a high-priced call girl ring." CBS' Armen Keteyian fleshed out some of the details from the indictment against the operators of the Emperor's Club VIP. The shell company Spitzer allegedly created to launder some $80,000 from his HSBC account to pay for sex was the QAT Consulting Group.

Keteyian reassured us that Spitzer had mainstream turn-ons: he apparently asked Kristen, his hooker, for "very basic things." An unnamed 23-year-old "escort" of Spitzer from a different service called ABC's Brian Ross to describe her parties with the then Attorney General two years ago: "He was a nice guy who tipped well. He did not do anything that was not clean."

As for the politics of New York State, ABC's Ross reported that the Governor "has drawn up a letter of resignation but the hold-up is his negotiations with federal prosecutors" even though Spitzer is not now facing any federal charges and the feds told Ross "there is no evidence Spitzer used state money or campaign funds to pay the prostitutes." CBS' Byron Pitts speculated that Spitzer might be using his potential resignation as a bargaining chip to avoid future felony prosecution. Pitts reflected that "the governor's own take-no-prisoner, need-no-friends style of politics" was hastening his departure. "He went after corporations, mobsters and pimps with equal venom."

Given that wiretaps and e-mail evidence were used to implicate Spitzer, ABC's Ross seemed pleased to find this soundbite from his own interview with Spitzer two years ago: "Never talk when you can nod and never nod when you can wink. And never write an e-mail, because it is death. You are giving prosecutors all the evidence we need."


Andrew Tyndall 3/13/08 4:44:06 pm

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