Some days you discover things that make you wonder if everything you know is wrong.

Remember the story of how the departing Clinton staffers "trashed" the White House offices? How they supposedly took all the ‘W" keys off the typewriters, cut computer printer cables, even left "porn bombs" (whatever those are) everywhere? A close Bush adviser was quoted by Internet muckraker Matt Drudge as saying "the damage went way beyond pranks, to vandalism." No less a source than NBC news reported breathlessly of "Phone lines cut, drawers filled with glue, door locks jimmied so that arriving Bush staff got locked inside their new offices." It was so bad that one veteran staffer was reported to be "weeping" at the extent of the carnage.

People tut-tutted and wagged their heads over the story, but you didn’t hear many expressions of disbelief, even from the supposedly "liberal, Clinton-loving" press. I mean, wasn’t it just LIKE those Clinton people, who everybody KNOWS were the most corrupt administration ever to infest the White House?

Oddly enough you also didn’t hear very much when the General Accounting office, the investigative arm of the Congress reported that the vandalism never happened. Note well: they’re not saying it was "exaggerated". They’re not saying it was "overblown." It. Never. Happened.

Here’s the skinny from the GAO (and remember that this was released when the Congress was still entirely Republican): "There was no damage to the offices of the White House's East or West Wings or EOB." Bush's own representatives had to own up (finally) by saying that "there is no record of damage that may have been deliberately caused by the employees of the Clinton administration."

Another untrue thing that everyone knows involves America’s children. Everybody knows that America’s kids aren’t just in trouble, they ARE trouble. Driven mad by Joe Camel ads, rap music, and video games, our kids are like werewolves, smoking, drinking, doing drugs, and ready at any moment to turn into maddened gun-toting animals shooting up the schools. We needed "zero-tolerance" policies that forbade students in ROTC from even posing for pictures next to ceremonial cannons for fear that the little monsters would go wild and create "another Columbine."

The real statistics, however, challenge these assumptions. Between 1990 and 1999, teen homicides went down 63 percent. Other violent crimes went down by 22 percent. Teen births? Down 17 percent. Several surveys have shown that violent crime by youth was at a 25 year low in 1998—yet that same year, a whopping 71% of respondents to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll felt that a school shooting was likely in their community.

So, you may ask, what do these two things have in common? The answer is found in yet another untrue thing that "everybody knows"—the myth of the "liberal dominated press."

A truly "liberal dominated press" would have trumpeted from the housetops the fact that the supposed "trashing" of the West Wing never happened. A "liberal" press would never have let the Bush Administration slide on their complicity in feeding the disinformation. Remember when Ari Fleisher, Bush’s mouthpiece, was telling the press that a "cataloging" of the "damage" was underway? They knew doggoned well that there was no damage to catalog. A liberal press would be holding their feet to the fire on that. Instead, I stumbled across the story in exactly two sources: The Kansas City Star and the Salon.com website on the Internet.

Put down your pens and stay those angry letters linking me with Ted Kennedy, however. I come to trash the press, not to praise it. What really drives the press is not liberalism, it’s careerism. Everyone’s in love with the so-called "big story." Everybody wants to be a Bob Woodward or a Carl Bernstein. Everyone wants to be the reporter that breaks the "big story."

If the truth be told, though, there really aren’t that many Watergate-sized stories out there (thank God). And, as you may remember, when the Watergate story first broke, no one believed it. It was a tough sell in those days to believe that the President could be involved in such a massive criminal conspiracy. But now, of course, it’s easy to believe. After all, we’ve heard it so much from the press.

So what does the press do today? They manufacture the "big story" out of rumors (like the White House "vandalism") and commonly held prejudices (the "violent propensities" of today’s children.) These types of stories, unlike the stories turned up by real investigative journalism, are easy to sell. Every new anecdote seems like a revelation, but it’s a revelation that people believe because it confirms what "everybody knows." And if what everybody knows is wrong---well, you’re never going to sell ad space for Depends and Claritin by making people think.

COPYRIGHT 2001 BY JERRY D. RHOADES, JR.