A High-Profile Plunge into Whitewater   

In his little office at the little New York Observer, Executive Editor Joe Conason made big waves in Whitewater this spring that were felt far beyond 57th Street.

Conason, 42, who writes a political column for the peach-colored, hip Manhattan weekly, piqued attention from the Big Apple to the Beltway when he wrote a piece for the Observer and a cover story for The Nation (cowritten by Murray Waas) that were ahead of the curve on Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr's outside legal work--which includes representing tobacco giant Brown & Williamson and potential Republican vice presidential candidate Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson.

The March 18 Nation article revealed that as late as January of this year, Starr's law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, was being sued by the Resolution Trust Corp., the government agency charged with cleaning up the S&L debacle and a key player in Whitewater. To follow up, Conason dove into Whitewater with an Observer piece headlined "Whitewater's Sam Dash Sees No Major Scandal." In it, Dash, Starr's $3,200-a-week ethics adviser and the onetime chief counsel of the Senate Watergate Committee, downplayed Whitewater's importance. And while he defended his boss' ethics and the legality of his activities, he called questions about Starr's law practice "legitimate" and admitted that the independent counsel "may deserve to be criticized for some very bad judgment."

The pieces focused attention on the Observer, until then largely unknown outside of Manhattan, and helped push what had been an obscure angle of the tangled Whitewater story onto the national news agenda. By the time the ink dried on a Conason column in the Observer that jabbed the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal for ignoring questions about Starr's outside legal practice, Beltway journalists were rushing to catch up with the allegations Conason had outlined. Back in New York, The New Yorker ran a lengthy piece by Jane Mayer about Starr's entanglements and the New York Times called for the independent counsel to step down.

Meanwhile, Starr moved to defend himself, issuing a statement that accused Conason of "recklessly misquoting and mischaracterizing" Dash's views. Dash also responded, charging in a four-page press release that Conason shaped the story to fit his own viewpoint.

Not missing a hiccup on the Whitewater beat, the Wall Street Journal ran some of Dash's rebuttal, mentioning that Conason stood by his story. Irked that his views weren't further included, Conason returned the spitball in his next column, which concluded that Starr, Dash and the Journal were changing the subject instead of answering questions about Starr's integrity. In the final round, Journal Editor Robert Bartley decided Conason already had his say in the Observer and opted not to run his letter to the editor defending his Dash story.

Conason says he took extra care to get Dash's opinions right by reviewing quotes and faxing the story to him before it went to press. "I wanted him to be interpreted correctly," Conason says. "He was in a pickle. That story's good enough. I didn't have to make anything up."

Conason says he felt vindicated when the mainstream media reported the facts of Starr's outside work, to "let [readers] make their own judgments." A Washington Post article by Susan Schmidt and R.H. Melton noted that the Whitewater momentum had shifted, at least temporarily, so that Republicans were on the defensive rather than the White House.

Village Voice media critic James Ledbetter says that Conason's work is an example of the New York Observer's increasing feistiness. "Their strategy has always been to get that paper into the hands of an elite, whether it's a policymaking or media or moneyed elite," Ledbetter says. "It's never been presented as a paper for a mass audience. It's a logical extension for them to say, 'We should cover Washington aggressively.' "

It isn't just Whitewater coverage that has led the 51,000-circulation Observer to raise eyebrows. Last fall the paper increased its cover price from 50 cents to $1 and more recently began to dabble with color on its front page. And when the Village Voice recently decided to become a free weekly, the Observer quickly snagged its primo newsstand position in Manhattan.

Housed in a townhouse on the Upper East Side, the Observer, just shy of nine years old, is New York City's other paper of record, chronicling the inside track on decidedly "inside New York" affairs, like local politics, media and the glitterati. The paper boasts in its media kits that its readers "are the movers and shakers" of New York City.

And even though Washington may be the paper's second-largest market, Editor Peter Kaplan says that in spite of the recent notoriety, the Observer's main focus remains mega-competitive New York, where 90 percent of its papers are distributed. Kaplan says the Dash splash and coverage of national issues are not efforts to groom the paper into a national media force. "It was a blip on the radar screen--a terrific blip on the screen," Kaplan says, "but our only shot at success here is to keep doing what we do."

Conason says his role as a columnist has not overshadowed his role as executive editor, just as the Observer's recent spate of Washington coverage will not overshadow its focus on New York. "A New York paper, by definition, deals with subjects of national interest," Conason says. "New York and Washington are very linked now for a variety of reasons dealing with media and government and the relationship between the two, so I think it's inevitable that we're going to cover matters of interest beyond the city."

But Kaplan says not to expect the Observer to open a Washington bureau anytime soon. "We need to stick to our knitting," he says. "We're not trying to become something bigger and fuzzier. We're not going to do a White House column unless they open up a Manhattan branch."