February 12 - 19, 1998
![[Don't Quote Me]](/standard/image/headers/dont_quote_me_header.gif)
It was all going to be so simple. Boy meets girl. Girl services boy. Girl cuts deal with independent counsel. Boy, humiliated and facing at least the theoretical possibility of impeachment, resigns. Right from the start, Fornigate seemed to fit so neatly into the archetypal patterns by which the media organize their universe that it was days before anyone stopped and noticed it wasn't unfolding the way it was supposed to. Scandalus interruptus
The media thought Fornigate was going to be simple, salacious, and fun. Now it's starting to look like work.
Don't Quote Me by Dan Kennedy
Indeed, a funny thing happened on the way to that dramatic last chopper ride from the South Lawn: Monica Lewinsky and her lawyer, the ubiquitous William Ginsburg, refused to cooperate with independent counsel Ken Starr. Thus the media, having been teased by tales of oral sex in the Oval Office, are now stuck -- as Warren St. John put it in a hilarious New York Observer piece last week -- with "a case of journalistic blue balls -- worked into a lather . . . then denied gratification."
Contrary to popular perceptions, this story has been driven not by the press but by the independent counsel's office. The story broke because Newsweek's Michael Isikoff learned that Starr had received incriminating tapes from Lewinsky's friend from hell, Linda Tripp. Now the press isn't getting anywhere because Starr isn't getting anywhere. And in a particularly weird twist, Clinton and his defenders may have their nemesis Matt Drudge, the notorious cybergossip, to thank: if he hadn't revealed on January 17 that Newsweek had held Isikoff's story, Starr would have had a whole extra week to talk Lewinsky into wearing a wire during her next assignation with the president.
People who worry about the media's tendency to shape, rather than cover, events should find that encouraging. Yet in a classic blame-the-messenger response, surveys show the public hates the way this story is being reported. At a forum at Harvard's Kennedy School on Monday night, pollster Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, said that 46 percent of the public holds a positive view of the media's performance and 51 percent holds a negative view. By contrast, he said, the public's assessment of the media during the Iran-contra scandal was 68 percent positive and 31 percent negative. Then again, support for the media's muckraking role has fallen from 67 percent to 55 percent since 1985, Kohut said, calling that finding "a real tragedy." Tragic it may be, but it would be even more tragic if the press responded by backing off.
With the story moving precisely nowhere, and Bill Clinton's approval rating at an all-time high, journalistic self-esteem has plummeted. The press should be directing its energies into finding out whether the president carried out a lengthy affair with a 21-year-old intern and then -- with the help of his friend Vernon Jordan, who was already being investigated for assistance he gave Whitewater felon Webster Hubbell -- urged her to lie about it under oath. Instead, reporters are asking a familiar, plaintive question: "Why does everyone hate us?"
Which is why White House aide Rahm Emanuel was in U.S. News & World Report columnist Gloria Borger's face at the Kennedy School forum. "Do you think the press has a conventional wisdom?" Emanuel asked, his voice soft but his finger wagging. "Do you think people in the press are influenced by their social and economic background?" Borger spluttered a bit, and Emanuel pounced, demanding "Yes or no?" as if he were an exasperated John McLaughlin trying to get Eleanor Clift to come to the point.
"Yes," Borger finally replied, and Emanuel leaned back, looking satisfied. What any of it had to do with the subject at hand -- the media's coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair -- was a mystery. But Emanuel, a lean and hungry-looking sort with a reputation for jumping up on desks and screaming at subordinates, had at least managed to inject some aggression into the debate. And when the media are on the defensive, aggression can be a reasonably effective substitute for the truth.
Certainly that's why Hillary Clinton struck back with her charge that Starr's investigation was part of a "right-wing conspiracy." Luckily for the Clintons, Starr is an ideological zealot, with well-documented ties to the right and an unseemly interest in the president's sexual proclivities. (The best idea to date has come from American Prospect coeditor Robert Kuttner, who in a recent syndicated column called for both Starr and Clinton to resign.) So even though Hillary's charge was laughed off in some circles, it was taken seriously by CNN (among others), making the questions being asked about the Clinton-Lewinsky story look like partisan posturing.
And just when the story looked as if it might reignite, with the New York Times' report last Friday that White House secretary Betty Currie had given testimony before the grand jury that was damaging to her boss, Team Clinton responded with aggression once again. This time the theme was leaks from Starr's office, with Clinton lawyer David Kendall dramatically filing a complaint against Starr. That, in turn, led to yet another round of media self-analysis over the ethics of using such leaks and over how much journalists should tell readers and viewers about the leakers and their motives.
At Monday's forum, Emanuel tried to argue that grand-jury leaks are considerably worse than garden-variety Washington leaks about such arcana as, say, an upcoming health-policy proposal. But that's disingenuous. The Boston Globe's Mark Jurkowitz pointed out on Tuesday that federal prosecutors, for better or worse, have long used leaks to advance their cases. Just ask former congressman Nick Mavroules and former Massachusetts House Speaker Charlie Flaherty. As Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote on Tuesday: "Patriotism may be the last refuge of a scoundrel, but yelling about leaks is a close second."
Perhaps the strangest aspect of the story -- and the most significant factor in its grinding to a halt -- is Lewinsky's refusal to deal. When the scandal first broke, it seemed inevitable that Lewinsky would enter into a plea agreement with Starr and immediately start telling prosecutors all the salacious details -- which, of course, would quickly be leaked to a properly grateful media. Indeed, to the extent that the press overreached in the first few days, it seemed to be based on an almost instinctive understanding that that's the way these things work. It wasn't until the State of the Union address, a week into the scandal, that the media finally began to realize there was nothing going on.
Lewinsky's lawyer, Ginsburg, has been bitterly criticized by those wise in the ways of Washington for not reaching an immunity agreement with Starr. Who knows? Despite Ginsburg's incendiary attack on Starr in this week's Time magazine, it may yet happen. But if it doesn't, it may turn out that the most prescient analysis was Jacob Weisberg's February 2 piece in Slate (http://www.slate.com), in which he theorized that Ginsburg had figured out that Starr, no matter how angry he gets, will not prosecute a 24-year-old woman for lying about her sex life. "Lewinsky doesn't want to testify against the president or Jordan," Weisberg hypothesized. "By casting doubt on the story she apparently told Tripp on tape, Ginsburg damages her value as a witness and diminishes the chance that anyone else will be prosecuted with her evidence." Interesting if true, as they say.
And what are we to make of Paula Jones's revictimization at the hands of one of her biggest media supporters: the Weekly Standard, a conservative political magazine run by Clinton-loathing pundit William Kristol? The magazine's February 9 cover is a full-color Sean Delonas illustration of Clinton as a centaur, with a nude Lewinsky riding on his back and an equally nude, pre-makeover Jones in his arms. The cover line: YOW! Jones, of course, has based her sexual-harassment complaint on her contention that she said no when Clinton allegedly asked her to "kiss it." She went public, she and her legal team at the right-wing Rutherford Institute have claimed on innumerable occasions, in order to salvage her reputation. (Never mind that, prior to her lawsuit, the sole existing reference to her was the mention of a "Paula" in David Brock's infamous Troopergate story for the American Spectator.)
Yet Nisha Mohammed, a Rutherford spokeswoman, didn't know about the Standard cover when contacted by the Phoenix. "At this point we can't really make any comment on it," she said, even after receiving a fax of the cover. And Claudia Winkler, a Standard managing editor, said pleasantly if implausibly that the Jones caricature wasn't Jones, but was, rather, intended to be "generic." She added, helpfully, that the non-Jones was originally Jones, but was un-Jonesed at the direction of the editors. Well, okay. Let's just say she looks like Jones with a nose job.
That's hardly the only oddity of this affair. Slate held a contest to name the scandal, and came up with Flytrap, rejecting such nominations as Come-a-lot and Intern Explorer (Slate, you see, is owned by Microsoft). Then there was the pop-culture highlight of the week: the news that O.J. Simpson stopped his SUV in front of Lewinsky's father's house on Monday and exchanged a few pleasantries with the encamped media. What would Princess Di think?
No doubt the Clintons are thinking -- hoping -- that these are signs the story is winding down. Perhaps it is, especially if Lewinsky won't talk. They shouldn't count on it, though. It's clear that the people who are closest to them don't.
At noontime on Monday, White House press secretary Mike McCurry spoke before several hundred people at the Kennedy School. It was a remarkable performance -- intelligent, friendly, and subtly but noticeably detached from the fortunes of the president he is charged with defending. Boston Herald columnist Margery Eagan captured the tone perfectly in a Tuesday piece headlined McCURRY DOESN'T KNOW, AND HE SURE DOESN'T WANT TO. McCurry went into loving detail in explaining how and why he's been cut out of the loop on the Lewinsky story. And he appeared to be reserving judgment on the issue of Clinton's involvement, blandly offering that he would quit "at the point where I don't believe anything I have been instructed to say. I have not encountered that in this case. Nor do I expect to."
But what if he does? What if we all do?
Last week, liberal Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne and the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page found themselves in a rare bit of agreement: that Clinton's ratings are high not because people don't care about the charges against him, but because they're withholding judgment. Dionne looked at a Post poll that showed Clinton with a 67 percent favorability rating, even though 52 percent believe he and Lewinsky had an affair. It turned out, on closer inspection, that only 25 percent simultaneously approve of the job he's doing and believe a sexual affair took place. "There is no amoral majority," Dionne wrote, adding that "if new information should undermine the president's denials, you can count on his approval ratings to go down."
The real media story is that reporters expected to have this one spoon-fed to them. Now it's starting to look like work
Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www1.shore.net/~dkennedy/
Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com
Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here
