Code of silence

Explaining the media's elitist disdain for the phony Clinton love-child story. Plus, the Herald and the Globe do battle over Fenway, and two slices of newspaper history.

Don't Quote Me by Dan Kennedy

It was actually the New York Times -- not Matt Drudge, not the Star, not the New York Post -- that broke the story about Bill Clinton's nonexistent love child. Trouble is, the Times' reporter, Katharine Steele, didn't know what she had.

In a January 2 front-pager about the "Weekend," the conservative Republican get-together in Phoenix formerly known as the "Dark Ages," Steele reported that "cyberscoop bad-boy" Drudge was teasing those on hand "with the promise of a report that he said would rock the world." She condescendingly quoted Drudge as telling an anti-Clinton radio host: "It's a story of worldwide import. People have been moved into safe houses today, awaiting medical results. This is all I will say on this. Stay tuned to the Drudge Report."

That evening, Drudge -- on his Fox News Channel show and in his electronically distributed newsletter -- rocked Washington by reporting that the Star, a supermarket tabloid, was conducting DNA tests on 13-year-old Danny Williams to verify his ex-prostitute mother's long-standing claim that Clinton is his father.

And that, in turn, led to a media feeding frenzy -- but one very different from the sort we've become accustomed to in recent years.

In the past, stories such as Gennifer Flowers's affair with Clinton and Frank Gifford's cheatin' heart rose above their tabloid origins when the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other elite news organizations published thumb-sucking pieces on What It All Means. As New Republic media critic William Powers, now with National Journal, once observed, a common conduit for tabloid stories is through Howard Kurtz's media column in the Post, which "launders the news for mainstream resale."

But in the case of Danny Williams and his mother, Bobbie Ann Williams, the big, elite media stayed far, far away until it was all over. Time reported on its Web site Saturday that the test results were negative. On Monday, Kurtz reported that it was an "utterly bogus charge." And the Times continues to maintain its silence, leaving those readers whose only news source is the Great Gray Lady to wonder what, precisely, Drudge was raving about out in Phoenix.

In other words, the legitimate press -- or most of it, anyway -- behaved exactly the way bluenosed media critics say it should. By refusing to traffic in rumor and unproven allegations, the media elite played the gatekeeper role it all too often seems to have abdicated.

So the Times, the Post, CNN, and the broadcast networks deserve the thanks of a grateful nation, right? Well, no. Indeed, by trying to re-establish their traditional standing as a social filter, the media merely demonstrated the obsoleteness of that role. Despite near-silence from leading news organizations, the love-child story became the talk of the nation. By refusing to deal with it -- to report on it, to evaluate it, to observe that the White House was in turmoil over it -- the media came across as repressive rather than responsible. Not to mention naive, if they really thought their refusal to cover the story would prevent anyone from learning about it.

"Why was the so-called 'love child' story reported at all?" asked an indignant Kurtz in his Monday column. Actually, it wasn't, not in any traditional sense.

Drudge, as is his wont, flogged it hard for his audience of media and political insiders and anti-Clinton conservatives, and that alone was enough to get it into general circulation. (Brill's Content recently reported that Drudge's Web site received more than 13.5 million visits during one month last fall, and that doesn't even count readers who get the Drudge Report by e-mail instead.)

It was, of course, covered on page one in Rupert Murdoch's New York Post (CLINTON PATERNITY BOMBSHELL, blared the January 3 cover) and in the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times, the two leading papers for Clinton crazies, but neither has any pretensions to journalistic respectability. The New York Daily News talked it up in its gossip column, and MSNBC and the Boston Herald briefly alluded to it. But that's hardly a major breakout.

The story reached millions more through entertainment media. Imus in the Morning lampooned it through song and parody. Jay Leno, on The Tonight Show, was particularly vicious, quipping, "We've seen what Clinton's girlfriends look like. I can't imagine what his hookers look like. Oh my God."

Thus, despite the best efforts of the media elite, the story was almost as widely known as if it had led every newspaper and newscast in the country. And, naturally, the elitists were buzzing about it too -- among themselves, anyway.

The online magazine Slate -- whose editor, Michael Kinsley, has defended the public's right to share in the buzz and who reportedly once offered Drudge a job -- last week became a veritable tip sheet for the latest in sleazy Clintonalia. Its "Explainer" column reported that because the Star did not have a complete set of Clinton's DNA test results, but only what was contained in the Starr report, even a positive match would be less than definitive. (The Slate reader who suggested that particular topic, by the way, was Boston civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate, a Phoenix contributor.) And in its "Keeping Tabs" roundup column, Slate reported not only on the Danny Williams story but also on the National Enquirer's recent claim that Clinton -- under physical attack from an enraged Hillary -- had ordered a Secret Service agent, "Keep that bitch away from me!"

The New York Observer also tackled the sleaze head-on, with Clinton defender Joe Conason denouncing right-wing efforts to promote both the Williams affair and a discredited rumor that Clinton had once forced himself on a woman sexually.

But then, Slate and the Observer are elite publications for elite readers -- briefing papers, in effect, for the very media and political players who don't trust the hoi polloi enough to share such explosive information with them.

Significantly, British and Canadian papers have covered the Williams story extensively. (Expatriate lefty Christopher Hitchens, a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Nation, wrote in London's Evening Standard that the not-yet-disproven allegation was further proof that Clinton is a "psychopath.")

The difference between US and British media coverage, Martin Kettle wrote in the Guardian, is that the British see the Clinton scandals primarily as entertainment, whereas Americans "are embarrassed by what has happened to their president, and hence to their country. That's why their overriding desires, in the clichés of the moment, are for closure and for moving on."

Kettle may be on to something, but I think it's simpler than that. American journalists like to think of themselves as members of a profession, with standards and qualifications and secret handshakes. They don't like reporting on sex, and even when they have to (as with the Lewinsky revelations), their first postcoital instinct is not to light a cigarette but rather to convene a seminar so they can wax self-indulgent about how awful they (and, even worse, their colleagues!) are to dwell on such matters.

In most respects, the British press is no match for its American counterpart. But give it this: it knows a story when it sees one, and it reports with a minimum of angst and handwringing. The American media, by ignoring the Danny Williams story until it was over, merely contributed to suspicions that they have an agenda, and that it's about something other than news.

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A top Boston Globe editor once had this to say when I asked him about a story that the Boston Herald had broken: "There are a lot of one-day wonders over there." His point -- that the Herald often hypes minor stories simply because it has an exclusive -- will be put to the test as the Red Sox prepare, at long last, to unveil their plans for a new ballpark.

The Herald played its January 4 exclusive as though the Sox had just declared war on the Fenway neighborhood. RED SOX EYE MASSIVE MEGAPLEX FOR FENWAY, screamed the front-page banner. The story, by Cosmo Macero Jr., Jack Meyers, and Scott Farmelant, reported that the Sox are considering a $1 billion proposal to build a new baseball stadium, two or three hotels, and entertainment and retail centers. The Herald added that the team would seek $200 million to $250 million in public funding.

Given House Speaker Tom Finneran's well-known opposition to spending tax dollars on sports teams, the Herald scenario should have struck any knowledgeable reader as unlikely -- or, perhaps, as a trial balloon, to be followed later by a more reasonable proposal. Indeed, the same story, further down, quotes "a source close to Red Sox CEO John Harrington" as being "wary" of such a grandiose scheme.

The next day, the Globe's Anthony Flint reported that an unnamed Red Sox "adviser" was calling the $200 million-plus figure "outrageous" (he put the amount of public money to be sought at $60 million to $100 million) and the word megaplex "just a scare term."

Feverish speculation is inevitable. The Patriots are leaving for Hartford, the Sox can't hang on to their best players, and the secretive Harrington has brought in two wired politicos: former Boston Redevelopment Authority head Bob Walsh, an intimate of Mayor Tom Menino, and Dukakis-era bigfoot John Sasso.

But we're going to have to wait until February 2, when the Sox are expected to announce their plans publicly, before we'll know whether the Herald blockbuster was for real or just a one-day wonder.

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Two recent pieces on newspaper history, one to savor, one to avoid.

The good one is in the current Vanity Fair, in which contributing editor David Margolick takes a look at PM, a pathbreaking New York tabloid that published from 1940 to 1948. Often considered to be a distant forefather of alternative and "new" journalism, the staunchly liberal PM helped start I.F. Stone on his muckraking career, gave birth to Parade magazine (okay, so not all of its children deserved to live), and inspired Clay Felker, the pioneering editor of New York magazine.

The bad one, a reminiscence about being introduced to New York's newspaper culture as a boy in the 1950s, is in the December 28/January 4 New Yorker. Written by longtime contributor George Trow, it is bloated with the sort of writerly pretentiousness I thought had died years ago, and punctuated by two absolutely gratuitous uses of the term cum shot. Call it the mutant offspring of William Shawn and Tina Brown.

The effect is rather like a buttoned-down father telling his teenage son that he thinks Marilyn Manson is "really cool," and believe me, it's not attractive in the least.

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Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.shore.net/~dkennedy

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Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com

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Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here

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