February 5 - 12, 1998
![[Don't Quote Me]](/standard/image/headers/dont_quote_me_header.gif)
The gantlet that White House secretary Betty Currie had to walk on the day of her grand jury testimony last week showed the media at their ugliest. Looking frail and tiny, Currie leaned on her lawyers for protection as the pack pressed in, thrusting cameras and microphones and tape recorders in her face. It was as though the reporters believed if their behavior was terrifying enough, she might actually blurt out that, yes, she saw Monica Lewinsky performing on the presidential organ in the Oval Office. Backlash
As the negative headlines mount, Clinton's popularity has hit new heights. But the press needs to ignore the polls, stop its handwringing, and stay the course.
Don't Quote Me by Dan Kennedy
And indeed, by week's end the media were deep in the kind of angst-ridden handwringing that invariably follows these periodic frenzies. From the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz to the Boston Globe's Mark Jurkowitz, from a two-hour CNN special on "media madness" to a front-page piece in Sunday's New York Times, from the Nieman Foundation to the Poynter Institute, all were in agreement: We've gone too far once again.
Well, pardon me if I dissent. Because it seems to me that, though the media's performance has hardly been perfect, it hasn't been nearly as bad as the garment-rending would suggest. The press has reported -- accurately, it would appear -- on a major investigation into possible wrongdoing on the part of Bill Clinton and his friend Vernon Jordan. The details of that investigation are so lurid that the media have had to strain to sensationalize them. And serious as the allegations are in their own right, they could be shown to have a direct link to something even more serious: that old standby, the Whitewater scandal.
So why do polls show Clinton's popularity soaring and the public's regard for the media plummeting? The answer lies in the subliminal message conveyed by Betty Currie's ordeal -- that is, that the media are omnipresent, omnivorous, insatiable. That when a big story falls into their lap, especially one involving sex, lies, and celebrity, they drop everything else they're doing (a historic papal visit to Cuba, in this case) to engage in endless, 24-hour repetition and speculation. And that, in the new mediascape of cable news channels and Internet scandal sheets and the New York Post Online, there is no escape.
Now, those are serious issues, and they're linked to important journalistic concerns about an accelerated news cycle that leaves little time for fact-checking. Witness the Dallas Morning News, which published a story on its Web site about a Secret Service agent who supposedly saw Bill and Monica in flagrante delicto, only to have to retract it in its paper edition. Or CNN's Larry King, who announced -- live -- that the next morning's New York Times would carry a bombshell; minutes later, he corrected himself. But ultimately those are issues of quantity, or perhaps velocity -- not quality.
Certainly the drop-off in coverage that set in after the State of the Union address was overdue. Since ABC News and the Washington Post broke the news, on January 21, there has been virtually nothing new to report. Newsweek, which actually had the information first but held it, filled in a lot of the details in its next issue. Other than that, the story is in a holding pattern, with the same tidbits repeated over and over again. Boston Globe columnist John Ellis, a former network news executive, wrote last Saturday that there are perhaps 20 reporters in Washington with the connections and the sources to move this story forward. Until one of them does, the rest of the media would do well to show some restraint. As Jay Leno quipped last week, referring to Bill and Monica's ropewalk hug, "I have seen that footage more than the Rodney King video." But that hardly means the media were wrong to make a huge deal of this in the first place.
Unfortunately, the backlash against the media has created the perception that there isn't much to this scandal. That's simply wrong. Lest we forget, independent counsel Ken Starr is investigating whether Bill Clinton carried on a lengthy sexual affair with a young intern, starting when she was 21, and urged her to lie about it while under oath. And despite Clinton's increasingly emphatic denials, the circumstantial evidence against him remains disturbing: the legalistic "talking points" Lewinsky gave her betrayer, Linda Tripp, which instructed Tripp to lie under oath; the one-on-one job interview Lewinsky had with UN ambassador Bill Richardson; the help and solicitation she received from Vernon Jordan. Even the worst supposed examples of media excess -- the reports of a semen-stained dress and that peephole-peeking Secret Service agent -- were actually part of Starr's investigation, and thus were legitimate news.
Some critics have also tut-tutted over the media's invoking the R-word (resignation). But that criticism, too, is misplaced. After all, the breathtakingly bad judgment (political, ethical, moral -- take your pick) Clinton is alleged to have shown has led such leading members of the "right-wing conspiracy" as former Clinton aides George Stephanopoulos and Leon Panetta, and Senator Pat Moynihan (D-New York), to suggest that, if the sexual affair alone turns out to be true, Clinton should go.
And, as the media have done a fitfully uneven job of conveying, there's the possibility of more -- much more. It's been widely reported that Starr is investigating whether Jordan urged Lewinsky to perjure herself. What's not quite so well known is that if Starr can make a case, he may be able to pressure Jordan into telling him why he arranged for all those lucrative contracts for former associate attorney general Webster Hubbell, the ex-con who worked with Hillary at the Rose Law Firm and who may know some dark secrets about Whitewater.
Most intriguing of all, the scandal is directly relevant to the issue of Clinton's character. After his health-care plan fell apart, he reinvented himself as a moral leader, inveighing against televised sex and violence, and talking to audiences about issues such as teenage pregnancy and personal responsibility. If he and Lewinsky had sex, he deserves to pay a high price, for it was he -- despite his well-known reputation for philandering -- who essentially put himself on a pedestal and said, "Watch me." I found it interesting that his former secretary of labor, Robert Reich, on WBUR Radio's The Connection last week, disagreed with a caller who said Clinton's personal life had nothing to do with his job performance. Reich reminded the caller that Clinton has been talking about "moral leadership" for years. What's Clinton going to say the next time a teenager asks him about safe sex?
About one thing the media have surely been wrong. This is no Watergate, no Iran-contra. Even if Starr succeeds in dragging Whitewater into this, there will still be no constitutional drama. This will remain a tawdry tale about Arkansas, sex, and politics. If the networks want to fill some time while waiting for the next revelation, a few retrospectives on the grotesque misdeeds of the Nixon and Reagan administrations would be in order.
But really, let's stop the self-flagellation. This is scandal played out as pop culture, and it's precisely what the media of the '90s are suited for. And though the handwringers don't like to admit it, these moments -- the O.J. Simpson trial, the Louise Woodward case, the Princess Di funeral -- teach us a lot about society and ourselves.
To wit: Bill Clinton is a politician who executed a brain-damaged inmate in order to help him win a primary; who proposed a welfare-reform plan that would have improved the lives of the poor, yet -- after he failed to push it through Congress -- cravenly signed a Republican scheme that will hurt them; who in 1992 promised a middle-class tax cut the country couldn't afford, then reversed himself within minutes of his inauguration. Not to engage in psychobabble, but the connection between his sexual and political lives seems clear. This is a man who will invariably opt for what feels good at the moment. Social critic Wendy Kaminer was everywhere last week, telling anyone with a camera that she's more bothered by Clinton's policy misdeeds than by his sexual behavior. Doesn't she see the connection?
And what does it say about us that we don't care about Clinton's personal life, even though he talks incessantly about ours? What does it say about the state of feminism when women who were rightly outraged by Clarence Thomas's pubic-hair-on-the-soda-can routine can't bring themselves to criticize the alleged sexual exploitation of a starry-eyed 21-year-old? What does it say about our attitudes regarding sexual harassment in the workplace?
In a brilliant essay in Salon this week, leftist journalist Christopher Hitchens, who was a contemporary of Clinton's at Oxford, draws the connection this way: "Now we have the bulbous Baptist Clinton who preaches sexual abstinence for teens, an inquisition for homosexuals in uniform, cutoffs for welfare mothers with insufficient moral fiber, and a V-chip to impose childish standards on an already infantile mass medium. And his apologists want everyone to be strictly nonjudgmental."
A quarter-century ago, a president of the United States committed some of the worst constitutional crimes in our nation's history. The media mostly ignored the wrongdoing, and had it not been for the persistence of two young, unknown reporters named Woodward and Bernstein, Richard Nixon would probably have finished out his term instead of being forced to resign in the disgrace he so richly deserved.
Now another president is in trouble, and once again the guardians of all that is right and good and responsible are telling the media to back off. It was a mistake then. It would be a mistake now. No, Clinton's no Nixon, nor even a Reagan, but that's not an excuse to ease up. The press should stop looking at the polls and start looking for the truth.
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
