Goodbye, Objectivity; Hello, Fleet St.: Murdoch’s Trojan Horse

If you believe New York Post editor Ken Chandler, it was all a coincidence. Just in time for its Aug. 29 edition, the Post got a leak from the supermarket tabloid Star that President Bill Clinton’s political advisor, Dick Morris, has been carrying on a toe-sucking liaison with a blond prostitute. As luck would have it, that Thursday just happened to be the very day Clinton would be accepting his party’s nomination at the Democratic National Convention.

Funny how these things work out. I mean, if you were trying to damage Clinton, you could not have had a better day to break the story. But, then, it was only a coincidence the story broke that day. Right?

Anyone who buys that probably also believes John Gotti was just a plumbing contractor. Even the Star’s editor, Phil Bunton, now concedes the Morris story was timed for the Democratic convention, where it would get maximum exposure. In a nonpartisan spirit, he has also said he wished he had had a similar story about Bob Dole during the GOP convention. But some cynics have detected a more sinister hand here than the invisible hand of capitalism. Some suspect that the reactionary media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, owner of the Post and one-time owner of the Star, deliberately manipulated the timing to wound Clinton on his big night. If so, it would have major implications for the American media.

In Britain, where Murdoch owns five papers, including the 4-million circulation Sun and the august Times, manipulating press coverage wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. There, it is assumed that individual newspapers have a rabid partisan agenda, and one factors this not only into what one reads but into the nation’s whole political culture. When the Murdoch papers attack a Laborite, or the liberal papers attack a Torie by revealing some sensational misconduct, it is business as usual. All scandals come with this sort of built-in discount.

And, once, it was not so different here. Many early 19th-century American papers were essentially partisan organs, with the express purpose of promoting certain candidates and parties and lacerating others. No one expected objectivity or fairness--and no one got it. Even by the end of the century, when the press was no longer formally attached to political parties, the new, high-circulation papers retained an edge and an attitude.

The most famous publishers of our own century--William Randolph Hearst of the New York Journal-American, Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune, Joseph Medill Patterson of the New York Daily News and his niece Eleanor “Cissy” Patterson of the Washington Times-Herald--were political slashers who used their news pages to editorialize. None felt encumbered by the niceties of journalistic impartiality--whether it was Hearst refusing to run his own reporter’s expose of President Herbert Hoover’s postmaster general because it would damage the GOP cause, or McCormick promoting isolationism in headlines before World War II.

There are still a few old-fashioned newspapers out there, like the infamous Manchester Union-Leader of New Hampshire or the Post, that make no pretense of being anything other than mouthpieces for a political faction, but the majority of the U.S. press has developed a general sense of objectivity and propriety and has established a clear separation of editorial opining from news reporting.

Indeed, the two--objectivity and propriety--had worked hand-in-glove. In trying to be fair, the mainstream press restricted its purview to those areas it felt could be objectively reported: events, political decisions, legislation, policy debates. The idea of reporting on a politician’s personal life was long off-limits--both because it would have leveled the protective wall of propriety separating respectable papers from disreputable ones, and because it would have forced the press to make the kinds of value judgments it had forsworn making on its news pages.

That’s why there was so much angst eight years ago, when the Miami Herald staked out presidential candidate Gary Hart’s Washington home and discovered model Donna Rice there. Other papers debated whether this was a legitimate news story or should have been left to the tabloids--a debate that would never have occurred in Britain. At the time, a Herald spokesman felt the need to justify the stakeout and the subsequent story. It spoke to Hart’s judgment, he said. Everyone seemed to realize the wall of propriety had been breached, but 1) it wasn’t for any partisan purpose, and 2) there was guilt at having done so.

Four years later, when a supermarket tabloid, the same Star that broke the Morris story, paid singer/newcaster Gennifer Flowers $150,000 for the lurid details of her alleged affair with presidential candidate Clinton, there was less angst. Not wanting to dignify a sleazy report, mainstream papers shoved the story deep inside their pages and covered it not as an accepted fact but as part of the larger political race: Would the alleged revelation have an effect on Clinton’s campaign? It was a watershed moment in U.S. journalism, because a low-rent tabloid had changed the standards of the mainstream press. But, once again, no one was accusing the Star of any vested interest. They were in it for the money.

In fact, if Hart and Flowers demonstrated that the press was no longer sensitive to propriety, the press did act as if it was still sensitive to the principle of objectivity. When Paula Corbin Jones said Clinton had propositioned her and exposed himself to her while governor of Arkansas, her tale got little play in most mainstream papers--in part because there was the widespread suspicion that Jones was letting herself be used by the Republican right to discredit Clinton. Again, sleaze was OK, but not in the service of partisan politics.

Like the Hart and Flowers stories, the Morris story moves us farther down the devolutionary ladder of journalism. This time, there was not only no angst from the mainstream press over the story--there was glee. Once the Post ran its headline calling Morris “Bill’s Bad Boy,” NBC’s Tim Russert looked like he could barely contain himself, so eager was he to hit the airwaves. The New York Times ran the story the next day on its front page, along with a front-page companion “think piece” on the impact of the expose. The Washington Post ran four related pieces. Time made Morris its cover boy for the second week in a row. All this, even though one could make a convincing argument that Morris is not a public official, has no obligation to the American people and his personal life is nobody’s business but his own--an argument I heard no one make on the air or in the print media.

The reason no one made that argument is perhaps that, after years of journalistic erosion, there is no longer any substantive difference between the mainstream press and the tabloid press, no ethical line to tell editors which stories are news and which are entertainment. Everyone and everything is fair game as long as he, she or it make good reading or good watching. Though the Star paid prostitute Sherry Rowlands for her account, it might as well have been any of the networks or newspapers that picked up the account. For them to protest in high dudgeon, as some did, that they don’t pay for stories is disingenuous to say the least when they are out there flogging this one.

But whatever the Morris story says about the ever-attenuating barrier between tabloidism and respectability, it also says something about the attenuation of objectivity. Because one can reasonably assume that Murdoch timed the release of the Morris story to hurt Clinton, and because Murdoch is a partisan with no claim to impartiality, this time no one in the respectable press can pretend that the Morris report was anything but politically motivated. Had it been confined to the Post, that is precisely how it would have been perceived. Once the mainstream press ran with it, they had not only joined the sleaze squad, they had also, without seeming to realize it, joined the right-wing hit squad.

Not even Hearst, who claimed to have landed Franklin D. Roosevelt the 1932 Democratic nomination by convincing rival John Nance Garner to bow out, had managed to accomplish what Murdoch did with Morris in enlisting the mainstream press in his partisan cause. Hearst could be dismissed as a provocateur with an ax to grind. Murdoch, on the other hand, used the press’s new addiction to sleaze to sneak the Morris story past the press’s own tripwire of avowed objectivity.

Because sleaze isn’t an event to be reported but rather a behavior that can be revealed, at the most opportune moment, Murdoch could control the timing. In the end, by controlling the timing, he controlled the coverage, since the big bang of the story wasn’t so much that Morris had done wrong as that his wrongdoing had eclipsed Clinton’s speech.

That may be the real issue here. As a political cause celebre, the Morris scandal has already faded. What won’t fade, one fears, is the way it may have recalibrated the default settings of the press. In an environment where no one seems to question the newsworthiness of an item or its provenance, he who can dispense the sleaze now rules the media. That is how Murdoch has finally succeeded in importing the partisanship of the British press into the heart of the once proudly objective mainstream American press without the press even seeming to know it. Morris has turned out to be Fleet Street’s Trojan Horse.