Two Impulses Drive the Media: Prurience and Self-Preservation

Why are the news media covering the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky story as if it were Armageddon, the Second Coming and the Super Bowl all rolled into one? Why are we allowing ourselves to be bounced back and forth like so many shuttlecocks by leakers in the independent counsel’s office and the White House? Why are we relying so heavily on unnamed sources whose motivations are as obvious as they are partisan? Why are we rushing into print and on the air and into cyberspace with stories that are incomplete and unreliable?

“It’s about circulation and ratings; it’s about competitive pressures,” Dan Rather, the CBS News anchor, said late last month during a CNN symposium on “Media Madness,” and he was right, or at least partially right. The audience for network news and daily newspapers has been declining for years, and in a frantic scramble to regain it, heretofore responsible media have been wallowing in stories that once were fodder only for the tabloids. William Kennedy Smith and Patricia Bowman. Erik and Lyle Menendez. Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan. John and Lorena Bobbitt. O.J. Simpson. Princess Di.

But the saga of Bill and Monica is not only about ratings and readership; it’s not just the latest manifestation of the cult of personality and the tabloidization of the American media. It’s also about Watergate--or, rather, about big-time journalists not wanting to go down in history as having “missed” Watergate II. The Washington Post was virtually alone in its early pursuit of the Watergate story, and that made cultural icons of reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and their editor, Ben Bradlee, all of whom were memorialized on the silver screen.

But no one in the media is going to let anyone else in the media--not the Post, not the Los Angeles Times, not the New York Times, not Newsweek, not even Matt Drudge--steal a march on the Clinton/Lewinsky story. No sirree. So we rush to print/broadcast/post the latest scandalous crumb to fall from the scullery table. Never mind if it’s true. Never mind if it’s a gross invasion of privacy. Never mind if we help push into the Supreme Court a case whose primary participants don’t even want to go to divorce court.

Defenders of the media’s coverage of this sorry story are fond of invoking Watergate. Just as Watergate was not ultimately about a burglary but about a cover-up, so this story is not ultimately about sex but about an (alleged) cover-up, about the larger issues of (alleged) perjury, (alleged) subornation of perjury and (alleged) obstruction of justice. This, they say, is the real reason they are pursuing the story so vigorously.

But the event that triggered the Watergate scandal was both a crime and an attempt to subvert the democratic process: a burglary at the Democratic Party’s national headquarters.

What has the media fulminating about Bill Clinton is (alleged) sexual infidelity. Sexual infidelity is immoral but it is not illegal, and it has about as much to do with the democratic process as Hillary’s hairdo. If even a fraction of the stories about Clinton’s philandering are true, then he is a reprehensible lout, a rotten husband. But that’s Hillary’s problem, not ours.

No one knows what goes on in anyone else’s marriage. Are the Clintons still together because of a joint love of power? A shared determination to do good? A true love that surpasseth (our) understanding? Who knows? Who cares!

If Hillary--for whatever reason--is willing to tolerate a husband who strays so far from the marital bed that he can’t be found with a divining rod, why should the media be the self-appointed monitors of morality?

Yes, it would be wrong for Clinton to lie under oath or to ask anyone else to lie under oath or to in any way obstruct justice. But if he did all those things, what was he lying about and asking others to lie about? What “justice” was he trying to obstruct? It was all about something that shouldn’t concern us in the first place--his own (alleged) sexual infidelity.

If we in the media hadn’t felt so institutionally guilty about having deprived the public of contemporaneous accounts of President Kennedy’s (alleged) dalliances with Marilyn Monroe, Judith Campbell Exner and a cast of thousands, we probably wouldn’t have been sniffing around Gary Hart’s townhouse. Once we chased Hart out of the 1988 presidential race because of his monkey business with Donna Rice, our journalistic blood-lust was permanently aroused. Our powers of rationalization have been at a seemingly permanent fever pitch ever since.

Infidelity, the media contend, is but a symptom of other, more important character flaws: dishonesty, poor judgment, recklessness, a callous disregard for others. Fair enough. Then why don’t we spend our time and our ink and our air time seeking and exposing evidence of those weaknesses in Clinton’s domestic and foreign policy, in his high-level appointments, in his relations with other heads of state? Why are we filling our pages and our newscasts with whispers and speculation about (alleged) presidential phone sex and an (allegedly) semen-stained dress and whether oral sex actually constitutes infidelity?

Reporters can’t do their jobs properly if they are forbidden to ferret out leaks. Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, My Lai and many other stories of consequence might never have been disclosed--and the public would have left dangerously ignorant of important information--if journalists were forced to rely solely on official, fully identified sources of information. But it seems to me that the (allegedly) responsible media have gotten much lazier in recent years, much more willing to abandon the standards that have long separated us from publications that specialize in stories about two-headed fat ladies from Mars who gave birth to Elvis’ love child after discovering a cure for cancer.

Many in the media say they are only giving readers and viewers what they want. They laugh at public opinion polls showing that people approve of the president’s political policies and don’t care about his sex life. People probably are more interested in the Clinton sex story than they’re willing to admit. But it’s one thing to be titillated by something, and it’s quite another to think that whatever you’re gossiping about is important. On the matter of Bill Clinton’s libido, the public has spoken clearly, at the polls and in the polls: It doesn’t matter.

What worries me the most about the media’s refusal to make this distinction is that it could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the media keep hammering away at the theme that the real issue is not sex but perjury and obstruction of justice, a weary and confused public may ultimately accept that argument. Then, if credible evidence is adduced that President Clinton did lie and ask others to lie--which would not be the biggest shock since Denver beat Green Bay in the Super Bowl--the logical conclusion that the media certainly would push (and that the public might be forced to accept) would be that impeachment or resignation are the only possible courses of action.

Regardless of what one thinks of Bill Clinton as a president or as a husband, it would be bad for this country--for its historic precedent, for its place in the world, for the future of its free press--if the media helped bring down a president simply because he couldn’t keep his fly zipped.