It’s All Entertaining, but It’s Not Politics

Politics is being treated as a form of entertainment, complained an astute observer. But politics itself is not entertainment. Politics is the sending of armed troops to restore hope to an agonized Haiti. Politics is the continual savage battle to control the flow of the nation’s wealth, upward to the affluent (the winners), downward to the working middle class or even, God forbid, to the poor (the losers). It is the medium through which a clashing array of interests express their desires and, occasionally, fulfill them.

It is not politics, but its presentation by the media, particularly by television but also by many newspapers, which has become a branch of the entertainment industry. The difference between news and entertainment is that news requires a judgment of what is significant, while entertainment a judgment about what people will enjoy. It is ruled by marketing. And in the world of marketing, the first commandment is that sex sells. It is adherence to this belief that has brought us the interminable discussions of the Monica Lewinsky “scandal,” and its supporting characters--Linda Tripp, Kathleen Willey, Kenneth Starr and, of course, the president of the United States.

It has nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with the public issues that influence our well being as citizens, or the problems which afflict the republic. But it gives the media the chance to talk about sex. Not since Lorena Bobbitt has any subject so liberated the public discourse. It was a breakthrough to talk about penises. It has been a revolution for otherwise serious commentators to discourse on oral sex (is it real sex or isn’t it?), adultery, sodomy, etc. I myself enjoy reading about sex, all kinds of sex from oral to old-fashioned intercourse and beyond. But I do not disguise my purely prurient interests with the claim that some important public interest is involved.

Let us assume that everything we suspect is true. What does it matter? I worked for two presidents--John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson--who were adulterers. And in this they continued in an established presidential tradition, from Cleveland to Harding to Eisenhower and, we can be sure, some more contemporary chief executives. (Probably not Truman and Reagan, but who can be sure?) And it was not just the presidents. There were nights I walked the corridors of the West Wing when sensual moans from behind closed office doors drowned out the sound of typewriters.

And let us also assume, but only for the sake of argument, that President Clinton lied. Presidents often lie. Usually, however, those lies are about far more important matters. One thinks of Johnson and the Gulf of Tonkin, or Reagan on aid to the Contras. Those lies were important. They influenced our perception of critical national policies, involving, as they did, issues of life and death.

Yet no one ever suggested that such lies were grounds for impeachment. To launch an elaborate investigation into an alleged “lie” about Lewinsky is a joke, a parody of the legal process. But, of course, it does allow well-established voices of the media to talk about sex. That is, they can bring us a little entertainment to enliven up dreary reports on Bosnia or overhauling the tax code.

I watch, with diminishing frequency, as seemingly serious commentators talk endlessly about the latest twist in the Lewinsky-Starr-Tripp saga, allowing them to mingle sex with the seeming suspense of a detective story, a doubly powerful marketing tool. And some have the audacity to complain that the American people don’t seem to care about it, when what they mean is that the marketing campaign isn’t working. They have come a long way from those early halcyon days when they anticipated they would plunge the country into turmoil, even force a president to resign, only to find that they had merely provided material for a few dinner table, or bar side, jokes. And yet they continue, imprisoned as they are by the dogma of marketing principles.

Worst of all, they have found that their entertainment masking as news doesn’t work. There is not the slightest indication that, after the opening act, more people kept watching news to catch up on the latest twist in Starr’s bizarre investigation. They are failing, not only as commentators on news, but by their own true lodestone: ratings and circulation. I suppose a television shot of Lewinsky in the act would bring a large audience. But only for a moment.

I have many quarrels with the Clinton administration, and have criticized it publicly and in print. But like most people I don’t care about Lewinsky. I am interested, of course. As an American and a man of appetites, I have to be interested. I have even told a joke or two. But, like most Americans, I believe the matter has no real significance for my well being or that of my country.

The truly sordid aspect of this entire matter has been the further degradation of an already deteriorated news media and many of its spokesmen who labor for once honorable publications and broadcasts. They may well have succeeded in weakening the presidency somewhat, an accomplishment that has harmed us all. But they have done even greater harm to themselves. And ultimately they may find that they are talking only to themselves and their friends, while the rest of us turn our attention to sports, where real people are engaged in real contests whose outcomes are at least as important as any “result” of the insanely obsessed Starr inquiry.