‘Public Affairs’ Reporting Draws McCarthy Parallels

As the mass media continue their saturation coverage of the Clinton scandal, some critics have coined the phrase “sexual McCarthyism” to protest the mean-spirited pursuit of skeletons in public officials’ closets.

“Are you now or have you ever been an adulterer?” may sound like a weak echo of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s thundering question about Communist Party membership in the 1950s. But the links between the anxiety of that era and independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s inquiry in our time are not so far-fetched:

In Illinois, GOP congressional candidate Gary Muller told reporters last week that he has signed a fidelity oath, swearing that he has never cheated on his wife or had a homosexual encounter. He dared his opponent to do the same.

In Texas, Gov. George W. Bush, widely expected to be a Republican presidential candidate, has been openly discussing his rowdy past with magazine writers, in the apparent hope of immunizing himself against future press investigations.

And at a Washington news conference, feminist Betty Friedan warned that “sex is going to take the place of the Cold War.” As reporters and government officials pry into private lives, she suggested, many will be driven out of public life.

To be sure, there are key differences between McCarthy’s probe of national subversion and Starr’s focus on President Clinton’s behavior. Yet there is one constant: Then as now, the press has played a crucial role in reflecting and amplifying charges of misconduct, and its performance has come under heavy fire.

The main similarity between current events and the Red scare of the 1950s is the issue of privacy, according to Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School of Communication in Philadelphia. “When you open up everything in someone’s past to scrutiny, and with no sense of fairness, it can lead to a witch hunt,” she said. “Obviously, the press plays a role in this.”

A Nightmarish Past Meets the Present

McCarthyism of any kind--sexual or political--is a loaded but often vague term that recalls a nightmarish episode in American history. The Wisconsin senator had millions of people in a panic almost 50 years ago, wondering if they would be exposed over long-ago incidents in their political pasts.

Using the investigative powers of a Senate committee, he made wild, unsubstantiated charges about communist infiltration of the U.S. government, and thousands of people lost their jobs after they were “blacklisted” for allegedly subversive activities. McCarthy was censured by the Senate in 1954 for his behavior and died three years later.

Today, “sexual McCarthyism” means different things, depending on whom you talk to. For some, it highlights Starr’s investigation of Clinton’s sexual activities with former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky. To others, it refers to a wave of recent “outings,” where the press prompted three Republican members of Congress to publicly acknowledge extramarital affairs.

Even more alarming to many is the specter of government prosecutors leaking ostensibly secret grand jury testimony--and having details of one’s most private affairs broadcast or published.

Sex-Related Inquiries Make Public Uneasy

For all these reasons, there is a growing unease that the sex lives of public figures have become legitimate targets of inquiry for media and government investigators--even though polls suggest a majority of Americans do not approve.

In last week’s New York Times/CBS News survey, for example, 78% said the House Judiciary Committee should never have released the sexually explicit videotape of Clinton’s grand jury testimony. Sixty-six percent of those who watched the tape said it was appropriate for Clinton to have refused to answer questions about his sexual relations with Lewinsky.

America has a long tradition of civil liberties, but witch hunts of any kind put it to the test, said Ellen Shrecker, author of “Many Are the Crimes,” a history of McCarthyism. In the 1950s and today, she said, “we’ve had a criminalization of activities, politics or sex, that are not illegal, and this is done through a governmental investigative process.”

Back then, the newspaper-dominated media routinely printed McCarthy’s charges--the most famous being that he had a list with the names of 205 suspected communists in the State Department--without verifying them. Although U.S. officials denied such charges in later stories, the damage was done.

The experience led to much soul-searching in journalism and a determination that the press would no longer be merely a mouthpiece for politicians. Instead, media officials resolved that they would investigate and verify stories on their own, an aggressive trend that reached its peak during the Watergate investigations.

Today, with a significantly larger media complex, the Clinton scandals are beamed into people’s homes on a level undreamed of 50 years ago, when barely 3 million Americans had television sets. And as the press pounds the drums about sex and confessed adulterers in high places--a nonstop barrage of information relayed by investigative reporters as well as prime-time pundits--the media are certainly playing a more independent role than they did during the McCarthy years.

This time, it has a far greater capacity to inform . . . or to do ill. And so far, reviews are decidedly mixed on whether the press has stoked the fires of “sexual McCarthyism.”

“In some ways, the media’s performance is reminiscent of the worst excesses of the 1950s, in terms of the prying into private lives,” said historian David Oshinsky, author of “A Conspiracy So Immense.” “You could make the case that McCarthy, for all his faults, was investigating something that had to do with policy. But when the press reports on a 30-year-old affair by [House Judiciary Committee Chairman] Henry Hyde, I don’t know what that has to do with policy.”

Although Starr’s office spearheaded the Clinton investigation, “the press is [often] carrying the ball all by itself, with its own probes,” said Edwin R. Bayley, a former Milwaukee Journal reporter who covered McCarthy. “In some ways, it [the media] is contributing to this criminalizing of sex, and this is truly deplorable.”

That prompts an angry retort from some media executives, such as “60 Minutes” creator Don Hewitt, who said that the press is merely doing its duty to report an important, albeit tawdry, story about a possible White House cover-up.

“Bill Clinton came to us [’60 Minutes’] in 1992 to talk about his marriage; we didn’t go to him, we didn’t raise that curtain,” Hewitt said. “It’s not the media that’s doing this. Do you think the Republicans would drop this if people stopped writing about it? We report what’s going on in America.”

Hewitt, who directed Edward R. Murrow’s famous televised attack on McCarthy, conceded that the investigation of private sexual behavior “is not a good trend in the Congress or anywhere else. And I’m not apologizing or making excuses for it . . . but we’re reporting the trend, we’re not creating the trend.”

That distinction may be meaningless, however, in an age of 24-hour media coverage. For example, scores of reporters passed up the opportunity to break the Hyde adultery story on the grounds that it was irrelevant--only to see their papers and stations run with it after the Web magazine Salon published the story.

In Los Angeles, KABC radio talk show host Michael Jackson noted that the minute after he read a news item in which Texas Gov. Bush suggested he might not seek the presidency, a caller asked if he had skeletons in his closet.

“Everything is now fair game, and all accusations about someone’s past will be heard, whether they are fair or unfair,” Jackson said. “The media has been milking these stories about Clinton and all the others from Day One. And from where I sit, yes, I think we have begun a new witch hunt.”

The irony, he added, is that for all its frenzied attention to private lives, the media have not persuaded the majority of Americans that any of this really matters. Unlike the McCarthy era, when the public was swept along with anti-communist fervor, most Americans seem jaded about sex and politics.

“I don’t think that the current wave of ‘outing’ people reflects any genuine desire in the general public to smoke out adulterers,” said James Fallows, former editor of U.S. News & World Report. “It’s purely political, a witch hunt confined to the elite, in which one party hurts another.”

But the danger, Fallows added, is that such vicious probing and counter-probing sets a damaging cultural precedent. “My impression is that even Clinton’s most steadfast opponents are a little squeamish about Starr and what he has uncovered,” Fallows said.

Sometimes, Americans are myopic about their own republic. Last week in Paris, a group of distinguished writers and artists--including Guenter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Carlos Fuentes--issued a joint statement deploring Starr’s “inquisitorial harassment” and “unlimited power” to invade private lives.

There may even be a useful lesson for Americans in the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, said Orville Schell, dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and a longtime China watcher. Back then, he said, “people were executed for having affairs . . . women were driven insane with hectoring and bullying if they dared kiss a man and weren’t married.”

Schell said he met recently with Chinese refugees, who were bewildered that Clinton, the world’s most powerful man, was being pilloried. “They agreed he might be a sexual obsessive,” he noted, “but they said the probe also reminded them of the world they left behind--a place with no privacy, where you can hold nothing aloof from state scrutiny.”