Anxious Moments

The crush of cameras and microphones outside the Mayflower Hotel told the story. “She’s Back,” the Washington Post breathlessly headlined. Yes, Monica S. Lewinsky was back, darling of the news media and of the House prosecutors trying to keep the Senate trial of President Bill Clinton afloat.

Lewinsky, already interrogated 22 times, said she had nothing new to say. It didn’t matter. In an age in which the first-ever screens had been installed in the Senate to show the president saying words the senators had read many times, what mattered was the hope that Lewinsky, in person or on videotape, might strike a spark that transcripts had not ignited.

So, having returned to Los Angeles to escape the media mob scene, Lewinsky was summoned back to Washington under subpoena from the House managers. She would like to play the media game on her own terms--an interview with Barbara Walters on ABC. But, meanwhile, she remains the pawn in a high-stakes game seeking to topple a president. It is a game in which politicians and media members play their assigned roles.

The year of Lewinsky has been a year of an intense consensual relationship between the media, hungry for a sexy story, and participants in the drama, eager to feed that appetite with self-serving spin. It was the year when the unholy alliance between a new kind of journalism and an old kind of manipulation reached maturity.

Jay Leno, who joked on “The Tonight Show” that Clinton’s 77-minute State of the Union address was “the longest the president has ever gone without sex,” may have spoken a profound truth when he told the Washington Post that he looked at the impeachment process as entertainment. “It’s like the Jerry Springer show, except everyone has a law degree,” he said.

In 1996, the Pew Research Center found that 26% of those surveyed got what information they had about the presidential campaign from late-night hosts like Leno and David Letterman, and 12% got their news from MTV. There is no reason to believe the ratios are much different for the White House scandal.

I should make my bias clear. I have been a journalist for more than 60 years, in print, on radio, on television. I have been appalled to watch “the press” metamorphose into “the news media” and, ultimately, into “the media,” occupying a small corner of a vast entertainment stage.

I can remember a different time. In 1952, writing from the Netherlands for the New York Times, I learned of Queen Juliana’s involvement with a faith healer who had inducted her into religious mysticism. Dutch friends persuaded me to kill the story, fearing it might undo the queen and perhaps the monarchy. Three years later, when the German magazine Der Spiegel broke the story, I wondered why I had been so soft-hearted. In today’s journalistic environment, I might have decided differently.

In 1971, working for CBS, I had occasion to film an interview with Rep. Wilbur D. Mills, the powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. He showed up in his office at 9 a.m. with liquor on his breath, speaking with exaggerated slowness. Back at the bureau, I mentioned that Mills seemed to have a drinking problem. But it did not occur to any of us that this was newsworthy--not until 1974, when Mills was found drunk, splashing in Washington’s Tidal Basin with an Argentine stripper.

In 1975, while covering the Senate investigation of the CIA, I noted in the report of Sen. Frank Church’s committee an obscure reference to a “close friend” of President John F. Kennedy who was also a friend of Mafia figures John Roselli and Sam Giancana, who, in turn, were involved with the CIA in trying to assassinate Fidel Castro.

Suspecting the “close friend” was a woman, I sent a memo to the producers of “The CBS Evening News” in New York, asking if I should pursue the lead. I made clear I had no enthusiasm for digging into the private life of our martyred president. Network news executives agreed.

Since then, we have learned all about Kennedy’s two-year affair with Judith Campbell Exner, with assignations at the Mayflower Hotel and the White House, terminated only when FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover warned the president that he was exposing himself to possible blackmail by organized crime.

Do I regret not having pursued the story? You bet. But that kind of taste and restraint was how it was in the news business then.

It is different today. The lines have blurred between reporter and talk-show host, between respectable newspaper and scandal sheet, between politician and commentator, between information and entertainment. In the fevered competition among multiple channels, with the Internet as a bewildering addition to the mix, every minute is a deadline and every rumor is a story.

One can see why Monicagate became the perfect story for the new journalism, because the core of the story is sex and how sex might bring down the world’s most powerful man, a cross between “Primary Colors” and “Wag the Dog.”

With the considerable help of the media, Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler magazine, found he could drive out a prospective speaker of the House, Rep. Robert L. Livingston (R-La.) and cause others to tremble about their extramarital pursuits.

One looks back to what may have been an early portent to the sex-politics-media nexus. In 1987, former Sen. Gary Hart sought to continue in the presidential race despite the disclosure of his involvement with Donna Rice, a model and actress. At a news conference, Hart was asked by a Washington Post reporter whether he had ever committed adultery. He refused to answer and abruptly withdrew from the campaign. Since then, the adultery question has become standard for reporters seeking their own moment in the sun.

Monicagate encapsulates what has happened since: a year of rumor and counterrumor, leak and counterleak. Independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr still has to answer in federal court for some 24 leaks of grand-jury information in which his office appears implicated. In Watergate days, Judge John J. Sirica threatened a jail sentence for anyone who leaked grand-jury information. In those days, to report what happened in the grand jury was unthinkable.

Remember how Monicagate started its multimedia career? On Sunday, Jan. 18, 1998, self-styled Internet gossip Matt Drudge reported rumors of a Clinton affair with a White House intern. That became an immediate topic on Sunday TV talk shows. On ABC, Bill Kristol, editor of the conservative newspaper the Weekly Standard, revealed that Newsweek had been working on a story involving tape-recorded conversations. Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff had, indeed, been working on such a story, based on Linda R. Tripp’s recorded conversations with Lewinsky, but Newsweek had elected to hold it for further checking.

Isikoff quickly became a media star as he made the rounds of television shows. Monicagate made it into print on Wednesday, Jan. 21, with stories in the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, both released the previous evening on the Internet. Jackie Judd of ABC learned about the story on Tuesday evening, in time to offer it to “Nightline.” But Ted Koppell, a TV anchorman of an older journalistic convention, turned it down in favor of the pope’s visit to Cuba, leaving Judd to get her scoop on ABC Radio.

What is the lesson of this media feeding frenzy? Should Newsweek be less scrupulous next time about checking an explosive story? Will the competition of rumormongers who call themselves journalists leave us at the mercy of titillating rumor, often planted with malice aforethought? Is what we once called journalism to be replaced by storytelling for fun and profit?

A media-age phenomenon, the big stakeout, became a feature of Monicagate. In 1973, covering Watergate for CBS, I was one of three reporters who staked out the home of John W. Dean III, the defector from the Nixon White House, with cameras, hoping for an interview or at least a picture. In 1998, the Monicagate stakeout assumed huge proportions, appearing to TV viewers like a media riot, further alienating the public from “the press.”

What has happened to us, the media? (I am tempted to say “them.”) Where did we lose our membership in an indentifiable group of professionals, called the Fourth Estate because we stood outside an establishment that we viewed with skeptical detachment?

In 1984, working for CNN as a news analyst, I got into an argument with my bosses because I refused to appear side by side with former Gov. John B. Connally as a “guest commentator” at the Dallas Republican convention. I insisted a journalist and a politician were different species.

That sounds laughable today, when former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos discourses with former Quayle aide Kristol on ABC television, when former Nixon aide Patrick J. Buchanan hosts CNN news programs between runs for the presidency. The 1999 news personality is something between Don Imus and “Larry King Live.” (It is apparently necessary to say “live” to avoid confusing a public no longer sure what is real.)

Monicagate encapsulates what Harvard professor and former CBS and NBC newsman Marvin Kalb calls “the new news,” the consequence of a technological revolution and a revolution in the ownership and management of the news industry. The proliferation of cable and satellite channels has created an enormous demand for “material” and put a premium on talking heads as the cheapest way to fill an hour. Economic consolidation has put television networks into the hands of conglomerates less interested in news as a mission than as a product in the marketplace. Competition among them, the remorseless hunt for ratings, has promoted sex, violence and a preference for the titillating over the illuminating.

“News,” writes Kalb, “has become a big, big business controlled not by powerful families but by media moguls who place a higher priority on the size of their profits than on the value of their contributions to society.”

When the annals of this era in journalism are written, best remembered will be the saturation coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial and the death of Princess Diana. Then, further down, Monicagate, where prosecutors and the news media learned to manipulate each other to mutual advantage.*