23.7 Million Tune In for Condit Interview

An estimated 23.7 million people tuned in to hear Rep. Gary Condit break his silence on missing government intern Chandra Levy in a television interview with ABC’s Connie Chung.

It was the highest-rated news interview since March 1999, when 48.5 million people tuned in to hear Barbara Walters talk with Monica Lewinsky about her relationship with President Clinton. Viewer interest in Condit turned the “PrimeTime Thursday” broadcast into the most-watched TV program of the summer, according to Nielsen Media Research.

On Friday, as critics hashed over Chung’s grilling of the California Democrat on the nature of his relationship with Levy, the veteran newscaster said she was “shocked” at his refusal to answer the question.

Chung mentioned a letter Condit sent to constituents earlier this week in which he wrote, “I will be interviewed on television, and hopefully I will be able to answer questions that help people understand. It’s not something I look forward to, but things have gone on long enough.” Chung said that led her to believe that, “All right, he was ready. He was going to answer questions.”

When Condit instead responded that he had been married 34 years and wasn’t going to go into specifics of his relationship with Levy, “I was surprised, I was incredulous, and I was trying to figure out how long to continue to try to get a different answer,” Chung said.

She said she circled around that question and issues of the police investigation, “where I ran into roadblocks too,” and then looked up and realized, “I’m halfway through [the allotted 30 minutes] and I know I haven’t covered a lot of areas. So I know I have to go at quite a clip now,” combining questions and eliminating follow-ups to get to all the topics on her six pages of handwritten notes.

In retrospect, Chung said, she wished she had had more time to ask the congressman about his political future and the impact of the story on his family.

Chung called the session “one of the most difficult interviews I’ve ever done” because of the time constraint and because “it was such a sensitive subject. The entire nature of the interview dealt with a missing young woman and a personal relationship. I didn’t want to go some places, and I knew, without even talking to him ever before, that it was not as if I was going to go where he didn’t want to go. I was just trying to get some definitive answers. . . . What was clear by the end was that he was determined to say exactly what he wanted to say and no more.”

She added that “I do believe that this was really what he wanted to say . . . as opposed to something imposed upon him” by advisors.

In contrast to the typical TV newsmagazine interview, which can run two hours or more, ABC agreed to the Condit team’s request of just 30 minutes, conducted “live on tape,” or unedited. Chung said she had no problem with those conditions, which have been criticized by other network executives, because “it’s been done before.”

Nonetheless, she said, the format meant there wasn’t the usual half-hour of “warmup time for the interviewee to become comfortable with the lights and cameras . . . and begin to have a conversation with me instead of question, answer, question, answer.”

Indeed, Chung said, after her first few questions, the tension in the room suddenly jumped and “didn’t end until I shook his hand.” The minute the interview ended, she said, Condit “jumped out of the chair” to talk to his lawyer, then shook hands with the camera crew and producers before joking to her, “I don’t know if I should be thanking you.”

Cable’s CNN and Fox News Channel saw their ratings soar Thursday night as they also jumped on the Condit story. CNN’s “Larry King Live” even tried to steal ABC’s thunder in the hour before “PrimeTime Thursday” by airing an interview with a Vanity Fair writer who had just interviewed Condit.