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The Clinton-Lewinsky Obsession - excessive media coverage of presidential scandal
Washington Monthly, Dec, 1998 by Todd Gitlin
As it was, on Jan. 21, CBS delayed 26 precious minutes before going to the president's Jim Lehrer interview denying entanglement with Lewinsky. For lagging behind ABC, NBC, CNN, and Fox, CBS got tweaked in the papers. "After months of chanting hard news, hard news," crowed Eric Mink in the New York Daily News, "CBS News blew it with the pressure on." No one rushed to defend CBS for its principled foot-dragging. It was lost on no one that the one network executive who didn't go live to the death and transfiguration of the people's princess in 1997, Lane Venardos, was soon demoted from his position overseeing hard news.
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Did CNN, MSNBC, and the Internet force Rather's hand? Cable and on-line news are too easy to blame for pressing the once-respectable organs ever downward. True, a TV monitor stays tuned to CNN in every newsroom, and on MSNBC, where the soap-opera format glided seamlessly from All-OJ to All-Diana to All-Monica, many a media personage has tied his success to the rising Starr. Instant stars have no incentive to see the scandal with any sense of proportion. Chris Matthews' nightly rant, "Hardball", swelled from 30 to 60 minutes last March, and when the Clinton video was released, MSNBC ratings shot up seven times higher than average. The absolute numbers are still small--CNN and MSNBC between them average less than three-quarters of a million viewers in prime time--but the increment is most attractive. Media analysts tune to these channels and are inclined to blame them--along with Internet news--for driving the hunt for scoops, stripping away inhibitions.
"We felt the drumbeat of CNN from the beginning," one top CBS news executive told me. "The picture of Monica in the beret. All the repetition elevated the importance of the story, made us feel that we'd better put more resources into it." But the competition CBS cares about most comes from ABC and NBC, not cable. It's ABC's Jackie Judd who runs CBS a merry race. In print, too, the drive toward scoops can never be underestimated. The Times, still smarting from the Post's Watergate coup, jumped the gun with Whitewater, and since then, leaping from gate to gate, neither the Times nor the Post has looked back.
From Woodward & Bernstein to Isikoff
Newsweek's Michael Isikoff, who dogged the Clinton sex story for months and finally got the scoop of scoops, got his journalistic start working for the Capitol Hill News Service, a Nader-funded operation. Was he, as reported, inspired by Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein? "In the general way that anybody of my age probably was," he told me. Such is the cunning of history. Woodward and Bernstein rounded out the Sixties by bringing down a government steeped in lies not about sex but about burglary, assault, and war. Whereupon investigative reporters were knighted by an invigorated establishment press. At the Post, self-mythologizing took over. In TV news, attitude became the norm: insouciance, snideness, and badgering, easily--but falsely--mistaken for ideological opposition. Something similar happened in print, leading Woodward to speak of the press last year, even before the Lewinsky uproar, as "prisoners of Watergate" -- trapped in the assumption that behind a scatter of facts and allegations, as in the murk of Whitewater, lies a grand plot.
