Five Myths about Media Coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky Story Alex Jones Eugene C. Patterson Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy DeWitt Wallace Center for Communications and Journalism, Duke University February 3, 1998 This topic deals with the past couple of weeks, and I think this is one of those situations where politics and policy come together. In the United States, during the last couple of years, the most important book on journalism that has been published is a book by a man named Jim Fallows--who is now the editor of U.S. News and World Report-- called Breaking the News. Some of you may have read it. The fundamental point of his book is that the American media are obsessed with politics at the expense of reporting policy. What I mean is that American media are much more interested in the power game of politics and who’s up and who’s down and whose prospects are improved and the “why” of the story rather than the “what” of the story. The idea, for instance, of reporting a State of the Union speech would not be what was said in the speech with the president’s policies and predictions of the future and hopes for the future, or his pronouncements on what various policies would be, but a sort of dissection of his motives. It would be speculation, usually, about his motives, because there is no necessarily clear way to know what his motives are. The area of politics is much more interesting--and has been to the American media for, I’d say, the last fifteen or twenty years--than policy issues themselves. I think a lot of journalists have divided feelings about this book and this premise, because a lot of that apparent shallowness, if you will, from Fallows’s point of view--the shallowness of the American media in ignoring the policy issues in exchange for dissection of the behind-the-scenes political scheming that goes into those policy issues--is an assumption that the real motivator of policy is power politics and not principle or even opinion. Public opinion, perhaps, but not the convictions of a politician. This has sort of come to a head-on collision--these two perspectives--this past week because, as Dee said, it’s hard to call what’s been happening in the last week a matter of policy, but at the same time it is a hugely important series of revelations that has everything to do with policy because it’s threatening to compromise the presidency. The question is, what’s the appropriate way to cover something like this? In my opinion the media have been shellacked in the last week, and I think that in many respects probably that’s not undeserved. To me, it’s a bit like seeing the coverage on television of a hurricane. Every hurricane looks much the same on television, no matter how bad the hurricane is, because there are flapping shutters and there is rolling surf and there are crashing waves and that’s “hurricane.” That’s hurricane in Miami, that’s hurricane in Cuba, and that’s hurricane in California, and it all looks the same, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a mega hurricane or a relatively ordinary hurricane--the pictures look very much the same. I think that very much has been the case in the past week as far as the media frenzy story. There has been, you know, again and again, a rebroadcast of the Starr press conference when he’s practically swamped by television cameras--like he’s in the path of a herd of buffalo--and that has sort of stood for “media frenzy.” There has been an awful lot of criticism of the media, here and abroad, for the way this story has been handled. And I don’t mean to suggest to you that I think that there has been a perfect media performance--far from it--but I do think that this has been a distortion. This media criticism in many respects has been based on what I have identified as five myths about the past two weeks that I would like to present to you, and then perhaps we can have a conversation about some of this. Myth number one: This is the myth that, I think, is especially pervasive in Europe and perhaps everywhere abroad, and has gotten increasing currency here because of the media coverage of the view from abroad, which is that this whole contretemps is a demonstration of a kind of cultural immaturity in America, an obsession with sex and a rather stupid obsession with the private life of the president when there are so many more important things going on. In my opinion, that is a rather shallow way of looking at what is going on here. And I’ll give you my reasons. Reason number one: I do not think that the American public has demonstrated a naiveté about the president and sex, for the reason that the American public elected and then reelected a man who has had a very public and controversial sexual history. One that has put him in a line of investigation and legal challenge that is unprecedented in our country and seems to have absolutely no impact on the American public, at least not so far as to change their votes about anything. I don’t think that the American public can be accused of being puritanical if they elected Bill Clinton in the face of Jennifer Flowers’ allegations. This was a woman who went on television and presented tapes of the president speaking to her and telling her to cover up and lie. The president then went on 60 Minutes and basically acknowledged his sexual difficulties in his marriage, and the American people elected him president. Then Paula Jones accused him of something that, if it had happened to my sister and if I’d found out about it, would’ve made me want to put the person who did it in jail. That was not an affair. What he is accused of is something much more tawdry than that, and much more contemptible, in my opinion, using his office as a means to get a woman--a complete stranger--to come to a hotel room and then propositioning her. That is using the power of an office in an extremely inappropriate way and is, in fact, if it were true, something that is against the law in this country. Even so, the American people reelected him president with full knowledge or, frankly, full belief, that this was the case. So, what I’m saying is this: It is, in my opinion, not appropriate to say that the American people don’t understand about sex and Bill Clinton. They elected him in spite of it. I think that they measured other things and voted accordingly. The Monica Lewinsky accusation, I submit, is a somewhat different situation. First of all, what Clinton is accused of is an abuse of his power that is comparable to what Paula Jones accused him of. Albeit an affair, it is an affair in which a vast difference of power is represented and it is an affair that took place in the White House. But the sex aspect is not really the most important issue. The real reason this story got the serious attention of the mainstream media was because the attorney general of the United States, who is certainly not that eager to authorize investigations against Bill Clinton and who has stopped them in various other places where there seemed to be ample reason to proceed, at least to some minds (about the fundraising scandal, for instance)--the attorney general of the U.S. authorized an investigation into, not his sex life, but into whether he suborned perjury and whether he abused his office, number one, and broke the law, number two, in the way he tried to cover up something that may have been an embarrassment to him. That’s a different issue. Now, I don’t try to say that sex is not something that titillates and that there’s not been quite a bit of extra attention because of the sex. But I think that it is genuinely fair to say that it is a one-dimensional analysis of the situation in this country to attribute the huge interest in the story only to an American obsession with sex. I don’t buy that, and I don’t think it’s true. Myth number two: that the use of unnamed sources has been shameful. In the last week, a lot has been made of the fact that virtually all of the information that has come out has been from unnamed sources. That, of course, is regrettable. I don’t think there’s any legitimate news organization in this country that doesn’t prefer to use on-the-record sources. As my colleagues at the New York Times and the Miami Herald and the Washington Post know full well, that is certainly the standard with those news organizations. I think that there is a difference in this situation, and I would ask you to join me just briefly in looking at a dissection of how this story evolved. First of all, this story is based not on a Jennifer Flowers or a Paula Jones-- especially not a Paula Jones, who has no real supporting evidence. This story, as it is unfolding, is based on twenty hours of tape recordings and some additional tape recordings created by the FBI, of a woman intern in the White House talking about her relationship with the president. In other words, this is not something fudgable. This is a tape. This is very much the same sort of situation that Jeffrey Mason found himself in when Janet Malcolm--well, I don’t want to go into that. The point is this: The spring that has been feeding this story all week, or all two weeks, has been a group of tapes that are explicitly defined. There’s a certain body of knowledge on these tapes, and what has been reported has been what is on these tapes for the most part--alleged to be on these tapes, anyway. I guess what I’m getting at is it has not been people speculating about various aspects of the case so much as people reporting and leaking what is on these tapes which, sooner or later, will be a matter not of opinion but of fact. These tapes will eventually be released, and that’s what they will say. It’s very much like, as far as I am concerned, reporting about what was on the Nixon tapes. It’s not about reporting what Nixon thought, it’s about what was on those tapes, which is a somewhat different thing. It’s a factual source of information that is then, through sources, reported. It’s unfortunate that the taped material was not made available or it was not something that could be validated. But it is certainly a source of information that is far more credible as far as I’m concerned, as a journalist--and I think most of you would agree--than someone just saying something off the record. In other words, having the opportunity to listen to those tapes--which, according to many of the reports has been the source of what this information was--is a far cry from simply reporting what sources say about something. It is a fact that many, many people in authority in Washington simply will not speak for attribution, and many of the mainstream news organizations in this country routinely float things, report things, from White House staff and other sources, on a background basis. This sort of source is something that is well established, and it is, especially with the mainstream media, a source of information that has credibility. This information has a level of believability to me if it comes from people who I have confidence in and who have been reporting through these sources, if you will, for some time. You get the impression from some of the criticism of the media that there’s never been an unnamed source in Washington reportage before, and that’s baloney. This story would have stopped being a source’s story wholly and disproportionately if one thing had happened which everyone, I think, expected to happen but did not: if the president had been willing to provide some on-the-record information. The president was the one who was accused. The ball was in the president’s court. The president could have done two things. He could have opened the books and said, “Absolutely, look, this is when she came, this is when she didn’t, this is all a lie, and I am telling you it’s a lie, and this is my relationship with Monica. We never had any sexual relationship. I had given her this, la-di-da. . . .” All I’m saying is that the president had every reason and opportunity by many, many standards to set the record straight. Nothing would have pleased the media more. He chose not to do that and, given the seriousness of the charges and the proximity to the highest level of power in this country, I’m not sure that the media should be faulted for using unnamed sources when they had no official source, and the obvious official source refused to step forward. Myth number three: The media have unfairly savaged the president and his family and invaded his privacy. As far as I’m concerned, if there’s anyone who does not have privacy, the president of the United States does not. Maybe that’s fair and maybe that’s not. Maybe that’s not the way people look at it, but it seems to me that the American people have given the president a measure of flexibility, and obviously no one is going to set up a camera in his bedroom, but if the president of the United States thinks he can have an affair and not have it reported then I think he’s naive. . . . The media during this past week have observed very, very serious and rather impressive, in my opinion, limits on where they have gone. You have not seen--or at least I have not seen--any reporting that was based on an effort to try to get Chelsea Clinton’s comments. Nor have I seen any report on what Chelsea Clinton has been saying to her friends. Or, an effort to get inside Chelsea Clinton’s world. I think a fence has been built around Chelsea Clinton by the media, so far as I know, and I don’t expect it to last, because I expect that the grocery store tabs will find it irresistible. I think Chelsea Clinton has been given a pass on this. Now, Chelsea Clinton is an adult. She’s not a child anymore. She is someone whose opinion, I think, everyone is interested in getting a sense of. But, it has been handled with great sensitivity and very gingerly. When Hillary Clinton went on the Today Show, if any of you saw that, she was asked about [Chelsea] in the most gentle way and she answered in the most general kind of way and that was it. I think if Chelsea Clinton takes it upon herself to come forward and defend her father, then, all of a sudden, she’s going to be in the middle of this story and it’s going to be a very quick move. If I were the editor of the Washington Post, the New York Times, I would want to know whether in fact this is what she really believes and whether there was pressure put to bear on her to do this. But I don’t think Chelsea is going to be touched by anybody in the mainstream media unless she puts herself forward. And frankly I think that Hillary Clinton has also gotten a by. Hillary Clinton went on the Today Show. She went on as the wife, not as the First Lady, and she spoke and was questioned and then basically said, “I’m not going to say anymore,” and that has been judged sufficient. She has, by virtue of her position as the wife in this situation, been given an opportunity to speak. She has been allowed to say exactly what she wanted to say, which has had the effect of shoring up her husband, and she has not been questioned hard. For instance, this past Sunday 60 Minutes ran some of the outtakes from the joint appearance in the wake of the Jennifer Flowers scandal in 1992 when Bill Clinton was being quizzed about his relationship with Flowers. He denied having an affair with her, and Hillary stood by her man. According to--yes--unnamed sources, Bill Clinton has now admitted having an affair with Jennifer Flowers when he was deposed by Paula Jones’s lawyer. That means he lied on 60 Minutes. No one has asked Hillary about that, to my knowledge. I think that there has been within the media a rather courtly silence--not a silence, exactly--but Hillary Clinton has declared her relationship with the president between them and absolutely nobody else’s business and basically the media has said okay. You can judge that as a very good news judgment or not. But I think that it certainly demonstrates a measure of restraint that the media has not really been given credit for in the past week. Myth number four: The media are a gang of uncontrolled beasts as incapable of controlling themselves as the president appears to be in the face of an attractive and compliant young woman. I think that the fact is that Bill Clinton, with the shrewd advice and bully pulpit of the White House and the incomparably important help of his wife, has basically brought the media to heel. When Bill Clinton and the White House went on the offensive, the media were quite willing to be the vehicle for that. The media have been just as eager to pick up the cudgel and beat the crap out of themselves as they were to pursue Bill Clinton and this story. There has practically been no news organization in the past week that has not done a very heartfelt and agonized mea culpa about all of the terrible things they have done in the past week or at least worried about it very much. This is not something that was just born of the media sensitivity. I think it was born in part of the counteroffensive from the White House, and I think that what we have not really seen--and I think it would take a Bill Safire or somebody to do it--is for someone to really step back and see how this all happened. Because when the media are being attacked by someone as smart, resourceful, and effective as the president and with the key position that he has to do the attacking, I think the media are very vulnerable to being put on the defensive and to being put on a whole other scent entirely. For instance, when Hillary Clinton denounced a right-wing conspiracy, that was not sort of tossed off as a matter of defensiveness and spin. That was turned into a huge new front, focused mostly on Kenneth Starr, and the media have, I think, been turned in many respects away from the original point of the story to an examination of Kenneth Starr. Now I don’t think Kenneth Starr should not be scrutinized. I think he should. I think it’s appropriate. But the point I’m trying to make is that the media are not this “untamed beast” bunch. They are a herd that can be turned, and when they are, they go thundering off in a different direction--and it takes someone good to turn them, it takes a lot of powerful friends and effort to turn them. But they are quite susceptible and willing to be turned, as I think has been demonstrated. I think that, in fact, this story has turned. I mean that all of a sudden the media are ashamed of themselves. The story has been relegated to the back pages and everybody seems, as far as the media are concerned, to be sitting around saying, “Well, we’ll just wait until Bill’s ready to talk and I guess we don’t really do anything until then.” I think that’s a demonstration of the ability of the presidency to manipulate the media, rather than the opposite. Myth number five: The media have gravely wounded the president--and unfairly. I think that the media have been wounded. There’s no question about that. I think that the media have borne the brunt now of the bad-guy status. I think that the fact that Clinton’s ratings with the public have never been as high is a demonstration. In an odd way, the scandal brought people to the State of the Union speech. I think the State of the Union speech made people focus on the president’s policies and how positive so many things are in this country at the moment in terms of peace and prosperity and efforts to make things right. Bill Clinton went through an incredible laundry list last week. If you were sitting in that audience listening to that speech, no matter who you were, you had to find something that you were glad about that Bill Clinton said. And he has found, in the issue of Social Security, a vehicle for doing battle with the Republicans about the budget surplus that is a brilliant stroke. I think that the idea that this is all just a matter of the public simply embracing Bill Clinton is not really fair. Personally, I think it’s a combination of things. It is the thing that is given most credit, which is the economy. It is the idea that Americans think this is a personal affair and they don’t want to rock the boat. But my sense of the way the American psyche works is a little more complicated than that. When someone said this last week it just made perfect sense: Americans are very sentimental people. Sentimental in a storytelling kind of way. The story of the American West is the prototypical American saga, and I think Americans like stories that have endings that make sense to them. I think it’s not just an accident that the way movies get made these days is that they get made, and they get shown to a test audience, and the test audience then figures out whether they like the ending or not, and they tack a new ending on it if the one that they tried out is not one that appeals to people. My understanding is that the recent remake of Great Expectations in fact was judged to have not an upbeat enough ending. So Dickens was cast aside and they had to recast it to make it sufficiently upbeat. I think that the American public sort of tries out stories and projects them, and I think that the way they projected this one, they did not like where it was heading. They did not like the idea of another sordid effort to bring down the president. They did not want resignation. They do not want the boat rocked in the kind of way that it was looking like it was about to be rocked. I think basically they just said, “We don’t want this. We do not want this to happen.” They want Bill Clinton to finish his term. They don’t want the presidency to be brought down in the way that this story would have to bring it down. And I think that, barring things that are now unforeseen, that is not going to happen. I don’t think people are making a rational calculation about where their best interests lie. I think it’s much more visceral and intuitive, and maybe that is the thing about our national culture and our national character that ought to be examined more. We are moviemakers in a way, and I think we don’t want the president of the United States to be the bad guy in the movie. I think we don’t want this to be true, and we don’t want to have to deal with it. So, with that, I will cease and desist and let’s have a conversation. Moderator: Okay. Five big myths. Anybody want to take on any of these or disagree with Alex about any of these myths? Media Fellow: When you’re saying that the public doesn’t want this to be true, are you saying that that’s resulting in an attack on the media? Alex Jones: Well, I think the attack on the media is several things. One, I think it was, you know, the “hurricane”--the story. It was O.J. Simpson all over again, and the media is very, very unattractive when it is in that mode of cameras mowing people down. Nobody likes that. It’s ugly. It’s stupid and it makes the media look like they don’t know what they’re doing--number one. Number two: I think that this is a kind of a borderline story as far as crime is concerned. I mean suborning to perjury is a very shady area, and it’s hard to imagine Bill Clinton being brought down by something as fudgable as that. So, short of something more explicit, the American public has decided that they don’t want that to happen, and to the extent that media is trying to cram it down their throats, they’re mad at them and they don’t like to hear it. They don’t want to hear it. It’s not that they don’t believe it. Last night I asked my class if any of them believed the president when he stood at the lectern, looked straight at the American public and said passionately, “I did not have a sexual relationship with this woman.” Nobody in the room believed it except one person. Tatiana’s unfortunately not here today. But she believed him, she said. [I think she’s in the minority. Most people] think that Bill Clinton has lied to them through his teeth. Moderator: The polls support that. In the polls it says people don’t believe what he says is true, and they also don’t think that he should resign. Alex Jones: Yeah. I think that they have decided that and . . . Moderator: I mean they do think he should resign. Alex Jones: Most people believe he’s lied to them, and they’re saying, “We don’t want this to happen anyway.” And to the extent that the media are forcing them to have to, you know, deal with this, I think that they’re not terribly happy about it. That doesn’t mean they’re not curious about it still. But I think that they have projected [the story to its probable end]. They don’t like that ending. They want this ending. This ending is, let him serve his term. Media Fellow: But . . . should we pull our punches then? Alex Jones: No. I completely disagree. . . . The fact the president has been able to simply say, “I’m not going to discuss this”--is that the end of it? Well, I don’t know. Maybe it is. There has been this flood of reports about what was on those tapes, but that’s out now. Everybody knows what was on those tapes. All the juicy stuff . . . Moderator: I disagree. . . . I don’t think they know what’s on the tapes. I think that only a handful of people have heard the tapes. There’s only one or two people at Newsweek who have heard ninety minutes of the tape, and they have put out confusing reports about what they’re basing their information on. Leading you to believe that it’s from the tape and then later, when asked, they say, “Oh no, we never heard that on the tape. We heard that it was on the tape from the investigators.” I think Starr has listened to the tapes. Tripp knows what’s on the tapes--though she doesn’t have verbatim memory of what’s on the tapes. Lewinsky doesn’t have verbatim memory of what she said on the tapes, because she didn’t know she was being taped. So, the problem I have with the sources is not [that they are] unnamed sources. It’s saying, “We spoke to a source who is knowledgeable enough for us to run a story on this,” and then later when you scratch the surface, the source is so far removed from the evidence. Like the source [who reported] on the Secret Service witnessing the act. That guy knew nothing about Secret Service people witnessing that. He wasn’t even connected to any part of the case. He was a Washington lawyer who had been at a cocktail party probably. And he was not a good source. And there was a lot of that. It’s not like they used [reliable] unnamed sources. Alex Jones: Well, I don’t disagree that those things happened. I think, though, that what has happened is that the unnamed source rap has been a way to discredit the essence of the story, and I think that was a mistake. I think that yes, there was a lot of bad information. But you know there was a lot of bad information during the Gulf War. That was all on the record. So, I mean, let’s be real here. I think in many cases journalists know that you often get more accurate information from unnamed sources than you do from named sources, because people won’t come through and tell you what’s really going on. Moderator: That’s not my argument. I mean, unknown sources--if you know who they are and what they represent--you can test that for yourself. But if you’re just picking up stuff from other media who have used unnamed sources, or you’re simply speaking to someone who has spoken to Starr’s staff and that’s your only source. . . . And that in fact has been the source of many, many stories, and that’s not what journalism used to be. You used to not be able to get away with that. Alex Jones: Let’s say, hypothetically, you’re the editor of the New York Times. You have a person who has been following the case who has contacts in the Starr group, and his person there gives him information about those tapes. Is that sufficiently a source? Moderator: If it’s somebody inside Starr’s office, I’m happy, yeah. But if it’s somebody who knows Starr’s assistant, I’m not happy. That’s not good enough for me. A friend of a friend? Alex Jones: Where did you see that? Moderator: That was the source for the thing on the witnesses. The fact that there was supposed to be this witness who saw . . . Alex Jones: But that was discredited immediately. Moderator: It was discredited and it was circulated again and then even in the correction they said, “Well, he didn’t exactly say that, he said something else,” but it was a very defensive correction that was not accurate. Alex Jones: Well, I’m not trying to say that there were not mistakes made and it was not overreaching because of the competitive pressure, but I would venture to say that if you lined up all of the things that have been said about what is on those tapes, they are going to be eventually demonstrated to have been rather accurate. Moderator: They may not be admissible. Alex Jones: Well, that’s a whole other issue. But the point is, they exist. They exist and what we’ve been getting from unnamed sources is what is on those tapes. Moderator: Sometimes we’ve been getting speculation about what’s on those tapes. No, we have, because I’ve looked at it real hard and there are some cases where it’s not the fact that they used an unnamed source. There’s no way around that in this story. You have to use unnamed sources. But it’s the fact that in some cases the media was not as skeptical about those sources as they used to be because they were desperate. They needed that information and they needed it “now,” not tomorrow, and I think we ought to talk about why the speed of this story was so different than other stories, and what effect that has on the standards. Because that’s my only concern--this story broke so fast and so furious that it makes all the problems associated with the Richard [Jewell] coverage look like a picnic. I mean this was even faster than that and more intense, I think, because of the Internet deadlines, which are constant, and because of the twenty-four-hour news cycle. I think it’s having a big effect on how we cover news. Alex Jones: I have no doubt that that’s true. But I think that even if the Internet had not been around, this would have been a firestorm story. I mean, it’s unprecedented in my experience, and when you add the sexual dimension to it. . . . Here’s another issue that I quibble with. One of the things that people have complained about was the fact that the media started talking about impeachment early on. Well, I think that it is fair to say that when the attorney general authorizes a criminal investigation, and the issues are what they are, and the person that is being investigated is the president of the United States, it would be stupid not to at least raise the question of whether or not impeachment is a prospect. I think it would be naive not to at least address it. I think that you have to raise it as a possibility and try to at least get some sense of how likely it is. I mean, I don’t think that’s bad journalism to have raised that early on because the attorney general on the record had authorized this investigation and that’s serious business. That’s not baloney. Moderator: Are there other questions or critiques of the myths? Media Fellow: You’re kind of preaching to the choir here, because we all are journalists, but if you took your five myths outside to the general public, I’m wondering how it would play--especially looking at myth number four [the media as uncontrolled beasts]. I mean, that’s all I hear from my husband and my mother--she used to love me, now I’m cut out of the will. Alex Jones: I think that the media have participated in a savage badgering and [have been on the receiving end, too]. I think it’s also true that there has been a lot of speculative stuff, and I think that it has been speculative against the direction of the American public’s impulse and sentiment. When you go against that grain, then you’re really going to be in trouble. I think that the media in this country, for a lot of good reasons, have become estranged from the public. I don’t want to give you the idea that I am not a critic of the media, the way this has all unfolded. I am a critic, and I think a lot of what Dee has said is exactly right. I think it’s a matter of a disproportionate kind of criticism, though, that has tended to make the media guilty for something that I don’t think the media fundamentally has been guilty of. It has been a flash, but it was a huge story, and it was a story that went to the very highest levels of power, and it was a sexy story. The thing is, when those things happen there are going to be mistakes made. But it has not, in my opinion, been the worst hour of the media. I think the O.J. Simpson trial was much more egregiously exploited and overdone. A whole host of media crimes were tied up with the O.J. Simpson trial in a way that I do not [see happening here]. I think the fact that this has sort of expanded like an accordion and gone right back again is also an indicator of how sensitive the media is to this kind of criticism and this kind of rebuff from the public. I think that they are going to be much more careful about how they proceed, and perhaps that’s appropriate. But what I’m afraid of is that it’s going to also be a time when they basically allow the president to get by with something that ought to be the subject of aggressive inquiry. Media Fellow: I can’t imagine that the Times and the Post and the leading papers like that would [drop it]. I mean, I think my paper, for instance, has kind of withdrawn a little bit, and the story has moved down the page if not inside. But I think that what my paper now would want to do is the in-depth pieces that don’t have the huge flashy headlines and the in-your-face kind of thing, moving to thoughtful, how-did-we-get-to- this-point kind of coverage. That’s what I will be expecting from the Times and the Post and the other big papers also. Alex Jones: Let me give you what I think may be a hint to the problem the media have. In the beginning of my class last night I had my students watch the State of the Union [address] and do an analysis of the way it was covered. Many of them watched ABC, and one of them was really upset by what he termed the “snide” way Peter Jennings said something. When Clinton went in to speak, here they were, both houses of Congress, blood enemies of the president at every turn, and they stood up and applauded, and Peter Jennings said, “I think that it’s important to note that this [ovation] is a tradition, that the office of the president essentially is what is being saluted here, not necessarily [Clinton himself],” or something along those lines. Basically he was explaining why, in the midst of this controversy and criticism of the president, both houses of Congress, including Newt Gingrich and the Republicans, would be on their feet applauding [Clinton] as he walked into the chamber. My student saw Jennings’s statement as an effort to undercut the dignity of Bill Clinton by saying, in effect, that they were applauding the office of the president. I didn’t look at it that way, personally. As far as I was concerned, it would be confusing to anyone who didn’t understand that that was what was going on. Why would they be applauding Bill Clinton this way? It was a standing ovation. After saying all these terrible things about him five minutes ago and five minutes after the speech. I said to my student, “Could Jennings have said the words he said in a way that would not have made you feel this way?” He wasn’t sure about that, but he thought maybe he could have. It was the tone of voice--what he inferred from the tone of voice about how these commentators felt about the president--that was what he was reacting to. That’s a hard thing to deal with, because that’s the most subtle thing to try to assess, that tone. You know, headlines are so valuable that way, so sensitive that way. In newspapers it’s headlines and in television it’s the tone of voice, it’s the way you end a sentence, it’s that sarcastic suggestion. And one person’s sarcasm is another person’s reportage. It’s hard to get at. I don’t know. I was not watching Peter Jennings so I don’t know whether I consider what he said to have been sarcastic or not. But I think that what he said was appropriate for him to say, because I think it would’ve been confusing to people otherwise. And I think it was also the truth. They were applauding the president of the United States, not Bill Clinton, and I think that was a good thing to say. But, you know, I’m not sure that that’s the way a million other people feel, including your father, about the press. And if they did see it that way, and they did feel that way, then it’s this straight line from Peter Jennings to you and that’s the way it is. Media Fellow: Talk about Teflon presidents. I mean, this guy’s got Reagan beat by miles. I don’t understand how he’s been able to slide away from every single thing that’s come along . . . the foreign money that’s slipping into the campaign, the overnights in the White House, the whole thing about the decision on the Indian casino and the money that came into the White House, and now this. And it seems that the public just--I hear what you’re saying about sentimentality but--the public just doesn’t seem to react or respond or whatever, and it astounds me. . . . Amazing! Alex Jones: I have another theory about that, and I don’t know if this holds any water or not, but I think the American public as a whole is actually very sensitive to calibrations of power. And I don’t think that the American public wants a Republican House, a Republican Senate, and a Republican president. I don’t think they want that. When you had that big congressional sweep in ’94, Bill Clinton may have become bulletproof because I think there’s a broad middle of America that does not want the Republican Party to run this country in all three branches of power. You know, you can overlook a lot of overnights in the White House and affairs with interns if that is what you are really fundamentally afraid of, because I think that what the Republican Party stands for is very, very frightening to a lot of people for some reason. Moderator: Well, it might be the same if there was a Democratic sweep. They don’t want to live in a one-party country. Alex Jones: There hasn’t been a single party in power for--gosh, I don’t know when. Dee, do you? Moderator: I don’t either. But I also sense that people don’t want to live in what feels like a Third World republic, where you can have a revolution in eight days. And I sense that that’s what happened. You know, with the media coverage so swift, and people talking about impeachment, and he could be gone by the end of the week. I think Sam Donaldson said it . . . he was talking about Al Gore in the White House and the presidency. And people were going, “Wait a minute, what country are we in?” And I just sense that there was this reaction to that, and sure they’re going to blame the press for that. [People were saying] maybe there’s a process here that should take place before we topple this guy. I think that’s sort of where we are. People are waiting to see the process unfold rather than just run [him] out. Alex Jones: I don’t think people want him to go at all. Moderator: No. I don’t think they do either. And I think they assume that if he’s going to go it’s going to take, you know, two years. It’s going to take a while--it’s not going to happen in a week. Alex Jones: I would like to ask you your opinions here about my position as far as the naiveté and sexual obsession--what do you think? [Media Fellow response about German chancellor’s affair.] Alex Jones: Well, let me ask you this. What if a woman came forward and said that the highest government official in Germany had, completely unprovoked, propositioned her and told her to give him oral sex? Media Fellow (Germany): That would bring this political person a lot of trouble, I would say. . . . I don’t know whether we would have so many specials as are here on TV. . . . As I said earlier, we don’t believe in our politicians. We more or less doubt what they say. It’s not only a personal question but also in politics. That means we have a more political approach concerning our politicians, you know. [Discussion about German media and government scandal.] Alex Jones: [Clinton has said] there was no sexual relationship. Let’s say a month from now there seems to be irrefutable evidence. And how that evidence might be considered irrefutable I guess is up to the individual; but evidence that makes it quite clear that the president lied. How important would that be in Germany? Media Fellow: Actually, I don’t know, because it’s a private lie. If someone lies about his [private life], why shouldn’t he? Of course, I agree someone who [works for] the public shouldn’t blame the public if the public wants to look into his private life. He doesn’t have any private life. But on the other side, we had a similar case a few years ago on the regional level. We had a municipal president-- that means a governor if you would compare to here--he promised he wouldn’t be involved with something and in the end it turned out, of course, he was. And there was disgust all throughout the public, but that had to do with his politics and it wasn’t a private question. I think we would even make a distinction between [the two--politics and private life] and we would then wait for the people to vote for him once more. Alex Jones: I’m not sure at the moment if after Watergate there was some attempt to impeach any European leader like this just to repeat this story, you know. Well, even the press in Europe after the Watergate probe, etc., was trying to [dig up] the same [kind of] story. You know, think globally act locally . . . but today we may expect something like that to happen in Europe. Media Fellow: Just think of Belgium. There was one of the ministers who had sex with children . . . Moderator: But that’s obvious crime, you know... Media Fellow: But arguing the point about morals . . . I didn’t want to do anything but to point out that there is a change going on [in how far the media can intrude into private lives]. And of course I agree with you that this change with Clinton would push it another step forward, a big step forward. Alex Jones: I’m not so sure that’s true. I think it may push it backwards. Media Fellow: Why do you say that? Alex Jones: Because of the shellacking that the media [has taken]. . . the media has been beaten up by the public and by themselves about how they’ve handled this. I think in a way what is rather unsophisticated about the way the media has handled this is [that they have not understood] this sort of suspension of disbelief in the American people and their desire not to have to address this. I’m reminded of my mother, who was a great fan of Liberace. Liberace was a pianist in this country and very flamboyant . . . he died of AIDS. He was the most outrageous sort of gay performer, but he never acknowledged that he was gay . . . but then he died of AIDS. I asked my mother how she felt about the fact that he was gay and she said, “Well, I don’t know that he was gay. I wasn’t under the bed so I don’t know.” . . . I think, in a way, the American public has treated this the way professionals do the stock market. The value of the stock market reflects a discounted expectation of what the future is going to be, and I think that is what has happened here. These allegations have been discounted--people believe them, and they discounted them, and they’re going to go on. And it being true or not true is going to be obviously an issue of interest. There is another element in this, though, that hasn’t gotten very much attention yet, but probably will. And that is the desire of the Republican Party to keep things exactly the way they are because they’re going to be running against Bill Clinton, you can be sure, in the congressional elections and then in the presidential election of 2000. There’s going to be a campaign against Bill Clinton and the corruption, personal corruption that he represents. So the Republicans, I think, are going to want to keep him there, which is going to keep the pot boiling but not boiling over. They’re not going to want to make a final showdown, because that’s really not in their political interest. Yes? Media Fellow: How is it that the media has . . . not really understood how much the American public is just like this . . . the estrangement that we were talking about. I get the impression--maybe this is just from where I sit---that we’re not loved. I mean, I want to be loved, and I think that a story like this just brings it more to the forefront how much we’re not loved. We don’t have a good vision of what the public thinks of us, and I don’t know that that ought to be our standard at all but . . we were talking about how this story just took off and just kind of went like a firestorm and the public doesn’t want any part of it. How is it that we don’t really have a clue about what the public wants? Alex Jones: Whether you do or you don’t, the competitive pressures here were overwhelming. Media Fellow: I think it doesn’t matter so much. Of course, if the public didn’t like stories like this, they would not buy the newspapers, they would not watch TV programs which they wouldn’t watch in normal times, and I think of course then you can blame the media. I would also say the media had to accept this but . . . I would say for them even to pick up the angle “media mania,” or whatever they call it, it’s the chance to make another story out of it, and so that is really bizarre. If the people say, “No, we don’t like it”--of course they do like it--if not, they wouldn’t watch it. Alex Jones: Here’s another thought along that line. You know they say that the women in New York who are very involved with fashion--in Europe as well--take a lot of trouble with their appearance. They do it for each other. They don’t do it for their husbands, they don’t do it for men in general. They are doing it for people who will understand and appreciate what they are doing. Their husbands certainly don’t really appreciate or understand what they are doing nor does the world at large, but the world they live in does. It’s a self-referential thing. I think with journalists it’s very much the same. We live in a world that is fully cut off from the public. We’re the voyeurs. We’re the people who stand back and look at the world, [who] are calculatedly somehow apart. Now, in the case of politics, we are much more in the world of the politicians than we are in the world of the public, and I think that’s one of the problems that we’ve had. But I think journalists do what they do because of the competitive environment. That competitive environment is not just something they are hounded by, it’s something that they relish because they’re competing with their colleagues. The people whose approval, in many ways, they care most about are the people they compete against and the people they work with. . . . There is really a kind of [attitude that] the public is a whole other bunch that doesn’t really understand how it’s done, the difficulty of doing it well, and doesn’t appreciate the subtleties of it when it’s actually done well. Media Fellow: Nobody would say, “Oh! of course I like to have stories about someone having sex in an office”--and why should they? If they would say, “I don’t mind at all,” then it wouldn’t be a story either. . . . I wanted to say something concerning your part where you wouldn’t agree that [the Clinton coverage] is a big step forward. The comparison isn’t quite right, but I think this is just like if you use a weapon [after you use it the first time], the shock--the imprint, in this case, on reader--isn’t as big as it was the first time. Maybe for a time you say you won’t use it, and the text will usually go a step back, but I think it won’t last. We had discussions when someone broke out of prison and TV reporters were following the car and they lent the telephone to one of the guys who broke out of the prison, and he took hostages. We can’t do it anymore because we gave this person a forum in our media. It isn’t because we can’t handle it for sure, but it happened and it has happened here too with O.J. Simpson. Alex Jones: I don’t mean to suggest that there aren’t going to be more media frenzies in the future. There obviously will be. I’ve heard that thing about weapons--you know, once they are out and used . . . well, I think that’s a perfect example. I believe if the atomic bomb had not been dropped when it was dropped, a much larger one would have been dropped later, because I think that sooner or later somebody was going to drop an atomic bomb. I think that power was too vast for someone not to try to use it or be tempted to use it. But I think that the fact that it was used--and was used with such horrific effect-- has meant that it has not been used since. Now, journalistically, the most obvious and recent example is Diana, the death of Diana, and the way that the media has stepped back from her sons--even in the most insane environment mediawise, there has been a great step back from that. And I think that in this case what will happen is not some millennial, you know, change of heart in the media. I think that what has happened because of this [Lewinsky] story is not that the media has been emboldened, but that the media has had its ears boxed and that it’s going to be in retreat now a bit. And I think that it is in retreat right now. Media Fellow: What, if anything, do you think the media should have done differently? Or do you think they covered the story the only way [it could have been covered] given the circumstances? Alex Jones: No . . . no. To the extent that they relaxed their standard and started taking information from second- and third-hand sources . . . just because of the competitive pressure, I think that’s contemptible. . . . I think that the worst of the media, in this case, has not been the speculations and doodling about whether this is going to be something that’s going to reach impeachment. I think that it has been the very thing that you’re talking about--the reach beyond what genuine anonymous source material should be, which is anonymous source material where a credible, reliable reporter has a relationship and has a reason to believe that the person who is talking to him, one, knows what they are talking about and, two, is telling the truth. And I think that to the extent that they went beyond that, they performed badly. The Dallas Morning News is a perfect example of it. Those cases where people were told, you know, what someone said to someone else about what someone else heard about the tapes and they resorted that--I think that’s very bad journalism. Media Fellow: What about the sheer volume [of coverage]--do you think it was out of proportion? Alex Jones: Personally, no, I don’t. I think that you could quibble about it, but here was a president who had a sex problem who, even though it was not made explicit, basically had a covenant with the people who voted for him that he was not going to do this kind of thing while he was in office and, one, he did it in office and . . . [we] had that person on tape reciting chapter and verse about it; two, she was a person of vastly different level of power and was the age of his daughter and he did it in the White House; and, three, there came of it allegations of other things that happened in the White House along these lines; and, four, that he was accused and the attorney general validated an inquiry on the basis that he has broken the law by suborning to perjury. And that’s quite a package as far as I’m concerned. I think that it was a big story. I do, I really do. Media Fellow: . . . in the last three weeks, the whole world was discussing the fate of the American president . . . and this is crazy. . . . I’m pretty sure that [in] other countries . . . it shows a kind of weakness. You said that you are convinced that those evidences are real. I’m not, because . . . Alex Jones: Let me make it clear. What I said was real was what was on the tapes. I don’t necessarily think that Monica was telling the truth about what happened. But I think the question is, was she quoted or were the tapes quoted? Media Fellow: [Why does that make a difference?] Alex Jones: See, that’s not the way our legal system works. Moderator: The principals are not going to talk as long as there’s litigation. And they have sealed the evidence. I mean it’s literally sealed. It is not a public record, and you cannot have access to those tapes right now. You may not ever get access to those tapes. They may be declared illegal or made illegal. [Discussion about FBI tapes and legality of taping conversations.] Media Fellow: Yes, it’s against the law. What [Linda Tripp did is against the law] because she was telephoning from Maryland. If you did it in North Carolina, it would have been just fine. . . . In Maryland both parties have to know that there’s a tape running. Alex Jones: I think that [earlier comment] makes a valid point about America, though, because America tends to be very self-interested, and the only thing that I can think of that would have blown this off the front page would have been the death of Diana, or a war with Iraq, or something like that. But, you know, one of the points is that there is no big, big story that is in competition. And so this is the biggest story around, and the fact that it’s the American president makes it more important than if it’s the president of Burma. Moderator: Well, the Pope in Cuba was pretty big, and he definitely didn’t get much coverage. The Pope in Cuba was pretty big. Alex Jones: He got a lot of coverage until this broke . . . Moderator: Well, I mean, all the anchors came home. He was about to get more coverage. . . Alex Jones: He’d been covered for several days. I feel like we’ve gotten plenty of people to do that . . . Media Fellow: Yeah, we did the Pope with a six-column--I mean, a huge, huge picture, of course, but we had Clinton above that, which was a very odd layout. And this is in Miami where the Pope, of course, is THE story. But the Clinton [story] was all the way across the top with a smaller headline and it was just the ugliest layout in the world. But, but we did it. . . . Yeah, we got it above the fold. Media Fellow: I just want say one word of caution. One thing that concerns me about the intensity of this story and how quickly it unfolded, because of all the pressures we’ve talked about and there’s nothing you can do about them--because of that, I think sometimes once the media gets their teeth into an angle, they lose their peripheral vision and it’s hard for them to see that there may be more than one angle. I think this happened in the Richard Jewell story, and I think it happened to some extent in this story. In the Richard Jewell story, they took at face value that the--I don’t know if it was SBI or FBI-- had something called a “profile of the bomber” and that Richard Jewell fit the profile. Now this profile is fictional, it’s hypothetical, but it was reported on as if it was evidence. Yeah, he fit the profile therefore he must be [the bomber]. And you know if you had time to do that story, you’d say, wait a minute, we’re usually skeptical of the cops. . . . [In the Clinton case] we had a prosecutor who went out and wired somebody before he had any permission to do so and then went back and got permission. And that in itself is a story and raised a lot of questions for me. I kept wondering, “When are they going to do the story about how much power this special prosecutor has?” And they finally have caught up with that story. But it took a long time to look at that as maybe part of the story: Is there a legal problem here? Is it good for country that we have one man who has so much power and he can go out and he can subpoena anybody he wants? I think it’s because the other part of the story was so much more interesting. The press can lose perspective--they definitely do when they don’t have enough time and when they’re competing on an hourly deadline to file the most interesting story. That’s what troubles me--that [here’s] a public policy story that didn’t really get much play. Now it’s probably starting to get a little bit . . . Alex Jones: I’ll tell you another public policy story involving the media that has not gotten the play that it would’ve because of this, and I think is a very important story. That is the trial of Oprah Winfrey down in Texas for saying that she wasn’t going to eat hamburger anymore. If that law is allowed to stand, I think it will be very, very damaging to the media in this country and to the people of this country. I’m wondering whether the effects of this scandal and media attention and the media hostility that’s engendered may be that, in this much more important case, public opinion [will be] on the other side and that will be a real, real shame. Thank goodness it’s Oprah Winfrey, because if anybody is a sympathetic figure [in the media], she is, but still it is outrageous to me that that trial is taking place at all. Moderator: Well, thank you very much, Alex Jones, for a very stimulating, interesting, provocative discussion on the media coverage of Clinton and Lewinsky. To be continued, I’m sure. 1