The word "hook" is a term of art. It is something that is included in order to attract attention. "Monica Lewinski" in the title is the hook for this piece. I will talk about her but this piece is primarily about other things. She is able to serve as my hook because she has been in the news recently. Andy Warhol coined the phrase "15 minutes of fame" to describe people who come under intense scrutiny for a short period of time. As I write this it appears that interest in Ms. Lewinski is already waning. It lasted more than 15 minutes. But an older phrase, "three day wonder", appears to be a reasonably accurate description for her recent time in the spotlight. The action that occasions her current round of attention is piece she wrote for Vanity Fair. It's in the June issue, the one with Jon Hamm (Vanity Fair's hook) on the cover.
I will get back to Ms. Lewinski and what she had to say at the end of this piece. And she does tie in to my main thesis. And that thesis is encapsulated in the boring (or at least less hook-ish) part of my title. And before continuing let me confess to a bit of hyperbole. I am not going to talk about all of journalism. I am going to focus on what passes for journalism inside the "beltway", the circular highway that surrounds our nation's capital, Washington DC. I believe my thesis applies to a broad swath of journalism but I am not going to attempt to prove that. I am not even going to talk about it. I will leave the question of how broadly my thesis applies across all areas of journalism in the hands of you, dear reader.
If I am going to talk about journalism failure I need to start by talking about journalism success. And to do that it is important to understand what journalism is about. Libraries are divided into two broad sections, fiction and non-fiction. Journalism resides in the broad category of non-fiction. Journalism is about what is true not what is false. It is about what is not what might be or how we wish things to be. Journalism is also bound up in the news, or more broadly, current events. Good journalism tells us what is going on in the world. It also tells us what is NOT going on in the world. There is an old saw to the effect that "people watch the news on TV to find out what disasters did not happen today".
Bound up in the news is the concept of "breaking news". Journalists value speed. They treasure the "scoop", getting a story out before anyone else does. And speed is sometimes the enemy of accuracy. The quick version of some event may be incomplete or inaccurate. I am going to deal with that problem by ignoring it. I am going to examine how three big stories were covered, not by any specific journalist but broadly. And each of these stories unfolded over a period of years. So with respect to the stories I am going to discuss there was plenty of time to fill in any gaps or correct any inaccuracies that were the result of the need for speed. And, depressingly, the time period over which these stories occurred is many decades. Given the amount of time involved the problem is systemic. It is not limited to a particular story or journalist or news organization. The dominant news medium was print for the first story and TV for the last. So maybe the Internet will finally fix the problem. Only time will tell.
The first story I am going to talk about is frequently referred to at the "McCarthy Era" or "McCarthyism". Senator Joe McCarthy was a Republican back bencher from Wisconsin who was first elected in 1946. He became famous starting with a speech he made in 1950 and remained famous until his death in 1957. To explain what the fuss was about will require a little background.
The US got dragged into World War II on the side of the British and in opposition to the Nazis. On the theory that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" the US ended up allied with what was then called the U.S.S.R. but which I will refer to as Russia for convenience. This was a good thing because the longest campaigns and the largest battles were fought between the Germans and the Russians. But the Russians were never very popular either before or during the war. And after the war the Russians took political and economic control of a group of countries generally referred to as "Eastern Europe". This made the Russians very unpopular by the late '40s. So there was an opportunity to make political hay. The Democrats had been in control before the war and during it. So blaming the Democrats for various bad behavior (e.g. cozying up to the commies) was a fun and profitable game for the Republicans.
Added to this was a long history of aggressive spying by the Russians. The Russians maintained an active program of spying and undercover political shenanigans in the '30s and during and after WWII. Their activities seemed unimportant to the US in the '30s. We turned a blind eye during the war in order to keep the Russians in the fight. The single biggest coup for Russian intelligence was stealing the US design for the Atomic Bomb. So by the late '40s the Russians were "dirty commies" who were spies and saboteurs. In the middle of this was the US State Department. During the war their job was to keep the Russians in the fight no matter what. This meant that various State Department officials spent a lot of time with Russians and said nice things about them on a regular basis. This left many State Department officials wide open to unscrupulous attacks. At the same time a number of Russian spies were identified by authorities. Enter Joe McCarthy.
McCarthy was happy to launch unscrupulous attacks. He was especially happy to launch them against the State Department. He was famous for waving a piece of paper around where it could be photographed but not read. According to McCarthy it contained a specific number of names (51 or 87 or some other specific number) of spies or traitors in the State Department or in some other part of the government. We now know that none of these papers contained any names at all. There were various investigations and committee hearings. And some spies were exposed. But the information to expose them was developed by the FBI or other government agency. J. Edgar Hoover (then head of the FBI) found McCarthy useful so he occasionally fed McCarthy tips. So did a few other government officials. We now know that McCarthy and his operatives developed no "actionable intelligence" on their own during this period.
In other words, McCarthy was a fraud (and a well known drunk). And it quickly became apparent he was a fraud to those in the know including many journalists. But he was useful. He advanced an agenda that benefitted people like J Edgar Hoover. Eisenhower, an honest and able man found him useful as he was damaging Democrats and Eisenhower was running for President as a Republican in '52. His theory was he could rein him in after the election. "Journalists" found him useful because he was good copy. So a circle of powerful people, many of them journalists, ran interference for him. The result was that McCarthy was able to ruin the lives of many good and patriotic people.
There is a journalist who is famous for openly opposing McCarthy. His name is Edward R. Murrow. Many books have been written about this subject. But a quick introduction to the Murrow/McCarthy battle can be found in a very good movie called "Good Night and Good Luck" starring George Clooney. But Murrow was an outlier. Almost no other "journalists" openly opposed McCarthy. Most of them jumped on the gravy train that McCarthy represented and enjoyed the ride.
McCarthy was eventually brought down and his era slowly ground to a halt. Was it great (or even adequate) journalism that did it? Sadly, no. It was TV. ABC was the new network on the block at the time and did not have a full schedule of daytime TV programs. McCarthy launched a Senate investigation that came to be known as the "Army/McCarthy hearings" because they were ostensibly about treason in the army. ABC decided to televise them. They went on for weeks and McCarthy was front and center as master of ceremonies. Average Americans got to see McCarthy as he actually was not as the news media portrayed him. And they did not like what they saw. The hearings effectively ended when the attorney representing the army said to McCarthy "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you no sense of decency?" The audience in the room and at home were nearly unanimous in their opinion that the answer was "no".
The next story I am going to cover is the granddaddy of all "gate"s, Watergate. Richard Nixon, who had come to prominence as part of the crew that hung on to Joe McCarthy's coat tails, was elected narrowly to the Presidency in 1968. So when 1972 rolled around he was of a mind to take no chances. But for a number of reasons he was way ahead. This was a situation he had no experience with. Not quite believing his good fortune and sitting on a large well funded organization (called CRP by the Nixon people and CREEP, technically the "Committee to Re-Elect the President", by everyone else) he decided to leave no stone unturned. A secret group called the "plumbers" (we find and fix leaks) was formed. They decided to break into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. The DNC happened to be then housed in a building complex near the Lincoln Memorial called the "Watergate Complex". The name of the building eventually became the nickname for the scandal.
On their second burglary job the plumbers were caught. Events surrounding Watergate spawned the aphorism "it's not the crime that gets you, it's the cover up" because that is how Watergate went. If the Nixon people had owned up early on they probably would have received a slap on the wrist and Nixon would have still been re-elected. Instead the burglars were initially characterized as a "rogue operation" that no senior officials knew anything about. But then payoffs were arranged and various cover up contingency plans were hatched and implemented. And things kept spiraling out in more and more baroque ways. Eventually the whole thing broke wide open and Nixon was forced to resign.
There is a Murrow-like character in Watergate. Except it is two people operating as a team that came to be known by the nickname Woodstein. The two members were Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. They were junior reporters for the Washington Post. As with McCarthyism before, most of the news media (including most of the senior reporters at the Washington Post) either provided cover for the Nixon people or stood on the sideline. Another hero in uncovering the scandal was a Federal Judge named John Sirica. He was the judge that officiated at the original burglary case. He refused to accept a plea deal the Nixon Justice Department had put together as part of the cover up effort. As a result of his probing facts came out that pointed to a larger conspiracy. This was one of several key points where the Nixon people came very close to successfully hushing things up. There is a book by Woodstein and a movie starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford called "All the President's Men" that covers some of the Watergate events. But the whole story has enough twists and turns (and players) to fill an entire season of "Game of Thrones".
From start to finish Watergate took about 3 years. The burglars were caught in June of 1972. The US Senate convened a "Watergate Hearing" committee in May of 1973. The critical time was during this first 18 months. The election took place in November of 1972 (Nixon won big). The Sirica hearings that led to additional information coming out also happened during this period. Woodstein were most active during this period. The revelation before the Senate committee (and the public) in August of 1973 of the existence of the Nixon Tapes put an end to any serious possibility of the cover up succeeding.
And, unlike the Army/McCarthy hearing, the Watergate Hearing was well conducted. It was covered on TV but this time the public gave the participating Senators high marks for how they comported themselves. It would be nice to report that DC journalists as a group also comported themselves well during the critical early period. But they didn't. They divided themselves for the most part into the "Nixon apologists" group and the "there's no story here" group. Once the existence of the Nixon Tapes was revealed it quickly became apparent that there was a big story here. At that point the DC news media came piling in. There were lots more twists and turns. But Nixon resigned in August of 1974 and was pardoned about a month later by President Ford.
I was too young for the McCarthy era. I heard stories about it and the last embers of McCarthyism were just dying down when I started getting interested in the world around me. But I was front and center for Watergate. And Watergate whetted my appetite to learn more about the McCarthy era. But by then (and still to some extent all the way to the present) the McCarthy period is not much spoken of. Very few people covered themselves in glory during this period. And there are a lot of people who engaged in shameful behavior during that period. They are happy to let sleeping dogs lie.
In any case, after Watergate wound up I spent some time trying to figure out what lessons could be learned. (I did the same thing at about the same time with respect to Vietnam. See http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2014/04/vietnam-lessons-learned.html for more on what I learned from Vietnam). My basic question with the Watergate affair was how to evaluate whether the media was doing a good job with respect to a potential scandal. I came up with two questions: (1) Is the media doing a thorough investigation? (2) Is the media afraid of the powers that be (the people being investigated)? The two questions are related. If the media is afraid of (or beholden to) the powers that be they are more likely to do a poor (or nonexistent) investigation. And the people who need to talk in order for the story to come out are less likely to spill the beans if they are afraid. With Watergate a large segment of the media had effectively been bought off by the Nixon Administration. This is not done using bags of cash. It is done by "access" (giving selected members of the press access - either off the record or on - to key administration figures) and "leaks" (dribbling out "not for attribution" juicy ("newsworthy") tidbits).
The Nixon Administration had a segment of the media in their pocket using some combination of access and leaks. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Everybody does it. But good journalists weigh the costs against the benefits. Are they being given correct information? Are they being required to slant their coverage in order to stay in the good graces of the administration? Good journalists should never tolerate being given bad information. And a certain amount of "slant" is probably unavoidable. But the slant should be kept to saying nice things about the administration (how much and for how long is a judgment call) but it should never extend to suppressing facts or shutting out the other side's ability to get their story out. So in the early stages of Watergate the Nixon Administration did not lack for cheerleaders.
Then there was the "thorough investigation" issue. Most of the media coverage between June and November of '72 was election coverage. With respect to Watergate it was definitely "there's no story there". How much of this was laziness or narrow mindedness versus being bought off by access and leaks versus fear of the Nixon Administration is hard to tell. The Nixon people kept a formal "enemies" list. People on this list were to be sabotaged at every opportunity. Given the number of "journalists" working in DC, the list was remarkably short. And with that let me move on to the third story, the one that involved Ms. Lewinski.
Actually this story is multiple stories. The first one goes by the name of "Whitewater". It broke during the 1992 campaign when Bill Clinton was running for President. At heart it was an influence peddling scandal. Someone does a favor for Bill and Bill does a favor for this person in return. Whitewater was a real estate development. The Clintons (before Bill was running for President) were given an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a deal that was supposed to be highly profitable. The problem with this scheme is that the Clintons ended up losing a bundle of money on the deal. After that the Clintons were unlikely to come through with the "pro quo" to go with the "quid". So even if the plan was to peddle influence, it didn't happen in this case.
Clinton won the election. In spite of this the "investigation" of Whitewater continued. But no one has ever shown that the Clintons made money on the deal. Various investigations have come up with various figures for their loss. But the figure was in the tens of thousands of dollars. (For contrast, Bill was earning $26,500 a year at the time of the deal.) Mostly what these investigations turned up was that the other party to the deal, a banker named Jim MacDougal, was a real sleezeball. But Whitewater turned out to be only the first of the Clinton "scandals". And, in an homage to Watergate, a "gate" nickname was usually attached to each.
The next one was "travel-gate". The Clintons kicked the current occupants of the White House travel office out and installed their own people. I never could understand what the big deal was. (And George W Bush did the same thing 10 years later and no one let out a peep.) Travel-gate somehow managed to garner vast quantities of publicity anyhow.
Shortly thereafter, we were treated to "Vince Foster-gate". Vince Foster was a Whitehouse aid who committed suicide. Somehow, in spite of the fact that the death was thoroughly investigated there was supposed to be some deep mysterious conspiracy behind the death. "It wasn't a suicide. It was a hit job ordered by Bill Clinton." It never made any sense. But the media obsessed about it for month after month anyhow.
There were others. It is now hard to keep them all straight. But before moving on to the one that involved Ms. Lewinski let me cover one more. Hillary was employed for many years by the Rose law firm. It was one of those political law firms that are ubiquitous in DC but Rose was in Little Rock, the state capital of Arkansas. While she was there she decided to invest in cattle futures. There is no evidence she ever had any interest in or knowledge of cattle futures except in the case of this one transaction. And the transaction turned a nice profit. Now, if you know how to game the system, it's pretty easy to make sure that a single transaction for a single individual makes money. There is no firm evidence that this happened in this case. But a single very profitable transaction is suggestive. So here we have a classic influence peddling scenario. But this whole thing never got any real traction. We heard ad infinitum about Whitewater, at best a failed effort at influence peddling, and we heard almost nothing about cattle futures, a classic influence peddling scenario. To this day I can make no sense of this.
Before he was elected there were a lot of rumors that Bill Clinton was a skirt chaser. No one was able to come up with definitive proof but there was a lot of speculation. Four years before Clinton ran another Democrat named Gary Hart ran for President. And he too was surrounded by similar rumors. One day he dared the media to come up with definitive proof. Shortly thereafter proof appeared that Hart had dallied with a lady named Donna Rice on a boat called "Monkey Business". Whether he was informed by the Hart experience or he was just a more careful politician, Clinton never made that mistake. In fact, in a famous "60 Minutes" interview early in the campaign he owned up to being a sinner and to having committed unspecified sins. He also did not take a "holier than thou" attitude and chastise others who had been caught out. So the implied pact was that his past dalliances would be let pass but that he would mend his ways while in the White House.
Various "bimbo alerts" surfaced after he entered the White House having to do with events that had occurred before he became President. But no hard proof was found. That is until Paula Jones emerged. She alleged an affair with Clinton. But hard proof was scarce. Eventually a lawsuit ensued and depositions were taken, including one by Bill Clinton. Meanwhile it turned out that Clinton had become involved with a White House intern named Monica Lewinski. The most salacious aspect of this involvement can best be characterized as mutual jerk off sessions. No actual sex (in the biblical sense) was involved. But that turned out to be enough. Lewinski had been confiding in a friend named Linda Tripp. Tripp in turn had consulted Lucianne Goldberg. Goldberg was very active in Republican circles. She advised Tripp to secretly tape her conversations with Lewinski. When it came out that Lewinski had a dress with semen stains on it (the "blue dress") Goldberg counseled Tripp to counsel Lewinski to keep the dress as insurance. . Tripp did what Goldberg counseled and Lewinski did what Tripp recommended.
The Republicans had engineered an "independent council" investigation of the various Clinton "scandals". They then engineered the replacement of original head with a hard charging conservative named Ken Starr. Starr was made aware of the existence of the tapes and the dress. He went to town. The investigation was supposed to be handled in secret but the Starr operation leaked like a sieve. And, in spite of running down every whisper, Starr concluded there was no serious wrongdoing involved. But after pressure was applied he dumped the whole thing in the lap of the US House of Representatives. The body was controlled by Republicans at the time so they promptly moved bills of impeachment. This results in a trial with the Senate in the role of the jury. The Senate (controlled by Democrats) did not vote to convict. The public generally concurred with the opinion of the Senate and Republicans did badly in the next election. With his feet cut out from under him, Clinton eventually settled with Paula Jones for $850,000 and no admission of guilt.
As a side note, the Tripp tapes were illegally recorded. The reason I mention this is a couple of years later another tape surfaced. This one featured Newt Gingrich, then Speaker of the House, and documented him engaging in flagrantly unethical behavior. Not a peep about illegality was heard from Republicans when the Tripp tapes surfaced. But a huge uproar went up about the "illegality" of the tape in the Gingrich case. The tape was leaked to the New York Times by Democratic Representative Jim McDermott. Republicans (including now Speaker John Boehner, who was heard on the tape) sued McDermott. The case dragged out for years and McDermott eventually lost. The result was millions of dollars of penalties, court costs, and legal fees. I will say in defense of the media that they did actively support the McDermott side of the case.
I applied my two Watergate tests to the various Clinton "scandals". In the Watergate case the answers were "no" (the media did not thoroughly investigate, at least in the critical early period when it mattered) and "yes" (many media figures were afraid of the Nixon Administration. Many low level employees also frankly admitted to Woodstein that they were afraid to talk.) In the Whitewater case, I quickly concluded the opposite. The answers were "yes" (a whole crop of journalists who had grown up on Watergate were eager to crack their own "gate") and "no" (no one in Little Rock seemed to be the least bit afraid of the Clintons nor reluctant to talk). If there was any substance to Whitewater I expected it to emerge quickly. It didn't. (The basic facts of Whitewater were all in the original story.) It became quickly apparent that the same was true of "travel-gate", "Vince Foster-gate" and other Clinton "scandals". The exceptions were "cattle futures", which the media quickly lost interest in, and the Lewinski affair.
Given this pattern at some point the story should have changed from "allegations by anonymous sources have surfaced suggesting Clinton involvement in fill-in-the-blank-gate" to "the GOP scandal machine has surfaced a new and likely false charge against the Clintons in a crass effort to damage them politically" but it never did. Instead the media ignores their earlier bad behavior and relies heavily on the Lewinski affair when the subject is raised because they can argue with at least marginal credibility that they behaved appropriately in that case. And the beltway media has yet to own up to their sins in any of these stories. I note without comment that in all the stories I have recounted the beltway media acted to promote Republican causes and damage Democratic ones. I am perfectly willing to believe that examples going the opposite way exist. Conservatives have suggested a number of possibilities. But so far I have found their analysis unconvincing.
Finally, let me recommend Ms. Lewinski's piece. It is well written and she has some interesting things to say. She does herself justice in that she gives us a much more well rounded picture of herself than the media has at any time, then or now. She titles her piece in part "The Culture of Humiliation". She styles herself an expert on that particular subject and I am convinced by her logic. Her involvement in a "gate" has effectively forestalled many carrier options. She has suggested that she can provide assistance to others who have also been the target of public humiliation. Again I am convinced. I wish her all the luck and much success in her endeavor.
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