Not even in Las Vegas does a warmup act receive the kind of attention paid last week to Linda Tripp, grand jury witness. Caesars Palace doesn’t have room for that many TV cameras.
Fortunately, for the sake of public enlightenment, Monica Beach does.
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Monica Beach?
It’s the wags’ term for the area around the federal courthouse. It’s where a media horde sets up shop, awaiting news from the grand jury looking into perjury and obstruction of justice claims inspired by the distinctly ambiguous relationship between President Clinton and former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
In an homage to modern electronics, more than 60 TV and still cameras were primed for battle as they awaited the woman whose secret recordings inspired the perjury and obstruction-of-justice investigation of President Clinton.
Shortly after 9 a.m. Tuesday, after months of feverish TV and newspaper speculation, Tripp stepped out of a dark van with security officers and her two college-age children. Click, click, click went the still cameras, a press version of a well-honed, synchronized swimming team.
Within 15 seconds, she disappeared into the side door of the courthouse for her long-awaited sessions with the grand jury. As far as drama, it fell short of the Allied landing at Normandy.
With Congress and Clinton out of town, Tripp seemed the only game in town for a media long on videotape, if short on imagination.
The media contingent of more than 200 was actually poised on three sides of the large stone building, unsure of which entrance might be used by the witness. CNN, The Associated Press and The Washington Post were among those with personnel at each side. And this is not to mention simultaneous, if smaller, “stakeouts” at the building housing the offices of Whitewater Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, as well as the Watergate hotel-apartment complex, which is often the home of Lewinsky.
In addition to the photo gang, nine satellite and microwave TV trucks were parked out in front of the court, to make those all-important live shots easier. For a split second, a Chicago visitor might have thought that the Consumer Electronics Show had relocated from McCormick Place.
Indeed, one satellite truck memorialized the arguable silliness of this observational overdose with this neatly stenciled sign on a side window:
“We Are Here for the KEN STARR GRAND JURY. Monica is not here. Appearing Today is LINDA TRIPP.”
And if one looked at several of the fancy trucks, there were other pieces of paper slid under their windshields. Look closely, and there was the depressing, if pragmatic, evidence of the length of their stays in the same position during the long investigation: take-out menus placed there by area restaurants.
“I had a real good angle,” said a freelance Associated Press television cameraman, moments after he and about eight others on his side of the building made virtually identical shots of Tripp arriving Tuesday, in virtually the exact same ritual she’d duplicate two days later in her final testimony before the 4th of July weekend.
Tripp, who is Lewinsky’s former White House and Pentagon colleague, could be the penultimate major witness, second only to the woman some see her as betraying. After months of waiting, the media was primed practically and rhetorically for Tripp.
“Will Linda Tripp get tripped up before the grand jury?” declared a microphone-holding young reporter as she recorded a “tease,” presumably impressed by her command of the language as her cameraman and producer looked on. “I’m Linda Block, and I’ll have a live report coming up.”
With a harsh summer sun out early, the television techies dispersed after Tripp’s arrival to their familiar lawn chairs under multicolored umbrellas; about as many as one finds on a slow day at Coney Island.
Those at the courthouse’s prime entrance, fronting Pennsylvania Avenue, lounge at the foot of a large pillar. As the sun changes angles, they move to capture the slivers of shade, in the process resembling a human sun dial.
But one had best not doze off since this is a prime example of the occasional stresses of doing nothing. All you need to do is miss somebody making a fleeting appearance and your bosses will be screaming: “How come WE didn’t have that totally inconsequential footage of so-and-so exiting his Lincoln Town Car and rushing into the building?!”
Meanwhile, I exploited the freedom of not caring when and where anybody was entering this temple of justice and, instead, mulled the head-turning expense of such a media stakeout:
– The five television microwave trucks in front of the courthouse on Pennsylvania Avenue cost about $200,000 apiece. The four satellite trucks cost about $500,000.
– The roughly 33 TV cameras (in a sign of the times, all Japanese-made), range from roughly $35,000 apiece to $50,000. In many cases, they were supplemented by lenses costing more than $10,000 and wireless microphones costing more than $1,000. Add lights, monitors, recorders and other gizmos, and the total price can easily reach $80,000 for the whole camera rig.
– The 30 still cameras, also almost all Japanese, tended to cost about $2,500 apiece. But fancy long lenses can add $5,000 to the cost of the fancier rigs.
– The major networks are so obsessed with the Lewinsky story that they are also “staking out” her apartment and Starr’s own offices. That stretches their staffs so much that they often must rent extra crews, costing about $1,200 a day per crew.
– As for salaries of the press horde, they range from those of modestly compensated stringers and 20-something TV producers to six-figure network correspondents such as Lisa Myers of NBC, Phil Jones of CBS and Bob Franken of CNN.
But if one took a probably low average salary of $40,000 for the assembled, one had perhaps $8 million worth of Tripp media watchers. Add $3 million in fancy trucks, the roughly $2.5 million in TV cameras, perhaps the $1 million for the still cameras and perhaps $100,000 in satellite transmission costs. That makes a roughly $14.5 million extravaganza.
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And remember, the headliner is yet to appear on this gaudy stage. Whitewater watchers, those tickets are going fast for the grand finale on Monica Beach.
And if you do cruise by on your travels here, I can recommend some dandy Chinese takeout.
A kiss might make it better
Here’s further evidence of the capital cesspool.
Stuart Taylor Jr. is a fine legal journalist who has turned into an anti-Clinton polemicist on Whitewater. He even had private discussions with Kenneth Starr about working for him, at the same time he was pontificating about the case in print and on TV.
The disclosure stirred a ripple of concern and explains why PBS’ “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” ended its formal relationship with him as a legal commentator.
Slate, the Microsoft on-line publication, now discloses that Taylor recently had drinks at a posh hotel bar with Starr’s top deputy. A clearly miffed Taylor, whose self-righteousness now exceeds Starr’s, wrote back to say this was not a business appointment but a “private and personal conversation” in which the aide sought his advice after feeling “troubled and hurt” by a negative portrayal of him in a magazine article.
Which is to say that if you’re a journalist here seeking to maintain professional rectitude by not formally laboring for a prosecutor, at least offer pro bono public relations and emotional counsel to his chief lieutenant at the bar of the Jefferson Hotel.