Let our conscience be your guide.
That’s one of the more provocative messages conveyed by the news media to politicians in a new national poll of leading journalists in the wake of the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Public Agenda, a non-partisan research organization, and Columbia Journalism Review surveyed 125 senior journalists and published the results in the magazine’s November/December issue and its Web site (www.cjr.org). Highlights include:
About 6 out of 10 journalists gave the press an “A” or a “B” for its coverage of Monicagate. More than a third believed the profession deserved a “C,” “D” or an “F” for its performance.
Plus, 44 percent thought the story had been “overplayed,” compared to a measly 4 percent who thought it had been “underplayed.” Meanwhile, 48 percent thought it was played “about right.”
A hearty 62 percent agreed that intense news media scrutiny of the personal lives of public officials had “probably driven some of our most prominent politicians out of political life.”
An even heartier 89 percent said they would not change the way they covered the private lives of political officials and candidates.
That’s more than the 56 percent who disagreed with the notion that journalists’ personal lives, including their sexual behavior, should be held to as high a moral standard as the personal lives of political officials.
Based on my informal survey of my colleagues, I was more surprised that 29 percent thought the private lives of journalists should be held to the same moral standards as those of politicians. .
I believe the personal lives of politicians should be held to as low a moral standard as the public expects of journalists. As long as the behavior in question doesn’t directly involve our professional life, embarrass our employers or break any laws, it should not be anybody’s business but the parties who are involved.
By my reasoning, politicians deserve special scrutiny only because their employer happens to be the public. That’s why I called for Clinton to resign after he confirmed after eight months of fibbing that he did have a “relationship” with “that woman” after all. I thought his public behavior had embarrassed his presidency beyond repair. He has chosen to try to prove me wrong.
So far, he appears to be succeeding, judging by the high approval ratings he has continued to earn for his public performance. His employer, the American public, has proved itself to be surprisingly difficult to embarrass.
In this way, Washington’s chattering classes, constantly pounding Clinton’s behavior, seem to be living in “Pleasantville,” that quaint black-and-white 1950s video village in the popular movie of the same name.
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Judging by the polls, the rest of the country seems to be living with more of a 1960s freewheeling morality. Today we have an era in which family dysfunction–much more serious than the Clintons–is constantly portrayed on daytime TV shows like “The Jerry Springer Show.”
This certainly doesn’t encourage the news media to change much about the way they cover scandals. Sure, Monicagate was overplayed. But imagine what would have happened if the news media had played it any less. We would have been hammered, particularly by Clinton’s critics on the right, for assisting his coverup.
In 1917, Sen. Hiram Johnson told his colleagues in a speech, “The first casualty when war comes is the truth.” For us in today’s news media it appears that our first casualty in the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal was our dignity.
Next comes the task of trying to win our dignity back from the rubble of sex, lies and a DNA-stained dress. As with Watergate and other scandals, the dust will settle on Monicagate someday, although at the rate Congress is moving, it might not happen until the next millennium.
Then we will scratch our heads and wring our hands about all the attention Monicagate took away from other stories that should have been better covered. Remember how all those big-foot reporters got called away from Pope John Paul II’s Cuba visit by Monicagate last January? That was only the beginning. We have a lot of catching up to do.
Then, armed with the lessons we have learned from our mistakes, we will set out enlightened and fully prepared to make new ones.
That’s the nature of news. It is full of surprises. That’s why we call it news.