Beyond the Cringe
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television BEYOND THE CRINGE By Reuven Frank The President squirmed as he answered. Over 20 million Americans watched and cringed. Again, television was making history. Monday,...
...it has become central to the whole process of Washington reporting...
...It never zoomed in, never moved farther back, right or left...
...and we., .were there...
...Then, TV viewers had to be content with only one dramatic image, that of Starr and his legal retinue getting out of their cars at the diplomatic entrance to the White House (see "The Mamoulian Factor," NL, September 7-21...
...Just as months of constant leaks had made the transcripts acceptable, so the transcripts had paved the way for the President's testimony to the grand jury...
...Delivered on Monday, August 17, Clinton's performance had been recorded on videotape...
...I once spent more than an hour with an editor going over a piece of film trying to take out a "goddamn...
...Four weeks to the day had passed since dozens of television correspondents, standing outside the Federal courthouse in Washington D.C., speculated on the air about what Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr's grand jury was seeing inside...
...Three or four members of Starr's staff asked questions off-camera, and once he himself did so...
...Five cable networks quickly declared they would...
...ABC, CBS and NBC were unable to make up their minds until the last minute...
...When the House Judiciary Committee proceeded to its debate on whether to hold impeachment hearings, a new generation of newspaper writers, reaching for some fresh insight, discovered that television was "central to the process...
...A lieutenant colonel, badly shot up, was having his leg amputated with what may have been too little anesthetic...
...For one reason or another, his words were generally considered to have been less than that and sat poorly with the public...
...and Barbara Jordan tackle the same issue...
...Twice NBC considered the material too salacious, and cut away to commentary...
...People line up at the Museum of Modern Art for hours to see films like that...
...during the previous summer's Watergate hearings, the American people were given a chance to watch history as it happened in front of the television cameras...
...If the camera angle was predictable, the President's subdued demeanor was not...
...To be accurate, it should be pointed out that the prosecution's disembodied questions, rather than the President's answers, contained the graphic descriptions...
...Reading to Dan Rather from Monica Lewinsky's testimony, Schieffer said: "He lifted my sweater, and so forth...
...Later in the morning, transcripts became available ahead of the tape as it was rolling, so that anchors and executives knew what was coming...
...The first professor of constitutional law to be elected President of the United States, his million-dollar lawyer at his side, faced a phalanx led by another million-dollar lawyer serving as independent counsel...
...It all resulted in a virtuosic display of the niceties of legal thrust and parry—like a state agricultural fair pavilion, with blue, red and white ribbons for the best in casuistry, hostility and inconsequence...
...Parents of young children did not protest, nor did easily outraged evangelical ministers from the rural South, or politicians who might consider such airing inimical to their prospects...
...But neither this nor the sweaty details were what made the tape news...
...Grizzled and respected reporters, like Sam Donaldson and Bob Schieffer, read to the anchormen from documents being handed to them page by page...
...But leaking is more than part of the Starr affair...
...It was to the older television executives, conditioned never to broadcast such material...
...It learned again the iron law that virtue is its own sole reward...
...Despite its omitting nothing, ABC ranked fourth in audience, after not only CBS and NBC, but CNN...
...Now, what had been hidden was revealed: Four hours of President Bill Clinton's testimony by closed circuit television—sent encrypted through fiber optic cable from the White House Map Room to the grand jury in the Federal courthouse —were broadcast by five cable networks plus ABC, NBC and CBS...
...Surely it was news...
...But if the whole Monica Lewinsky affair has been shaped by leaking attorneys, let it not obscure the fact that they have other skills...
...As anticipated, the camera was positioned for a medium closeup...
...Even the explicit description of the mechanics of what men and women sometimes do together was no longer shocking...
...Telling the audience what you exclusively learned, of course, saves the cost of a camera crew...
...Afterward, some reporters and listeners who call in to cable television "news-chat" programs complained about hair-splitting...
...Describing President Richard M. Nixon's August 10, 1974 resignation, Watergate: Chronology of a Crisis, a bulky but indispensable volume published by Congressional Quarterly, says: "Once again, as...
...But some slipped by them...
...They have come from the prosecution's lawyers, from defendants and their lawyers, from witnesses and their lawyers, from the White House and its layers of lawyers...
...At 9 a.m., CBS and NBC and the five cable networks began their programs, announcing to the breathless world that the video of the President was being loaded and other consequentialities...
...Many were apparent as the videotape unspooled...
...Once they finally did decide, they put the bravest possible face on it...
...Monday, September 21, 1998...
...In another context, the whole "show"— more than four hours of one man's face answering questions asked by disembodied voices—could have been passed off as avant-garde theater...
...On another occasion, a cameraman covering combat in Vietnam sent us a remarkable story he had done inside a battalion medical tent...
...Probing questions will be asked not only of friendly lawyers but of those on the other side...
...This time, only the cable networks brought the Judiciary Committee's debate on considering impeachment into America's homes...
...There was nothing genuinely new or mildly untoward, either, in watching what the grand jury had seen of Bill Clinton...
...What might have been shocking only days before was accepted, even normal...
...He displayed, perhaps, a flush of embarrassment, or pursed his lips in anger, but there were no outbursts, nor did he stalk out in high dudgeon, as the bestplaced reporters had forewarned us to expect...
...NBC's audience fell by a third...
...The atmosphere has been coarsened that much, that fast...
...Peter Bart, the editor of the entertainment industry's newspaper, Variety, accurately summed up the situation this way: "Certainly no one can accuse Bill Clinton of bringing much in the way of civility or class to the Presidency, but it remained for Ken Starr to force-feed us a media diet of self-degradation...
...for television, there are no taboos left to break...
...On the evening of the day President Clinton actually testified to the grand jury, he delivered what was billed as an apology to the nation...
...Indeed, this provided a festival of lawyering...
...We got letters complaining about befouling America's homes at supper time...
...They were too young to remember that in the summer of 1974 the country had watched Representatives Sam Ervin, Peter W Rodino Jr...
...On Friday, September 11, the Congressional leadership released thousands of pages of material Starr had sent to back up his case...
...ABC chose to wait until the tape was actually ready to roll, about 9:20...
...Had they...
...One has the impression that the most famous names in Washington journalism could not cover a one-alarm fire without leaks from the fire chief, made on condition of anonymity...
...Moreover, items that get leaked tend to be the kind of lightweight fare favored by both the nightly news and, above all, the TV news magazines...
...In fact, when the tape of the President rolled across the American landscape, indeed around the world, there were no new words, no unfamiliar activities...
...After his testimony was shown, it provided hints of why he seemed so surly during his four-minute address that evening...
...That is what had been leaked to them, and when it did not happen they were the angriest...
...At least, not to the public...
...That's what lawyers do...
...It has been noted that since the Starr inquiries began over four years ago, leaks have been feeding the flames of controversy on all sides...
...In the case of the President's testimony, the feeling was you either broadcast it or you don't...
...Where was the surprise...
...Or, more than once, "I'm not going into details...
...Although none of the still-proscribed "seven words you can't say on television" that made comedian George Carlin rich and famous were mentioned, no one had said "oral sex" on the three old networks before...
...It was decided that words he uttered while lying on the table should not be edited out...
...Rather, it was the sight of the President testifying under oath in what had been thought to be secret proceedings...
...Yes they had...
...Reporters who were once in constant motion in search of information and explanation today stay in one place and let the leaks come to them...
...It was Clinton's lowest point of popularity during the Lewinsky affair so far...
...When I began in TV news, no one was allowed to say "hell" on the air...
...Detail will follow detail...
...They made a valiant attempt to edit raunchy material...
...Those hearings were carried in their entirety by the three major broadcast networks...
...If and when the House committee conducts impeachment hearings, interest will flare up...
...They attracted a much smaller audience, although apparently it included the aforementioned new generation of newspaper writers...
...All these years later, when respected television journalists read from the transcripts Kenneth Starr dumped on Congress and on them—sometimes using Latin words or other euphemisms, but often with no recourse except to repeat what had been said—no TV executive I spoke to reported any negative public reaction...
...Reluctantly...
...Who could have misleaked, and for what hidden, devious purpose, they wondered, as though some sacred bond had been broken...
Vol. 81 • November 1998 • No. 12
