On Television
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television AFTER MONICA, WHO? By Reuven Frank The day after the United States Senate voted not to remove President Bill Clinton from office, ratings for the allnews cable network MSNBC...
...MSNBC, the most egregious of the "All Monica All The Time" cable services, seen on more cable systems than Fox News, fell behind it in the audience figures, and the soul-searching and head-rolling began...
...Her story was urged by the impeachment zealots on all doubters as additional proof of his unfitness...
...Perhaps the postimpeachment slump in viewers so universally feared would not occur after all...
...NBC News took a month to check out the story...
...The parallel most often cited is Robert F. Kennedy's seeking the Democratic nomination for the very same seat in 1964...
...It may not be Mrs...
...Neither did anyone call in about Kosovo—that is, not on American cable television...
...But despite some snide newspaper editorials and snarling from the New York State Democratic Party establishment, RFK received a fraction of the attention that the mere possibility of Mrs...
...Somewhere in all this there is a lesson for TV news as it ponders its future, but what...
...For reasons clear only to the Nielsen organization, the final day of the February sweeps month was March 3. On that day, at last, Barbara Walters presented her long-awaited interview with Monica Lewinsky...
...She was, she said, a victim of the President's sexual proclivities long before he gained national attention...
...By Reuven Frank The day after the United States Senate voted not to remove President Bill Clinton from office, ratings for the allnews cable network MSNBC fell by half...
...The subject they found was television...
...On shows in Greece—yes, everybody has them—callers were concerned about the loss of national pride and dignity in the failure to protect Ocalan...
...Detoxification promises to be protracted, painful and ugly...
...The ratings were only slightly higher than the show normally achieved...
...After Diana, Monica...
...As the scandal unfolded the smallest one, Fox News, reached virtual parity with MSNBC—presumably proving the wisdom of its decision not to spend the $300,000 that would have been needed for on-the-ground coverage of the December bombing of Baghdad, one of the more important parallel news events...
...Clinton entering the race has gotten...
...Some scoffers scoffed...
...To further fill the threatening vacuum, all-news cable made another of its sporadic runs at the story of JonBenét Ramsey, the 6-year-old Colorado beauty queen whose murder has languished unsolved for two years and whose blameless bones are rattled every time there is a scandal deficiency...
...For those who consider it a stretch to equate the response to her candidacy and the Lewinsky scandal, I would point to the admittedly somewhat diminished cable chat shows...
...despite the noise level, despite the illogic and the vitriol, the ratings did not go back up...
...Apparently only true obsessives were engaged, and there were fewer of them than needed...
...Checking, establishing veracity, seeking corroboration before publishing now seem as quaint, as charming, as old-fashioned as white gloves and spats...
...Actually some people did...
...And Americanjournalism does not seem inclined to do anything about it...
...The phones rang and the public opined...
...Its commitment to scandal over policy has become a permanent part of American journalism...
...They found a ready subject and pursued it with a fury...
...Partisan "commentators" shouted and fumed, heaping contumely on each other and sordid details on their audiences...
...While logically the prospect of her campaigning against Mayor Rudolph W Giuliani is a different matter than the White House scandal, it does not qualify as such in today's media atmosphere...
...Like J. Edgar Hoover's FBI agents at secret Communist meetings, they are salted among the viewers of John McLaughlin and Bill O'Reilly and Larry King and Geraldo Rivera...
...Then a new outrage surfaced...
...That may not prove much, but it is one indication that however small the audiences attracted by all-news and talk cable channels, they include executive editors and city editors and assignment editors and editorial directors of every daily and weekly in the United States...
...Since she is not more famous than he was, it must be that we live in a time when only fame matters...
...An Arkansas nursing home operator named Juanita Broaddrick identified herself publicly as the "Jane Doe No...
...Nobody mentioned the capture of Abdullah Ocalan outside the Greek Embassy in Kenya, or the resulting Kurdish riots all over Europe...
...Of course, the impact of the scandal's end has not been limited to television...
...NBC News was accused of (a) saving the interview to play during the February sweeps period, and (b) even withholding the interview at the behest of the White House...
...But CBS was broadcasting the music industry's Grammy awards at the same time, featuring live appearances by pop stars, rap artists and other culture heroes, and the counter-scoffers scoffed that the Grammys had done less well than hoped...
...For more than a week the cable channels adumbrated, animadverted and masticated on the ABC interview...
...Clinton's candidacy may not have been scandal, but it was great gossip...
...Cable's new foul-weather friends did not just come out of thin air...
...It interviewed more than 80 people who might have known of the incident, checked hotel registers, 21-year-old newspaper clippings, and every other available source...
...Some of the interview had been leaked to pump up excitement...
...5" cited in the documents Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr delivered to the House of Representatives...
...Broaddrick submitted to a videotaped interview by an NBC News reporter in January...
...The idea that it was simply engaging in what used to be considered responsible reporting was hardly considered...
...The question for all-news cable now is sometimes expressed as follows: "After O.J., Diana...
...In this era of minor news and major gossip, when the journalistic agenda is determined by what topic or which celebrity will stimulate the most vigorous, mindless arguing by the kind of people who telephone call-in programs, Hillary Rodham Clinton's prospective Senate race has drawn the kind of coverage throughout the Fourth Estate that, say, a bid by Barbara Walters might have attracted...
...Once again it roused no interest, either for the supermarket tabloids or on television...
...Even CNN, though not quite as committed to talking only about impeachment—and now the source of basic news for many people— lost more than a fifth of its viewers...
...At least in their initial response, newspapers did somewhat better than the others...
...The Monica Lewinsky affair fattened audiences at all three cable news networks...
...He, too, was a carpetbagger—a native of Massachusetts, resident of Virginia, Attorney General of the United States, and confidant of his brother, the recently martyred President John F Kennedy...
...The Broaddrick charges of sexual assault, unprovable in a court of law, nevertheless proved irresistible to all-news cable before, during and after the Dateline broadcast...
...Clinton's fault, but she has lately been on the covers of Time and Newsweek for the same reasons she was on the cover of Vogue...
...This represented a small percentage of their audiences, but it approximated in total viewers the gains made by cable...
...Without it, cable ratings started to slip back...
...But a funny thing happened...
...Reporting, too, has been a casualty of the primacy of gossip, to be replaced by competitive leaking, by inadequate sources, by "what-if...
...Mrs...
...Word of the interview leaked out, as these days it must...
...Newspapers and cable gossips peddled what they said was the gist of the story...
...Despite Broaddrick...
...In the event, Barbara interviewing Monica did even better than expected: It pulled more than 70 million viewers and, remarkably, had as many at the end of the two hours as when it began...
...Herputative candidacy wouldn't have attracted the same attention had there been no Monica...
...The audience for Rupert Murdoch's Fox News went down by a third...
...newspapers speculated, talk shows went into their dance...
...After THE impeachment postmortems a new topic was raised: Would Hillary Rodham Clinton run forthe United States Senate from New York...
...Whoever it is, the Clinton impeachment trial has ensured that all-news and talk cable is here to stay...
...The NBC interview ran on its Dateline newsmagazine program, indeed during sweeps month...
...MSNBC, supplied by NBC News, did not have to decide, while CNN is like a wire service, built upon the existence of a worldwide reporting staff...
...It was the scandal's brilliant last moment, like a dying galaxy's...
...Yet the networks, too, had been devoting themselves to the scandal—if not as exclusively, still excessively according to many, among them their own producers...
...One CBS executive had estimated privately that it would attract more viewers than E.R., the NBC hospital drama that usually leads the weekly ratings...
...Little remarked was the loss of almost 2 million viewers by the three regular nightly network newscasts between the last (preMonica) quarter of 1997 and the last quarter of 1998...
...After Monica, who...
...In their news sections, Op-Ed columns and editorials, they reported the direction TV would take...
...The others were in less trouble, but still in trouble...
...Although some of their stories were little more than speculation, a lot were based on whatthe cable orregularnetwork managements were willing to say, the plans they were ready to share...
...The same people called in, banging the same tired drums...
...The rest of the American news media landscape—from the New York Times to the National Enquirer, from National Public Radio to the Drudge Report—has similarly been grappling with the vexingproblem of what to do next...
...speculation offered as fact...
...The anticipated audience for the two-hour program was so huge that ABC had asked up to $800,000 for a 30second commercial, more than four times the regular rate...
...Interestingly, TV news—especially the all-news and talk channels—made no effort to tell us what newspapers would do...
...ABC has made much of not having paid Monica Lewinsky to be interviewed, but was silent about providing her book a 120-minute prime time network commercial the day before publication...
Vol. 82 • March 1999 • No. 3
