Scandalous News!!!
SIMMONS, TRACY LEE
Scandalous News!!! Should the media report on the private lives of political figures? BY TRACY LEE SIMMONS Sander Vanocur, a reporter for NBC News during the Kennedy administration, has been...
...John F. Kennedy, though, would have been sunk...
...Tastefulness went down too...
...Or Newt Gingrich's with a young employee...
...Do the authors know something Elizabeth Dole doesn't...
...Nonetheless, the Clinton story broods over every other story highlighted in the book...
...We can applaud the greater openness even while lamenting the lapse of a world where we didn't have to hear about stained cocktail dresses and cigars as sex toys...
...Vanocur has an answer for those armed with the benefit of hindsight: "Give me the lede...
...Kennedy's indiscretions were not news because those who wrote the news decided they weren't...
...Give me, that is, the news hook big enough to justify dropping such a bomb on the American public...
...few were shocked...
...Her name is Sally...
...Journalism has seen more vicious and unscrupulous days, perhaps none more so than the Tracy Lee Simmons is director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College...
...Why no blunt questions during those genial press conferences...
...Or the Boston Globe's handling of Ray Flynn's drinking...
...The authors endorse what they call a "Fairness Doctrine...
...And private lives have been fair game in modern political journalism ever since the Tidal Basin sporting of Wilbur Mills in 1974...
...The Founding Fathers would not have disagreed with Ruskin's view of journalism as a machine churning out "so many square leagues of dirtily printed falsehood...
...President Clinton's antics receive comparatively little attention in the book...
...Where exactly does the Internet fit in here, the Matt Drudge clones who have an incentive not to be bound by these journalistic rules...
...In both cases, the principles hold that covering these stories violated fairness...
...No, according to these rules, because the affair, if it had happened, indicated no compulsive conduct on Dole's part, nor had Dole made President Clinton's conduct an issue that year...
...The authors even provide us with a score card, based on a lettered scale, that grades the performance of the press on these and a handful of other stories...
...But he isn't typical, and more helpful to would-be journalistic rule-makers are the grayer cases, the ones where delicate judgment calls were made, for better or worse, largely by professionals trying to get it right...
...Many might have been disgusted...
...This is the way journalism was done...
...Professional standards do not bind non-professionals, and one of journalism's most important tasks today remains much what it always was: "Reminding readers why they cannot believe everything they read and hear, online and off...
...This wasn't always so...
...Under these principles, George W. Bush would have fared well with his cocaine barrage...
...This has been a presidency to which only Petronius Arbiter or Penthouse could have done justice...
...Ought they to have done so, especially as the woman involved had decided to go on the record...
...Here is innuendo at its least-subtle best...
...First, his sixteen-year-old daughter was caught with an open beer can in a car in 1995, while his son was found to be playing musical chairs with private schools around Washington and was suspected of having used marijuana in the seventh grade...
...The authors of Peepshow don't mind embarrassing exposure...
...it's the gratuity and prurience of recent experience—the peepshow effect—they wish to curb...
...The same spirit that declined to follow up the rumors of philandering also kept under wraps photographs of the grieving president taken just after the death of his infant son...
...Callen-der, a hired pen for the Federalist cause: It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves...
...Incidentally, why the reference to Bob Dole's "first divorce...
...It tends to take up all the air in the room...
...His features are said to bear a striking...resemblance to those of the president himself...
...As Alistair Cooke rightly noted not too long ago, when reticence passed away, it took more with it than the dearth of information and the circumspect reply...
...The wildcard, though, is the great slough of the alternative media...
...We have reason to be hopeful...
...If the mainstream media have always found professional foul lines difficult to measure and chalk for themselves, now they must compete with a garish multiplicity of new sources of information, some of which exist only to entertain and titillate...
...The authors don't shy away from granting passage to legitimate, probing inquiries, even into the private lives of public people...
...In September 1802, readers of a Federalist paper, The Richmond Recorder, found the following lede written by J.T...
...Jefferson never responded to the allegation, but the charge was of a piece with the scurrility regularly practiced in the age...
...Thus go the principles...
...The Washington Post and Time declined to report them...
...Why were there no stakeouts...
...One thing needs enforcement more than anything else, and it can't even be helpfully defined: Taste...
...Surprisingly, the media showed restraint with the second story, but the first, the authors believe, was unfair and overdone...
...The public is not served, though, when the rules of propriety are "set by late-night comedians, grocery store tabloids, [and] crusading pornogra-phers...
...The curious thing to ponder now is not the renewed hunger for reticence in the coverage of scandal—an appetite achingly understandable after the furtive grotesqueries of Clinton's affair with Lewinsky—but the assumption that discretion was ever the norm in Grub Street...
...But Sabato, Stencel, and Lichter aren't calling for a return to a bewigged, courtly gentility that never quite existed anyway...
...Fairness is the point here...
...What about Governor Roy Romer's affair with a top adviser...
...The picture emerging from the case studies portrays a press in remarkably good shape, restraining and asserting itself with warrant, and admitting mistakes of fact or judgment when they are made...
...We even meet the case of John McCain's temper...
...Next we see them applied to recent stories...
...Civility will always require that certain shades be left closed, certain doors shut...
...BY TRACY LEE SIMMONS Sander Vanocur, a reporter for NBC News during the Kennedy administration, has been taken to task time and again by younger mavericks over his role, shared with everyone else in the White House press corps of that day, in not reporting on rumors of President Kennedy's affairs with women...
...Why did so many journalists consent to look the other way...
...Peeping into windows can serve a purpose: "Intense scrutiny by the press and political opponents can drive away scalawags, increase public accountability and foster realistic attitudes about the human fallibility of elected leaders," they write...
...But then certain strands of private life are to be considered out of bounds: matters involving underage children or other family members (here we have some qualifications), "current extramarital activity as long as it is discreet and non-compulsive" (here too we find qualifications in a category not all are likely to agree with), sexual orientation "per se," and drug or alcohol abuse that could be tagged as "youthful indulgence or experimentation...
...Instead they would have us all—especially professional journalists and all who inform or form opinion—step back and reflect upon the effects, political and otherwise, of recent spates of systematic scandal journalism, and in so doing they offer "ways to raise editorial standards, increase journalistic credibility, and provide reasonable privacy protections to those who seek public office...
...A recent call for higher standards in journalism, Peepshow: Media and Politics in an Age of Scandal, by Larry J. Sabato, Mark Stencel, and S. Robert Lichter, has a little bit the tone of a grant-funded policy paper...
...While it's sure to displease contemporary students of journalism, Van-ocur's rejoinder reveals one of the lines drawn daily by both editors and reporters, who must offset their desire for a scoop against the standard practices prevailing within their profession...
...Audiences haven't been fed up with Peeping Tom journalism and its needlessly licentious revelations alone, but with the lack of decency that characterized much otherwise imperfect press coverage two or three generations ago...
...There are instances where politicians' private lives are fairly subject to review: their financial status and their health, incidents landing them in court, sexual activity where private and public roles are mixed (as with an affair with subordinates or lobbyists), compulsive or "manifestly indiscreet" sexual conduct, illegal drug use as an adult or having condoned that use in others, and private behavior involving public money...
...How about Vice President Gore's problems with his children...
...he would not have had to resort to sophistries and complex arithmetic...
...For example, rumors reached numerous newspapers and broadcasters during the 1996 presidential campaign that Bob Dole had had a four-year extramarital affair before his divorce in 1972...
...Vanocur would have had his lede, with or without the Mafia girlfriend...
...the president's expression of grief wasn't...
...The name of her eldest son is Tim...
...The Federalist Papers didn't really set the tone for newspapers of the early Republic...
...Although the authors worry that relentless and ill-advised exposés may continue to wear down voter turnout and chase away worthy men and women from seeking political office, the public is served when candidates and officials are made to stand before fair inquiries into their public and private doings, especially when the latter impinge sufficiently on their public duties...
...The ruckus over the Thomas Jefferson-Sally Hemings liaison, despite the sensation inspired recently over DNA findings, is no modern revelation...
...That collusive reticence may seem sinister now, but at the time it was deemed merely professional, even collegial...
...With every salacious charge, from fondled interns to escaped paternity to rape, flung his way, one would think the authors could simply put Lexis-Nexis into overdrive and have it write their book for them...
...They well understand the demands placed upon editors and reporters anxious not to be scooped by the competition, as well as the greater fecundity of information tidbits expected in modern times by the reading and viewing public...
...The baby's death was news...
...first quarter of the nineteenth century, when practically anything about anyone might be printed...
Vol. 5 • April 2000 • No. 29
