Playing In The Trash While News Slips By
Adventures in Medialand during a feeding frenzy. When, in the course of human events, fate throws you into a book tour while the media are going bonkers about the president’s sex life, you realize what it must feel like to be a heretic. There you are, and you’re just not saying what everyone else is.
To suggest that we might actually have more important political problems than President Clinton’s love life is such apostasy that your professional colleagues look at you as though you’d just grown two heads. Try to bring up something you think matters to people - say, Clinton’s interesting plan to get enough money to fix up the one-third of our public schools that are falling apart - and you might as well try to get a conversation going about the situation in Upper Volta.
In truth, it is not All Monica All the Time, or even All Willey All the Time. The news channels occasionally break away to mention something like Clinton’s efforts to bring about peace in Northern Ireland before they rush back to tales of groping in the Oval Office.
Historical perspective is ruled inadmissible; John Kennedy apparently romped like a bunny rabbit while he was in the White House, but historians have yet to find that it affected his handling of the Cuban missile crisis. It is not titillating enough to point out that of all our 20th-century presidents, those we know had extramarital affairs include Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower, while those we are fairly sure did not include Calvin Coolidge and Richard Nixon. (Not that it proves anything anyway - it’s just a suggestive factoid.) Back to Monica and Paula and Kathleen.
A favorite television format these days is to find women guaranteed to disagree with one another and encourage them to have at it: “Let’s watch the girls have a cat fight.” Try to suggest that in this perfect symphony of people behaving badly, the media themselves are real high on the list and - they go right back to Monica and Paula and Kathleen.
Near as I can tell, the only people keeping their heads while all about them are losing theirs are the American variety. This is annoying members of the media no end. According to the polls, Americans are having no trouble at all distinguishing between Clinton’s alleged sexual misconduct - they disapprove of it emphatically - and the job he’s doing as president, which they think is not bad at all. This sensible distinction is driving our public scolds to bemoan the moral decline of the nation and to announce the coming of a giant asteroid, thus raising the always-timely question, “Is God punishing us?”
There are few sights more repellent than the media having a fit of morality. The other day, I was privileged to witness the cast of McLaughlin & Co. taking on the highly ponderable question of whether Clinton might actually be the devil. Well, it’s a concept.
The 24-hour news channels, of which there are now several, seem particularly prone to hyperventilation. They have given the story its own logo - “Investigating the President,” “Crisis at the White House” - as though it were the Persian Gulf War redux.
The daily bearbaiting in the White House briefing room, with presidential press secretary Mike McCurry as the embattled ursus with the hounds slashing and snapping at him, is particularly ugly theater since this particular bear has no claws - the dogs know he will not slash back. Some of the questions are not questions; they are open insults.
An even more gruesome genre is the occasional half-hour devoted to whether or not the media just might possibly be overplaying this a wee, tiny bit. Someone like Jeff Greenfield presides over a sickening display of self-righteousness, pomposity, smugness and arrogance as all hands agree that they are only “doing their job.” Using Con Ed’s old slogan, “Dig we must,” the media meisters attempt to convince us of the wildly ludicrous proposition that they are not enjoying this at all.
This last squirrelly defense, “just doing our job,” is so patently untrue as to be offensive. If we were doing our job, the allegations made by Kathleen Willey, which have been reported and discussed since August, would not now be front page news. If we were doing our job, people might be hearing almost as much about the banking industry’s blatant attempt to buy its way out of lowering the interest rates on student loans - a potential rip-off of poor students that comes to $11 billion over five years - as they are about Willey.
Much as I hate to join the grumpy, puritanical Pecksniffs who keep harrumphing about other folks’ bad behavior, my colleagues in the media are making it irresistible.
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