Writers for this round: Jay Rosen, Todd Gitlin, Pamela Newkirk, Mitchell Stephens and Ellen Willis

Setting the Cultural Perimeter

Jay Rosen writes:

On Tim Russert's CNBC interview show May 21, 2000, the NBC Washington Bureau chief welcomed George Stephanopolous, formerly a top advisor to Bill Clinton, now a pundit for ABC News. Stephanopolous reviewed what both he and Russert considered the history: Gary Hart's withdrawal from the presidential race in 1988, following revelations of his affair with Donna Rice, made it easier for Clinton to survive in 1992 when allegations of an affair surfaced during the primary season. Clinton, in 1992 and then again in 1998 during the spectacular revelations of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, made it easier for New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who (they noted) received a largely sympathetic response during a personal ordeal played out in public. For those who weren't following the story at the time, here's what happened:

Giuliani, a Republican in his second term of office, learned that he had prostate cancer. We learned about that, plus a new girlfriend around town. The girlfriend was the one he said he needed "now more than ever." Then he announced in front of reporters that his marriage to TV reporter and actress Donna Hanover was ending. She — stunned to get the news this way — replied with credible allegations of adultery dated before the current girlfriend appeared. The tabloids went wild. Speculation began among the chattering classes. Still undecided about his course of treatment and with his private life exposed, Giuliani finally withdrew from his expected Senate race against Hillary Clinton, who needs no introduction to earlier chapters in this story. The crisis was said to have humanized the Mayor, an interpretation aided by his humbled manner, some poignant statements about "mortality and humanity" and the stark facts of his trauma.

In the style of analysis Russert and Stephanopolous put in motion, how badly a politician has been "wounded" becomes a shadow topic for the state of public sentiment on squeamish subjects like love, sex and marriage. Statements are made about how censorious or tolerant Americans are, which then become judgments about how bad the damage is for the political fortunes of a public figure. The ordeal is seen as "harder" or "easier," depending on various sins thought to be involved, and on shifting public attitudes about sinners in office, along with the perceived effectiveness of attacks by opponents. The relevant history is assumed to be the history of similar scandals. This sometimes leads to debates about the fairness or unfairness of a given figure's treatment, which is the window available for discussing the American news media and its peculiar obsessions. Add in an occasional zeitgeist piece about the shifting line between personal and public business, and that's basically the cultural perimeter set by mainstream journalism and media commentary. It certainly was on Tim Russert's program May 21.

The New York Media Circle will now try to explode this box, and unpack its contents....

Mills in Search of Grist

Todd Gitlin writes:

What's the poor pundit to do? An event takes place, a certifiable one. Reporters report facts, but commentators must comment. That is what they are supposed to do. With so much time to fill, they are mills in search of grist, and they grind exceeding small. What kind of comment will do? Well, as John McLaughlin discovered, predictions are good filler, the Hamburger Helper of the punditocracy, but they have two disadvantages: (1) they can easily be proved wrong (cf. Brill's monthly pundit rankings), and (2) they don't take up enough time and space. So the indispensable part of the pundits' work is putting events "into context." A modicum of historical context is the most accessible kind — one that certifies the pundit's right to be drawing a salary. Whence the event — the mistress sighting, the gaffe, whatever — becomes a test of the political climate, the temperature of the American public, etc. Et voilŕ! Another hour has been amusingly — or tediously — spent.

I'm beginning to think that the problem with these riffs is not that they take place but that the riffers don't know when to stop. Journalists love (1) scandal, (2) talking about scandal, (3) making distinctions among scandals. Viewers and readers love scandals for reasons Ellen Willis has well described: soap operas are how we conduct conversations of how "we" think about sex, marriage, propriety and, in general, our understandings of how we do, and should, live now. Nothing wrong with that, and a lot to be said for it.

We don't want to stamp out these tantalizing pundit eruptions, we want to accompany them with exercises in different sorts. For one thing, cross-national comparisons. Name the issue, there's something to be said — and learned — about how scandals (or other events) are treated elsewhere. (Here I have to disclose that I popped up with my own close-to-instant analysis of the Giuliani contretemps, in Newsday. A lot of people talk about the French model, for example, but before I wrote this piece I didn't hear anyone else talk about how Mitterrand handled his out-of-wedlock daughter eruption in 1994.) When's the last time you heard a pundit compare approaches to crime in different countries? The Times' Fox Butterfield did a front-pager a couple of months ago comparing New York's approach to lowering crime with San Diego's and Boston's (these are the three cities that have reduced violent crime the most in recent years), showing that Giuliani's scorched-earth approach is not the only way to go. That single piece was worth a thousand George Will thumbsuckers.

In all the pundit inches and minutes expended on the China trade issue, for example, how many were devoted to historical perspective? Where were the comparisons among China today, South Africa in the '80s, Cuba over four decades, Japan in the '30s? What were the consequences of sanctions (or lack of sanctions) in these three cases? Who were the forces in favor, who against?

But then again, such pieces would require research. Damn!

Character vs. Discretion

Pamela Newkirk writes:

Since reporting is the bread and butter of the punditocacy, I look more to reported stories to gage the news media's response to Mayor Giuliani's personal escapades. I view pundits less as journalists than as entertainers who blow hot air in carefully crafted (read: amusing) sound bites for a living. But in news accounts we can glimpse (a) how the news media justify the coverage of a public person's sex life and (b) to what extent journalists will go to prove the coverage is warranted.

Since Gary Hart, the news media have struggled with their rationale for exposing details of a public person's private life. Many editors defended the Donna Rice expose on the grounds that Hart brazenly invited such scrutiny. They argued he was foolish to go on "Monkey Business" and pose with Rice on his lap. His behavior, they argued, showed a lapse in judgment that could speak to his fitness for the presidency. The same editors said other elected officials (like George Bush, who had throughout his presidency been romantically linked with an aide) had been discreet. Bill Clinton's dalliance with Gennifer Flowers, on the other hand, was legitimate news because she had gone public — in a supermarket tabloid account for which she was paid. Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky was fair game because Ken Starr, with taxpayer dollars, wrote a detailed report about it. As for Donald Trump, wasn't it Marla Maples who proclaimed: "It was the best sex I ever had"? Recent history shows that the line between what is fair to reveal or conceal is hair-strand thin.

Repulsed by the depths to which the news media sank in the Monica Lewinsky coverage, I found myself riveted by the Giuliani unveiling. Was my new-found tolerance for such coverage vengeful — stemming from my disdain for Giuliani's judgmental and intolerant response to everything from street vendors, welfare mothers and victims of police violence to what he deems anti-Catholic art? Was I hypocritical for reveling in the news media's invasion in an area I had in the past viewed as off-limit, or had I, in this instance, found a legitimate excuse for the disclosure?

On the surface, the Giuliani story closely resembled the Hart affair. Like Hart, Giuliani had, in a sense, dared the media to report a story most City Hall reporters had gossiped about for a year. With few exceptions, most in the media left his secret in City Hall's Room 6, as they had the alleged affairs of many other prominent elected officials, including Giuliani's former rival, David Dinkins. (During the 1989 mayoral campaign, every city newspaper had a story about Dinkins' alleged extra-marital affair with a city employee ready to run, but none every published it. Similarly, reporters, with a wink, went along with the staged relationship between former Mayor Ed Koch and Bess Myerson during his mayoral campaign while ignoring rumors of his homosexuality).

But Giuliani had gone further than even Hart by flaunting his companion at official events while his wife stayed out of view. And with public sympathy mounting following the disclosure of his cancer diagnosis, it was Giuliani who decided it was time to come clean about his "very good friend" while revealing his long-time wife was old news. Reporters and editors had no reason to look for a hook. Giuliani had thrown them one. From the moment Giuliani revealed his preference in companions, most of the coverage focused less on the affair, which paled next to the manner in which he revealed it. For many New Yorkers, Giuliani's insensitively premature announcement about a separation from his wife said more about the mayor's heart than the way he has, for two terms, treated minorities, the poor and the powerless. Stories were replete with polls showing us that New Yorkers cared little about his extra-marital affairs.

As news of Giuliani's Upper East Side girlfriend dominated the news, reporters privately juggled another hot potato. Who, they wondered, would be first to drop the ball about alleged girlfriend number two? Most speculated that the revelation of yet another Guiliani girlfriend — on top of revelations about his alleged intimate relations with former aide Chritine Lategano — would surely derail his Senate campaign. Giuliani dropped out of the race before we could see if and how the media would justify that disclosure. Someone was bound to break the news. This much is clear: many in the news media show far more restraint in these matters than these disclosures would have us believe. Character is far from the issue in these sexual exposes. More at issue is discretion — or how the public person handles his indiscretions. It is also true that the line between what is and is not legitimate news is subjectively and haphazardly drawn, and many more reputations will be sullied before news gatekeepers decide how much of a public person's personal life is fair game. In the meantime, most of us will continue to read every tantalizing detail as we condemn the media invasion.

Liberating Living Room Walls

Mitchell Stephens writes:

When I was young, it was not uncommon to find a picture of Eisenhower, Kennedy or even FDR hanging on a living-room wall. I have yet to see, on more recent research expeditions, Clinton so honored. I think that's good for him and good for us. A new, if still imperfect, level of honesty has been achieved. And most Americans have learned to keep two difficult thoughts in their heads: that leaders can have private lives as messy as anyone else's and that individuals with messy private lives can still be effective leaders.

For this we have to thank all those smutty but fascinating stories about Franklin, Lucy, Ike, Kay, Jack, Judith, Marilyn, Gary, Donna, Bill, Gennifer, Paula and Monica — stories retailed by biographies, tabloids, Web sites, talk shows and White House correspondents. Yes, too much of what has been written or said has been fatuous or narrow (hardly a new embarrassment for journalism). Most journalists still aren't able to comment thoughtfully on sex (hardly a rare failing in America). And the line between what is and is not acceptable to report has indeed, as Pamela Newkirk notes, been "haphazardly drawn." Nevertheless, these stories helped pull those phony photos — of blemish-free men and their friction-free families — down.

In the end, those of us who refused to weep and wail, as the mud poured out of the Star, the Enquirer, Drugereport.com, Hardball and more or less everywhere else, have been vindicated. Information, even a barrage of uncomfortable information, has once again proved salubrious. The opinion polls on Giuliani — pre-pullout but post-"Gal Pal"—provided the latest evidence that a lesson has been learned: More than seventy percent of New York State voters didn't care about the then-Senate candidate's tangled romantic life. Coverage of these scandals has helped Americans wise up.

Click here for "Uncomfortable Information," a video experiment by Mitchell Stephens.
( viewing instructions)

Those Tolerant Americans

Ellen Willis writes:

The Giuliani saga could make a novel of Tolstoyan proportions: the family unhappy in its own way; the man awakened to the horror of his spiritual aridity by the onset of passion and the threat of death (symbolic of his two contending impulses); etc. But while all the ingredients seemed to be there at the start, this story, gripping though it is (and I'm not being sarcastic, not at all), has not, turned out to be one of those Rorschach-test episodes that tell us something about the culture we're living in and foment angry arguments about what, exactly, that something might be.

That possibility vanished with the Mayor's withdrawal from the Senate race, the proof being that the media dropped the story cold about two nanoseconds later. It was the campaign that had provided the compelling media narrative, campaigns being in themselves a form of popular culture with built-in suspense, which even in these days of pale and shriveled government can on occasion reassert its erstwhile fascination. Here you had two larger than life, easily satirized characters, both with national reputations, dicey family lives (each unhappy in its own way), private-public issues, lust for control issues, and segments of the electorate who hate them with a passion; and one of the protagonists was acting out like mad, confounding everyone's expectations. How would New Yorkers, and their kibitzers nationwide, react? Surely the answer to that question would have told us something about the culture we live in, though I have no idea what, since we never really had a chance to find out. What we have instead is a lame-duck mayor who is clearly an emotional mess. Plenty of psychological resonance there, and undoubtedly political repercussions, but cultural significance? Giuliani has certainly gotten weird, not that he was exactly the guy next door to begin with, but we already knew that all New Yorkers (New York City-ers, that is) are weird in their own way.

Well, maybe there's one tiny thing to say about Sex and the Culture. I find all the backpatting about how tolerant Americans have become and we're all adulterer-symps now intensely annoying. What would happen if Hillary were seen in public with a "good friend"? Of course, all those tolerant Americans would say more power to her, it's about time, Bill certainly had it coming.

Sure they would.

Jay Rosen is chair of the journalism department at New York University and a press critic. He is the author of "What Are Journalists For?" (1999).

Todd Gitlin is a professor of culture, sociology and journalism at New York University and the author of numerous books on politics and the media. His recent works include "Sacrifice," a novel (1999), and "The Twilight of Common Dreams" (1996).

Pamela Newkirk, a former reporter at New York Newsday, is an assistant professor of journalism at New York University and author of the forthcoming "Within the Veil: Black Journalists, White Media".

Mitchell Stephens is a professor of journalism at New York University and a media historian. His most recent book is "The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word" (1988).