The following is presented for educational purposes alone, under the "fair use" doctrine.
JUST SAY NO -
AND TURN OFF TABLOID TV
by Marie Cocco Newsday-February 2, 1999
It's the eve of the monicabowl and nothing is right.
Not unless you sell ads for ABC and have cajoled some soap company into paying quintuple the usual rate for a 30-second spot during Barbara Walters' interview tomorrow night with the woman who sparked a constitutional confrontation.
The public can be expected to watch Monica Lewinsky tell her story, or at least that bit of it we do not know from the Tripp tapes, the e-mails and the chatter of her shrinks. If the public were not going to watch, if it would put its remote control where it tells pollsters it wants it - off the presidential sex scandal - the network would not be able to jack up the ad price.
You can assume the public that has said for a year it is repulsed with this obsession will indulge its obsession and watch. The public watches the Super Bowl, too, not because it offers great football but because it offers a great Event.
The big celebrity interview is an Event. That is why Barbara Walters is as big - bigger - than John Madden.
The Monica Lewinsky interview comes on the heels of the Juanita Broaddrick interview. That, too, has become an Event and maybe that is the only word for it, since the interview violated every tenet of what we used to call journalism.
Broaddrick is the Arkansas nursing-home operator who says President Bill Clinton raped her 21 years ago. Her story has been floating around, like the dust cloud hovering by the Peanuts character Pigpen, for about a decade.The story she now tells on TV she has denied, repeatedly, in the past. It is about an incident that is said to have taken place two decades ago.
It can never be proved or disproved by either party. There is no connection to any action, at the time of the alleged encounter or since then, that Clinton has ever taken. Broaddrick's allegation is within the realm of the possible, and Clinton's denial is as credible as his others.This is a stinking mess. It is not journalism.
The media took a pass on this story many times for many years for many good reasons. But now they have bit hard, in good measure because the mainstream media's evil stepsisters, the Internet hucksters, kept taunting and urging the forbidden bite. The penalty for not biting was to risk having the Internet hucksters call the mainstream reporters hypocrites, though we used to call people who exercise editorial judgment editors.
The very first thing you learned when you went into journalism was a maxim: When in doubt, leave it out.
That has gone the way of the afternoon newspaper. There are new standards now, though I really couldn't tell you what they are.You cannot say the public is better informed because of these new standards. You cannot say the quality of journalism is improved, or that a central mission of the press - to keep a watchful eye on power so it is not abused - is advanced.
Not even the public guzzling this untreated effluent thinks so. It believes the media are immoral, unprofessional, go too far in keeping scandal bubbling and even harm democracy.
That is what the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found, in a new poll. Comparing the public's attitude toward the press now to what it was in 1985, there is no good news. "Contempt" is the word pollster Andrew Kohut uses to sum up his findings.
Of all the rotten things the public thinks about the press, the worst is that it
no longer thinks the press plays a vital role in protecting democracy. It is about evenly split, 45 percent to 38 percent, on whether the press protects democracy or hurts it. In 1985, the public saw the press as caretaker of democracy by better than two to one.no longer thinks the press plays a vital role in protecting democracy
Yet we are told that the Internet, cable and all the new ways to communicate back and forth with the people on TV have made things more democratic. Why, tomorrow night, while ABC is airing its Lewinsky scoop, MSNBC is asking its loyalists to watch its competitor but then react by phone or e-mail to MSNBC.
This is a lot of democracy. But a big portion of the public seems to think it is part of the reason democracy is hurting.
Kohut has a theory about this. He calls it "the arithmetic of tabloidism." All it means is that there is a broad public at large, and then there is that part of the public hooked on scandal and driving the ratings.
This part has a perfect right to watch. The rest of the public has a right to click the on-off button. Enough clicks in the right direction will change the ad rates - and the programing, too.
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