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STALEMATE | PAGE 2 OF 2 A reader looking for some smoking-gun answer to this question in "Spin Cycle" will search in vain. The most intriguing insider revelation is that some journalists felt seduced and abandoned by Clinton. Before the 1992 elections, Kurtz writes, Clinton reached out to "a small group of younger, New Democrat-style reporters and columnists, such as Joe Klein of New York magazine, E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post, and Ron Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times ... Some of these favored reporters naturally came to feel that they would have access to Clinton in the White House, perhaps be invited to kick around ideas. After he won the presidency, however, Clinton no longer bothered with his formerly favorite journalists ... 'All of them came to the conclusion that the schmoozing was fake and they had all been pawns in his campaign,' a Clinton friend said." But the main reason "most" White House journalists had a "jaundiced view of Clinton," according to Kurtz, was their belief that he was a slippery scoundrel, a Teflon Willie. Before Monica Lewinsky, they "had been supremely frustrated ... as Clinton kept slip-sliding his way through the scandalous muck ... Clinton, in their view, had gotten away with it. Until now." The reporters "knew that Bill and Hillary Clinton had a particular tendency to fudge the facts ... Truth was an early casualty in this administration, the reporters believed, and it was their responsibility to keep pounding on the door until they, and the public, got some adequate answers. They viewed themselves as the cavalry, the last line of defense against a corrupt White House that had perfected the art of the cover-up, the one force in society that could charge through the fog and uncover the truth." The journalists "were filled with moral fervor, determined that readers and viewers should care and that somehow they would make them care." This heroic-scribes-battling-corruption story no doubt contains elements of truth, but it seems inadequate to explain the depth of the press corps's dislike of Clinton -- if only because the corruption doesn't seem quite vast enough to inspire such high-minded fervor. Whitewater, Filegate, Travelgate, the soft-money scandal -- none of these approach the big leagues of Watergate or Iran-contra. The New York Times' brilliantly poison-penned Maureen Dowd's self-defense comes across as particularly disingenuous. "George Stephanopoulos had once accused Dowd of hating Clinton," Kurtz writes. "She believed that he simply didn't get it. Her job was not to like or dislike Clinton, but to render judgment on whether he had a good week or gave a bad speech or was sinking into sanctimony ... The White House seemed to long for the days when journalists were royal courtiers in JFK's Camelot. But times had changed; the culture was coarser, more confrontational." In fact, of course, Dowd's "job" as the sadistic Freudian of the Op-Ed Page is precisely to "like or dislike" Clinton and any other patient unfortunate enough to find himself lying on her couch of pain. As for the culture's descent into coarseness and confrontation, it would of course be impious to suggest that the once-august New York Times and its star columnist might have anything to do with that. In fact, Dowd's invocation of the culture of coarseness goes a long way toward explaining the press's evil eye for Clinton -- and suggests that even if Clinton, for some reason, arouses special ire, subsequent presidents are likely to suffer the same fate. As James Fallows has argued in "Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy," the press's coverage of politics has become increasingly sensation-driven, horse-race obsessed and cynical. These attitudes may have been exacerbated by the various Clinton scandals, but it's difficult to escape the conclusion that they exist independently of them, that they are built into the very structure of how contemporary journalism works. Of course, some of this mutual mistrust is both natural and healthy. The media should be vigilant and, when appropriate, adversarial: Who would want journalists to return to the lap-dog perch they occupied during the Reagan administration, when a know-nothing, TV-savvy president and his handlers were treated with such gentleness that, as Mark Hertsgaard points out in "On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency," even those handlers could find nothing to complain of? And much of the negative press coverage of the Clinton administration has been perfectly legitimate. But one need not be a Clinton "loyalist" -- to use a term somewhat too promiscuously wielded by the machos at the New York Times -- to see that something has clearly gone wrong. The media's adversarial stance has hardened into a dogma; the laudable journalistic impulse to expose evil deeds has degenerated into the far more problematic desire to expose hypocritical motivations. In this climate, it is disturbing, but not particularly surprising, to learn that the elite reporters "liked (Kenneth) Starr and his prosecutors and tended to give them the benefit of the doubt." The fact that Starr's office is one of their most important sources of information may play some role here. But it may be larger than that: Journalists seem increasingly unable to distinguish their role from that of prosecutors. Witness National Public Radio correspondent Nina Totenberg, who has referred to Starr as a "friend and a colleague." Since when are reporters colleagues of prosecutors? Since the culture of permanent suspicion took over in Washington. As Kurtz writes, White House journalists are "interested in conflict, in drama, in behind-the-scenes maneuvering, in pulling back the curtain and exposing the Oz-like manipulations of the Clinton crowd. It was their job to report what the President said, but increasingly they saw it as their mission to explain why he said it and what seedy political purpose he was trying to accomplish along the way." This sneering skepticism, once the province of the editorial page, has crept into straight news reporting. Again, this can be warranted: The "he said, she said" school of even-handed reporting can be moronic. But reporters at the Times now routinely insert so much nudge-nudging and rhetorical counter-spin into their news pieces that the good gray paper of record has begun to feel like a slick national magazine with a bad case of 'tude. And as the Times goes, so goes the rest of the press pack. When the best paper in the country begins to tilt, it sets the agenda. The "magazine-ification" of the Times, subtle as it is, is disturbingly reminiscent of what has happened at the New Yorker, which has become virtually indistinguishable, in its frenetic, all-too-worldly obsessions, from the rest of the slicks. Certainly a journal like the one in which this piece appears is in no position to cry out for a state of permanent media gravitas -- for sheer pointless, sensationalistic gossip-mongering, it would be hard to exceed Salon's "review" of Monica Lewinsky's mother's "Private Lives of the Three Tenors," to choose only one of hundreds of bottom-dwelling examples. But it seems legitimate to hold the newspapers of record to a different standard. Some of the more thoughtful reflections on the press's new attitude come from the Clinton advisors and flacks interviewed by Kurtz, including Mike McCurry, Rahm Emanuel, Dick Morris (who is, incidentally, referred to as a "maniac" by various insiders numerous times) and Don Baer. Much of the media's attitude, these men argue, is the result of peer pressure to be tough -- a charge that rings true to anyone who's ever spent much time in a newsroom. "(Joe) Klein would sit in Baer's office and complain that even at the New Yorker, the bible of the Manhattan intelligentsia, the pressure to be cutting and ironic was intense. In covering the president, Baer believed, it was hip to be hostile. Otherwise your colleagues thought you were in the tank, the charge hurled at Klein's predecessor, Sidney Blumenthal." This no-presidential-pussies-need-apply attitude explains the derision that spilled out of seemingly every Times piece on Blumenthal in the days after he was subpoenaed. For his part, Emanuel believed that "the press operated within paradigms, neat little belief systems that fit the contours of elite opinion. The notion of objective reporting was hogwash; Washington journalists were incredibly, if subconsciously, biased. Their preconceived take on Bill Clinton, he believed, was that he was a petulant little child with an uncontrollable appetite." Above all, the impression that one gets -- not just from Clinton's spinners, but from Kurtz's reporting -- is that the media is playing a giant game, the object of which is to get the president. The reporters want red meat -- impeachment is the grand, Woodward-and-Bernstein prize, with indictments, humiliations and sagging polls as consolations. The great investigative tradition of American journalism, by this portrait, has sunk into the country's acquisitive culture: Power, professional advancement, prestige, fame and money are showered upon the winners. Reporters like to tell themselves that the very spin at which the Clinton team is so adroit is responsible for this ugly atmosphere -- if some slick PR guy is constantly telling you something, you start to think the truth is the exact opposite. There's some justification for this belief -- but it may also be that postmodern journalists are too quick to associate slickness with malevolence. What if, behind all the Machiavellian manipulation, there might be, on occasion, a sincere belief in a given policy? Cynicism, too, can be misleading -- and it may have led the press astray on Clinton, whose presidency and personality seem to be an inextricable, almost unfathomable mixture of sincerity and calculation. In any case, to ask a modern president to give up PR is a bit like asking a man walking through a dark alley to wave his wallet over his head. As Fallows points out, the press savaged as a political dunce and hayseed the one recent president, Jimmy Carter, who dared to venture into the public arena without a smoothly functioning spin machine. Is this sterile scenario of mutual suspicion destined to play out again
and again? Maybe not: There are cycles in media culture, and this one too
may pass. After Watergate, the press backed off -- too far -- on Reagan.
But there's not much reason for optimism. The media seems increasingly
unable or unwilling to resist larger trends afoot in the culture -- the
fast-food lure of cheap conflict, the crack high of scandal, the opiate of
cynicism. Spin begets spin begets spin. Turning and turning in this
widening gyre, we wait eagerly for the next edition, for the 11 o'clock
update on the anarchy we've loosed upon the world.
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