T A B L E_.T A L K

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R E C E N T L Y

Cool on global warming
By Susan Lehman
Is it a conflict of interest for a Newsweek editor to rally anti-environmentalists?
(12/17/98)

Mickey Mouse scandal grips nation
By Gary Krist
Darlene voted out of Mousketeers on straight party lines -- charged with doing really, really bad things
(12/16/98)

Brillian mistake
By James Poniewozik
Why Brill's Content is too good for this world
(12/15/98)

The strange liberation of Michael Huffington
By Susan Lehman
Us goes weekly, all the Remnick that's fit to print and other tales of media madness
(12/10/98)

Secret America
By Steve Erickson
When Thomas Jefferson declared we had the right to "life," he meant one immune from the prying eyes of the media and the state
(12/09/98)

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BROWSE THE
UNDER THE COVERS
ARCHIVE

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BROWSE THE
MEDIA CIRCUS
ARCHIVE

BY JAMES PONIEWOZIK
Last weekend, the House of Representatives met in a special session to resolve one of the gravest matters ever put before it: selecting Time magazine's Man of the Year. At least that was the case if a gossip item in the New York Post was accurate -- that Time was standing by ready to name Hillary Clinton Woman of the Year if impeachment failed, and, failing a vote by press time, home-run king Mark McGwire.

It was a week to boggle the mind, a week to make history -- a week, in short, to totally fuck up year-in-review roundups. Forget politics stopping at the water's edge; the principle that was truly upended this past week is that no real news should occur between Dec. 15 and Jan. 2. Then again, the last week in the news really was the year in the news, what with the simultaneous climaxes of the impeachment story and the bombing of -- oh, you know, that luminous green country with no people in it. Why bother rounding up 1998? We spent a year there last week.

The same holds for the year's media news: Its issues and trends were captured in miniature in the overstressed news coverage of the last few days. You want the influence of the Web on old media? Look at the cable-news networks, which -- cramming frames within frames to keep both war and Washington on air -- needed only a hit counter and a few bootleg Simpsons gifs to look like poorly designed home pages circa 1995. You want advertorial innovation? No sooner had the military named its assault on -- it was someplace in the Middle East, right? -- than Fox News Channel tastefully whipped up the logo "Desert FOX," the latter word in massive gold type, inaugurating the first product placement in a U.S. military adventure. (Might we suggest "The Samsung Korean War II"?) You want reality television? Look at the nose-cone bombing footage that the Pentagon trotted out and feel the pride of living in a country that installs TV cameras even on its weapons. America does not rip your heart out and show it to you before you die; America rips your heart out and puts it on CNN.

But above all, the week proved that there was only one story this year, when impeachment won the airwaves from the hostilities in -- Iran! That's it! (All this proving how silly the "Wag the Dog" postulate was. If President Clinton believed a remote-controlled war against a group of swarthy third worlders would distract Americans for more than half an hour, he wouldn't have had the brains to get elected in the first place.) It's only a shame McGwire didn't end up on Time's cover, not because "he let us finally feel good about ourselves again" (from last year's Mars mission back through Cal Ripken Jr., the first Gulf War and beyond, America never really stops finally feeling good about itself again), but because he proved that no subject -- from war to the economy to baseball -- was too important, exciting or irrelevant to be brought into the tedious embrace of the Story of the Year.

Or Stories of the Year, for that story broke down into two identifiable but not inseparable parts: the Monica story (the sex, the thong, the Altoids) and the legal-political story (the subpoenas, the leaks, the hearings). The highfalutin J-school critique of the media's performance in 1998 is that while the press admirably covered the legal-political story, which after all involved the potential removal of the chief executive, it was out of line on the sex story, which after all was just a tawdry tale about the president having an affair with a 22-year-old.

N E X T_ P A G E | Out of the scandalmongers' control