You know there is trouble in the land when President Clinton shows up early for an
appointment, and when he gives a brief speech. His questioning in front of Ken Starr’s grand jury began at
12:59 Monday afternoon, one minute ahead of schedule. And at 10 p.m., he
gave a speech that was over by 10:04.
In that speech, Clinton looked into the eyes of the American people
and said — oh, but you knew what he was going to say before it happened,
didn’t you? “This afternoon in this room …” “Protecting my family …”
“Important work to do …” Virtually every talking point in the speech was
hashed out in the press weeks ago — you could have written this speech
last week, except that, naive you, you might have used a word like “lied” or
“sorry” rather than “misled” or “regret.”
And the pre-prep continued tonight; by 8 p.m., the slogan “Candor, Contrition,
and Closure” simultaneously appeared on the chat shows as if by airborne
leaflet. (And don’t you just know that catch phrase was vetted to avoid
choosing an unfortunate initial? “This speech has to be about Pain,
Presidentiality, and Peace.” “Yeah, and Puss–” “OK, cancel those faxes!”)
Over the past few weeks, every wag in the press has taken a stab at writing a
dramatic speech for the president: Say it’s none of their business. Say
you’ll resign. Say you’re seeking help. The subtext to all these suggestions
is: For once in your life, do something unexpected. Say something that wasn’t
tested in focus groups and the op-eds and advisors’ sessions. We got instead
“A critical lapse in judgment and a personal failure on my part.” Did the man
miss a jump shot? For all its petulance toward Starr, it was a speech to
end no speeches, leaving John Ashcroft and James Carville and Bay Buchanan
and Barney Frank batting the same rhetorical back-court shots that they
had been before and will be, presumably, until the end of time. You want
closure? You can’t handle closure!
A different sort of closure, then: The checks are in the mail — Chris’,
Keith’s, mine. And yours too. The Dow Jones industrial average closed up
nearly 150 points. It was an excellent, excellent day in the
United States of America.
Let it never be said that the president has no effect on the economy.
By setting a grand-jury testimony date two weeks in advance, President
Clinton not only turned the media into a massive focus group, airing
out every possible stonewalling tactic and pre-scripting his
confession down to the last comma, he in effect decreed a national
holiday — Testimoniday — and opened a punditry Olympiad that would
help finance second homes and midlife-crisis car purchases up and down
the Northeast corridor.
So the last two weeks have been the “Speed 2″ of news squawk: Like
most sequels, a joyless exercise of the will, promising more loot and
less fun for all the Sandra Bullocks involved — red-faced, spittle-spewing Chris
Matthews, cagey John Gibson, squeaky, indomitable Arianna Huffington.
Again, we trotted out the presidential historians, poll takers and sex
columnists. Again, we got the clichéd subplot involving the
mustachioed Arab villain, raising the specter of America entering its
second war with Iraq to be fought over precious fluids. And again, a
nation huddled by the TV, steeling itself for the horrifying and
unprecedented prospect of William Jefferson Clinton telling the truth.
But enough about the leadership of the free world, a turning point in
the history of America, blah blah blah. This is Web journalism, after
all. Let’s talk about me.
This is only the second column I’ve written for Salon on the Clinton-Lewinsky
sex scandal, and in that respect I am an atypical professional and a
poor provider for my family.
This time, I was asked to write pretty much the same sort of piece I
wrote in January; I felt burned out on the exhaustive, microscopic
coverage and was convinced I had nothing to add to the subject. So I
wholeheartedly said yes.
And in that respect I am entirely typical. For while commentaries on
the Lewinsky scandal inevitably riff on what it is “about” — sex,
perjury, character, politics, privacy, media ethics, the Constitution, the Bible –
they are all wrong.
The Monica Lewinsky scandal is about getting paid.
Wisely leading the pack in getting what he can out of his notoriety
while the gettin’s good is Matt Drudge. Anyone who says that new cable
networks like Fox are pushing amateur public-access programming off
the airwaves has obviously not seen Drudge’s talk show. A hat in search
of a television personality, Drudge has always been best at looking
hard-boiled, and once you actually hear him fumble nervously through
an interview the magic is gone. His modus operandi is to stammer out a
question — “Congressman Traficant, are you … um … what do you
foresee for the next couple of … ah … months?” — then smile
triumphantly, as if he had just extemporized “J’Accuse,” and lean back
rakishly in the Sam Spadey office set that Fox has installed him in.
You half expect him to knock back a swig of Jim Beam for effect.
Among the mouthpieces laying into Clinton on Drudge was Ann Coulter,
the author of “High Crimes and Misdemeanors” and yet another
hard-bodied soldier in the fembot army of young anti-Clintonites in
miniskirts. Is the GOP cloning these women in a desert compound
somewhere? You have to wonder if this isn’t some sort of psychosexual
torture intended to whip Clinton into a guilt-ridden state of
libidinal mania — every time he turns on the television, there’s some
foxy blond skirt wagging her finger, like some femme-fatale
school principal out of Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher” video. (“That’s
right, Ms. Ingraham … Ah’ve been a baaad boy … Ah must be
punished … Betty! Send me in another one of those interns!”)
But let’s hear it above all for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the
old-timers who made a spry, better-late-than-never effort to inject
themselves into the Monica circuit, arguing for the superiority of the
real scandal that they uncovered a quarter-century ago, while
walking uphill through six feet of snow. The nation needs to wake up,
the now-superseded reporters argued, before we run into a
constitutional train wreck over a petty, irrelevant lie, a “moment of
national madness.” Which is all well and good for this rich and venerable pair to say. But if the media were to suddenly develop a sense of proportion about Zippergate, how would Michael Isikoff and the rest afford to move in next door to Woodward in Georgetown?
Mom is replacing the cab driver as the great local-color cliché of
American journalism. Any chatterer with a mother living in the
heartland now apparently believes he has a pipeline to the secret
heart of America, and thus we’re periodically treated to five seconds
of homespun wisdom that Sonny Boy managed to speed-dial up in between
the amuse-bouche and the appetizer. In USA Today, Des Moines Register
editor Dennis Ryerson’s mom is sick of Monica; here in Salon, Ned
Stafford’s mom, whom “the pulse of the real America flows through,”
calls Ken Starr a “foolish man.” (If your mother happens also to drive
a taxi, it’s a better career head start than a Medill scholarship.)
But in times of crisis we all have our jobs: For those of us flying
coach, that job is Keepin’ it Real. Thus the cable networks put on
their gas masks and sallied out into the streets for the vox populi
over the weekend. A CNN news crew went to all the trouble of lugging
camera equipment down several flights so as to halt Manhattan traffic interviewing riders on city
buses. A poor MSNBC drudge drew the short straw and interviewed
novelty T-shirted Weebles at a Wisconsin fair: “As much as I don’t
like being on television,” one woman ventured, she was nonetheless
willing to deliver herself of a three-minute screed on the president’s
morals.
But then her job was to be hesitant about appearing on television;
that’s part of Keepin’ it Real, just like the caller to a Fox show who
self-deprecatingly labeled herself as “a real American” — i.e., one
of those average schlemiels — to establish Main Street cred. Who says
the media condescends to us? We’re well trained enough now to
condescend to ourselves.
One of the most prominent winners in the scandal, MSNBC anchor Keith
Olbermann, has made a point of protesting his success lately, publicly
stating that he’s sick, sick of the relentless scandal hunt and
recently crankily introducing “our usual long-running story.”
Nonetheless, Testimoniday commercials whipped up by MSNBC trumpeted,
“He’s covered this story like nobody else, and no one will bring you
the president’s testimony like Keith Olbermann.”
Why the ambivalence? Olbermann knows full well that like all
supernovas, this one will leave new stars in its wake; and he knows too
that before January he was just a former ESPN sports jockey on
the cable-news backwater where Soledad O’Brien of “The Site” used to
interview a computer-animated cartoon. But that exposure can only go
so far; since this scandal tends to dirty everyone who touches it (or
at least leaves them a little, you know, sticky), a newsie who wants
to profit from it must tactfully let us know that he feels just
ghastly about the whole ruddy business, truly. Keith Olbermann can
be remembered years hence as that guy who did all those Monica
Lewinsky newscasts, or he can be remembered as that journalist who
detested doing all those Lewinsky newscasts.
Or, of course, he could be remembered as the man who walked away from
a high-profile prime-time slot rather than advance his career by
pimping a story he putatively hates. And I could be remembered as the
queen of freaking Egypt.
But it is not only the thick of hair and fat of Rolodex who have a
financial stake in the Clinton investigation. Clinton’s troubles, like
everything else nowadays, are business news, and they have been linked
repeatedly to the wild swings in the stock market. Here’s how Carl
Cannon of the National Journal summed up regular-folk sentiment,
echoed throughout the weekend in polls and call-ins, in a National Public Radio
interview: “The economy’s never been better, the stock market’s never
been better. I’m working, my wife’s working, my idiot brother-in-law
who hasn’t had a job in two years — he’s working. I got a new boat.
I’m building onto the house. And you want to put all this in jeopardy
over sex?”
As a member of the cultural elite I know this news is supposed to
cheer me. But it’s hard to get all misty over a mercantile,
bean-counting nation wanting to hang onto its leader like a pair of
lucky underwear. Back in those pioneering days of early February, when
we realized the country was ready to absolve a president for
fornication, a press corps of pâté-campagne-eating Rousseaus
proclaimed a new Enlightenment in America. The Puritans are dead! Vive
la France! But we’re not tolerant. Nor are we intolerant. It’s just
that, if it doesn’t affect our 401Ks, we don’t give a crap.
We haven’t become the French at all. We’ve become the Swiss.
The scene at the Newseum in Virginia Sunday night resembled purgatory
five minutes after a Delta shuttle crash. Jeff Greenfield was hosting
“a national town meeting” on CNN to discuss what to expect on
Testimoniday and examine the role of the media, but the “town” that
CNN assembled consisted entirely of a bleacherful of reporters and
commentators answering questions from other reporters and commentators
and, very occasionally, viewers. Jesse Jackson speculated on the first
family’s spiritual condition; Pat Buchanan reminisced about Watergate;
Greta Van Susteren fixed her hair on camera.
In fact, CNN barely managed to get in an actual caller every half
hour, a situation perhaps exacerbated by the fact that the network
didn’t even pony up for a toll-free number. And in a sense it was
perhaps the most honest two hours of journalism we have seen in this
entire saga. Why go through the charade of putting a town in the town
meeting? The voice of the public would just be filtered through the
people filling the bleachers here. Why not simply cut out the
middleman?
Here was a Beltway pundit’s Platonic Republic: an electorate stripped
of both politicians and voters, leaving nothing but talking heads.
Tomorrow, Clinton would admit to sex with Lewinsky, or he wouldn’t;
the country would turn on him, or it wouldn’t. Like it mattered. In
this chilly looking little forum, we had moved long beyond that: A
presidential mea culpa was not merely a foregone conclusion, it was
already over. This massive Time Warner chorus was ready to start
pursuing the Next New Thing, to look ahead to November and January and
beyond, and to do it in the company of the only people who really
understood them. The media had become interviewer, subject and
audience.
It was paradise.
WASHINGTON — When Vernon Jordan appeared at the federal courthouse in Washington last week, it looked as if he had first gone to his tailor and said, “One Washington power broker outfit, please.” There he was, wearing a tan topcoat, an exquisitely cut dark suit and a felt hat adorned with a distinguished feather, walking in the footsteps of Clark Clifford, Thomas Corcoran and other legendary Washington influence masters.
Of course, neither of those two behind-the-scenes operators had to testify before a grand jury because a White House intern was captured on tape boasting of sexually servicing the president of the United States. But even when thrust into such an unusual situation, the 62-year-old Jordan kept cool, affirmed his friendship with the president and smoothly defended his own integrity. It was almost as if the real secret to protect was not the true nature of the relationship between President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, but Jordan’s own kind of intimacy with the president.
With the exception of Hillary Clinton, it appears, no one spends more quality time with the president than Jordan. Numerous media reports identify Jordan with the sobriquet “presidential friend,” as if that is his official position. But what precisely does FOB One do when he’s not duffing with Clinton on the links?
In his spare time, Jordan conducts business at the law and lobbying firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Field, pocketing $1 million a year. Yet Jordan maintains he neither practices law nor lobbies for the firm’s clients, which represent a fair slice of corporate America. So how does he earn his keep? A little bit of this, a little bit of that. “He puts people together,” says one former senior Clinton White House aide who used to interact with Jordan. Who does he put together? “I’m not really sure,” the aide notes. And to achieve what? “Not sure about that, either. Deals, I suppose.”
Jordan does not file any disclosure reports that reveal his sources of income or that indicate who pays for his unique services. He and his wife sit on 17 corporate boards, apparently a record for a husband-wife team. His roster includes Dow Jones, American Express and Bankers Trust. All told, he receives $500,000-plus a year from his directorships. If he’s a man with an agenda, it’s a hidden one. In Jordan’s line of work, one shouldn’t have to spell out quid pro quos — it’s in bad taste. But when a man has such access to the president — and delivers important favors for the president and his staff — it is fair to ask what he might wish in return, even if a payback isn’t explicitly requested.
A recent Wall Street Journal article illustrated one way in which the former civil rights leader operates. When an acquaintance asked Jordan to help her 24-year-old son find a job, Jordan invited the young man to his office and called Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, who called Kurt Campbell, a deputy assistant secretary of defense, who referred the job seeker to a defense company, which hired him. This may be, as the Journal explained, standard operating procedure for Jordan. But it also shows how Washington operates on favor-trading. Now, does the deputy assistant secretary owe the defense firm a favor in return? Does Talbott hope to receive some assistance from Jordan down the line? This is what a fixer like Jordan does, he greases the wheels — not necessarily out of public interest, but for his own purposes.
One of the more stunning aspects of the Lewinsky affair is how gracefully Jordan has managed to skate through it, so far. For weeks after the initial scandal broke, he kept out of the media line of fire, and even during his grand jury appearances he was handled with the utmost gentility. How did he arrange that? “That’s just Vernon,” says a Clinton aide with a chuckle.
That is, Jordan is a favorite son of the Washington establishment, and that includes its media denizens. As the initial revelations poured out and White House correspondents were talking excitedly of a “White House meltdown,” Chip Reid of MSNBC told viewers that he had spent the day canvassing the nation’s capital and that he had found a consensus among the town’s high and mighty: It’s possible that President Clinton would have an affair with an underling and then suborn perjury, but Jordan would never do a thing like that. Not our Vernon, the town’s ultimate gatekeeper.
While Clinton has a well-known distaste for the Washington social
establishment, the president’s aides concede that Jordan has plenty of pull
with him. After all, Clinton asked him to oversee the presidential
transition after his 1992 victory. (And when Jordan was helping to select
administration appointees who would have to deal with tobacco matters, he
was sitting on the board of cigarette manufacturer RJR Nabisco.) But these
aides routinely deny that Jordan does anything so brash as to lobby the
president on behalf of a particular client.
Yet Jordan does exert influence on policy. A year ago, a White House aide
who was handling the administration’s brief on campaign finance reform
informed me that White House staff members were concocting some
hard-hitting initiatives on this front. To truly take on this matter, I
replied, Clinton would have to be willing to alienate corporate
contributors and close friends like — I picked a name out of a fedora –
Vernon Jordan.
“Vernon,” she said with a smile. “Yes.”
“What about him?” I asked.
“He called me,” she said. Now, this aide was no lowly intern, but she was
not one of the heavier weights in the White House. Yet she was receiving a
call from the First Friend, who wanted to talk about policy.
“And?”
“He told me he thought it was not a good idea.”
Not a good idea for the president to push campaign finance reform? “And,”
I asked, “he just assumed that because he’s Vernon Jordan he could block a
presidential initiative in this area?”
“Yes,” she said, with a nervous laugh. But — after a pause — she assured me
that Jordan would not be able to kill the initiative.
Maybe not. But a full-fledged campaign finance reform initiative never
materialized, and though the president said he supported reform, he did very
little to champion the cause in the past year. No arm-twisting, no campaign to pressure members of Congress. And on the day the McCain-Feingold reform bill — a modest measure — met its final death, the president
was out of town.
The lack of White House vigor on the reform front may not be directly attributable to Jordan. Nothing in
Washington ever is. But he made a call, talked to the person in charge,
made his views known. And the companies that sign up with Akin, Gump know
that.
How many similar calls has Jordan made since Clinton took office? We do not
know. How else has he tried to influence administration policy? We do not
know. We know more about what Monica Lewinsky did during high school than
what Vernon Jordan does daily in Washington. But his affairs matter much
more than hers.
I first met Laura Ingraham on the set of MSNBC on the network’s first day on the air. If memory serves, she asked former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres a question displaying both amazing audacity and embarrassing ignorance. Coming just days after the explosion aboard TWA flight 800 over Long Island, Laura wanted to know if Peres thought it was a good idea for the U.S. to bomb Syria or Libya in response. Peres clearly thought she was nuts and did his best to explain that no one even knew if foul play had been involved yet. In between interview segments, Laura and I gossiped about Joe Klein, who had just been unmasked as “Anonymous.” She told me that a day earlier she had seen Klein coming out of a meeting at CBS all smiles, chuckling over something with his bosses there and so, as far as she could tell, his future was assured.
What could I conclude but that this woman was more full of shit than just about anyone I had ever met? She was clearly off her rocker when it came to international politics. Worse, the comments about CBS seemed to indicate she was desperate to impress. I had heard rumors that she was being considered to replace Klein there, but frankly, I dismissed them out of hand. Klein was obnoxious, but at least he had a track record. Who the hell did this ignorant pixie think she was? Well, Laura Ingraham understands the media better than I do. She has something more important than knowledge or experience — and she knows it. She has star quality.
Laura was hired by CBS to replace Klein, and together with Bill Bradley offers regular commentary on the Evening News. She also worked as a regular pundit on MSNBC, thereby becoming the only person in history, as far as I know, to negotiate simultaneous contracts with both NBC and CBS news. Neither one could live without her. She also turns up regularly on Imus, “The McLaughlin Group,” “Politically Incorrect,” in Vanity Fair and on the New York Post’s Page Six. One day she is flying on Robert DeNiro’s plane, the next she is dining with Dustin Hoffman. Laura look-alikes have begun sprouting up all over the media, spouting right-wing anti-feminist politics as they brush their peroxide blond locks back and straighten out their leopard miniskirts on camera. Who cares that, to most women, Laura and her acolytes’ right-wing Republican politics have about as much appeal as a stag party in a strip joint.
Laura recently left MSNBC, presumably for greener pastures, and so I can write about her without any professional conflicts of interest. I admit to liking her and missing her around the station. Unless the subject was law or a Clinton-related scandal, Laura rarely seemed to know much about the subject at hand, but she never evinced any ambivalence about where the real issue lay. She once destroyed me in a debate about the upcoming election when I tried to argue that the great unaddressed issue between Clinton and Bob Dole was the ravaging effect global capitalism has had on peoples’ lives and communities. She just laughed. We were, after all, on television. Just how did I expect to explain to soccer moms that their problems lay not with taxes or family values but with highly mobile capital markets? Laura looked and sounded great and responded with some snappy Republican campaign slogan. I was toast.
More than anyone else alive, I fear, Laura Ingraham speaks to the Zeitgeist of the contemporary American media. She is young, sexy and ambitious. She argues politics the way lawyers argue cases, as if there can be no possible interpretation other than her own, and what can possibly be the matter with her pathetically out-to-lunch opponent? She is a class-A schmoozer who understands her considerable gifts and exploits them to the fullest. If there’s someone at a party or a lunch or even in a TV studio Laura wants to talk to, she’s there, and suddenly the guy is an old friend.
What Laura is not, however, is a careful thinker or knowledgeable analyst. Her professional training is pretty much limited to a bomb-throwing stint at the Dartmouth Review, three years of law school, a clerkship for Clarence Thomas and a sexy appearance on the cover of the New York Times Magazine. I understand why she was hired by MSNBC, which puts a premium on youth and hence is willing to cut workers slack in the experience and reasoned thought department; and a beautiful right-wing blond on “The McLaughlin Group” requires no explanation whatever. But CBS News? Opposite Bill Bradley? This is not a morning show, where Molinari-esque perkiness comes with the coffee. This is the flagship news program of what once was “the Tiffany network.” Are great looks and superficial debating abilities so valuable on television that a Laura Ingraham is equivalent to a former senator who rewrote the tax code and has provided the country with some of its toughest political speeches on race for the past two decades?
Well, yes. CBS’s ratings may be in the toilet, but no one is blaming Laura. The network is most often criticized for sticking to stodgy old formulas that emphasize “real news” at the expense of the feel-good, tabloidy stuff that is eating up the business the way Godzilla swallowed Tokyo. We have reached the point, it seems, where exactly the same qualities that make someone a likable sitcom star can also land them a job where Bill Moyers and Eric Severeid once sat. What I don’t understand is why Laura is satisfied with just politics. Diane Sawyer once worked for Nixon but, as glamorous agent for our celebrity yearnings, she can now buy and sell small countries. Ditto for the apolitical non-journalist Barbara Walters. Laura Ingraham has catapulted herself atop the greasy pole of political commentary in a period when most aspiring TV personalities are still peddling their wares in Peoria. Can it be long before she’s showing Queens Diane and Barbara the door as well? They are showing a few wrinkles, after all.
ralph Nader, the legendary consumer advocate, has a new enemy: Bill Gates and his software giant, Microsoft.
Nader is organizing a conference in Washington, D.C., next month that he says will explore how Microsoft is working to extend its near-monopolistic control of the software business into other industries, including banking, insurance, car dealerships, travel services, real estate and television.
He has sent invitations to lawyers, writers, academics and corporate critics of Microsoft, along with Vice President Al Gore and Gates himself. The aim, Nader says, is to begin a public discussion about Microsoft’s business practices and possibly mobilize the Justice Department’s antitrust division to take the growing chorus of complaints more seriously.
Microsoft spokesperson Vivek Varma has called the conference, titled “Appraising Microsoft and its Global Strategy,” a “misguided effort” driven by Microsoft’s competitors and said the list of speakers “reads like a rogues’ gallery.”
Salon spoke about the conference and the alleged Microsoft’s threat with Nader and Jamie Love, the technology specialist at Nader’s Center for the Study of Responsive Law in Washington, D.C.
Jim Clark of Netscape has called Microsoft an “evil corporation.” Do you agree with that characterization?
Nader: The words I use is that Microsoft has strong monopolistic tendencies to their business strategy. Microsoft has this belief that if they don’t control everything, they will control nothing. They have a total zero-sum view. With their 90 percent control of the operating system, which generates spectacular profit margins, they can use the money from this monopolistic position to leverage their control into one area after another. Their browser (Internet Explorer) is just one example of that.
What are others?
Nader: Well, they are moving out from software, right through the computer industry to other service industries, like banking, insurance, travel, publishing and cable. And they’re moving from conduit to content as well.
Netscape still controls the lion’s share of the browser market. How do you see Microsoft taking that over?
Love: In its implementation of Java, Microsoft has adopted a kind of “Java-plus” strategy. Rather than having the plain old Java code, they’re using an embrace-and-extend strategy, whereby Microsoft embraces the open standard of Java but then throws in some extensions which make it perform better with future versions of Windows 95, but not at all with non-Microsoft systems. Sun Microsystems is now suing Microsoft for violating the licensing terms. We think the government could do something in the antitrust area regarding Microsoft’s attempted perversion of Java.
Apart from the Java licensing issue, what is so wrong with Microsoft branching out into other fields?
Nader: First of all, apart from antitrust considerations, it’s just not healthy for any economy and society to have one company play such a dominant role in even one field. It’s even less healthy if that company has a dominant role in all kinds of commercial and industrial sectors. This isn’t just John D. Rockefeller trying to dominate the oil industry. This is a company trying to be the toll collector at gateway after gateway on the information superhighway, using, in effect, a closed-door business strategy. The result is, innovation suffers. Venture capital for potential competitors dries up. Venture capitalists will say, “Why bother? Even if company X comes up with something that’s good, it’s not going to be able to deal with Microsoft’s power.”
You said earlier that Microsoft was moving from conduit to content. What’s the problem with that?
Nader: When it comes to content involving commercial transactions, the more control Microsoft has, the more they can intimidate critical reporting on them. For example, we had people who wanted to take part in the conference, but their CEOs squashed them. This was in industries like travel and newspapers. This spills over into news reporting as well. They now have MSNBC. There was rumor last week that Microsoft wants to buy CBS. We’ve already seen that the TV networks handle stories differently depending on their commercial alliances. For example, when some nuclear plants in Connecticut had to shut down last summer, CBS, which is owned by Westinghouse, and NBC, which is owned by General Electric, never reported it. So if Microsoft actually buys CBS and establishes more alliances, say with Disney , which owns ABC, the penumbra of their intimidation is going to be extraordinary.
Specifically,
how do you see Microsoft impacting the television business?
Love: The real threat is down the road. With their monopoly over the operating
system, the question is: To what degree are they going to make the Microsoft
browser the front end to television sets, which is exactly what they want to
do? When you have (TCI Chairman) John Malone saying, “Microsoft is not going to dominate the cable industry the way they dominate the software industry,” it’s time to start worrying.
Why?
Love: Because Malone
is saying that he knows that Microsoft is interested in this
integration of multimedia through the front end of a television, and he’s
afraid of Microsoft. Just yesterday, Microsoft announced that Windows 98 and
the new version of the Internet Explorer (4.0) will permit you to receive TV signals and download data directly into your computer. So down the road, when we turn on
our combination TV-computer, Gates would like control the operating system
that will help us navigate from video to audio to data to online commercial
transactions. He wants everybody who wants to play in that Web environment to
be his partner. And if you’re a competitor, the odds are your products will be
hidden deep in the menus. They’ll crash more. That’s the game that’s
already been played on the desktop. The question is whether or not Gates can
take it into multimedia.
Nader: In other areas, they will destroy entire industries. For instance,
the encyclopedia that Microsoft is in right now. They’re not printing
encyclopedias. They’ve got an online version that is squeezing the existing
print versions. So in terms of access and the use of encyclopedias, Microsoft
is already the big kid on the block in an industry that’s been operating for
150 years. In the billing and presentment area of the banking industry,
Microsoft is going to the banks and saying they’ll give them the software for
free. Once they get a lock on that, they’ll be the toll collector for that
whole area of online business. Just think of the leverage. Pretty soon,
they’ll move into financial services. They’re not going to build new banks.
They’re just going to channel existing industries onto the information
superhighway. This is Microsoft’s global business strategy.
But isn’t it true that as a Microsoft spokesperson said about the software business, that the whole field of high-tech is a “dynamic, innovative market.” Wouldn’t we be going in these directions, with or without Bill Gates?
Nader: When the auto started to replace the
horse-and-buggy, there were a lot of auto companies. They had
different engine systems and all kinds of different innovations. There was
the Stanley Steamer, an electric car, and the internal combustion engine.
What you’re seeing here is not just a horse-and-buggy industry that’s being
challenged; you’re seeing dozens and dozens of industries that are being
challenged by an emerging monopolistic competitor. It’s almost as if the
entire horse-and-buggy industry were challenged by a giant General Motors
from the get-go. And that is where the innovation will suffer, that’s where pricing will become more and more
burdensome once the Microsoft monopoly kicks in. Don’t forget that a lot of
monopolies get started with predatory pricing. One form of predatory pricing
is to give away your product, which is possible in Microsoft’s case because of the enormous profits it gained from the monopoly over operating systems. That should be
considered unfair competition.
Love: Everybody expects technology to create upheavals in industry and new
players. What’s unique about Microsoft is that it’s trying to become the central player
in unprecedented areas of business.
Its ability to leverage its power, to provide the crucial
software for program interfaces, standards for performing secure credit card
transactions, video-streaming and so forth puts them in a position where they
become a partner in all these businesses. At any given moment, they can go
from being your partner to being your direct competitor.
What do you hope to achieve with the conference?
Nader: We want the conference to put all this on the table, in public. We would like a response and a dialogue with Microsoft and
Bill Gates. In his book, “The Road Ahead,” Gates made repeated points
about the need for dialogue on the emerging information superhighway
in a period of technological change. This conference is right square on
that principle.
You have said that some of the invitees felt intimidated from attending.
Nader: Of course. Why do you think the conference is being held in the first place?
There’s a fear and intimidation that is spreading rapidly throughout the
software industry and is beginning the spread in the other industries that
Microsoft is starting to penetrate. This reluctance to speak out in a
supposedly free economy and free society is very unhealthy and very
troubling. The fact that Novell, which is very critical of Microsoft, doesn’t
feel that it’s able to make a presentation at the conference, illustrates
just how much the doors on free and critical speech in the business community are
closing. There’s great fear. Some have even joked about needing a witness
protection program.
Have you been pressing the Justice Department on the issue?
Nader: They don’t respond. They just listen when we talk with them. They have three
problems. One is they’re not adequately staffed with skilled people to deal
with a company like Microsoft and the high-velocity change in the industry.
Second, Microsoft is very politically wired through the vice president, the
president and other members of the administration. That sends its own signal
to the antitrust division of the Justice Department. And third, there is a great reluctance among the people who know about Microsoft’s monopolistic practices to become willing and open witnesses. The ability of Microsoft to retaliate is a many unsplendored thing. They can do it by restricting access to the code committees, getting other companies to veer away from what they consider a Microsoft-unfriendly
corporate critic, they can raid them, move into their industry with predatory
pricing practices.
“we have now become the first guests on this show without black mock turtlenecks,” Brian Williams announced on July 12 when he appeared with weatherman Al Roker on John Hockenberry’s “Edgewise,” the MSNBC show that was abruptly canceled a week later. It was a throwaway line: Williams, a student-council-type who sticks with jackets, is the star of MSNBC’s “The News with Brian Williams,” a standard news show that’s always had the network’s full support. His appearance with Hockenberry was meant to give a brotherly boost to the network’s offbeat, NPR-inspired magazine show, which had bewildered MSNBC brass since its launch last fall. Instead, Williams underscored the difference between the show and the network. Like an artsy kid in a high school full of jocks — or a black turtleneck in a closet full of suits — “Edgewise” just didn’t fit in at MSNBC.
It wasn’t for lack of trying. With a near-evangelical commitment to eclecticism, the producers of “Edgewise” created a show designed to leave no curiosity unpiqued. An hour-long magazine program that aired Saturday and Sunday nights at 8 and 11 p.m., the show combined interviews, short documentaries, performance and commentary; it also took on a dizzying range of topics.
“Our tone was curiosity and fascination rather than hysteria,” says producer R.J. Cutler, who came to television after having produced the high-profile documentaries “A Perfect Candidate” and “The War Room.” The show’s 40 episodes include unnarrated, high-concept segments on cockfighting, Zaire, a pro-life haunted house, Wallace Shawn, Jeff Buckley, assisted suicide and Tiger Woods’ caddy. In many ways it resembled “Heat,” a radio show, broadcast on public radio, that both Hockenberry and Cutler worked on in the early 1990s. “You can have artistic aspirations on a news show,” Cutler says. “We wanted to mix ways of looking at the world. We believed a person who is interested in seeing David Brinkley very well may be interested in seeing Michelle Shocked in the same show.”
Critics applauded, film festivals took notice and fans sent worshipful e-mail — but the network never “fell in love with the show,” says Hockenberry. Neither did an appreciable viewership. When the numbers came in — markedly lower than the fledgling network’s already low average — MSNBC was quick to pull the plug.
Some weeks the show’s ratings had been too small even to measure. According to Mark Harrington, MSNBC’s president, it is just a question of math. “A once-a-week program was too much of an investment to sustain at this point,” NBC News President Andrew Lack adds.
According to “Edgewise” producers, however, the show was perfectly viable; it just needed a little help from the top. “We had a new form, a new network and a new talent,” Hockenberry says, referring to himself, a former news correspondent at NPR and ABC and author of “Moving Violation,” a memoir, and “Spokeman,” a successful one-man show, both of which chronicle his life in a wheelchair. (Hockenberry was paralyzed from the waist down in 1976.)
“We didn’t get any cross-promotion” — on NBC or CNBC. “The show was seen as too out there,” says Hockenberry. Cutler agrees: “They were not shy about saying, ‘We have no idea what you’re doing.’” As a consequence, the producers argue, the management took a laissez-faire attitude toward the square-peg show, which they had given Hockenberry as part of his agreement to work as a correspondent on “Dateline NBC.” “The show was the secret they wanted kept secret,” says Cutler.
But maybe the turtlenecks could have tried harder with the suits, too. The show’s producers, according to Hockenberry, “needed to get into the game and become the darlings of the network.” It was especially important, in Hockenberry’s opinion, that the “Edgewise” people become TV people. Cutler “came from film, so he was viewed with suspicion … the burden to schmooze was his.”
Curiously, it didn’t help that the show became popular with the independent film community, leading to an invitation to show a “best of” tape at the 1996 Nantucket Film Festival. “That was not reassuring to higher-ups,” says producer and booker Brad Klein. “They saw it as frivolous and artsy.” The eerie subject matter of some of the shows might also have given programmers pause. The July 14 Watergate/Wes Craven show — a look into “contagion of all kinds,” Hockenberry promised — could not have offered much comfort to programmers looking to warm the hearts of the Microsoft generation.
The show’s efforts to combine art and news did indeed produce some weird effects. The title sequence, a jazzy black-and-white montage of parts from a manual typewriter, suggested maverick reporting and archival work; the warm, den-like set, on the other hand, seemed more like a place to watch TV than to broadcast it. After one show’s series of still photographs showing Cambodians facing execution under the Khmer Rouge, the return to the buttery colors of Hockenberry’s den, and to Hockenberry’s own curatorial egalitarianism — in which all manner of material is “interesting” — was a little jarring. In cases like this, “curiosity and fascination” may not be motivation enough to assimilate disturbing material, especially when it’s set against clips from “Contact” featuring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey. When the juxtapositions were this stark, Hockenberry’s radio-trained avuncularity was not enough to make sense of them.
Finally, though, it could be that the problem with “Edgewise” comes down to the problem with “edge.” “People who really have an edge were like ‘pshaw,’” Hockenberry says, referring to responses to the show’s content. “The show was made by people who want edge but don’t know exactly what edge is.” When asked for his own working definition, Hockenberry did not miss a beat. “Nietzsche would say that ‘edge’ is that moment when the creature has reached the boundaries of its cage and is sniffing in places that might just be meaningless, hoping it’s going to reach a new world.” Ah … the kind of concept for which black turtlenecks were invented.
