T A B L E__T A L K

Are presidential bowel movements the media's next frontier? What hasn't the news covered? Discuss it in Table Talk

T H E
C L I N T O N
C R I S I S

A BRITISH JOURNALIST DECRIES THE MEDIA-WHIPPED FRENZY OVER PRESIDENT CLINTON'S PRIVATE LIFE.

BY JUREK MARTIN

William Rees-Mogg is the sort of Englishman not given to doubts about America. Two years ago, he told readers of his column in the Times of London that it was perfectly obvious that Colin Powell would be the next president of the United States. Twenty-two years earlier, when the editor of an organ still august in its pre-Murdoch days, he flew to Washington expressly and imperiously to tell the National Press Club that it was ridiculous even to think about unseating Richard Nixon over such a picayune matter as Watergate.

As Washington blithely discusses the impeachment or resignation of President Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair, it is a little harder for some of us to laugh at Rees-Mogg. His fault was that he could not see that Watergate was a matter of state, which it clearly was. But if you think, as I do, that Clinton's alleged dalliance with a White House intern has nothing to do with the governance of this country beyond narrow legal technicalities and hypocritical moral judgments, then you can at least see where Rees-Mogg was coming from.

Writing as a Brit who has spent the majority of his adult life in America reporting on this country, I would not even dream of introducing the standard foreign arguments, already aired in European editorials, that necessary U.S. leadership in world affairs is being put at risk at a particularly perilous time. All times are perilous and if Watergate proved anything, it was that the U.S. government could continue to function even with a paralyzed, paranoid president and an evil empire apparently poised to take advantage.

So, come to that, did Iran-contra, when George Shultz and the fabulous Baker boys, James and Howard, pretty much served as regents for Ronald Reagan. Nor did the supposedly all-consuming preoccupations of Whitewater prevent Clinton from taking the Republican majority in Congress to the political cleaners in 1995-96 and getting himself re-elected in the process.

I would not waste much time either with the peculiar hang-up that Anglo-Saxons on both sides of the Atlantic have about the sex lives of public officials. It was serious 35 years ago that John Profumo, in charge of British defense, was sleeping with a woman who was also sleeping with a Soviet military attaché, and it might have been serious if Elly Rometsch, one of John F. Kennedy's liaisons, was indeed an East German spy, as Seymour Hersh now suggests. But most of the victims of our sexual exposés, including the self-destructive Gary Hart, hardly put the nation at risk by their behavior. Poor Henry Cisneros was even a good HUD secretary -- not that he will ever hold public office again.

You do not have to be in the Clinton camp to worry about the present state of the media mind, specifically its lack of all perspective. David Gelernter, the Unabomber victim from Yale, writes powerfully of his rage, his sense of injustice, that a national magazine could juxtapose his work with Kaczynski's manifesto, as if both were equivalent, merely two sides of the same argument. Similar legitimate outrage came this week from Tom Shales, in the Washington Post, over the appearance of Matt Drudge, the right-wing Internet gossip, on "Meet the Press," on the grounds that he has "no credentials whatever to serve on a panel with professional journalists or even professional pundits."

But journalism has changed beyond all recognition from the Watergate era. In effect, there are no longer any "gatekeepers" prepared to pass judgment on what news is fit to print. (Newsweek tried but, having failed, immediately put what it did not print on its Web site.) Drudge says the public has a right to know what reporters know, conveniently or deliberately forgetting that reporters are not automatically imbued with papal infallibility or omniscience. Any source, no matter how suspect or biased, can now get a story into print, on the air or on the Internet and thus become part of the media food chain, as witnessed by the current cases of Lucianne Goldberg and Linda Tripp.

You do not have to be an old fart, or even a fuddy-duddy liberal or conservative, to regret the reductio ad absurdum shortening of the modern news cycle. Its worst consequence is that too many reporters, not to mention pundits, no longer think, or even check, before they spout forth. (Indeed, the old classic American journalistic differentiation between reporter and commentator, which served a purpose, is now as dead as the dodo. If it weren't, I would not be writing this.)

But this also breeds a kind of perverse nervousness in the media. Having been assailed by the right for so long for not "telling the truth" about Clinton, the grand panjandrums are now falling over backwards to let it all hang out, with only the occasional obligatory caveat. In the process, legitimate questions about the motives of his accusers, including Kenneth Starr, are being overlooked, except by those, like James Carville, who usually grind Clinton's ax, and they are dismissed as mere spin doctors. After all, who does really gain from the present sorry state of affairs?

And that brings you back, in a roundabout way, to Rees-Mogg. Impeachment of a president is a deadly serious matter, with potentially drastic consequences for the nation itself. Does America really want to kick out a president it elected twice -- a man who may even be quite good at the job of governing -- for sleeping with a young woman and/or lying about it? If so, then fin de millennium madness will surely have arrived.
SALON | Jan. 28, 1998

Jurek Martin was Washington bureau chief of the Financial Times from 1975-81 and 1992-97.