Professor Steve Ponder

by Steve Ponder

No shortage exists of speculation on how the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton will affect the presidency, Congress, public opinion, the legal system, and the next presidential campaign. But the news media were affected by this spectacle, too, in ways maybe just as important to how citizens of the 21st century learn about political issues and what they think about the media and the democratic process.

News coverage of Monica Lewinsky's affair with President Clinton and the prolonged impeachment process has been strongly criticized by media watchdog groups, academics, much of the public, and more than a few journalists. The media were accused of a long list of failings, including sensationalism, scandal-mongering, partisanship, pomposity, cynicism, superficiality, deception, and crass commercialism, to name a few. Some of the issues raised indeed were troubling: whether there should be limits on invading the private lives of public officials; whether a line still exists between news and entertainment and the embarrassing behavior of feckless pundits and pseudo-journalists on cable and on the Internet; and, in December, the disquieting emergence of Larry Flynt as a fellow investigative journalist.

Despite the escalating tensions, neither presidential success with new technologies nor frustration among the correspondents has caused the White House or the news media to abandon completely their shaky relationship.

Those are serious concerns, and the public standing of all journalists suffers from that sort of criticism, justified or not. What may be just as ominous in the long run, however, may be the extent to which the public tuned out as the impeachment process dragged on. By the time of the Senate trial, most Americans had found the media coverage, flawed or otherwise, to be mostly irrelevant. Two weeks before the final verdicts, a survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that only 15 percent of those responding were following the trial closely, despite saturation coverage. In the end, while the network correspondents and pundits congratulated each other for being witnesses to history, most of the viewers had long since voted with their clickers.

This public reaction, or the lack of it, to coverage of the trial may be as indicative of how the news media have been affected by impeachment as the earlier concerns over what was happening to the standards of traditional journalism. Indeed, Monicagate may have marked the last hurrah for the print-oriented, presidency-focused, technologically centralized, more or less representative reporting of government events that has characterized Washington, DC journalism for much of the 20th century.

The shift from the "old media" of news to developing "new media" forms and formats has been under way for some time. Bill Clinton, now safely the last 20th-century president, dramatized it in his early appearances with Larry King and in other non-news performances. Jeff Elder, one of Clinton's early media strategists, irked White House correspondents by suggesting, somewhat prematurely, that with cable TV and other new technologies, the president might be able to dispense with their services.

Managing the Press has been listed among the top ten books on newspaper history in Clio, the newsletter of the history division of Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

Indeed, the uneasy relationship between the President and the press corps, through which Americans have viewed the polity through most of the century, is not necessarily a permanent one. The Constitution does not require presidents to speak to the citizenry through the press. But, beginning about 100 years ago with the "new media" of daily newspapers and national magazines, presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and their successors found it increasingly advantageous to do so. The correspondents found it to be a prestigious and rewarding relationship as well, as long as they were willing to tolerate a certain level of management in return for regular news feedings.

The relationship was difficult from the start. Theodore Roosevelt tried to banish reporters who didn't write what he directed. Wilson lamented the "fictions" he read in the newspapers daily. Herbert Hoover wrote hundreds of letters of complaint to editors. Presidents throughout the century repeatedly seized on the next "new media" to try to reach the public more directly than through the distortions of the press, including photography, radio, newsreels, television, and, most recently, e-mail and web pages. All were unable to ignore completely the "old media" of news, because it provided the White House with greater credibility and large audiences, at least until now.

The long year of Monicagate brings both those assumptions into question. Not only did most Americans tune out what the media gatekeepers wanted them to watch, the news coverage seemed to have little direct impact on public opinion. Clinton's popularity ratings are higher now than they were before last January's revelations and the subsequent avalanche of critical news and comment. The pundits have blamed this on citizen indifference, decline of the civic culture, and moral failure of the audience.

But this seeming public inattention reflects dissatisfaction with the media as well as with the message. Rather than bashing the public for failing to live up to media expectations, the forward thinkers in political journalism might be better served by repairing relations with their audiences, as well as considering what their own role may be in the post-impeachment universe.

None of this suggests that 21st-century presidents will be able to throw the correspondents out of the White House, at least not right away. But it does raise fundamental questions about the presidency, political communications, how citizens learn about public affairs, and the future of the "fourth branch of government" notion that correspondents have treasured for the past half-century or so. Will the news media decline and be replaced by personalized computer messages from the presidential listserve? What will happen to the political process without a common denominator of news information? Impeachment did not create these questions, but it dramatizes that the need for answers may be closer than we think.