MediaWatch: September 21, 1998

Saving the Sex Talk For Our Sitcoms

The cynical expectation that Ken Starr’s report to Congress would be covered like a juicy Harlequin romance novel did not come to life on the networks. Perhaps the biggest surprise of the media aftermath is the relative scarcity of reporting on the actual sexual details included in the report. In prime time news magazine shows the hosts were soon lashing out at Starr for embarrassing Clinton.

Beginning with Friday night, September 11, the evening after the report hit the Internet, evening and morning news shows all spent more time running through Starr’s abuse of power and obstruction charges than on the sexual incidents and perjury recounted in the report. While that journalistic focus emphasized the crimes and abuses under investigation, MediaWatch analysts’ review of the first weekend’s coverage found the networks’ vague references to sex failed to convey the legal absurdity of the President’s denial of sexual relations.

On the 11th, CBS’s Scott Pelley observed that "sex is only the foundation for the serious legal allegations that follow," but only he detailed a specific incident in which Clinton misused his power over the Secret Service to ensure his affair with Lewinsky remained secret. Otherwise, the networks all relayed the same basic impeachable charges from the Starr report and followed with stories on the rebuttal from Clinton lawyer David Kendall. Only CBS’s Bob Schieffer noted Lewinsky said Clinton told her "he had hundreds of affairs in his early part of his marriage, but after he had turned 40 he had tried to slow down." Only NBC’s Lisa Myers picked up on Clinton as a cad: "Lewinsky testified that weeks into their sexual relationship the President still called her ‘kiddo,’ and she wasn’t sure he even knew her name." To be specific:

ABC: Jackie Judd ran through Starr’s charges, mixing in a vague reference to the sexual incidents: "As evidence, the report includes explicit details about ten sexual encounters Lewinsky said she had with Mr. Clinton. Including one in the Oval Office bathroom and another that occurred while Mr. Clinton was on the phone with a member of Congress. The details are necessary, prosecutors write, to prove the President perjured himself in the Jones case and again before Ken Starr’s grand jury when Mr. Clinton denied having sexual relations with Lewinsky whatever definition is used."

CBS: Coverage began with Bob Schieffer on Capitol Hill. Over video of the boxes with the report being opened Schieffer suggested: "It had been advertised as steamy and you could almost see the steam rising as the boxes came open. It was a tawdry tale told by a young woman who had become emotionally involved with an older married man."

Schieffer added: "She and the President had ten sexual encounters, eight while she worked at the White House, two thereafter," noting "the physical relationship with the President included oral sex, but not sexual intercourse." Schieffer recounted two episodes: "There are also torrid passages. During one episode a cigar was used as a sex toy. At another point they had sex while he chatted on the phone with a Congressman."

CNN: On their special at 8pm ET, Wolf Blitzer and co-anchor Judy Woodruff got no more specific on sex than to refer to "intimate touching." In the second half of the show co-anchor Bernard Shaw warned that some viewers might find the next story offensive. In it, Jonathan Karl examined the controversy over the definition of sex. He read the definition Clinton reacted to in the Jones deposition: "A person engages in sexual relations when the person knowingly engages in or causes contact with the genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh or buttocks of any person." Karl explained that Clinton claims oral sex is not in that definition, but without getting into any offensive detail concluded by noting that "Lewinsky describes in graphic detail activity with the President that goes beyond oral sex."

FNC: On the Fox Report, David Shuster read a cleaned up recollection of one incident, with a portion displayed on screen: "The report says quote, ‘According to Ms. Lewinsky, she performed oral sex on the President on nine occasions. On all nine of those occasions the President fondled and kissed her bare breasts. He touched her...both through her underwear and directly...On one occasion the President (used) a cigar (to stimulate her.)’ On several occasions, the report says that Monica Lewinsky was performing oral sex on Mr. Clinton while he was talking on the phone with a member of Congress."

NBC: Nightly News reporter Lisa Myers took time to lay out how Starr’s facts counter Clinton’s claim of no sexual relations: "Specifically, the President told a grand jury that he never touched Lewinsky’s breasts or other intimate parts of her body and therefore had not perjured himself in his deposition in the Jones case last January when he said he had not had sexual relations with Lewinsky. Prosecutors cite at least 13 instances in which he touched her in very intimate ways including one episode involving a cigar. In another disclosure not likely to sit well with Congress, the report also charges the President and Lewinsky were having sex while the President was on the phone with three different members of Congress in November 1995."

As the hours passed, network reaction switched to attacking Kenneth Starr’s inclusion of explicit details in the report. On ABC’s 20/20, Barbara Walters asked Jackie Judd: "When you read this report it is so salacious, it is so graphic. There will be many people who will feel it’s disgusting, wonder what they’ll tell their children. There could be a backlash against Ken Starr. I asked the prosecutor’s office today why it had to be so salacious and was told that the answer is in the report."

During a special two-hour Dateline, Stone Phillips demanded of guest Bill McCollum, a Republican Congressman from Florida: "Did this report have to be that detailed, that explicit? I mean you cringe when you read it. Does the Congress need it, do the American people need to hear it, should the President be subjected to that kind of embarrassment?" Phillips apparently thought so in 1992, asking George Bush in a question re-aired in the same show without any suggestion that NBC had any evidence, if he’d had an affair with aide Jennifer Fitzgerald

On Saturday’s NBC Nightly News, Keith Miller checked in with a stale recitation of jaded European reaction: "In France, Le Monde described the report as ‘a monster... worthy of the reports of the Inquisition...where deviants and heretics were hunted down to the depth of their souls.’" A woman in Paris complained: "It’s horrible. I hate Kenneth Starr and I think it’s horrible for Clinton but, because he loses credibility about the world."

On Monday morning Today’s Katie Couric came at Pat Buchanan: "Do you think Ken Starr really had to get so graphic in this report? I mean it’s, much of it is in the ‘more than what we really wanted to know’ category. Did the details have to be so lurid?"

Reporters and pundits answered the question correctly — that Clinton’s legal hair-splitting required explicit detail, followed by minute-by-minute corroboration of Clinton’s and Lewinsky’s whereabouts. In short, the Starr report corroborated Lewinsky’s testimony, but that damning proof, as Couric confessed, was "more than we really wanted to know." The network stars suggested they don’t want the truth. They don’t want evidence. They want Clinton’s survival.

By Tuesday night, Dan Rather reported that CBS pollsters went looking for public disgust with Ken Starr: "Nearly two-thirds polled say the explicit content of Starr’s report is, quote, ‘inappropriate.’ Majorities of those polled say Congress was wrong to release the sexy details and that the special prosecutor’s motive was to quote ‘embarrass’ the President." The exact numbers: 65 percent called the release of sexual details inappropriate; 59 percent thought it was wrong for Congress to release them and 59 percent said they were meant to embarrass Clinton. That was not the networks’ intention.

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