MediaWatch: September 21, 1998
Table of Contents:
- MediaWatch: September 21, 1998
- Saving the Sex Talk For Our Sitcoms
- NewsBites
- Admired For Her Faithful, Loving Lies?
- "Remarkable" Calculated Confession
- Clinton's Lawyers Lashed
Admired For Her Faithful, Loving Lies?
NBC Promotes First Lady’s Focus on "What She Does Best"
As the Clintons faced Ken Starr’s listing of impeachable offenses, NBC praised Hillary Clinton’s remarkable performance in the role of wronged spouse, lauding a victim instead of disdaining an architect of obstruction and a co-perpetrator of seven months of lies.
On the September 11 Today, co-host Matt Lauer enthused: "Extraordinary performance from the First Lady in the last couple of days. Last night she introduced her husband. We saw it in the Mik [Jim Miklaszewski] piece but I think it bears watching again. Here’s what she said with her husband sitting right next to her."
That night, Tom Brokaw plugged: "Still ahead tonight, NBC News In Depth. How’s she coping with this personal betrayal?...The First Lady, caught up in the President’s lies. Now where does she turn?" Andrea Mitchell played a clip of a minister at the prayer breakfast praising Hillary’s grace and courage, adding: "Enough grace and courage to be her husband’s chief cheerleader at a political event last night." Mitchell worried: "How can she carry on now that the entire nation can learn the sexual details?" She answered with "friends and former aides who have been with the First Lady," including her former press secretary and CBS flack Lisa Caputo, and Mandy Grunwald, who began 1992 by shaming ABC’s Ted Koppel out of questioning Clinton’s sexual recklessness with Gennifer Flowers on Nightline.
Jane Pauley picked up on Mitchell’s theme the next night in a two-hour Dateline special titled "The President and the People." Pauley claimed Hillary unquestioningly accepted her husband’s denials: "She had believed his denials and indeed last January, as she told the Today show’s Matt Lauer, he seemed to take for granted that she wouldn’t believe everything she read in the papers....Then silence. As the investigation turned up the heat on friends and colleagues, even as he testifies under oath before a grand jury, she says nothing. Balancing a threat to her marriage against the assault on his presidency, she does what she does best, she goes to work. In July, a bus tour to preserve historic places."
Pauley continued: "By August people are looking into her eyes for an idea of what she’s going through." After noting the irony that the woman who said in 1992 she’s not just standing by her man now is, Pauley asserted: "Once vilified for ambition and political overreaching when she took on health care, now she’s admired for being the faithful, loving wife." At least by NBC.
