The people have spoken. And the sound that emanated from their
collective lips on Tuesday was a resonant, whoopee-cushion-like
effusion aimed directly into the ears not only of the
Bible-thumping wing of the Republican Party but of
the punditocracy -- the pay-by-the-hour windbags,
moralists for hire, Op-Ed Savonarolas and assorted
other dispensers of reddi-whipped political wisdom
and congealed ethical instruction. If they did
nothing else, the midterm election results laid to rest
once and for all the notion that the chattering
classes speak for and to anybody but themselves.
The pundits have been so wrong about so many things and
with such glorious consistency that their record almost inspires awe.
Cast your mind back to last winter, when reports of a Clinton dalliance
first switched the pundit Outrage-O-Meter onto permanent autopilot.
There was ABC's Sam Donaldson, intoning to his cronies that
"if he's not telling the truth, I think his presidency is numbered
in days." There was Donaldson's newbie colleague George
Stephanopoulos on the same show, following in the footsteps of
his Beltway Media Club elders with the same cluck-clucking line.
There was right-wing pinup girl Ann Coulter,
arguing for impeachment on the talk shows at the
same time that she was assisting the actual
impeachment effort. There was the New York
Times editorial page, piously donning its black
executioner's hood and mournfully sharpening its ax
in preparation for the bloody, yet necessary, civic
task a Newspaper of Record must sometimes
undertake. There was Times columnist William
Safire, pulling off the admirable feat of being paid
by the newspaper for writing what read like internal
GOP strategy memos. There was the credulous
Washington press corps, chasing after every Starr
handout with visions of Watergate glory dancing
like sugarplums in their heads. And there was the
nation's self-appointed Scolder-in-Chief William
Bennett, elbowing his way to the front of the Bully
Pulpit and exhorting us all to be more outraged.
But not many of us were outraged. In fact, outside
of the pathological cabal of Clinton-haters, that
weird group who are single-handedly carrying on
the paranoid tradition of American politics, few
Americans even cared. The gigantic Wagnerian
gesamtkunstwerk, in which TV, newspapers,
magazines and tabloids all contributed their unique
voices to a cacophony of moral pomposity and
dead-wrong political predictions, was completely
ignored by the public at large.
This only made things worse. With each new
leaked "development," the weird, self-obsessed
dance going on inside the media's opulent little glass
house grew more frenzied. The tapes! The dress!
The video! The cigar! Men in power ties hurled
themselves weirdly through the air. Smoke rose out
of John Gibson's bushy hair. Staid producers
gyrated like Bacchantes, spinmeisters howled in
heat. Outside, people were banging on the walls,
screaming at the crazed masquers to stop it and let
our elected leaders get back to work, but they might
as well have been scruffy transients banging on the
hood of a speeding Lexus.
Finally, the mad fit ended. After the videotape was
released and Clinton's approval ratings went up, the
whole thing deflated like yesterday's party balloon.
The New York Times, which had been calling on
Clinton to admit he lied under oath (a weirdly
vengeful and gratuitous demand, reminiscent of
Maoist "constructive self-criticism" followed by the
firing squad), began easing surreptitiously toward
the exit, even hinting that they might find Kenneth
Starr objectionable for something more serious than
just his poor PR skills. Maureen Dowd turned her
evil eye away from Monica and upon the
independent counsel. The talking heads and
editorialists suddenly embraced a new sobriety, a
note of measured and self-satisfied civic centrism in
which the Voice of the People, once portrayed as
appallingly shallow and materialistic, now rippled
through the wheat fields like a Carl Sandburg
oration. And since no one was taping the pundits'
earlier idiotic utterances, no one accused them of
the journalistic equivalent of malpractice. By the
end of election night, the whole unseemly episode
had been so cleaned up, so sanitized, that it might
as well never have existed.
And so lo and behold, on "Nightline" last night who
should turn up but George Stephanopoulos,
practically choking up as he fed Ted Koppel some
heartwarming inside dish about how the president
spent the evening "camped out in White House
Chief of Staff John Podesta's office hunched over
that computer, pulling up the results one by one by
one in loving fashion and then calling the victors on
the telephone. It's been an amazing night for the
president." Did Koppel ask Stephanopoulos why he
had suddenly become so warm and fuzzy about the
man he had denounced weeks ago as unfit for
office? Of course not. Because this is Pundit Land,
where colleagues don't step on each other's toes
and yesterday's moral outrage magically morphs
into today's "clear-eyed assessment."
Of course, not being on the same page as the
people does not necessarily make journalists wrong:
The people are not always right. But the Lewinsky
episode was no case of voices crying in the
wilderness, of lonely press guardians of our civic
virtue trying to wake up a slumbering citizenry. The
facts of the case were never substantially in dispute,
after all -- it was all a matter of interpretation, of
judgment. But on matters of judgment pertaining to
the civic good, in a spectacle-drenched age in which
the elite media have enormous power, one would
hope that at least some of those judgments would
reflect what real people actually believe. And here
the pundits completely failed. It is now clear that
from the very beginning, at least as many people
believed that the Starr investigation was a political
witch hunt as that Clinton should be thrown out --
but until recently, the mainstream media completely
ignored Starr.
How has the elite media fallen so completely out of touch
with the American people? There are several reasons.
First, there is the media's well-chronicled ideological imbalance
-- the McLaughlin Group syndrome, in which talk shows are loaded up
with right-wing commentators and one or two hapless centrists
posing as liberals. Until the media, particularly the TV media, more
accurately reflect the actual spectrum of opinion in this country
(to balance right-wing ideologues like George Will, Fred Barnes,
William Kristol, etc., you'd have to exhume the Fabians),
humiliating debacles like the Lewinsky story will happen again.
Second, there's the structural explanation: money.
Monica Lewinsky was good for ratings; she sold papers, moved
magazines, built Web traffic. Like O.J., the scandal launched entire
shows -- and created, in Keith Olbermann, the world's first
postmodern anchor. You expected Olbermann's
face to come equipped with Derridean footnotes, so
infinitely ironic were his expressions -- and so futile,
as the profitable circus raged on around him.
Third, there is the pundits' peculiarly American
obeisance to puritanism. In fact, I believe that most
pundits do see themselves as speaking in some way
for "the people" -- we are to believe that their
Olympian pronouncements are channeled from
Everyman. But this actually led them to pretend to
be more sanctimonious, more morally censorious,
than they really were. They got all dressed up,
morally speaking, for their "official"
pronouncements. Fearing that it would be suicidal
for them to appear as if they were pooh-poohing
presidential adultery, they were led into a fatal
pomposity. (Of course, some talking heads'
pomposity seems entirely genuine, as in the case of
Cokie Roberts.) Their priggishness made them look
like guidance counselors at an all-night rave. The
country is simply hipper than they thought.
Which leads to the related fourth point: Due to
income, lifestyle, political beliefs and various
professional deformations, the pundit class is
increasingly out of touch with ordinary Americans.
The worst sins of a highly specialized professional
group were exposed in the scandal coverage: the
incestuous insularity, group-think and delusions of
phony "expertise." Lavishly compensated and
ego-inflated, the Tim Russerts and George Willses
of Pundit Land are unbuffeted by the thousand
trials and tribulations that less pampered people
experience, trials that teach them tolerance and
humor. This explains the pundits' bizarre moral
arrogance, their rigid naiveté, their laughable -- and
often hypocritical -- shock, shock,at discovering
that a president had engaged in the oldest sin in the
book. And it also explains some of the visceral
antipathy -- even hatred -- more and more
Americans feel for the media.
Finally, there is just plain old bad journalism. The
real story of the scandal coverage is the failure of
the media to make sophisticated discriminations, to
ask larger questions. It's as if Washington reporters
had decided that to place the scandal story in a
bigger context (asking, for instance, why Starr
should be extending his Whitewater probe into the
president's private life) would be a violation of
journalistic etiquette that would land them outside
the clubby comforts of the Beltway consensus. At a
more mundane level, reporters often just can't see
the forest for the trees. As Washington Post media
columnist Howard Kurtz portrays them in "Spin
Cycle," Beltway journalists are suspicious in the
wrong way -- incapable of distinguishing between
an irrelevant "gotcha" story that will advance their
career and one that has actual significance.
Has the punditocracy learned its lesson? We can
probably expect a little less shrillness in the
upcoming impeachment farce, a little less
harrumphing sanctimony. But nothing is likely to
really change. In an age in which politics,
journalism and show business have begun to merge,
pundits have increasingly become performers, and
performers posture and declaim -- that's what they
do. As long as political commentators, like
sports-radio jocks, are hired on the basis of who
has the loudest, most obnoxiously nasal voice, we'll
be forced to endure their sermons. And as long as
those commentators remain drawn from a stagnant,
inbred pool, those sermons will be inane.
SALON | Nov. 5, 1998