J. Michael Hogan
Penn State University

What a sad commentary on the cynicism and moral degeneracy of contemporary American journalism. On August 17, 1998, there was William Jefferson Clinton--the man who had lied to the American people, his friends and loyal supporters, and even his family for nearly seven months--finally telling the truth. And, in a virtually unanimous voice, the pundits proclaimed the speech a failure, perhaps the worst of Clinton's political life. Clinton did not appear sufficiently contrite. He let his anger get the best of him. He tried to shift the blame to his accusers. Evaluating the speech--as they evaluate all public discourse--as a strategic maneuver in the "game" of politics, the pundits condemned it for not giving the public what it supposedly wanted: a sincere apology. As Margaret Carlson of Time put it: "The Speech That Would Put This All Behind Us failed by not putting an apology in front of us."¹

Rhetorical critics already have begun to echo this journalistic consensus. Dusting off the theory of apologia, they seek generic explanations for the failure of the speech as an apology.² Yet what evidence do we have that the speech failed, or even that the public wanted an apology? The polling data certainly do not support such conclusions. There was no free fall in Clinton's support. Indeed, Clinton's approval rating remained "remarkably steady" in polls taken immediately after the speech; in the week following the speech, it even "ticked up" a bit.³

The speech of August 17 may not have been much of an apology, but it succeeded nevertheless. We did not see the "real" Bill Clinton on August 17, wearing his emotions on his sleeve and tossing political caution to the wind as he apologized for the pain that he caused his family and the nation. We saw instead the "classic Bill Clinton," as Pulitzer-Prize winning Clinton biographer David Maraniss observed⁴--the same poll-driven, focus-group-tested, made-for-television president we have known all along. Clinton knows no source of rhetorical inspiration other than the polling data, and the speech of August 17 was no exception. With the Big Lie no longer viable, Clinton admitted to the affair, which the polls showed the public did not care much about, and he attacked Ken Starr, who the polls showed was about as popular as Saddam Hussein. In consultation with his master illusionists Bob Squier and Harry Tomason, Clinton fashioned a speech that succeeded because it was a non-speech, lasting only 250 seconds. Clinton succeeded because the public--again, as the polls showed--had heard all it cared to hear about Monica Lewinsky.

In their instant analyses of the speech, the journalists overlooked this key to its success. Focusing on the first 200 seconds of the speech, in which Clinton admitted to the affair, denied legal wrongdoing, and criticized the Starr investigation, they failed to hear Clinton's peroration as an attack on the journalists themselves. Reclaiming the distinction between public and private matters, Clinton delivered the key lines in slow, emphatic cadences. The matter is "important to me personally," Clinton stated, but "it is private." It is "nobody's business but ours," he insisted, and he articulated a principle utterly alien to the White House press corps: "Even presidents have private lives." When he criticized the "pursuit of personal destruction" and the "prying into private lives," the journalists heard criticisms of Ken Starr rather than of themselves. Yet surely Clinton was not speaking only about Ken Starr when, in the final line of the speech, he complained about the "spectacle" of the past seven months and declared it time to "repair the fabric of our national discourse."⁵ Instead, he blamed the same people the American people blamed for the fiasco: the journalists who, for nearly seven months, had treated Clinton's sex life as the most important "issue" facing the nation.

The Lewinsky matter has become the most-polled "issue" in U.S. history, yet somehow we completely missed the point. According to the polls,⁶ a small segment of the public (overwhelmingly Republican) considered Clinton a moral degenerate who deserved to be impeached; another segment (overwhelmingly Democratic) believed in Hillary's "vast right-wing conspiracy." But Americans of all political stripes agreed--by margins of 70 to 80 percent--that the news media gave the "issue" too much coverage. When asked by the Center for Survey Research and Analysis to choose from a list of words to describe that coverage, respondents rarely chose words such as "informative" or even "entertaining." More frequently they chose "disappointing" and "irresponsible." The word chosen most often to describe the coverage was "excessive"; the second most frequently chosen word was "embarrassing." And, remember, people chose these words to describe the media coverage, not the affair itself.

Working to justify the "feeding frenzy" of their bosses, the media pollsters tried to convince us that the public shared the journalists' political voyeurism. They asked literally hundreds of questions that forced respondents to speculate about the truth of journalistic gossip and rumors, soliciting opinions on such pressing public concerns as whether Clinton suffered from a "sex addiction," whether Clinton or Lewinsky made the "first move," or whether the sex described in the Starr report should be considered "normal or kinky." The pollsters asked whether we would trust Bill Clinton to "babysit" our teenage daughters, and whether we would slap the president if he tried to kiss us! Using a variety of question-wording techniques designed to discourage non-responses, the pollsters created countable opinions out of non-attitudes; that is, they counted opinions created by the polling itself. And the result was a fictional public that legitimized the media's obsession with the sordid details of the "scandal" and, more generally, the trend toward tabloid junk substituting for real news. Pointing to the fictional, voyeuristic public created by the pollsters, journalists deflected criticism of the "feeding frenzy" by claiming that they were only giving the public what it wanted.

Yet if there is one clear message in the polling data on the Lewinsky scandal, it is precisely the opposite. The public did not care about Clinton's sex life. They were not looking for an apology on August 17 because they considered it a private matter. Instead, they were looking for relief from the "feeding frenzy" itself. On the rare occasions when the pollsters gave respondents the option of saying they had "no opinion" about the sexual allegations, large majorities chose that option. To their credit, most Americans considered it none of their business. When asked about the media coverage, on the other hand, they had firm opinions. Only a week into the controversy the Gallup poll asked Americans whether they agreed that "the increased attention being given to the private lives of public officials and candidates" was a "good thing" for "politics and government in this country." Seventy-three percent said "no"; only 26 percent agreed, and even that figure was skewed by a large percentage of Republicans (44 percent) who, ironically, had finally found a reason to praise the "liberal media."

The real lesson of the Lewinsky scandal transcends questions about the morality or fate of William Jefferson Clinton. It goes to the heart of the problem with our increasingly dysfunctional democracy. However we feel about Clinton, the Lewinsky "feeding frenzy" demonstrated once again how thoroughly the news media have shirked their social responsibilities as the "Fourth Estate." It demonstrated how contemporary journalism, with its cynical, even nilhistic framing of politics as a mere strategic "game," defies the will of the people and subverts the democratic process. We can only hope that, in the wake of the Lewinsky scandal, journalists will take a hard look at themselves--at their agenda and their values, at how their definition of "news" ill-serves the public interest. Were they to do so, they might come to see themselves as the American people see them: as out-of-control and completely out-of-touch with the public they profess to serve.

Notes

1. Margaret Carlson, "Now Say It Like You Mean It," Time, 14 September 1998, p. 44.

2. A panel at the recent NCA convention in New York, for example, featured papers commenting on the failure of the speech and a response by Wil Linkugel, whose early work on apologia has framed much of the work on presidential scandals and apologies.

3. See Ronald Brownstein, "Few Believe Clinton, But Most Applaud His Work," Los Angeles Times, 21 August 1998; Mark Z. Barabak, "U.S. Raids Get Broad Support; Clinton Issues Not Significant," Los Angeles Times, 23 August 1998.

4. Quoted from the post-speech commentary on NBC News, 17 August 1998.

5. All quotations are taken from a videotape of the CBS News broadcast of the speech.

6. All of the polls discussed here are archived in the computer data base of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Connecticut.