The Cost Of It All

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The Lewinsky scandal "is like the Hope diamond," says Robert Lichter, president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs. "It attracts people and destroys everyone that comes into contact with it. The President's moral standing is destroyed, the political process is suspended and the press, instead of filtering out the fire hydrant of information in the information age, is like a dog urinating on it."

There are many reasons, some of them fiercely personal, why people hate this story so much. It makes it hard to watch the news with our children. It leaves garbage in the living room. Every story gets viewed through a dirty prism: How much is our foreign policy shaped by domestic scandal? Did the tobacco bill fail because the President couldn't afford the fight? Cynicism is a political poison we've been absorbing into our bloodstream for a generation. But this time cynicism is just the beginning.

All along this story has been less about crime than punishment. From the nails in Kathleen Willey's tires to the jokes about Linda Tripp's chins to the around-the-clock evisceration of Monica Lewinsky, the story has nourished a culture of cruelty that sacrifices empathy for entertainment. If Clinton has been more mercilessly ridiculed than past Presidents, we can excuse it as partly a response to his own decisions--beginning with his decision to run for office. But the other civilians caught up in the story never ran for anything. They may have done something foolish or wrong, but who of us can imagine paying such a price in humiliation for our stupidities and failures?

"This whole thing is horrible," says Todd Gitlin, a professor of culture, journalism and sociology at New York University. "I'm filled with disgust with what has become of this country, and I hold the media crucially responsible. What has happened is that in the glee, sometimes even the guilty glee, of enthusiasm for this story, the press has sent a very clear signal to the public that it lives in a different world than the world of a self-governing democracy."

Gitlin and other journalism scholars are hard-pressed to remember any other story that has triggered such furor. It has forced some healthy choices, a necessary filtering reaction to the information age: so much is available around the clock that viewers and readers become editors themselves, making judgments not about what they can find out but about what they want to know. "The general discourse had been getting cruder and cruder," observes Judith Martin, a.k.a. Miss Manners. "Privacy and discretion had almost disappeared from the general public usage before the scandal. Now that the salacious nosiness has been carried to this logical conclusion, there's been a reaction on the side of propriety. Now, this is a society that has had nonstop television confessions for 20 years, people vying to get on and reveal everything they can. With this story, what a pleasant surprise--people are reacting by saying, you know, we really shouldn't be discussing this."