Exactly!
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Reporting about Lewinsky scandal still grist for debate
Fort Worth Star-Telegram - Saturday, December 26, 1998
Author: Janny Scott , New York Times
In the first frenzied weeks after the name Monica Lewinsky lurched into the news in January, it was clear that the news media had entered uncharted waters - a rip current where competition between old and new media was rewriting the rules of gathering and reporting news.
There were Matt Drudge, who first posted the story, pilfered from Newsweek, on his Internet tip sheet; the talk shows that gave it legs; the 24-hour cable TV news networks that rode it up the ratings; and the handful of respected newspapers that publicly stumbled in the scramble to keep up.
Looking back on the past 11 months, many people inside and outside journalism described the episode as a laboratory experiment for the postmodern media age - the moment when the diverse forces of the instant communication era converged for the first time on a major political scandal.
How members of the news media have performed - and how the public fared - is a subject of stark disagreement. After months of criticism, many working journalists now express a sense of near-vindication. Most of what was reported, they said in recent interviews, has turned out to be true.
Others, however, described the past 11 months as “a very dark chapter in the history of the American press,” as Geneva Overholser, a former ombudsman for The Washington Post, put it. After such shameful excesses, some said, it is an inadequate defense to point out that the stories were not wrong after all.
“There is this other task,” said Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University. “The news media have to help us have the best conversation we can about what became a constitutional crisis. Looked at that way, the performance of our journalists can be seen as a kind of national tragedy.
“It was a tragedy because the media cooperated in the expansion of this story to a sort of partisan, divisive and directionless game,” Rosen said. “It also produced a level of public exhaustion that is now a serious defect. We don’t need the American public to be exhausted by impeachment at this hour.”
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The story may mark the moment at which the notion of a serious so-called disconnect between the public and the press became conventional wisdom. The press presumed to understand what was important, and what was not, in a way that many Americans came to resent.