by Russell Frank
Frank is an assistant professor in the College of at Communications at Penn State University .
Monica Lewinsky testified on tape "with a youthful, wide-eyed earnestness." Or, she came across as "mature, composed and ready for a career in the law." Take your pick.
In Sandra Sobieraj's AP version, during one of the "snippets" of Lewinsky's deposition shown to the U.S. Senate on Feb. 6, Monica's "naturally downturned mouth and round eyes had the look of an alarmed child trying not to cry."
While to Melinda Henneberger of the New York Times, "her appearance, voice and vocabulary said she was all grown up - and even a little hard." Sobieraj appraised Monica's makeup as "muted." Henneberger found it "heavy."
The two reporters agreed on one thing: The witness wore pearls. What are we to make of these diametrically opposed accounts? Is this the final triumph of subjectivity? The end of reporting? What would Walter Lippmann say?
During a golden age that never was, reporters pretended to be objective. The truth, as they say on the "X-Files," was out there. The reporter's job was to bring it back. Bylines didn't matter because we could assume that any trained information gatherer would return from the field with the same set of facts, which "spoke for themselves."
Alas, the concept of objectivity self-destructed when deconstructed. To observe is also to ignore, to separate the experiential field into foreground and background, to segment the stream of experience into events with beginnings and ends. To narrate is to offer a version of reality, to reify such cultural constructs as "story," "event" and "news."
There are no reporters anymore, there are only staff writers, each locked into his or her point of view, which amounts to a trained incapacity to see much beyond what one's race, creed, gender, generation, socio-economic status, politics, education, upbringing or personality allows one to see.
The New York Times distinguishes "news analysis" pieces from unlabeled stories, which readers are to regard as "news," but collapses its own distinctions by shuttling its staffers between the two forms. Needless to say, neither Melinda Henneberger's or Sandra Sobieraj's stories bore the "News Analysis" label.
Despite all their differences, the Times and AP pieces - along with most other stories that ran in newspapers around the country on Feb. 7 - share an approach to news-writing that regards people as performers whose appearances on the world stage can be reviewed as theater. Everybody's a critic.
Of course, a deposition is a performance, for which the witness's lawyers prepare her as well as any stage director would. But the writers assigned to the Lewinsky show tried to have it both ways. On one hand, this was Monica in "snippets," on video, as a seasoned and well-coached witness, in clothes appropriate to the occasion. ("No baseball cap, no beret with a shiny hatpin," wrote Mary Leonard of the Boston Globe. How mature of Monica to show up for a deposition in a "sensible" suit.)
On the other hand, this was our chance to finally find out what Monica was "really like."
Here is what we learned, thanks to the intrepid reporters: She scratched her nose! She sipped water - demurely! - from a glass! She has short fingers! Her hair framed her face!
Oh, how everyone loves Monica's hair. No less than four Boston writers weighed in on the Lewinsky locks.
In other words, if you didn't catch Monica's act, you didn't miss a thing.