One Scandalous Story: Clinton, Lewinsky, and Thirteen Days That Tarnished American Journalism [Hardcover]

Marvin Kalb (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 25, 2001

In 1963 Marvin Kalb observed the Secret Service escorting an attractive woman into a hotel for what was most likely a rendezvous with President Kennedy. Kalb, then a news correspondent for CBS, didn't consider the incident newsworthy. Thirty-five years later, Kalb watched in dismay as the press dove headfirst into the scandal of President Clinton's affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, disclosing every prurient detail. How and why had the journalistic landscape shifted so dramatically?

"One Scandalous Story" seeks to answer this critical question through the inside story of thirteen days -- January 13-25, 1998 -- that make up a vital chapter in the history of American journalism. In riveting detail, Kalb examines just how the media covered the Lewinsky scandal, offering what he calls an "X-ray of the Washington press corps." Drawing on hundreds of original interviews, Kalb allows us to eavesdrop on the incestuous deals between reporters and sources, the bitter disagreements among editors, the machination of moguls for whom news is Big Business, and above all, the frantic maneuvering to break the story. With fresh insight, he retraces decisions made by Michael Isikoff of "Newsweek," Internet renegade Matt Drudge, Jackie Judd of ABC, Clinton-basher Lucianne Goldberg, Susan Schmidt of "The Washington Post," Jackie Bennett of the Office of the Independent Counsel, and other key players in this scandal that veered from low comedy to high drama.

Through the lens of those thirteen turbulent days, Kalb offers us a portrait of the "new news" in all its contradictions. He reveals how intense economic pressures in the news business, the ascendancy of the Internet, theblurring of roles between reporters and commentators, and a surge of dubious sourcing and "copy-cat journalism" have combined to make tabloid-style journalism increasingly mainstream. But are we condemned to a resurgence of "yellow journalism"? Painstakingly documented and sobering in its conclusions, "One Scandalous Story" issues a clarion call to newsmakers and the American public alike: "Journalism can change for the better -- and must."

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

When Marvin Kalb was a CBS News correspondent in 1963, he had an opportunity to cover a presidential scandal. President John F. Kennedy was staying at a hotel in New York City when Kalb accidentally stepped into a private elevator and was thrown to the ground by a secret service agent. "I looked up just long enough to see the back of a woman with stunningly attractive legs entering the elevator," he recalls. She was on her way for a rendezvous with JFK. It was the scoop of a lifetime, except for one thing: Kalb didn't report it. "As I write about this incident more than thirty-seven years later, I am amazed not by my decision to do nothing but by the fact, quite undeniable, that never for one moment did I even consider pursuing and reporting what I had seen," he reflects.

That was another era, of course, and quite different from the one Bill Clinton found himself in at the start of the Monica Lewinsky ordeal. How that scandal went public--and the media's role in making it happen--is Kalb's controversial subject. "I decided to focus tightly on thirteen days of Washington coverage: the eight days leading up to the breaking of the story, the day it broke, and the next four days, when journalists focused on the scandal as if nothing else in the world mattered," he writes. The result was "journalism run amok." In One Scandalous Story, Kalb treats the whole episode with open scorn: "It took only a few days in January 1998 for journalists to realize that they were in uncharted waters. Faced by a scandalous story involving a president and an intern, a competitive twenty-four-hours-a-day news cycle, and a coldly demanding economic imperative, many found themselves violating just about every rule in the book." Kalb offers a detailed chronicle of how the scandal unfolded in the press, filling his tale with a cast of familiar characters, such as Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff (accused of an "unhealthy collaboration" with his sources) and Internet impresario Matt Drudge ("the young man with the Walter Winchell fedora, the cocked eyebrow, and the unshaven chin"). Yet these individuals, in Kalb's telling, were merely following the new economic imperatives of their industry, "one linked to titillation and profit." This resulted in "the most intrusive press invasion of presidential privacy in the history of the nation." Kalb focuses almost all of his fire at the media and largely refrains from criticizing Clinton's actions. No matter what one thinks of how a president ought to behave, though, it's hard to disagree that the media's own behavior might have been much improved during this unseemly episode in American political history. --John Miller

From Publishers Weekly

Kalb is mad as hell, and he's not going to take it anymore. A distinguished TV journalist for 30 years and now director of the Washington office of Harvard's Shorestein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy Kalb (The Nixon Memo; etc.) decries the decline in standards he now finds in a profession he loves. He presents a detailed account of how journalism debased itself with a feeding frenzy in 1998, when l'affaire Lewinsky first broke. Television and newspapers' new motto became "All Monica, All the Time." Few reporters, however, really knew much about the story, and they were all too willing, according to Kalb, to report gossip as news, innuendo as fact, without finding reliable sources. Reporters even became sources in a "prairie fire of copycat journalism." A rumor would appear on the Internet, particularly the Drudge Report, and be picked up by a TV reporter, who would in turn be used as a source by a print journalist. So, whether eventually substantiated or not, stories of a stained blue dress or a witness to a Clinton-Lewinsky tryst, or allegations the President told Lewinsky to lie were all fed into the sordid national discourse. The problem, Kalb finds, is that the corporate concentration of ownership of news pushes the bottom line above all else. And with the proliferation of news outlets, especially in cable TV, reporters must titillate rather than teach in order to compete, to draw in viewers. Kalb's report on reporting is an engrossing and disturbing story of what happens when integrity gives way to expediency. (Oct.) Forecast: Hopefully, the news media won't be so stung by Kalb's sharp criticism that they ignore it and media attention should help this important study sell well.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; First ptg edition (September 25, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684859394
• ISBN-13: 978-0684859392
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #297,427 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #18 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Current Events > Mass Media
  • #52 in Books > Sports & Outdoors > Miscellaneous > Journalism

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

51 of 62 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting study, October 22, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: One Scandalous Story: Clinton, Lewinsky, and Thirteen Days That Tarnished American Journalism (Hardcover)

Marvin Kalb has written a book looking at the coverage of the first weeks of Monicagate. It is not a "tell all" book. He doesn't expose all the deals cut between various news organizations and the Office of Independent Council. But what he reveals is disturbing enough.

I suspect when future historians look back at Monicagate they will be writing quite a different story from what has been written so far. The real story has to be written by people who don't have an investment in it. Unfortunately the entire Washington Media Elite is so invested in this story that I don't trust any of them to write an objective account of it. They can't tell all without revealing their own complicity in it which is why Michael Isikoff's book was so disappointing. He had gone out of his way to erase his own fingerprints.

Kalb's book is disappointing in one regard. He doesn't examine the implications of what happens when the press trades access for silence. The press kept quiet about Starr's collusion with Jones lawyers for fear he would cut off leaks. Unfortunately this kind of quid pro quo happens every day across the country. Reporter keep quiet about prosecutorial abuse in exchange for illegal leaks from prosecutors, Police, the FBI. Any discussion of this is treated as taboo by the press.

Kalb also doesn't discuss the Grand Jury laws broken by Starr's office in the name of "the rule of law". But in fairness that is an altogether different book.

Overall Kalb's book is helpful in understanding the hysteria that gripped the press in 1998.

7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One great storyteller, May 10, 2003

By 

John B. Maggiore (Buffalo, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: One Scandalous Story: Clinton, Lewinsky, and Thirteen Days That Tarnished American Journalism (Hardcover)

The first thing to understand about ONE SCANDALOUS STORY is that it is itself a story. Marvin Kalb is an excellent storyteller. A seasoned journalist and professor, Kalb is expert in taking information and presenting it in an interesting and compelling way. He succeeds in doing that here, which is no small accomplishment as, at first blush, there's not much more to be said about the Clinton-Lewinsky story. Beyond the way her writes, Kalb does add a new, or at least neglected wrinkle, which is the scandal of how the story was covered.

Kalb's dissection of journalism's treatment of the unfolding drama in its earliest days is what this book is really about. Kalb explains early on that he was looking for a subject to use as the centerpiece of a discussion about a number of observations he's made over his career about the impact of the press on public policy, how television affects politics and related topics. As the name of the book implies, the developments over the past 30 years, culminating in the Clinton-Lewinsky story, are not good.

Kalb's account explains how coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky story drove the sequence of events. He demonstrates how poor sources, reporting of rumor, and saturation coverage magnified the significance of what was actually happening. Kalb does not justify Bill Clinton's bad behavior, but he makes the point that coverage of that behavior was all out of proportion to what else was going on in the world - and how that coverage wasn't very good anyway. (An interesting "other" development was the US-Iraq showdown of 1998. The thought occurred to me that the Clinton-Lewinsky story could have derailed the American public's preparedness for a larger confrontation - sort of a reverse `wag the dog' phenomena.)

Kalb is at his very best when he picks apart specific reports and bring a magnifying glass to the transcript of actual stories covering the Clinton-Lewinsky tale. My only criticism of this book is that there isn't enough of that. Where ONE SCANDALOUS STORY replays what happened between Clinton, Lewinsky, Ken Starr, etc. it takes away from its exploration of how the story was actually covered.

I also don't think that the end of ONE SCANDALOUS STORY is the end of the story. If coverage of Clinton-Lewinsky represented the culmination of the press's degeneration, it also hastened the subsequent further decline. Coverage of the 2000 election results, if anything, one-upped Clinton-Lewinsky in terms of bad journalism, and in a different but important way, coverage of the 2003 invasion of Iraq represented the complete meltdown of the kinds of journalistic standards Kalb is so concerned with.

Hopefully, Kalb is thinking along the same lines and another book is forthcoming. His point is too important to be made once.

16 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing, what a great book!, October 10, 2001

By 

Joyce (Great Neck, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: One Scandalous Story: Clinton, Lewinsky, and Thirteen Days That Tarnished American Journalism (Hardcover)

You must read this book. Great writing by a great author.
Joyce