Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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

Well, Marvin baby tries to do a good job. Unfortunately somewhere he lost his way. I simply did not understand the point he was trying to make. In one way I thought it was a "mea culpa" for Clinton, and in another way it was in regards to how trashy news reporting has become. Maybe it was both, but definitely trying to make heads or tails of this book is challenging. That he started with his episode with Kennedy didn't help his thesis one bit. He mixed apples and oranges and ended up with kiwis -- and I'm not sure yet if they are fruit or vegetable. That's the way I feel about this book too.

If you want objectivity, buy some other book. If you love the ex-president and still think he is a hero you will love this long-winded apology for his most notable acts in office. In 1963 Mr. Kalb should have reported about his abuse at the hands of the Secret Service as well as the reason they took such measures - to cover up JFK's affair. Apparently Kalb's silence bought him continued access to JFK's White House - a compromising journalistic tactic which he laments in this book.

This is another attempt, like many others, to rationalize Clinton's scandals. Clinton fan? Buy the book. Otherwise ignore it.