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The Starr Report: In print, on TV, in polls, at the water cooler, and as literature.

Sunday, September 20, 1998

The story this week is the Starr report and how we're all taking it... From television to economists to pollsters to print.

Broadcasting President Clinton's Grand Jury Testimony
Are the president's privacy rights being trampled? New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis shares his views.

Media-Economics 101
Informing the public has always been a prime concern of the press, but the all mighty dollar seems to be shaping the news cycle as well. New Yorker staff writer John Cassidy tells us how.

To Print or Not to Print...
Newspaper editors chime in on why they did or did not print the Starr Report.
GUESTS:
Nigel Wade, Editor in Chief, Chicago Sun Times
Louise Seals, Managing Editor, Richmond Times Dispatch

The Power of the Polls in the Process
The Pollsters were out calculating public opinion minutes after the release of the Starr Report. President Clinton is notorious for this poll monitoring.

How Much Are the Polls Affecting the Current Congressional Investigation? Andrew Kohut, Director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, takes a look.

How People Are Talking to Each Other About the Starr Report
Reporter Amy Eddings has the public's reaction to the Starr report.

Listener letters

Reporting on the The Lewinsky Affair: An Evaluation
The Starr Report, Clinton's grand jury testimony, the Tripp tapes. How much information is too much? What does the public need to know?
GUESTS:
Michael Isikoff, staff writer, Newsweek
Scott Shuger, Today's Papers, Slate Magazine
Les Crystal, Executive Producer, The Newshour with Jim Lehrer

Watergate, The Legend Returns as Congress Considers Impeachment
Comparisons to Watergate abound in the media's analysis of the current scandal. Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, Howard Baker are all being brought forth as experts on the impeachment process. Reporter Monica Brady takes a deeper look at the Watergate legacy.

Commentary: A Literary Analysis of the Starr Report
by James Poniewozik, columnist for Salon Magazine.

Joyce Maynard on Memoir and Privacy
In her new memoir, At Home in the World, Joyce Maynard, a woman who has lived her life on the page, discusses her infamous affair with J.D. Salinger, a man as private as she is public.

WNYC archives id: 23992

Amy Eddings - A National Conversation on Sex, Lies and Videotape

Kenneth Starr's report, with its stark, fierce documentation of sexual liaisons in the Oval Office, is the kind of story that makes for great water cooler conversations. But the very nature of the story also limits who you can talk to about it. Amy Eddings looks at how people are making sense of this ubiquitous media event.

Everyone knew it was coming. After seven months of screaming headlines and leaked grand jury testimony, people even had a good idea of what it would say. But, when Kio Stark and Scott Pilutick double-clicked their way to the Starr report on-line last week, they didn't quite expect what they found.

Kio Stark: There were five or six of us standing around, more people trickling over every time someone went, EEEWWWW.

Amy: Did you start from the beginning?

Scott Pilutik: No, of course not, we went right to the sex part. We all did.
Stark and Pilutic work at Oven Digital, a web design firm in Manhattan. After running a search function on the document for words like "oral sex," co-workers took turns reading parts of the report out loud.

Amy: and how did you feel about that?

Kio: Oh, it was just funny. This is an office that has a lot of high comedy, and no one is particularly embarrassed, so.

Scott: Maybe everyone else wasn't embarrassed, but I was... (laughs) I was a little embarrassed? You know, I didn't feel comfortable with what our president was doing in the Oval Office, myself. It was really to that level, I was a President and I didn't think it would happen to me." I think it was a lot more risque than anyone was prepared for.

That didn't stop any of the brave souls at Oven Digital from forging ahead and continuing their reading of the document. And although Pilutick and Stark were entertained by the uproar, they felt it was high time the media moved on to what they characterized as other, more serious matters of state.

Teacher Charles Osewalt: All right, so we have to define the personal life and public life, right?

At William Howard Taft High School in the Bronx, 10th grade students in Charles Osewalt's media criticism class grapple with the question of why President Clinton's private liaisons should be a matter of public record.

Charles Osewalt, teacher: Natalie.

Natalie: All right. People say that Hillary forgives Clinton, then we should just mind our business, right?

Oswalt: Some people say that, right.

Natalie: But...he's the president! They're just informing us of what he did.

Oswalt: Who's they?

Natalie: The media. If he knows what type of job he has, if he knows what type of job he has, he should know how to keep himself. Everybody's going to be underneath him, wanting to know his life. So. If he didn't want nobody...nobody to know his life or business he just shouldn't have done what he did.

Osewalt says that, unlike many of his colleagues, who bandy about the latest Monica and Bill joke, his students want to talk about issues of trust, forgiveness and redemption.

Amy: Has it made you think about what truth means to you, and what integrity means to you and morality means to you?

Osewalt: Every single day! (laughs) and I'm re-evaluating that as we speak. I mean, am I compromising, am I doing the best of my ability, am I cheating my employer, am I giving one hundred percent? The word character has the word act in it. And I teach my kids, you are not just what you say, you are your actions and what you do. And I think I'm constantly re-evaluating it and I think everybody should.

Caprice Bush, who works for the media giant, Viacom, thinks that the government should also do some re-evaluation. She thinks the Starr report's allegations of perjury, abuse of power, and obstruction of justice are overblown, hyped up by the tawdry circumstances of Clinton's affair...but she doesn't blame the media for taking the bait.

Caprice Bush: It's, it's entertainment! It's like some nasty movie or something. That's what's keeping everybody so interested. It's almost like the government is trying to sell us a movie, and everybody's watching it. You can't blame people for wanting to be entertained. It's just, the people that are putting it out there need to be ashamed.

But shame won't stand in the way of this story, and the dominance it will continue to have in the news. For On the Media, this is Amy Eddings in New York.

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