How Gary Hart and 'Monkey Business' Changed Politics and the Media
Note: Today's Leonard Lopate Show in on tape. This is a rebroadcast of an interview that took place on October 6th, 2014.
In 1987, Gary Hart seemed set to win the Democratic nomination for president and was ahead of George H. W. Bush in the polls. Until rumors of marital infidelity and a photo was taken of Hart and a model near a yacht named Monkey Business. Political reporter Matt Bai recounts the Hart affair and argues that it marked a turning point in the ethos of political media-and, by extension, politics itself-when candidates' "character" began to draw more attention than their political experience. In his book All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid, Bai makes the compelling case that this changed how politics is covered—private lives became public, news became entertainment, and politics became fodder for the tabloids.
