After the President, a Torrent of Babble

You are old, father William

the young man said

and your hair has grown very white

and yet you incessantly stand on your head--

Do you think, at your age, it is right?

--Lewis Carroll

Whaddaya think? Whaddaya think?

--Larry King on CNN Monday night

*

Whew! What you just heard was a collective sigh of relief following months of agonizing root canal.

Now that the president has confessed to the nation, let’s rejoice that this chapter of the Clinton-Lewinsky-Starr odyssey has concluded, that the accompanying frenzy of wild guessing by much of the media has finally blown over. Enough is enough, don’t you agree? For the good of the nation, we in the media must put this behind us and move forward. Please, folks, let us get on with the job we are paid to do.

Guess wildly about the next chapter.

“I want you to understand that we’re trying to be pillars of accuracy,” CBS anchorman Dan Rather announced Monday morning just prior to President Clinton’s grand jury testimony that CBS, ABC, NBC and the all-news cable networks set up their live shots for with a level of hyperventilation recalling the Wide World of O.J.

“We’ll see you as the trail winds on,” dusty Dan signed off a bit later, sounding evermore like Roy Rogers or Zane Grey out there on the purple sage. We’re the ones with the saddle sores, though.

Although Rather gets credit for earnestly seeking to segregate fact from conjecture, what viewers got mostly about this national catastrophe Monday and early Tuesday were pillars of poop. Much of the coverage: Not appropriate.

So what else is new!

Was this like a family outing at the stadium or what? Evidence that those calling the shots at CNN had finally snapped came when it kept a sports-style time-elapsed clock in the upper right-hand corner of the screen for a couple of hours Monday morning.

“Elapsed time: 00:11 [minutes].

“Status: Testifying.”

Would Clinton be able to beat the clock? Did he have a two-minute drill in his arsenal? Also, would CNN come to its senses and yank the clock? Finally it did.

There were the usual lapses, too, such as writer Gail Sheehy getting asked about the first lady on ABC’s “Good Morning America” Tuesday: “Why does she put up with it?” As if Sheehy, watching from afar, would have a clue. And here was Larry King asking his panel one of his trademark unanswerable questions on CNN Monday night: “What do you make [of this]? What happened? What went wrong?” And why is the Earth round?

On NBC’s “Today,” meanwhile, there was co-host Matt Lauer on Tuesday correctly pressing Clinton senior advisor Rahm Emanuel on whether he felt personally betrayed by the president’s public admission, yet failing to ask an arguably more pertinent question: Shouldn’t Emanuel and his colleagues themselves apologize to the public for earlier stating categorically on TV that Clinton did not have sexual relations with Monica S. Lewinsky?

Why did they have any more credibility now than their boss?

An “army of liars” is what “Hardball” host Chris Matthews titled these familiar Clinton mouthpieces on his MSNBC series Tuesday morning. A tough but fitting indictment. Yet why do Matthews’ and other programs continue to book these types, from both parties, if their spinning and spoon-feeding is so predictable and obviously insincere?

But that’s only the half of it.

When there was something to report, no right-thinking observer of the media has ever faulted the weight of this story’s coverage once it grew to epic stature. When the presidency may be buckling--for whatever reason, valid or invalid--that’s huge.

*

The key phrase, though, is something to report, for it’s TV’s ferocious speculation that’s been by far the most appalling, this week being a screaming metaphor for the demonseed swelling inside some of the nation’s media heavies.

CNN’s King, during his double-sized two-hour show Monday night: “We’ve got about seven minutes left. Time for everybody to get some more words in.”

Isn’t that what this is all about--words? Any words, as long as they fill space?

Who would have predicted the full impact of the 24-hour news cycle that has resulted from the growth of CNN and the more recent arrivals of MSNBC and the Fox News Channel? All-news seemed like a grand concept, and it is, except it has created competitive pressures to be constantly gabbing about high-profile stories even when there is nothing to gab about. Each of these networks has many programs whose needs must be filled. Thus, MSNBC and CNN, in particular, have drained the Clinton-Lewinsky story like vampires, keeping at its neck even on those many occasions when there was no blood left to suck.

So bring on the speculation, however surreal.

That carried over to this week. At midmorning Monday, while Clinton was still with the grand jury, a CNN reporter was inside a Little Rock restaurant asking a patron to guess what “the president is testifying about at this moment.” Was CNN reeling from heat stroke or something?

Several hours later, CNN went to a break promising to return with “the political and legal fallout of the president’s day.” But . . . that day was still in process.

*

Throughout the afternoon, all three cable news channels had people on predicting what the president would say in his speech, if he made it (that wasn’t yet known) and how the nation would respond. Obvious question: Instead of guessing, why not wait and see?

Get outta here. The 24-hour news monster must be fed.

Could it get worse? Yes. Flash-forward to Monday night when, eight minutes before Clinton is scheduled to address the nation, King is going around the horn, asking his panelists: “Does he hit a home run at the plate?”

It says something about CNN and its worship of personalities that it chose King to anchor coverage of this crucial evening instead of the more qualified Bernard Shaw, Judy Woodruff or Jeff Greenfield, who, as part of King’s panel, resembled someone who had set off for a TV studio, taken a wrong turn and wound up on Pluto.

When King asked him to forecast how Clinton would do, Greenfield, the former ABC newsman who is CNN’s senior analyst, replied: “I don’t do predictions.” When asked by King after the speech for a quickie verdict, he said: “I think to judge this on a scale--rhetoric 6, cosmetology 8--is almost offensive.” Well, who hired this guy?

Nearly everyone else on the sprawling panel had no such reservation, which was one reason why Greenfield’s more measured and thoughtful analysis of Monday’s developments stood out so strikingly. Jeffrey Toobin was also especially astute on ABC Monday and Tuesday.

There’s been little in the coverage that you’d designate for a time capsule, unless the purpose was to preserve a snapshot of media manners in the ‘90s. A good project would be to match pundit forecasts with what has actually happened. You could start with George Will’s crystal ball, when he said flat-out about Clinton: “His presidency is as dead--deader--than Woodrow Wilson was when he had a stroke.”

That prediction was delivered on ABC, but not this week. He made it Jan. 25. Just something more to think about.

As the trail winds on.