Lewinsky Scandal Illegitimate
CNN's Near-Unanimous Town Meeting
The Tuesday after the Senate
impeachment vote, CNN delivered three hours and 34 minutes of prime time
discussion framed around the liberal agenda that the media were wrong to
pursue the Lewinsky story: A two-part "Conversation with America: We the
People" town meeting with a Larry Ling Live sandwiched in between
(featuring five liberals versus just one conservative). No conservatives
were among the on-stage town meeting panelists: former CBS News anchor
Walter Cronkite, NAACP President Kweisi Mfume, Sally Quinn of the
Washington Post and former Republican Senator Howard Baker.
The show accepted the premise
that the Lewinsky story was an illegitimate invasion of Clinton’s
privacy that distracted from the real issues. Much of the show revolved
around host Jeff Greenfield’s question "How do you put the genie back in
the bottle?" Cronkite answered: "The responsible press has to, first of
all, ignore the salacious scandal on which the tabloids live," meaning
ignore Lewinsky-type stories as journalists should not "deal in people’s
private peccadillos, their moral values, if you please, unless those
peccadillos affected their job."
Conservatives would argue that
the media failed in not pursuing the Gennifer Flowers story back in
1992, but Quinn lamented how alternate media outlets made it impossible
for the story to be suppressed: "The Washington Post and the
New York Times refused to write about Gennifer Flowers. She was
having a press conference and playing tapes, and we weren’t writing
about it. And it was all over the news, and everybody was talking about
it. And finally, the Washington Post was forced to write about
it. I think that’s a problem."
Republican House Manager
Lindsey Graham made a brief appearance, but the first person CNN went to
in a remote from his North Carolina district declared she was pleased
Graham failed: "I’m glad President Clinton stuck in there, Hillary stuck
by his side and the family stayed together."
One minister condemned Clinton,
but most reflected views closer to a Presbyterian minister in Madison,
Indiana: "My own 10-year-old daughter would sit there and hear all of
these things going on on the TV. And she’d point out, but the President
is for education, the President has done these other things. Those are
the things that are important even to a small child at 10 years old." A
Los Angeles Catholic priest insisted: "The future of the human family is
not determined by what the President does with his sex life in the White
House. It has to do with what we’re going to do about 14.5 million
children who are poor in this country...and the Congress doesn’t have
time to debate any nuclear test ban treaty."
Other invited guests used the
CNN platform to denounce conservatives. Harvard’s Dr. Alvin Poussaint
charged: "It was not just about, quote, sex or even perjury. It was also
about bringing down someone who they ideologically oppose. He also
supports abortion. So I think there’s an undercurrent here, all of these
different issues, human rights issues, has to do with disenfranchised
groups in the society becoming more of America in a democratic way, that
somehow the reactionary elements are trying to suppress."
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