Dana - 2008: Politics and the Media

Dana Edwards         04/10/08

Politics and the Media

A few weeks ago I stood in line at a supermarket, carefully setting the plastic separator on the conveyor belt to distinguish my milk and cheerios from the cat food, beer, and various canned items belonging to the man in front. I found myself lazily scanning the magazine rack for amusing headlines: Women’s Health –“Lose Ten Pounds in Three Days!”, Men’s Health - “Get Huge and Ripped, Star – “Britney’s Hopeless Crack Addiction”, Cosmopolitan- “Fifty Ways to Please Your Man”, Okay - “Heath Ledger: The Real Story”. There was nothing new, just the same old exaggerated celebrity gossip, same old digitally-enhanced images of anorexic models and steroid-pumping, superhuman hulks. But then, just as I was turning to the candy rack to check out the newest flavors of gum, something caught my eye: “ Governor Sex Scandal”, a bold headline accompanied by the glaring, concerned face of former Governor Eliot Spitzer.  

Up to that point, I had figured –perhaps hoped- that politicians were spared from infotainment, the merciless gossip and gross invasions of privacy that encompass Hollywood stars and pop icons in trashy tabloids. Magazines like Star and Okay, I assumed, stuck to lambasting celebrities and fueling the American fascination with entertainment culture. When politicians fool around and get caught, as they invariably do, they deserve a more respectable medium such as CNN, or at least a real newspaper, I thought. I was oblivious. Now, it seems, the personal lives of our very leaders are fair game for supermarket newsstands, put up on display for the oh-so-sophisticated tabloid demographic to shake its head in harsh moral judgment.

In the past year, all the media have had numerous field days- even weeks- as politicians left and right have been caught with their pants down, or with their feet in neighboring men’s-room stalls. 2007 and 2008 saw eleven major scandals, ranging from Congressman Glenn Murphy’s sexual assault on a sleeping man to Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s affair with his Chief-of-Staff, Christine Beatty. More than one sixth of all the American political sex scandals that have ever gone public took place in 2007 and 2008, and the year has only begun! If I were to plot a graph with the number of scandals on the y-axis, and the years, since 1797 (the Alexander Hamilton-Maria Reynolds affair) on the x-axis, it would closely resemble the exponential function, y=3^(x-1797).

 What’s going on? Are they in heat? Are the officials letting out steam in the waning months of the Bush Administration? No, I don’t think politicians have suddenly become unfaithful, unscrupulous sex fiends. Political philandering is as old as the oldest profession itself.  As Henry Kissinger famously said, “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” And the politician’s lifestyle is the ultimate environment for extramarital affairs, a little hanky panky while away from the Misses up on Capitol Hill. The growing number of political sex scandals, it seems, is due to the flaunters of those scandals themselves, the media, and not to the congressmen and governors who are acting as they always have. As Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker recently put it, “…the key variable is not the libidos of the politicians but the vigilance of the agencies, public and private, that keep a squinty eye on them.”

The eyes of the agencies are indeed squinty these days. You can hardly involve yourself in a prostitution ring without having your phone conversations with your favorite call girl wiretapped by federal investigators. In all seriousness, something has changed in the overall attitude towards these affairs, and the resolve with which internal organizations examine their political subjects. Forty-five years ago, during John F. Kennedy’s presidency, maters as such were far more hush-hush. Kennedy, as we now know, was an obsessive womanizer who apparently slept with a different woman every night. No one in the White House looked in to his bedroom conduct or tried to expose him as the sex addict he was. The secret service, in on Kennedy’s secret, not only swore to keep it that way but also helped provide him with his nightly mistresses. The fact that no one revealed him, not even one of the -by my count- six hundred odd women he slept with between 1961 and 1963, attests to a social and political atmosphere in which people really didn’t want to know. 

Here’s my theory; two major changes since the early 1960’s have caused the ever-growing numbers of political sex scandals: changes in technology and culture. We are living in the information age. (Or at least relative to the past we can call it the information age; perhaps people in the future will transmit thoughts telepathically, creating an abundance of readily available info the likes of which are presently unknown.) With the Internet currently at the fingertips of more than two thirds of our country’s populace, the slightest mention of scandal can explode into nationwide phenomena. Television, as well, is watched more often and by more people than it was half a century ago, though I daren’t say everyone is watching the news; shows like American Idol and One Tree Hill (whatever that is) dominate the ratings. Tabloids, as I saw at the supermarket, are now huge; millions of Americans read them religiously. My point is that it is easier than ever to broadcast and view information of any kind. The vehicle for conveying political sex scandals is there, now the motivation to do so:

For whatever reason, Americans today seem to be less interested in actual news, and more in sensational incidents and juicy details- gossip, in short. The media, as always, have adapted to the demands and interests of their viewers. They report more scandals and less actually important and relevant news; entertainment has taken priority over quality and significance. Let me use myself as an example. Up until Eliot Spitzer’s scandal, I had never heard of him. Now, all I know of the man is that he likes to sleep with prostitutes, and that he fraudulently uses taxpayers’ dollars to pay for the high-class service. Why don’t I know much about his political actions, about the accomplishments and downfalls that are actually relevant to his job title? Americans aren’t as interested in those boring details; they want to know about sex. The media respond by showing sex. Let me clarify, however, that the media are not totally innocent, simply employing the concept of supply and demand. They have, in a way, grabbed hold of the American interests and amplified them. We now hunger for more gossip and less substance. The news channels, the Internet and the tabloids all pander to the prurient interests of today’s consumers, pander to the immature kid inside every one of us that causes us to watch Jerry Springer and like it.

To sum up, to make sense of this outburst of sexual peccadilloes among our nation’s most powerful, I offer some closing thoughts. Way back in the 18th or 19th century, sexual misconduct in congress went for the most part unnoticed and un-remarked upon. It was almost the same far later in the 1960’s. Today scandals are rampant. Nothing has changed in the politicians. They have always fooled around and will always fool around. Nothing has changed in our moral standards; we have always been and will always be a puritanical society. It is we who have changed. We want to hear about the sex lives of our leaders, and I find it sad and creepy. In addition, 19th century and 1960’s political philanderers got away with it because the technology wasn’t there to broadcast their misconduct, and the media wasn’t so pervasive and invasive. Men on horseback couldn’t get the message across as well as the Internet can.

Unless we take after ancient China and require our politicians to be strictly eunuchs or, far better, we stop caring about our officials’ personal lives, I expect we will see far more sex scandals in the future, far more Eliot Spitzers forced to resign for matters totally irrelevant to gubernatorial affairs.