It almost always comes to this during seasons of politics: At some point the media become the news. This is not a comfortable position to be in, especially when journalists have gotten there by asking questions that good folks just don`t ask, at least not in public.
President Bush calls these questions ”sleaze” and says the media ought to give some thought to their behavior. He must sense that he has America on his side, having seen the sympathetic public response to his expression of anger at being asked about a New York Post article that quoted a passage from a book reporting a dead man`s speculation that Bush had been unfaithful to his wife.
The fact is, he and the public are right. Journalists ought to worry about becoming a band of modern inquisitors prying into the private lives of public officials. They ought to worry not just because their audience doesn`t like it. They ought to worry because they are human beings, subject to standards of common decency.
There are times when private behavior has public importance-when it impinges on public business, for example, or reveals a deep character flaw that could cause public problems. The media are quite justly accused of having in the past looked the other way when they saw drunkenness and other egregious behavior by political leaders.
So sometimes it is necessary for reporters to ask questions that are embarrassing to ask and more embarrassing to answer. And it may be necessary to do so even when a lot of good people would rather they didn`t. But that does not turn the press pass into a license to be a 20th Century Torquemada doing random morality checks.
To begin with, a reporter ought to have a solid basis for asking the question. It is one thing to ask Bill Clinton about the assertions of Gennifer Flowers or Bush about the allegation in a book, and quite another to ask them or anyone else whether they had ever been unfaithful, which at best is moral zealotry and at worst an attempt to increase one`s own importance by goading somebody powerful into making a mistake.
The means of asking an intimate question also should be appropriate to the level of credibility of the report that gave rise to it. When the New York Post or a supermarket tabloid carries a story, a respectable journalist might think twice about asking for a response in an interview in the Oval Office with the cameras running. In some circumstances, an official denial by a press spokesman is all that an allegation deserves. And after a candidate has given a response to such a question, a journalist ought to have a good reason for bringing it up again.
There are a number of reasons why these simple rules do not operate today.
First, the media are not one entity; they are many. The responsible silence of 99 can be broken by the crudeness of one.
Second, the packaging and hermetic sealing of political candidates create a temptation to try to pierce the cover by making things personal. (This may also be why a candidate these days is asked whether he would choose his political position on abortion over his relationship with his daughter or his position on the death penalty over his rage at the rape of his wife.)
Finally, we are a society obsessed with function and dysfunction in the intimate realm. Such national fascinations always end up playing themselves out in politics, which in a democracy is supposed to reflect what people care about.
These are reasons but not excuses. It would be better if we all had less curiosity about the private lives of politicians and a bit more curiosity about the details of candidates` political beliefs, which are often as difficult to discover as a secret sin.
But until then, the standards of discretion of the daytime talk show should not be adopted by the news media. Civility and a respect for others ought to restrain the behavior of journalists; the right to ask and speak freely does not make obnoxiousness a virtue.
