One Scandalous Story: Clinton, Lewinsky, and Thirteen Days That Tarnished American Journalism

That was another era, of course, and quite different from the one Bill Clinton found himself in at the start of the Monica Lewinsky ordeal. How that scandal went public--and the media's role in making it happen--is Kalb's controversial subject. "I decided to focus tightly on thirteen days of Washington coverage: the eight days leading up to the breaking of the story, the day it broke, and the next four days, when journalists focused on the scandal as if nothing else in the world mattered," he writes. The result was "journalism run amok." In One Scandalous Story, Kalb treats the whole episode with open scorn: "It took only a few days in January 1998 for journalists to realize that they were in uncharted waters. Faced by a scandalous story involving a president and an intern, a competitive twenty-four-hours-a-day news cycle, and a coldly demanding economic imperative, many found themselves violating just about every rule in the book." Kalb offers a detailed chronicle of how the scandal unfolded in the press, filling his tale with a cast of familiar characters, such as Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff (accused of an "unhealthy collaboration" with his sources) and Internet impresario Matt Drudge ("the young man with the Walter Winchell fedora, the cocked eyebrow, and the unshaven chin"). Yet these individuals, in Kalb's telling, were merely following the new economic imperatives of their industry, "one linked to titillation and profit." This resulted in "the most intrusive press invasion of presidential privacy in the history of the nation." Kalb focuses almost all of his fire at the media and largely refrains from criticizing Clinton's actions. No matter what one thinks of how a president ought to behave, though, it's hard to disagree that the media's own behavior might have been much improved during this unseemly episode in American political history. --John Miller

Product Description

In 1963 Marvin Kalb observed the Secret Service escorting an attractive woman into a hotel for what was most likely a rendezvous with President Kennedy. Kalb, then a news correspondent for CBS, didn't consider the incident newsworthy. Thirty-five years later, Kalb watched in dismay as the press dove headfirst into the scandal of President Clinton's affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, disclosing every prurient detail. How and why had the journalistic landscape shifted so dramatically?

One Scandalous Story seeks to answer this critical question through the inside story of thirteen days -- January 13-25, 1998 -- that make up a vital chapter in the history of American journalism. In riveting detail, Kalb examines just how the media covered the Lewinsky scandal, offering what he calls an "X-ray of the Washington press corps." Drawing on hundreds of original interviews, Kalb allows us to eavesdrop on the incestuous deals between reporters and sources, the bitter disagreements among editors, the machination of moguls for whom news is Big Business, and above all, the frantic maneuvering to break the story. With fresh insight, he retraces decisions made by Michael Isikoff of Newsweek, Internet renegade Matt Drudge, Jackie Judd of ABC, Clinton-basher Lucianne Goldberg, Susan Schmidt of The Washington Post, Jackie Bennett of the Office of the Independent Counsel, and other key players in this scandal that veered from low comedy to high drama.

Through the lens of those thirteen turbulent days, Kalb offers us a portrait of the "new news" in all its contradictions. He reveals how intense economic pressures in the news business, the ascendancy of the Internet, the blurring of roles between reporters and commentators, and a surge of dubious sourcing and "copy-cat journalism" have combined to make tabloid-style journalism increasingly mainstream. But are we condemned to a resurgence of "yellow journalism"? Painstakingly documented and sobering in its conclusions, One Scandalous Story issues a clarion call to newsmakers and the American public alike: "Journalism can change for the better -- and must."

Kalb's dissection of journalism's treatment of the unfolding drama in its earliest days is what this book is really about. Kalb explains early on that he was looking for a subject to use as the centerpiece of a discussion about a number of observations he's made over his career about the impact of the press on public policy, how television affects politics and related topics. As the name of the book implies, the developments over the past 30 years, culminating in the Clinton-Lewinsky story, are not good.

Kalb's account explains how coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky story drove the sequence of events. He demonstrates how poor sources, reporting of rumor, and saturation coverage magnified the significance of what was actually happening. Kalb does not justify Bill Clinton's bad behavior, but he makes the point that coverage of that behavior was all out of proportion to what else was going on in the world - and how that coverage wasn't very good anyway. (An interesting "other" development was the US-Iraq showdown of 1998. The thought occurred to me that the Clinton-Lewinsky story could have derailed the American public's preparedness for a larger confrontation - sort of a reverse `wag the dog' phenomena.)

Kalb is at his very best when he picks apart specific reports and bring a magnifying glass to the transcript of actual stories covering the Clinton-Lewinsky tale. My only criticism of this book is that there isn't enough of that. Where ONE SCANDALOUS STORY replays what happened between Clinton, Lewinsky, Ken Starr, etc. it takes away from its exploration of how the story was actually covered.

I also don't think that the end of ONE SCANDALOUS STORY is the end of the story. If coverage of Clinton-Lewinsky represented the culmination of the press's degeneration, it also hastened the subsequent further decline. Coverage of the 2000 election results, if anything, one-upped Clinton-Lewinsky in terms of bad journalism, and in a different but important way, coverage of the 2003 invasion of Iraq represented the complete meltdown of the kinds of journalistic standards Kalb is so concerned with.

Hopefully, Kalb is thinking along the same lines and another book is forthcoming. His point is too important to be made once.


doc in Louisiana   September 16, 2002
 3 out of 14 found this review helpful

Well, Marvin baby tries to do a good job. Unfortunately somewhere he lost his way. I simply did not understand the point he was trying to make. In one way I thought it was a "mea culpa" for Clinton, and in another way it was in regards to how trashy news reporting has become. Maybe it was both, but definitely trying to make heads or tails of this book is challenging. That he started with his episode with Kennedy didn't help his thesis one bit. He mixed apples and oranges and ended up with kiwis -- and I'm not sure yet if they are fruit or vegetable. That's the way I feel about this book too.


Another attempt to rationalize Clinton's scandals   December 31, 2001
 11 out of 57 found this review helpful

This is another attempt, like many others, to rationalize Clinton's scandals. Clinton fan? Buy the book. Otherwise ignore it.


Summary: The Nasty Press Forced Clinton to Commit Perjury   December 19, 2001
 12 out of 56 found this review helpful

If you want objectivity, buy some other book. If you love the ex-president and still think he is a hero you will love this long-winded apology for his most notable acts in office. In 1963 Mr. Kalb should have reported about his abuse at the hands of the Secret Service as well as the reason they took such measures - to cover up JFK's affair. Apparently Kalb's silence bought him continued access to JFK's White House - a compromising journalistic tactic which he laments in this book.


Interesting study   October 23, 2001
 50 out of 61 found this review helpful

Marvin Kalb has written a book looking at the coverage of the first weeks of Monicagate. It is not a "tell all" book. He doesn't expose all the deals cut between various news organizations and the Office of Independent Council. But what he reveals is disturbing enough.

I suspect when future historians look back at Monicagate they will be writing quite a different story from what has been written so far. The real story has to be written by people who don't have an investment in it. Unfortunately the entire Washington Media Elite is so invested in this story that I don't trust any of them to write an objective account of it. They can't tell all without revealing their own complicity in it which is why Michael Isikoff's book was so disappointing. He had gone out of his way to erase his own fingerprints.

Kalb's book is disappointing in one regard. He doesn't examine the implications of what happens when the press trades access for silence. The press kept quiet about Starr's collusion with Jones lawyers for fear he would cut off leaks. Unfortunately this kind of quid pro quo happens every day across the country. Reporter keep quiet about prosecutorial abuse in exchange for illegal leaks from prosecutors, Police, the FBI. Any discussion of this is treated as taboo by the press.

Kalb also doesn't discuss the Grand Jury laws broken by Starr's office in the name of "the rule of law". But in fairness that is an altogether different book.

Overall Kalb's book is helpful in understanding the hysteria that gripped the press in 1998.