CORN: Gary Condit and Popcorn Journalism

I swear -- please believe me -- I was not going to write about the Chandra Levy-Gary Condit matter. Really. Then I tripped across this line tossed out by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd in reference to the Levy-Condit story:

"It's just as legitimate as covering the patients bill of rights or campaign finance, maybe more so, because here the press has a crucial role in forcing out the truth."

Maybe more so? Hours before I perused these three words, I had been called by a booker for a cable television show. The previous day The Washington Post had published a story noting the executive producer of The CBS Evening News considered the Levy-Condit business non-news and had kept any mention of it from passing between Dan Rather's lips. Would I come on the show, the booker asked, and defend the Condit-ain't-news position? (I guess the producer himself was unavailable.)

Of course not, I replied. I had already appeared on several news-talk shows discussing the case. Obviously, I believed it is a subject deserving coverage. But I said I would be glad to appear on the show to discuss the proportionality of the coverage. Does it warrant all the attention it has been receiving, particularly on the cable news networks? Has the story been excessively hyped to Monica-ish levels and inappropriately gussied up with dramatic musical cues and miniseries-like titles (MSNBC: "The Search for Chandra"; Fox News Channel: "Vanished: Where is Chandra Levy?")

Look at how the media first covered this, I told the booker, who was too polite to hang up. They started somewhat bashfully and cautiously. The sex angle hovered in the background, but most of the media were slow to go all out on the story. The Washington Post demurely placed much of its early coverage in the Metro section.

As facts (and speculation) emerged and sex became a explicit component of the store -- and as Condit's lies about the sex became apparent -- the cable networks and the tabloid newspapers pumped up the coverage. And the cable-nets and the tabs had what they are ever on the look-out for: the One-Big-Story that can play day after day, dripping with drama and peopled by characters. In this instance, an ambitious, missing, young -- and pregnant? -- woman, a congressman who rides a hog, a frightened flight attendant, and -- get this -- a minister's daughter. More to come, presumably. Reality television don't get much better.

Hell, yes it's a story. A congressman withholding information relevant to a police investigation and a congressman perhaps suborning perjury (by allegedly asking the flight attendant to lie to the FBI about their alleged affair). And there is the prospect of the murder of a woman who was entangled with a lawmaker. ("A philanderer or a murderer?" one MSNBC reporter said breathlessly.) The question, I said to the booker, is not whether to cover the case, but how to cover it while maintaining perspective on what else is happening in our wild and wacky world.

"Well, it's summer," she replied. "Not too much is going on." (She was echoing a soundbite from University of Virginia professor Larry Sabato: "I always tell political people that summertime is the most dangerous time of year because something is going to fill the media void. And that something is usually scandalous.")

Testing her patience, I remarked, actually there's a lot of newsy stuff transpiring, and I went through the list. The patients' bill of rights, the no-holds-bar battle over campaign finance reform, the disappearing budget surplus, the Bush Administration effort to scuttle a UN conference designed to control the global flow of small arms, the stem-cell debate, the Bush discount drug plan assailed by critics for being a half-measure, the exchange of fighting-words between the NAACP and the White House, the Olympics in Beijing, the smelly deal in which the Salvation Army backed Bush's faith-based initiative in exchange for a White House regulation that would allow the Salvation Army to escape local and state anti-discrimination laws, the political fundraising records just set by both parties, the acceleration of Bush's unbudgeted national missile defense plan, the conservative initiative for a constitutional amendment that would ban same-sex marriage.