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The Starr Report: the Old Media Bows Before the Internet

By Richard Wiggins

riday, September 11, 1998, is a day that will live in infamy. Yes, of course, historians will mark the day that the public first saw the detailed allegations about President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. But September 11, 1998 will go down in history for another reason: it was also the day that the old media fully capitulated to the new media – the Internet.

Every major television network and newspaper organization spent the afternoon of September 11 rushing to get the report out verbatim before their competitors did. Not analysis of the report, or a summary of the report – but the report itself.

For the television networks, the spectacle was like none ever seen before. Of course, television has specialized in live coverage of breaking events since the 1956 political conventions and the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy. But never have I seen television networks scrambling over each other to read a written report over the air.

On NBC, we had Gwen Ifill, a respected journalist and a former reporter for The New York Times, live on camera, flipping through a printed copy of the Starr report, reading passages as she encountered them. NBC anchor Tom Brokaw at one point admitted "You're watching us do our homework on the air."

Over at CBS, the story wasn't much better. At one point a correspondent was seen with her back to the camera as she looked at a computer monitor behind her, reading text of the report as downloaded in Netscape.

At another point, venerable CBS reporter Bob Shieffer was on camera reading from the report, and he asked the camera to pan down and show assistant editors on their knees, pawing through printouts to find juicy passages to read. Shieffer had previously editorialized about his discomfort with reporting the details of this story, and having to read the salacious passages on air must have stuck in his craw.

The question arises: what value is television providing when they are rushing to read a report on air verbatim, when citizens can get the report themselves over the Net? One answer might be that it was actually pretty hard to get hold of the report over the Net on Friday (see discussion on that issue below). Yet what public service is being performed when anchors and journalists paw through a 400 page document and proclaim "OK, here's something good!" and they read about the September 10, 1995 encounter instead of the April 23, 1996 encounter?

The role of journalists is to sift through voluminous amounts of information and pick out the most important facts and evidence so that the public, the vast majority of which will never have time to read a 400-page report on this matter, knows the high points. "But they had no choice other than to do this, because television is now competing with the Internet" you say. If that's true, it's a sad day for journalism. If "journalists" are skimming a report for the salacious parts in real time on camera, they are no longer adding any value at all. In fact, their contribution is of negative value: they are not going to read the entire report live on camera – wait for the mini series division to do that – and therefore their hastily-chosen selections are not likely to be the best summary of the report's high points.

Can you imagine a different world, in which Tom Brokaw breaks in for this brief announcement:

In other words, "It would be a disservice to you to try to pick this report apart live on the air. We need time to digest the report to find the important parts. Goodbye for now."

Can't imagine that? No, probably not – no network wants to be trumped by the Internet.

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