The Media's Scandals

I really wish we could transport all the technology, all the 24-hour news agencies, and all the political watchdog organizations back to the 1960’s just to see what would happen. The CIA director having an affair with his biographer pales in comparison to the President of the United States romping around with the most attractive, most fascinating Hollywood actress in the country.

I’m deeply grateful to all of the educators in my life, but none beat out the many loose-lipped history professors prone divulging scandalous digressions I’ve had since entering college. Jack Kennedy seems to be a favorite of these types of teachers, and they find particular enjoyment in telling and retelling a particular risqué scene in which a Secret Service agent desperately tries to delay Jackie Onassis on her walk through the White House lawn while another shouts a coded warning over a hedge, behind which the President frantically searches for his swimming trunks – or at least a towel – while a third agent ushers a panicked trio of nude secretaries through the back gate.

Although a clear embellishment, imagine if Fox News had gotten a hold story about the nation’s 35^th President, or one of the many like it. Would he have been impeached? Or forced to resign? Or, maybe, he would have been only superficially reprimanded, a punishment as motivated by the jealousy of his peers as by any wrongdoing on the adulterer’s part.

Of course, many of these stories did not come to public light until well after the assassination of Kennedy. Overall, his affairs were largely kept under wraps, expect for a particularly sultry “Happy Birthday,” that is.

But I still would like to know what would happen if the constituency of John F. Kennedy knew of his sex scandals in the way we know of Petraeus’s, or Clinton’s, or John Edwards’ or Anthony Weiner’s.

Sure, there would be at least some outrage. Walter Cronkite would give a particularly disapproving newscast on that Wednesday evening, just as Brian Williams had earlier this week. A headline, involving some kind of double entendre, would splash across each of the major newspapers. And some sum of money would be directed towards the mistress(es), to either encourage her to continue or discourage her from speaking.

But would it go this far? The Petraeus scandal has been in the papers for almost a week and I seems to be picking up steam!

Would reporters fifty years ago have dug as deep into the muck as today’s do, just to get a few lines for a scandal sheet story? Would Senators and Representatives be calling for investigational hearings and resignations? Would they be calling for impeachments? Would they be, as many members of the today’s House and Senate are, decrying the fact that those bastards at the FBI left them out of the loop during the course of the investigation and deprived Intelligence Committee members of a few weeks of entertainment?

I don’t think anything would happen differently in the hypothetical than what already happened in history. Maybe, for instance if the New York Times, got a hold of JFK’s affair(s) and printed up a story, there would be outrage. I guess there certainly would. But it wouldn’t last; it wouldn’t go that far, not as far as it seems to now. At least I don’t think.

Why? Is the United States that much moral (or morally outrage-able) society? Do we presently hold up much higher standards of fidelity and integrity and honesty and are more likely to throw rotten vegetables at our leaders when they inevitably stumble underneath them? Although I can easily imagine the archetypal 60’s man Don Draper slapping a philandering JFK on the back, jokingly calling him a dog and sipping on an Old Fashioned, I can’t say that modern America is more “moral” or “rooted in traditional values” or any more like Inis Beag than it was fifty years ago.

Now we must confront the horrible monstrous machine that is The Media. It just chugs along, this media machine. It seeks any fuel it can possible guzzle, and when it can’t find any, the machine must to create fuel for itself, even resorting to ruining the lives of generally upstanding, although admittedly flawed, members of society.

Stories, and the outrage attached to them, are determined by the ratings potential, rather than their actual importance to current events. The heads of these “news” entities know exactly what gets the public’s attention and they don’t have the decency to protect us from it. Maybe the reason nobody in the 60’s heard about Kennedy’s extra-marital activities isn’t because the public didn’t or wouldn’t care. Maybe it’s because leading journalists at the time didn’t feel the pressure to get ratings and page views and mouse clicks and were able to maintain some journalistic integrity over their subject matter.

Petraeus spent at least a good chunk of his time as CIA chief blowing up innocent civilians in Pakistan and we barely heard about that from Anderson Cooper. But now that we find out he’s banging a woman on the side, Petraeus is all we hear about. It’s all anyone talks about.

What would have happened if Petraeus’s affair leaked on the Friday before Election Day, instead of the one after?

No one would know who the president is. And maybe no one would care.