Correction Needed: WashPost Book Critic Indicts Fox News (Born In 1996) for Gary Hart Scandal In 1987

October 12th, 2014 9:24 AM

Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley somehow imagined Fox News played a role in Gary Hart’s undoing over his adultery in 1987....but Fox News went on the air in 1996. Aren’t there any copy editors at the Post who are old enough to remember such a basic fact about the news business?

Yardley was reviewing the new book “All The Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid” by former Newsweek reporter Matt Bai, lamenting how Hart was ruined by a suddenly nosy “media rampage,” and politics was forever changed. While Yardley correctly suggests Bai’s prose is overwrought, it’s also remarkably un-historical, since the press never exactly ruined the presidential chances of Bill Clinton or John Edwards in a “media rampage.”

In those days “the press” meant, to all intents and purposes, newspapers. By 1987, though, things were beginning to change. CNN and Fox had recently arrived on the scene, jazzing up the news in ways unfamiliar to the stodgy big three of ABC, CBS and NBC...

CNN came on the air in 1980, so that half is also a little thin. Yardley laments Washington Post reporter Paul Taylor asking Hart if he had ever committed adultery. The widespread media revulsion at that Taylor question was what changed modern journalism. Yardley reflects that anti-moralistic urge, even approvingly quoted from Hendrik Hertzberg, somehow putting our liberal media into some sort of Islamic jihad:

In the minds of too many people in the media, the Hart case legitimized sensationalism masquerading as serious journalism. It now became permissible for journalists to go after politicians’ private behavior on the grounds that what they did away from reporters and cameramen was a guide to their true “character.” Bai, who writes about politics for Yahoo News, quotes a sensible piece by Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Republic (Hertzberg, formerly a speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, now writes for the New Yorker), in which he said that Hart “has now become the first American victim of Islamic justice” and continued: “He has been politically stoned to death for adultery. The difference is that in Iran, the mullahs do not insult the condemned prisoner by telling him that he is being executed not for adultery but because of ‘concerns about his character,’ ‘questions about his judgment,’ or ‘doubts about his candor.’ ”

It happens that though I was not in any way involved in The Post’s coverage of Hart and have never met Paul Taylor, I did devote part of a weekly column I wrote in those days to Hart’s case. I said that “in Washington, and wherever else two or more politicians may gather, he who does not get caught has ‘character’ and he who gets caught has none.” That seems to me as true today as it was then. The persecutorial media that so alarms Bai has no real interest in “character” and oceans of interest in sex and sensation. This unfortunately at times has involved what is known as the “mainstream” media, but the contributions of People and US Weekly and the National Enquirer and, especially, the Daily Mail Online and all those bloggers madly typing away have only intensified things. Probably the political climate would be a lot healthier and the political discussion a lot more constructive if the media would simply obey that most basic of biblical injunctions: He who is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone.

That’s a remarkably cynical conclusion, and ignores a lot of other biblical injunctions against adultery. Yardley is one of those cynics who thinks every politician cheats on his wife, and it means nothing about his character. He may even agree with Eleanor Clift that “libido and leadership are linked,” thus depriving us of sexy President Hart.

PS: Tom Johnson reminded me that Yardley's own adultery might explain his attitude.