Our President/Their Scandal: The Role of the British Press in Keeping the Clinton Scandals Alive

Abstract

The spring of 1994 was an interesting time for news in Washington. The Clinton administration’s flagship domestic policy, health care industry reform, was being debated; intervening in Haiti to restore the democratically elected government was being openly discussed; nuclear diplomacy was being carried on with varying degrees of urgency in relation to North Korea, India and Pakistan; the first free elections in South Africa’s history were coming up. Hanging over all events was the ongoing war in Bosnia.

If you lived in America and read the newspaper you could read about all these things. You would come away from reading the day’s news with a general sense that the Clinton team was still trying to find its feet. You would certainly not come away thinking the Administration was in crisis. If you lived in London you would have had quite a different impression. The President most of the American press was covering, and the President the British press was covering were entirely different. The British press corps in Washington seemed wholly focussed on the sexual harassment lawsuit against the President being made by Paula Jones. They gleefully reported every sordid allegation coming out of Arkansas. In some quarters of the British press Vince Foster’s corpse was exhumed to be anecdotally examined for proof that he had been murdered.

I live in London. That spring I was working as National Public Radio’s London correspondent. Part of my job was to read the British press and the American press every day. It seemed to me the British papers had gone mad. That the tabloids would want to play up sex scandals involving the President was understandable. Scandal is an essential part of their editorial mix. But the quality press: The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian and the Independent all took an astonishing interest in scandal stories – at the expense of other news.

I wasn’t the only person having this epiphany. Historian Arthur Schlesinger visited London that spring to give a lecture. He was reported to have asked Bruce Gornick, the local head of the organization Democrats Abroad, “The British press are really hard on President Clinton. Why?”

It was a good question. It was a question asked frequently at the White House in ensuing years. It remains a good question. To find the answer it’s necessary to understand the competitive nature of the British press; the increasingly symbiotic relations of the media and political elites in London and Washington; and, the way Clinton opponents tried to use the media – including the British press, to get their stories into American discourse.