[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 180 (Tuesday, November 14, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2175-E2176]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        THE CHARACTER CONUNDRUM

                                 ______


                         HON. MICHAEL G. OXLEY

                                of ohio

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, November 14, 1995

  Mr. OXLEY. Mr. Speaker, I would like to bring a recent column by 
Richard Harwood of the Washington Post regarding the media to the 
attention of my colleagues.
  The reality is that journalists have real power in America. To a 
degree, this is as it should be, since a free and independent press is 
critical to the health of any democracy. With this power, however, come 
certain responsibilities. Accuracy is one. Objectivity is another. Now, 
as Mr. Harwood points out, a measure of good judgment would be welcome.
  As more and more of the fourth estate descends into tabloid-quality 
reporting, the question arises as to the motives behind the trend. 
Increased circulation--or ratings, as the case may be--certainly tops 
the list. Sadly, sex, scandal, and negativism sell. Add to this a 
seemingly innate cynicism among reporters and an institutional bias 
against conservative tastes and ideas, and you have the makings of the 
current state of affairs.
  This is not to say that reporters should avoid matters of 
controversy. Rather, it is to suggest that an attempt be made to run 
stories of real substance on matters of genuine consequence, rather 
than exploiting every topic for its gratuitous shock value.
  The media elite like to make themselves out as selfless servants of 
the public good, standing up for the little guy against the 
establishment. The truth is that the press is one of the most 
entrenched, unaccountable institutions in Washington. The next time a 
group of news editors gets together to wring their hands over the 
tawdry state of their industry, they need look no further than their 
own daily decisions for responsibility.
  With that, Mr. Speaker, I commend the following column to the 
attention of all interested parties.

                       The `Character' Conundrum

                          (By Richard Harwood)

       James David Barber of Duke University is the author of the 
     proposition that our fate as a society is more dependent than 
     we may realize on the quality of our journalism.
       As the political parties have sunk into a state of virtual 
     irrelevance, journalists have become the new bosses of 
     presidential politics. They are the power brokers and 
     character cops who dominate the process of ``identifying, 
     winnowing, advancing and publicizing'' the people who would 
     lead the nation.
       The task of the journalist, Barber tells us, is to 
     illuminate the ``question of character. . . . The problem is 
     to get behind the mask to the man, to the permanent basics of 
     the personality that bear on Presidential performance.'' The 
     key is ``the life story, the biography. . . . For people 
     sense that all our theoretical constructs and elaborate 
     fantasies take their human meaning from their incarnation in 
     the flesh and blood of persons. . . . Biography brings theory 
     down to earth, history to focus, fantasy to reality.''
       The late Theodore White made a start on this kind of 
     journalism with his book ``The Making of the President 
     1960.'' ``The idea,'' he wrote, ``was to follow the campaign 
     from beginning to end. It would be written as a novel is 
     written, with anticipated surprises as, one by one, early 
     contenders vanish in the primaries until only two jousters 
     struggle for the prize in November. . . . It should be 
     written as a story of a man in trouble, of the leader under 
     the pressures of circumstance. The leader--and the 
     circumstances. That was where the story lay.''
       The book was an enormous success. Other journalists 
     followed his lead, including Richard Ben Cramer, whose 
     thousand-page volume on the 1988 campaign--``What It 
     takes''--is recognized as a masterpiece.
       The problem with these great studies of character and 
     action is that the information they contained was not 
     available to voters until after the elections had long since 
     been decided. Cramer's book involved six years of work and 
     was not published until 1992.
       Barber concedes the problem: ``Journalism will continue to 
     be history in a hurry. That is the main stumbling block.'' A 
     fellow political scientist, Thomas Patterson of Syracuse 
     University, insists it will always be so because that is the 
     nature of the news business. ``A party,'' Patterson argues, 
     ``is driven by the steady force of its traditions and 
     constituent interests. . . . [It] has the incentive--the 
     possibility of acquiring political power--to give order and 
     voice to society . . . to articulate interests and to forge 
     them into a winning coalition. The press has no such 
     incentive and no such purpose. Its objective is the discovery 
     and development of good stories.''
       And ``good stories,'' he writes, increasingly are defined 
     as ``negative'' stories, stories that ``expose'' some trivial 
     gaffe or misbehavior on the superficial assumption that they 
     tell us something important about the ``character'' and 
     ``fitness'' of candidates. More often, he argues, stories of 
     this kind tell us more about reporters' cynicism and contempt 
     for politics than about the character of the people they 
     write about.
       Richard Ben Cramer observed this in the baby boomers of the 
     press corps and was appalled and driven to hyperbole as they 
     worked over Gary Hart and his ``character flaws'' in 1988. 
     These were the people of whom it could be said that in their 
     salad days ``if sex were money, they all would have been 
     rich.'' But now ``the salient fact about this boom generation 
     had nothing to do with its love-and-drug-addled idealism when 
     it--when they--were the hope and heritors of the world.
       ``By 1987, they still felt the world was theirs . . . and 
     ought, by all rights, to dance to their tune. . . . But the 
     salient fact at this point in their lives was . . . they were 
     turning forty. They were worried about their gums. They were 
     experts on soy formula. They were working seriously on their 
     (late or second) marriages. They were livid about saturated 
     fats in the airline food. . . . They did not drink, they did 
     not smoke, drugs were a sniggering memory. . . . And they 
     certainly, God knows, did not mess around. Sex! It was tacky. 
     It was dangerous. It was (sniff!) . . . not serious.
       ``And . . . no one else was going to get away with sex 
     either. Or drugs. Or ill health. Or fouling their air.''
       They not only nailed Hart with charges of infidelity but 
     nailed Douglas Ginsberg, a Supreme Court nominee, for smoking 
     pot years earlier. They nailed Clarence Thomas for alleged 
     lasciviousness, Bill Clinton for sex and experimentation with 
     a joint, and tried to nail George Bush for an alleged affair 
     with a co-worker. John Kennedy didn't live long enough to get 
     the treatment.
       Must presidential candidates--or journalists or bankers--
     come to marriage as virgins to prove their ``character'' and 
     ``fitness'' for office? Must journalists, on those terms, be 
     questioned on their fitness to judge others? Does an 
     adulterous act, the sometime ingestion of a proscribed 
     substance, too-slow dancing or the recitation of an ethnic 
     joke now get you a permanent sentence in the political 
     wilderness? Does having an abortion get you a disqualifying 
     Scarlet Letter?
       The columnist Mary McGrory asked some questions recently 
     about Bill Clinton, who is now 2\1/2\ years into his first 
     term as president; ``Is his character not yet jelled--is he a 
     14-year-old who might still grow up? Or is this a permanent 
     pattern of oscillation between mature grown-up and sniveling 
     teenager?''
       All the journalistic energies spend in 1992 on Gennifer 
     Flowers and similar matters did not get to or have any 
     obvious relevance to the character and fitness questions that 
     still puzzle McGrory and countless other journalists and 
     citizens.
       One thing is certain. When Prof. Barber exhorted us to 
     examine and illuminate character, he was not talking about 
     the insubstantial trash that we too often pass off as wisdom 
     and insight into who these people are who want to lead the 
     country. ``As far as I can see,'' he wrote, ``all of us are 
     more or 

[[Page E 2176]]
     less neurotic, damned, healthy, saved, debased and great. That does not 
     mean you send the grocer to fix your your plumbing. . . . 
     [You] try to reach beyond characterization to political 
     impact.''
       A subsidiary industry of the news business is the post-
     election conference or seminar on how we went wrong in our 
     work. Why did we commit so much ``tabloid journalsim''? Why 
     was coverage of the ``real issues'' so lously? Why didn't we 
     better understand the candidates, their characters, their 
     personalities?
       When all this psycho-babble is over and the next campaign 
     comes around, we tend to repeat the same scenario because we 
     can't help ourselves, because the habits of journalism are 
     too hard to kick, because our history is too hurried, because 
     truth and news are not the same.

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