Over 11,000 pages of Hillary Clinton’s schedules from her years as First Lady were released yesterday, with hungry reporters anxious to dig in. At first blush, their anticipation is not unfounded — getting a better sense of how Clinton spent her years in the White House could bolster or undermine her claims about her experience, which are obviously underpinning her presidential campaign.
But the schedules themselves are actually kind of boring. As the NYT noted, the records have “all the emotional punch of a factory-worker’s timecard.” The materials aren’t a diary, they don’t include transcripts or gripping details, and they more or less just give a sense of where Clinton was on any given day. Hardly the stuff of front-page news (which, of course, it was).
Left with little relevant news, major outlets aimed lower and ran with irrelevant news. Consider this bizarre report from the ABC News “Investigative Unit.”
Hillary Clinton spent the night in the White House on the day her husband had oral sex with Monica Lewinsky, and may have actually been in the White House when it happened, according to records of her schedule released today by the National Archives. […]
The public schedule for Sen. Clinton on Feb. 28, 1997, the day on which Lewinsky’s infamous blue dress would become stained by the president, shows the first lady spent the morning and the night in the White House.
The Feb. 28 schedule lists her as attending four “drop-by” events, closed to the press, between 11 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. and then records her as staying in the White House overnight that fateful day…. According to the Starr report, President Clinton took Lewinsky into an Oval Office bathroom in the early evening, after recording a radio address. Forensic tests later “conclusively” showed that the blue dress she was wearing “was stained with the President’s semen,” according to the Starr report.
It wasn’t just ABC; the lead item this morning on CNN’s political blog was this AP item: “Hillary Clinton was in the White House on a half dozen days when her husband had sexual encounters with Monica Lewinsky, according to the first lady’s calendars released Wednesday.” The report goes on to list every single Lewinsky liaison, and where Hillary Clinton was at the time.
It’s as if media outlets which handled the Lewinsky affair irresponsibly a decade ago have decided to bask in their negligence all over again.
Maybe you like Hillary, maybe you don’t. Maybe you want her to be the Democratic nominee, maybe not. This has nothing to do with any of that.
The point here is that Hillary Clinton’s location during her husband’s affair is of literally no news value 10 years later. These reports are cheap, tawdry, and absurd. By what rationale is this considered important? How does an editor or producer justify humiliating a presidential candidate for no reason?
My suspicion is that shallow journalists, who enjoyed the Lewinsky scandal a little too much a decade ago, never really got over it. Sure, they moved on to other scandals and personal-interest distractions, but they never quite forgot their first love. Given half a chance, they’ll go right back to it, whether it has news value or not. And yesterday, that were given half a chance.
As CNN’s Jack Cafferty noted on the air yesterday afternoon:
“Interesting, isn’t it, all those 11,000, 12,000 pages of documents released today. What’s the first thing that the press corps satisfied their curiosity about? The fact that Hillary Clinton was in the White House the day Monica Lewinsky got the stain on her dress. That moved on one of the wires that I read about at 3:00 this afternoon. Amazing.”
Ironically, there actually may have been some news in the Clinton records, which some reporters brushed past to go straight for the Lewinsky angle. For example, the schedules show that the former First Lady’s responsibilities declined significantly after her healthcare initiative fell apart. They also indicate that Hillary Clinton played a fairly active role in helping the White House pass NAFTA, which was a topic of considerable discussion a few weeks ago. There are even some insights on her Bosnia trip, which became the focus of speculation after the ’90s-era comedian Sinbad contradicted some of her claims about what transpired.
But never mind those substantive, relevant angles; there’s a Lewisnky discussion to renew.