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when the outrage was starting to lose its oomph, Gary Condit decided
it was time to reveal his long-delayed public-relations genius to
the world. The Condit camp ruled out NBC, whose Chandra Levy coverage
was too hot, and CBS, whose Chandra coverage was frozen somewhere
in time. He would be choosing ABC, but which interviewer? The Drudge
Report suggested Diane Sawyer and Barbara Walters would be butting
their hair-sprayed heads again, but Condit chose Connie Chung.
Let's be blunt:
He could have chosen the toughest possible interviewers — say, the
Levys — and it wouldn't help his dead-man-walking political career.
But if he had to decide which personality could enter the hometown
bunker behind the wall of pickup trucks and RVs, Connie Chung was
a better pick than the other starlets.
Barbara Walters
is too legendary, unless Condit wanted to see his interview snippets
displayed any time Barbara recounts her biggest moments, probably
right after the Lewinsky clips. Diane Sawyer would be my personal
favorite. In November 1998, she brought brass knuckles to her interview
with Ken Starr, underlining her distaste for his strange religious
upbringing (without dancing!) and asserting: "I cannot tell
you how many people have said to me, 'ask him.' Do I have a right
to ask about your sex life?" Wouldn't that have been great
to display if she won the Condit contest?
Connie Chung
doesn't lug around the diva power of the other two. Most media mavens
remember Connie as a) the woman who co-anchored the CBS Evening
News from Tonya Harding's ice rink in Oregon, or b) the woman
who asked Newt Gingrich's mother to whisper just to her (and the
nation listening in) that her son thought Hillary was a "bitch."
But I never
thought that was the only memorable moment in that interview on
her old CBS show, Eye to Eye with Connie Chung. Early on,
she questioned the motives for the Gingrich family interview: "Newt
knows you're talking to us, right?... Some people out there would
say he just wants the two of you to talk to us, and talk to the
American people, because he wants everybody to know that he's just
a homespun kind of guy." Despite having the middle name Leroy,
nobody was going to buy Newt as "homespun." He was just
hoping people would realize he was a human being with a mom and
a step dad, as opposed to most media coverage, which suggested he
was an extraterrestrial danger to the survival of the human race.
Connie also
ran down a list of mostly negative descriptions for the Gingriches:
"These are some of the things said about your son — a very
dangerous man...visionary... bomb-throwing guerrilla warrior...abrasive."
If that wasn't negative enough, she headed straight for his first
divorce: "According to a friend at the time, Newt said he was
divorcing Jackie because she wasn't young enough or pretty enough
to be the wife of a President and besides she has cancer."
With this kind of record with Gingrich, a poor-Gary interview with
Condit would look a little odd.
But then, Connie's
interview with the Gingriches looked odd back then when I discovered
a very different interview with a political parent. Sitting there
in the database was a 1993 interview on the Eye to Eye debut
with Virginia Kelley, the mother of Bill and Roger Clinton. True
to the liberal media playbook, she elicited stories from the Clinton
clan showing the president in a positive light: how he protected
them from his abusive stepfather, how he served as a father figure
to his brother. Connie never asked about any negative traits of
Bill Clinton's. In a previously unaired portion of the interview
on January 6, 1994, after Kelley's death, she asked: "It seems
that both of your boys have this desire to be famous, and to be
loved, and to be stars." The smile on Connie's face carried
not one sliver of a suggestion that this was in anyway a bad or
embarrassing thing, as demonstrated in the president's grating chutzpah
or Roger's ridiculous attempt at a singing career.
Just last week,
Connie scored a major interview with Karin Stanford, the mother
of Jesse Jackson's love child. She began the segment: "When
you first heard that Jesse Jackson admitted he'd fathered an out-of-wedlock
child, what did you think? Jackson, the charismatic national symbol
of human rights, the married father of five grown children?"
CBS couldn't consider that to some, the words "charismatic
national symbol of human rights" aren't the first words to
leap to mind.
When it came
time to promote the upcoming interview on Good Morning America,
Antonio Mora challenged Connie about Jackson's absence from the
child's life since the affair was revealed: "Isn't this kind
of hypocritical for a man who has preached responsibility for African
American fathers for such a long time?"
She came to
Jackson's defense: "Well, actually, Karin Stanford herself
says that she admires him for not denying the child right from the
beginning. When it first became public, he was actually the one
who released the information to upstage a tabloid paper that was
going to put it out."
Mora threw
in: "Right, that was going to come out with the story."
Connie maintained the pro-Jackson spin: "But he acknowledged
it, he didn't deny it and she says 'good for him,' because he was
born out of wedlock and understood, you know, the pain that it causes."
Certainly, the most pro-Jackson spin would have been to avoid the
interview, but the tone was oddly soft.
Even if Connie's
latest coup seems oddly soft, media coverage of Condit has often
been oddly soft, and not just to Condit. Major anchors often have
left the impression that somehow, Condit didn't belong to a political
party, and even if he did, that political party had absolutely no
responsibility to guard its own collective image by having any discouraging
words for him. The networks put Newt Gingrich through the wringer
for hitting up donors so he could play the ill-fated professor on
a TV course teaching college kids the secrets of "Renewing
American Civilization." Gary Condit ought to suffer a bit more
for lying to the police and the parents of a girl who is missing
and presumed dead after he used her as part of a stable of sexual
outlets.
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