Connie vs. Condit’s Charisma
Will she go soft on another Democrat?

By Tim Graham, White House correspondent of World & former director of media analysis at the Media Research Center
August 23, 2001 11:00 a.m.

ust 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.