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Copies of Brill's Content have now flooded Portland's newsstands. The self-proclaimed "Independent Voice of the Information Age" rushed its August issue into print last month to take advantage of a journalistic coup (titled "Pressgate") by editor and publisher Steve Brill. For this single contribution to the continuing Monica Lewinsky saga, the inaugural issue of Brill's magazine merits attention. By now, most everyone pursuing a life in journalism feels somehow violated by the way this story has been covered. It's not so much the tawdry nature of the allegations, or even the cast of characters. Rather, the story simply reeks of too much information for which there is inadequate documented support. With the publication of "Pressgate," our lingering suspicions about the quality of the reporting are supported by specifics. Aside from independent counsel Ken Starr, the key players in Brill's sordid yet thoroughly engaging drama are Lucianne Goldberg, a trash-talking literary agent interested in conservative causes; Linda Tripp, the embittered government functionary who, Brill writes, "[f]or years...had been a frustrated client of Goldberg's, hoping to sell a White House scandal memoir"; and Michael Isikoff, a hard-driving staff writer for Newsweek whom Goldberg affectionately dubbed "Spikey." "The abuses that were Watergate," Brill writes, "spawned great reporting. The Lewinsky story has reversed the process. Here, an author in quest of material [Tripp] teamed up with a prosecutor in quest of a crime [Starr], and most of the press [led by Isikoff] became a cheering section for the combination that followed." Brill's reporting contains plenty of sourced material to buttress its conclusion and is accompanied by an eerie day-by-day account of how the media actually covered the Lewinsky story during its first three weeks, from Jan. 21 through Feb. 11. Brill's article has come in for harsh criticism from Starr and Isikoff, among others. But if even a portion of its assertion that Starr and members of his office fed the media carefully predigested morsels of its Lewinsky fare is accurate, "Pressgate" offers a powerful indictment. "As such," Brill writes, "the Lewinsky saga raises the question of whether the press has abandoned its Watergate glory of being a check on official abuse of power. For in this story the press seems to have become an enabler of Starr's abuse of power." In recent weeks a remarkable series of media missteps has added further weight to the stated purpose of Brill's Content--"that consumers of news and information in this Information Age should know how what they watch, read or log onto is produced, and how much they can rely on it." First came the discovery that two highly regarded journalists had fabricated stories and columns for major mainstream publications. Then a large daily newspaper agreed to pay millions to the subject of an investigative series, apparently because one of the paper's reporters had stolen corporate voicemails. Finally, last week, a television news network (CNN) and a major weekly newsmagazine (Time) retracted widely cross-promoted accounts of the use of nerve gas on American defectors during the Vietnam War. Typical press criticism these days would debate the marketing aspects of these missteps by the media. Now, if subsequent issues of Brill's Content continue to raise questions as serious, pointed and essential to our craft as those presented in "Pressgate," we'll all be better off. |
