Matt Bai: The Tabloidization of Politics Story

Matt Bai: “Ethos of Political Journalism Shifts in the Years after Hart (Scandal)”

By: Andrew Noerr

            There was once upon a time when political journalism didn’t seem to focus on the private lives of the politicians and leaders of the United States. Rather, the media attention that politicians would receive would be dedicated to how they would perform their jobs in office. However, this all seemingly changed not after the immense Watergate snafu in the 1970s, but instead when the scandal surrounding Senator and Democratic presidential hopeful Gary Hart and model Donna Rice was revealed to the public in 1987 that completely altered the impending presidential race in 1988.

            All of that was the subject of a riveting talk done by Yahoo! News columnist and former New York Times chief political correspondent Matt Bai at the Commonwealth Club on October 20. Dressed professionally in a black suit, Bai detailed the sequence of events that comprised the Gary Hart sex scandal, as that is the main subject of his new book titled All the Truth is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid. Out of all the things that Bai mentioned in his talk, one moment that stood out the moment was when he discussed how the Hart scandal transformed political journalism in the late 1980s.

            “The ethos of political journalism shifts in the years after Hart,” Bai noted in the middle of his speech. “It changes from illumination of worldviews and ideas and agendas to principally trying to find the lie.”

            The lie that was discovered in 1987 would end up shocking the nation. As Bai stated in his talk, Hart was a strong candidate for the presidency in 1987 before the scandal erupted. He was leading in the polls by over 20 points in the Democratic primaries at one point, and he was far ahead of the eventual 41^st President of the United States George H.W. Bush.

            However, if there was one thing Gary Hart couldn’t do, it was that he couldn’t foresee what Bai described as “the convergence that was happening in society between politics and journalism and entertainment.” Many news outlets started chasing Hart amidst rumors that he was a “womanizer.” Well-known newspapers such as the Miami Herald and The Washington Post would soon be the main sources for what became the Gary Hart sex scandal.

            Bai mentioned that a reporter from the Miami Herald named Tom Fieldler would be one of the first writers to witness firsthand what was occurring between Hart and Donna Rice. On May 2, 1987, Fieldler and some other reporters ended up staking out near Hart’s townhouse in Washington D.C. After they witnessed a woman enter and leave his townhouse, Hart was later bombarded in an alley near his home by Fieldler and the other reporters with questions about the identity of the woman and why she was there. Bai emphasized how that moment would be an indicator of the transformation that was developing in political journalism.

            “In that oil-stained alley, on that ground, I think the ground of American politics and journalism shifted,” Bai said.

            The drama didn’t end there. Three days later, Hart was having a press conference in New Hampshire in front of a large group of reporters. A writer from The Washington Post named Paul Taylor attended the event, and he ended up asking the questions that shook Hart’s psyche enough to cause him to drop out of the race. Bai recited the interview between Taylor and Hart that day.

            “Senator, do you consider yourself a moral person?” Taylor asked Hart back in 1987.

            “Yes,” Hart responded.

            “Do you consider adultery immoral?” Taylor then asked.

            “I suppose so,” Hart replied.

            Taylor’s next inquiry would metaphorically drop a bomb on Hart’s life.

            “Senator, have you ever committed adultery?”

            Hart was stunned, even though he had been rehearsing his answers to questions like that on the plane ride to New Hampshire. Bai specifically mentioned how Hart knew that the reporters knew the answer to that question, and they all wanted him to say something on-the-record about the affair.

            “I don’t think that’s a fair question,” Hart said, and he has responded the same way to that question ever since, according to Bai.

            The media scrutiny dominated Hart and Rice from that point going forward. Rice in particular didn’t know how to deal with the astronomical amount of media attention that she would receive. All Rice wanted to do was go home after the news of the scandal were revealed to the public, but she wasn’t able to do so. She was forced to give a press conference in Florida before being able to somewhat return to her own life. According to Bai, reporters from all over the country paid lots of money to live in the homes nearby Rice so that they could cover the aspects of her day-to-day life while the scandal dominated the news.

            The affair certainly impacted the 1988 presidential election, but it also confirmed the extreme alteration that political journalism was undergoing at that time. Reporters started to look for ways in which political candidates may be lying to the media or ways in which they were potentially hiding something from the public. Bai admitted that this was the environment that he lived in when he first become a political journalist, and it has caused all aspects of politicians’ lives to be thrust in the spotlight.

            “(We) set up a process in which all context was lost,” Bai said about what political journalists did after the Hart scandal. “You were always the one flaw that we needed to find in order to beat our competitors and get some level of acclaim.”

            As Bai talked about all of the captivating details that he uncovered from the Gary Hart scandal, the audience in attendance often reacted in awe or shock. Even though most of the members of the audience were seemingly alive during the scandal, it’s as if they had completely missed how influential the affair would be to the realm of politics and journalism. They seemingly only remembered how the scandal impacted their decision at the polls.

            “It was captivating,” Judith Heggie, a San Francisco citizen who attended the talk, said. “I didn’t know anything about Gary Hart except that he was a possible candidate for President. When I heard about the scandal, I was like everybody else… I judged him on his one-known affair rather than all the other things he had done.”  

            Ultimately, Bai noted that this kind of political journalism that now exists can cause politicians to not be defined by the positive aspects of their work or their agendas, but rather they would be judged by the worst thing that they’ve ever done. The trickle-down effect of this is that the public’s trust in politicians diminishes greatly, and in return politicians tend to not want to open up about their lives to the media. Still, a lot more scandals were disclosed to the public after the Hart affair. In the words of Bai, politicians shifted from being hunters to being the hunted in the eyes of political journalists, and that still holds true today.