The newest reporters roaming Capitol Hill are none other than the reporters from TMZ. The celebrity gossip website, famous for its aggressive and sometimes nasty — but often effective — information-gathering tactics, opened a Washington, DC office last week.
TMZ’s expansion into congressional news promises even more celebrity-style coverage of politicians. (For example, TMZ founder Harvey Levin recently asked the public to send in photos of lawmakers doing nothing but their jobs during Congress’s spring break.) But this media bravado and its consequences go back further, to the 1980s. The most obvious example is that of Colorado Senator Gary Hart, a forgotten politician once considered a front-runner for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination, who was forced out in the race for allegedly having a romantic relationship.
Rolling Stone columnist Matt Bai, who wrote a book about the Hart scandal called All the Truth Revealed: The Week Politics Got in the Newshe says Today, It’s Explained co-host Noel King that Hart was right about many things to come in politics, including getting the leaders we “deserve.”
The following is part of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s more throughout the episode, so tune in Today, It’s Explained wherever you find podcasts, incl Apple Podcasts, Pandoraand Spotify.
Gary Hart in 1987 was a distant Democratic candidate for the presidential nomination (in 1988). It all disappeared in a week in what was the first modern sex scandal in politics.
It was said that he had an affair with a woman who was not his wife, and that he slept with her at night on a boat and then had her in his townhouse. He was followed by reporters from the Miami Herald who hid in the bushes on his street and followed him. It all made for great drama and his political ambitions were then set and his political career never took off.
What was new here was that, instead of being discovered either in the commission of a crime or by some kind of disclosure, the press went out and looked for evidence of extramarital affairs on the part of Gary Hart. And the journalists decided at that time that it was important and necessary to know whether he was faithful to his wife or not.
“There was a lot going on at that time. You were right at the birth of satellite technology and what would become the 24-hour news cycle.”
Hart, who grew up in an era of very different laws, basically said that this is none of your business. And that was not considered an appropriate response then or now. He never explained it, including to me, and I wrote a whole book about it.
The laws did not change because Hart was a different kind of politician or because he changed the laws. The rules changed because they were changing and Gary Hart stepped into it. There was a lot going on at that time. You were right at the birth of satellite technology and what would become the 24 hour news cycle.
Suddenly it was possible to go live from anywhere, which had a real impact on what was considered news and what wasn’t. You also had this new generation of journalists who had been inspired in the business by the example of Woodward and Bernstein 10 to 15 years earlier. That meant not just bringing people down in a deep way, not just looking for scandal, but actually protecting the American voter from failure and bad behavior, something they thought the American media of the previous generation had failed to do.
How did (Hart) act once he was arrested?
Stubbornly. He felt it was nobody’s business. He refused to answer questions about it. He tried to continue. Hart would tell you that he dropped out of the race not because he was no longer a candidate, but because it was impossible to talk to voters. Suddenly it wasn’t just the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and the Washington Post on the campaign trail. It was People Magazine and it was brand new Current Affairs and all these kinds of things.
He’s dropping out of the race after a week, and he’s giving a speech that I think, especially given the time we’re in, is the most important forgotten speech in American political history:
Soon we will all again quote Jefferson as saying, “I tremble for my country when I think we may, in fact, get the kind of leaders we deserve.” Some things may be interesting but that does not mean they are important.
And I have returned many times in my writing over the years to this passage. Because I think in a way, as a country, that’s what happened. We have created a political process that rewards shamelessness and dishonesty with spectacle and entertainment. And look, we’ve got a president now, twice, who is shameless and a publicist and an attention seeker and entertainer at heart. And those two things are not coincidental.
Some of the scams that have been exposed are not just cheating scams. Some of them are serious crimes, sex crimes. Is tabloid coverage of political journalism also a good thing?
Yes. Not all scandal news, not all tabloid news, is worthless. It’s not like we don’t care about anything you do in private. But I disagree with those who say, Well, if the president is having an affair, we should know about it. You have to be responsible for that, right?
There are many journalists who covered Gary Hart. If they are still around today, they will tell you he got what he deserved. My answer to that has been, well, I guess we’ll have to go back in history. Let’s build a time machine. We’re going to have to get rid of FDR and we’re going to have to get rid of Lyndon Johnson and we’re going to have to get rid of John Kennedy. And I think we can think of another way through the Great Depression and World War II and the Cold War because none of these people deserve to be president.
We are not the moral police. My sympathy with Gary Hart is that he was pleading at the time not out of complete innocence, not that he should not be held responsible. Basically, he was saying that some things are appropriate and others are not. And no one has ever made a case with any persuasiveness that anything Gary Hart did at the time was important to the US administration.
Congress takes a break and TMZ hunts (Sen.) Lindsey Graham near Disney World. There were these satisfactory responses: Perhaps we should focus on what Congress intends. Maybe we should be more angry with them. Do you put any stock in that?
I saw a grown man having a lot of fun at Disney. And look, I think the alleged footnotes to those pictures were different. It wasn’t just about the senator being happy when the Capitol was idle. It was about the rumor about Senator Graham that the bubble stick seemed to take hold in people’s minds.
Rumors about his gender.
“If you’re chasing a politician around Disney World … I don’t know how constructive that is.”
Of all the things I dislike most about Donald Trump, I will give him credit for always talking to the media. He wants to be seen, he needs to be heard. I have lived in an era where I went from riding cars and buses and getting to know the candidates who wanted to rule the country, and having lunch with them and socializing to the extent that I understood who they were, to an era where it is impossible to have that kind of intimacy with the leading politicians of those days. And we created that climate.
If you’re chasing a politician around Disney World because he seems to be having a great time when the government isn’t perfect, I don’t know that’s constructive.
