Presidential Scandals, Coverage of

Early Scandals

The role of news media in publicizing scandals is part of the political process in a democracy. Although the news media profit commercially from scandals—people do buy newspapers and listen to television to [Page 1107]learn shocking details—journalists defend reporting scandal as crucial to their responsibility as civic watchdogs. Affected public figures and their supporters generally charge the news media with irresponsibility and crass motivations. Today Presidents make extensive use of both political consultants and public relations experts to minimize damage from charges of wrongdoing.

Accusations of scandalous conduct were hurled at early Presidents—for instance, reports that Thomas Jefferson (1801–09) had fathered children by his slave, Sally Hemings, were published in the partisan press of his day (and proven correct thanks to DNA tests two centuries later). For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, news media were reluctant to report on the private failings of Presidents. They drew a line between public and private behavior that concealed the infidelities of John F. Kennedy (1961–63), for example, until after his death. By contrast, rumors of Clinton's affair with the ex-intern spread rapidly via the Internet. Those reports led to official investigations related to a sexual harassment lawsuit and spurred media dissemination of other accounts of Clinton's sexual relations. His wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who earlier acknowledged difficulties in their marriage, appeared on television and accused “a vast right-wing conspiracy” of plotting to discredit the President.

In addition to Watergate in the 1970s, the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan administration in the early 1980s, and the Clinton affair a decade later, historians list a variety of scandals as particularly noteworthy—the XYZ affair, Credit Mobilier, and Teapot Dome, for example. Each of these was an outgrowth of its period and prominently covered by contemporary media. While partisanship was a factor in publicizing each of these events, the magnitude of the offenses went far beyond the scope of customary political infighting and raised questions of illegal, as well as unethical, activity.

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