American Press and Private Life: A Very Recent ‘Tradition’

In the flood of comments about the (François) Hollande/(Julie) Gayet affair, a certain generalization seems to prevail in the comparison between American and French traditions regarding the respect of politicians’ private lives.

In short, the American press would always and inherently be revealing, whether by sensationalism, a sense of counterbalance or by moralism. The Latin countries, led by France, would, on the contrary, be discrete, respectful regarding power, even amoral.

The reality is a bit more complicated and here are some contextualization elements of this slightly too binary and Manichean theory. In fact, the “American tradition” of revealing politicians’ escapades and love affairs is relatively recent. As the former Washington Post editor-in-chief, Ben Bradlee, admitted in his memoir “The Good Life,” American journalists have long protected the private life of their president. Franklin Roosevelt benefited from the informed discretion of the press. John Kennedy, who led a particularly athletic sexual life, could also count on silence from the media.

Why? For the most part, the American journalistic practice was dominated by “liberal” journalists, politically and even personally close to these heads of state, stemming from the Democratic Party, who found it horrible and “irrelevant” to publicly display the secrets about “human weaknesses” and sovereign debaucheries.

The Upheaval of the ‘80s

The great change, of which the Democratic President Bill Clinton was the eminent victim during the Monica Lewinsky affair in the ‘90s, corresponded to both a change of “cultural and ideological domination” in the United States and to a disruption of journalistic paradigms.

At the end of the ‘70s, President Carter had agreed to respond to a question about “lust” in a celebrity interview in Playboy magazine. In allowing journalists to enter the holy of holies of the intimacy of a president, it was therefore necessary to break down the barriers between the church and the state. However it was mainly under the presidency of Ronald Reagan, carried by a powerful conservative and religious (evangelist and Catholic) wave, that the press truly engaged itself within this means of revelation, in relaying the denunciations put forward by conservative activist groups and other “leagues of virtue.”

The arrival of a new media sphere also allowed this change in practices. The ‘80s and ‘90s saw the rise in power of conservative media, notably through radio with Rush Limbaugh, zealously anti-liberal and anti-Democrat, and, a little later, through television with the creation of Fox News, the flagship of the Republican noise machine. They corresponded equally with the development of tabloids and the tabloidization of television.

Talk-show formats also opened the door to a more controversial and mocking form of journalism, while the rise of the Internet offered a platform to the “quasi-journalists” addicted to rumors, insinuations and secrets about the “debaucherous” life of the powerful. Matt Drudge, with his Drudge Report, played a key role in Bill Clinton’s troubles by forcing the mainstream media players to revise Clinton’s revelations about the Lewinsky affair.

The Embarrassment of Quality Media

However, a gap continues to exist within the American press. Quality media generally remain fairly prudent and it is with a lot of embarrassment that they intervene on slippery ground. For the more respectable journalists, the criterion of revelation is that of public interest: It’s a question of deciding whether the private life of a president or a state authority figure violates the law or puts the republic in danger.

Nevertheless, the competence of sensational media or borderline conservative sectors largely reduces the room for maneuvering and the free will of journalists who strive for legitimate protection of public persons’ private lives. The majority of American politicians are aware of this and consequently refrain from testing the media’s ability to snoop about.