Analysis Of The Media Coverage Of Bill Clinton And Monica Lewinsky Affair And Its Impact On Public Perception

I’m sure many have heard about the Scandal with Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton it was the scandal of the century even bigger than Marilyn and Kennedy I believe. But the question is how did this happen? We want more of this let’s inspect on what the media gave us back then.

The Lewinsky Scandal had begun around the 1990s a little before my time of even understanding but I’m still going to dig up as much information on the scandal as possible. Lewinsky was simply an intern at the White House in her early 20s so she’s young, hot, fresh the two had begun a sexual relationship that continues sporadically until 1997. So, I did some research on how the media has been none institutionalized and how the relationship with readers have changed. Among high profile cases, the Monica Lewinsky case that had been leaked by the CIA fewer rules have been applied it's all about how to get the story.

The media had covered the event of Bill and Monica for example, writing in the early months of the scandal, public opinion scholar John Zaller argued that the public's continued support for Clinton for all the Monica Lewinsky story could be accounted for by reference to three a priori variables not subject to media influence: peace (the lack of serious international threats to the United States), prosperity (the strong state of the economy), and Clinton's moderate policy positions. I dub this the 3ps model. In Zaller's interpretation, the heavily-covered Lewinsky spectacle did not affect public opinion in any significant way, and media cues mattered far less than people's assessments of how Clinton's policies had benefited them by providing peace and prosperity. Zaller dismissed mediated political communication altogether, since the most obvious media “cues” did not trigger the expected response in the most obvious dependent variable.

Since the highly negative, media coverage filled with attacks on Clinton by other political elites in the early weeks of the scandal appeared to have lowered Clinton's approval ratings only slightly and temporarily, Zaller reasoned, media coverage did not affect public opinion. Zaller's argument has been joined by other scholars, such as Gary Jacobson, who argued in the pages of Political Science Quarterly, “The simplest explanation for Clinton's continuing support is probably the most compelling: to borrow the watchword from his 1992 campaign, ‘the economy stupid.” Wow media really wasn’t as bad on Bill because he was a great president much seems like it, but he did commit adultery against his wife which I did hear got him impeached but beyond that a year after the scandal is when he was impeached for the actions at hand but it seems as if Washington were about to explode from the scandal.

Now, what about Sexism if that was Hillary, she would be called all kinds of names, and he might have even left her when in fact she stayed by his side. Now Monica did get it bad she is the one who got it the worst when bill was still popular, I guess just a man being a man right? The media tore her to shreds. Monica played a huge role in the media and the story and her PR team was good at that.

The public-private distinction shaped public responses to the scandal seems clear. As Molly Sonner and Clyde Wilcox observe, “For many Americans, Clinton's affair with Lewinsky was a private matter of importance only to them and Hillary Clinton.”[12] This judgment arose early in the scandal. Writing in the Washington Post on March 1998, Kathleen Hall Jamieson observed that a majority of the public had drawn “a clear distinction between private and public character; between the personal and the presidential. Jamieson cited a Harris Poll from 25 February 1998 showing 80 percent agreement with the proposition that “in judging Clinton, we should focus on how the country is doing and his policies, and not on his private life.” The common logic behind this public/private distinction appeared time and again across different kinds of poll questions throughout the scandal a remarkably robust phenomenon. Empirically, public reactions to the Lewinsky impeachment scandal invite us to build a richer conceptualization of mass-mediated public opinion.

The Lewinsky case suggests that public opinion is best understood not simply as a stimulus-response process in which elite and media cues are either accepted or rejected by the public, but as a dynamic process in which various publics construct understandings of news events and political issues based in large part on (but not limited to) information, narratives, and symbols provided by political elites and the media.

In cases like the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, “what matters” extends beyond simple self-interested decisional heuristics and automatic affective responses to include symbolic constructions and collective sense-making of the political world. This collective sense-making includes the categorizing and defining of actors, issues, and events; the interaction of media symbols with personal and social identities; and the collective construction of and response to news narratives, not just to free-floating cues. Even at the time of the scandal it has been the obsession for nearly everyone back then news and even Tv shows like on the Tonight Show with Jay leno. Clinton did survive though with his charm but no with just a wag of his finger stating “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” was gold for the media.

The aftermath of it all was basically the public private distinction that was so crucial to interpreting the majority's continued support for Clintons was not constructed in the same way by various subgroups. Different segments of the public related to the scandal on a symbolic as a well as a material level, and different groups ‘assessments of the scandal were based on their different interpretations of the characters in the news narrative and of the narrative itself. This should not be surprising, given the findings of numerous scholars regarding the importance of the symbolic and social identification dimensions of public opinion, and given the public's ability to construct their own narratives from the raw materials of the news and assign their own meanings to news stories.

As Virginia and Joe Soss observed of the Anita Hill Clarence Thomas hearings, for example “heightened media coverage and public attentiveness” during high-profile political spectacles “produce a…formidable tide of political information that can facilitate [considerable] diversity in perceptions, emotions, and attitudes. I do feel Race was a factor in this case and lower- and upper-class groups along with this scandal. Hillary composed herself like a lady through the media the whole time along the allegations even though I’m sure she was hurting in the inside and humiliated in front of the whole country. Bill stayed popular throughout the whole time of his presidency though despite everything that the media let out and how media had stormed the story.

The process of resolving questions about things such as public morals, sexual politics, fairness, and privacy may well be more important to people (and have more effect on their feelings about the events they have experienced in common) than the fragmentary issue or approval shifts that are the objects of so much concern in simpler models of media politics. Moreover, the meanings that people draw from engagement with broader, ongoing narrative themes in media politics seem to be as important to understand as the issue positions that may be derived from simple heuristic calculations based on media-independent factors. To put it bluntly, the 3Ps' model implies that impeachment might have been decided in the public arena in a thumbs up, thumbs down fashion, on the basis of largely extraneous considerations.

The coverage all together was very sensational. It’s been more than 20 years and people will still reference the scandal looking back and sexual harassment is still and issue. Hillary is fine she ran for president and despite all the noise about her grand future, Hillary has predilections these days that are downright modest. In her public appearances, rather than spreading her wings, she seems to be nesting. Whereas she once wanted to colonize no less than one-seventh of the economy with her health-care plan, consider the role she played in this year's budget. Her fingerprints are all over dozens of small, shrewd programs. She was the driving force behind the tax credit for stay-at-home moms and grants to help children on Medicaid treat their asthma, and more money to train pediatricians in children's hospitals. She has been doing so good minus the elections and emails and things she has had everything all together for the most part.

To close my conclusion, I would say the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal unfolded in an era of 'new media' politics that presented fresh and often unanticipated challenges for presidential leadership. New media actors, such as call-in talk radio and TV hosts, tabloid journalists, and Internet gossip columnists, played a significant role in scandal politics. They influenced the framework within which stories were reported and perceived by the public. New media channels, in particular, framed the events leading up to the presidential impeachment in dramatic, prime time-style entertainment. This entertainment news frame allowed citizens to compartmentalize their perceptions of President Clinton as a leader versus a private individual involved in a sex scandal. Media Politics can explain, at least in part, President Clinton's strong job performance evaluations in the midst of one of the most publicized political scandals of the century.