Friday, Jul 4, 2008
Salon Media Circus: Howard Kurtz's 'Spin Cycle' paints a damning portrait of the sterile battle between Clinton's PR team and the terminally cynical White House media.
Mar 27, 1998 | The spin in the blurbs on the back of Howard Kurtz's new book is better than any inside it. According to Pete Hamill, the book "takes us into the sick little world of obsessed, self-important, prosecutorial journalists and their opposing cadre of self-important, image-mongering White House flacks." For Fred Barnes, however, "Spin Cycle: Inside the Clinton Propaganda Machine" is a "riveting account of how President Clinton and press secretary Mike McCurry make the national media knuckle under." And for Dan Rather, the book's publication means "now it's the Clinton administration's turn to sweat." Even books about spin, it seems, can be spun.
Of these various spins, Hamill's rotates closest to the truth. "Spin Cycle" does provide an intimate portrait of Clinton's image-burnishing machine, but there aren't any big surprises here, unless you fell asleep before 1968 and missed the PR revolution that has been deodorizing the presidency since at least the days of Richard Nixon. And only the crudest spinner, his mind perhaps softened by too many appearances in the friendly padded confines of "The McLaughlin Group," could try to get away with asserting on the evidence of this book that Clinton's team has made "the national media knuckle under." Indeed, you could argue that exactly the reverse has taken place: that much of the press's animosity toward Clinton is due not to the man himself or his policies but to the blazer-wearing semioticians surrounding him.
"Spin Cycle" is a lively insider's look at the weird, formulaic dance between state-of-the-art spinners and an elite journalistic establishment whose determination not to be spun imparts its own distortion. It is a portrait of an aggressively jaded, postmodern press going head to head with a high-tech, postmodern presidency: Both sides know the other's moves in advance, both sides view everything the other side does as a mere tactic, and both sides are determined to beat their enemy to the punch. The result is an infinite regress, a stalemate, a cynical miasma in which either side's claims to sincerity or dedication to higher principle are seen as just another gambit in a strange, interminable game. Unfortunately, the only loser in this game is the truth.
Kurtz himself, the media reporter for the Washington Post, doesn't draw that conclusion -- or, indeed, many conclusions about the larger implications of this closed, self-looping system. He writes in a flexible third person voice, half seeming to reflect the thoughts of the players, half historically omniscient: "What really infuriated the president, and Hillary, was the way the press kept changing the parameters of scandal." This narrative technique allows him to walk in and out of the minds of his characters, but it often leaves ambiguous what his own opinions are. Still, "Spin Cycle" is such a solidly reported book that it doesn't need grand authorial theories.
Kurtz appears to embrace conventional Beltway wisdom about Clinton: "The central mystery of Bill Clinton's fifth year in office was how a President so aggressively investigated on so many fronts could remain so popular with the American people." As a colleague of the journalists he writes about, it's understandable that Kurtz doesn't openly criticize them -- and in any case, individual journalists aren't the real issue here. But implicit in "Spin Cycle" is a sense that the whole system of Washington reporting has somehow gone terribly wrong. To Kurtz's credit, he doesn't put his thumb on the scales: He presents the arguments and attitudes of administration officials as fairly and thoroughly as he does those of journalists. Indeed, the most interesting thing about "Spin Cycle" is not the minutiae of leaks, access fights, document dumps and other familiar spin techniques -- which may be more sophisticated but don't seem any more egregious than those practiced by the last four administrations -- but the running argument between the two sides, which are, as Kurtz writes, "joined at the hip in a strangely symbiotic relationship." That relationship is, to put it mildly, highly dysfunctional. The elite media's intense dislike of Clinton is one of the more mysterious phenomena of recent years. On the face of it, the president and the media ought to get along: They share the same liberal-centrist politics, came of age at the same tolerant time, worship at the same shrine of urban professionalism. Why, then, have the media, in particular the New York Times and the Washington Post, been so hostile toward Clinton -- far more than they were toward his predecessor, George Bush, with whom they had much less in common?
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