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

[unhappycamper]

http://watchingamerica.com/News/230669/american-press-and-private-life-a-very-recent-tradition/

American Press and Private Life: A Very Recent ‘Tradition’
Le Soir, Belgium
By Jean-Paul Marthoz
Translated By Jessica Loizou
13 January 2014
Edited by Gillian Palmer

~snip~

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.