Behind closed doors

The Herald's gossip about John Kerry is just more evidence of how Bill Clinton has degraded public life. Plus, Jeff Jacoby under rhetorical fire, and war correspondents under real fire.

Don't Quote Me by Dan Kennedy

The post-JFK media have never been much good at making distinctions between the personal and public lives of politicians. Just ask Gary Hart. So the shrinkage of the privacy zone now taking place because of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair is a matter of degree rather than of kind. Still, it's alarming that this zone is in danger of disappearing entirely. We could reach the point where the only people who run for office are so abnormal in their willingness to be humiliated that they should be disqualified on those grounds alone.

People like Bill Clinton, in other words.

The latest entry in this journalistic race to the bottom is the September 2 edition of the new, improved Boston Herald, in which the "Inside Track" -- the paper's gossip column -- alleges that Senator John Kerry was briefly visited at his Beacon Hill home one recent evening by a 22-year-old woman while his wife, Teresa Heinz, was away.

The Herald had not one iota of evidence that the woman, a Harvard student, was doing anything other than what she and Kerry's office claimed she was doing -- namely, dropping off a résumé. The only area of dispute seems to be over whether she was there for 15 minutes or for 45 minutes, and whether her visit took place before 11 p.m. or closer to midnight. But that didn't stop the paper from breathlessly describing her as a "former model" and "stunning Southern gal," and asking: "Is it smart for a senator with presidential ambitions to be entertaining attractive women when the wife is away?"

The item provoked sharp words between the Kerry camp and the Herald. "The item implies a situation which is not true and misconstrues the most innocent of circumstances to imply that something untoward occurred," complains Kerry spokesman Jim Jones. Retorts managing editor for news Andrew Gully, who fielded a call from Kerry the night before the item ran: "We didn't say that he was doing anything but taking her résumé. It was absolutely fair game for the `Inside Track.' " Another Herald source says that if he were in Kerry's position, "I think I would be on my front steps clutching the résumé and saying, `See you later.' "

And to think that people make fun of Kerry for not being a regular guy.

If Kerry is intent on running for president, he'd better get used to such treatment. Because Clinton, by engaging in grossly inappropriate behavior and by allowing his minions to hint that he's going to take his enemies down with him, is contributing to an environment in which absolutely nothing is out of bounds.

Take what happened to Representative Dan Burton, who last week admitted -- just before the Indiana Star and News could report the news on its Web site -- that he'd fathered a child out of wedlock. (It had been rumored for more than a week that Vanity Fair was getting ready to report the story, too.) As Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz suggested on Monday, Burton's extramarital affair -- which took place before he was elected to Congress, more than a decade ago -- is no one's business but his and his wife's. The Star and News can't even credibly use hypocrisy as an excuse: though Burton has been one of Clinton's chief inquisitors, it's campaign-finance corruption that turns him on, not White House sex.

Or consider the Web publication Salon, one of Clinton's principal media defenders, which recently recycled an old Vanity Fair article about House Speaker Newt Gingrich's varied sex life, arguing that Gingrich is in no position to call the shots in an impeachment inquiry. Never mind that any such inquiry would involve nonsexual issues such as perjury and subornation of perjury.

What's being lost in all these cases is the distinction between purely private behavior and private behavior that the public has a right to be concerned about. A Boston Globe editorial on Saturday got it just right in offering qualified praise for Senator Joseph Lieberman's criticism of Clinton. While disagreeing with Lieberman's statement that "a president's private life is public," the editorial went on to argue that "having sex with an employee in the workplace does not deserve protection."

Though it can be hard to figure out where to draw the line, certainly John Kerry should be able to receive a visitor in his home without having to read a lascivious item about it in the Herald.

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The fictions of former Globe columnists Mike Barnicle and Patricia Smith are already making life difficult for other Globe staffers. Example: op-ed-page columnist Jeff Jacoby, who's been targeted by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

What incurred CAIR's wrath was an August 31 piece in which Jacoby lambasted a National Public Radio producer for giving in to a demand by a Muslim activist that Steven Emerson, a controversial journalist who investigates Islamic-inspired terrorists, be banned from the call-in show Talk of the Nation.

In a statement, CAIR asked the Globe "to investigate whether another of its columnists fabricated information." To drive home the point, executive director Nihad Awad was quoted as equating Jacoby's "misstatements" to those of "two other Boston Globe columnists who resigned after they were found to have fabricated information or plagiarized others' work."

Yet CAIR's claims would appear to be a matter of interpretation and opinion rather than fabrication. For instance, CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper says Jacoby falsely alleged that the organization called for Emerson to be blacklisted by NPR. In fact, Jacoby accurately attributed the blacklisting campaign to Muslim activist Ali Abunimah, reporting simply that CAIR "has led the way in demonizing Emerson as an anti-Arab racist." That's absolutely true, as anyone who has examined CAIR's Web site (http://www.cair-net.org) can attest. Hooper also complains that Jacoby erred in writing that CAIR "warmly defends Hamas." But Hooper himself volunteers that Awad spoke positively of Hamas before he became CAIR's executive director, and before Hamas began attacking civilian targets.

Hooper, citing what he calls a "stonewalling" approach on the part of the Globe, says CAIR is now considering legal action. It's a stance that frustrates editorial-page editor David Greenway, who laments that the Barnicle and Smith situations have created an environment in which any Globe writer is considered tainted. "This has nothing to do with fabrication. It's a matter of opinion," he says. Adds Jacoby: "If they want to have a fight with me, I'm willing to fight back."

As for whether Emerson has been banned from Talk of the Nation or any other NPR program, that question can't be answered definitively until and unless he's invited back. In fact, Emerson is widely loathed in leftist and pro-Palestinian circles, and critics often note that he was among the first of the so-called experts to blame the Oklahoma City bombings on Islamic extremists -- a leap to judgment he now says he regrets. But he's also respected enough to have published commentaries in recent weeks in the Wall Street Journal and the New Republic.

Jeffrey Dvorkin, NPR's vice president for news and information, says flatly that Emerson has not been banned and that the producer who suggested otherwise exceeded her authority. But as Emerson himself says, "One of the problems with a blacklist is that you never know, because people never put it in writing."

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In the new media world of spin, buzz, and celebrity, it can be jolting to encounter something unquestionably real. Such is the bracing effect of Dying to Tell the Story, an extraordinary documentary to be shown this Sunday at 9 p.m. on the TBS cable station.

The two-hour film focuses on Dan Eldon, a 22-year-old Reuters photographer who was one of four journalists stoned to death by an angry mob in Somalia in 1993. Eldon's story is told from the point of view of his sister, Amy, who interviews a wide range of war reporters and photographers in an attempt to glean some insight into why her brother embraced such dangerous work. In the deeply moving conclusion, she visits the scene of his death.

Amy Eldon's own story, as it turns out, is almost as fascinating as her brother's. A 1997 graduate of Boston University's Department of Film and Television, she first conceived of the project while she was still in school; she was helped along with her idea by her then-professor, Jeremy Murray-Brown. She and her mother, Kathy Eldon, who is also a journalist, took the project to the Turner Broadcasting System. Kathy Eldon is the executive producer, Amy the associate producer and on-camera narrator.

On Tuesday evening, the Eldons returned to BU for a prebroadcast showing of Dying to Tell the Story at the university's Tsai Performance Center.

The film switches back and forth between scenes of Dan Eldon in Somalia (with a narrator reading excerpts from Eldon's extensive journals) and Amy Eldon's interviews with journalists -- some who knew her brother, others who have powerful stories of their own to tell. Included are numerous examples of these journalists' work: heart-breaking, gut-wrenching scenes of war and starvation in such places as Bosnia, Rwanda, the Middle East, South Africa, and, of course, Somalia.

The most articulate are the television reporters, CNN's Christiane Amanpour and the BBC's Martin Bell, now a member of the British Parliament. But far more haunting are the British photographer Don McCullin, who clearly left a large portion of his sanity on the battlefield, and the South African photographer Peter Mugabane, whose doggedness earned him a lengthy stint in prison during the apartheid years.

Amy Eldon, who's now 24, projects an image of considerable self-assurance but concedes that she's still trying to come to terms with her brother's death. "You do have a public face to get through this, because it's too emotional to open up every time you see it," she says.

Her on-camera role came about only after the project was already under way. It was a smart move, because her presence works as a unifying theme in what could have been a hodgepodge. And her awkward, earnest interviewing style seems to bring out the best in her subjects. "I'm not slick," she says. "I'm just a kid."

One point the film makes forcefully is that the murder of Dan Eldon and his comrades was not an isolated case -- it is far from unusual for journalists in the world's trouble spots to be injured or killed.

And on it goes. After the lights went up, Amy Eldon announced that Carlos Mavroleon -- a videographer who appears in Dying to Tell the Story -- died last week in the custody of Pakistani authorities while on assignment for 60 Minutes.

The circumstances were described as mysterious.

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Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.shore.net/~dkennedy

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Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com

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Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here

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