Only hours after the release of the report of the Office of the Independent Counsel on Friday, September 11, editorial writers sprang to their terminals. Over the weekend, a hundred or so daily newspapers (out of the country's fifteen hundred) called on the president to resign. By the end of September, resignation.com, a site created by the political freebooter Arianna Huffington, listed 181 publications favoring resignation, most of them dailies.

This was not a partisan outburst. Newspapers of all sizes, regions, and political coloration joined in. They ranged from USA Today to Nevada's Daily Sparks Tribune, and included a share of the traditionally moderate, pragmatic press -- the Des Moines Register, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Chicago Tribune. I read twenty-two of them.

Despite the short time to prepare (and to think), the editorials were more than adequate examples of the editorial writer's art, stating their arguments cogently and dealing soberly with possible counter-arguments. The well-presented editorial in the San Jose Mercury News ran to almost 1,500 words. Most based their recommendation on two relatively simple and reasonable-sounding contentions -- that Clinton's behavior had eroded the moral authority of his presidency; that he should spare the country the prolonged impeachment process.

Many expressed virginal horror over the plethora of sexual detail. The first paragraph of the Augusta, Georgia, Chronicle's editorial was one word: "Disgusting." Little Rock's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette suggested, in apparent innocence, that the Starr report should have been accompanied with mouthwash. (In The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik theorized that the press's protected existence "gives indignant newspaper editorials their charm, like the cheese produced by monks.")

Indeed, it was the sexual detail in the report that furnished the ammunition for so many editorialists urging an immediate aborting of the Clinton presidency. Not for them drawn-out hearings, tedious wrangling, or long national nightmare. They implied that Clinton would be smart to start packing as soon as he read the morning papers. The more realistic conceded that their arguments were moot -- that, of course, Clinton was not about to resign.

Though it served as the trigger, the Starr report received surprisingly little analysis from the editorial writers. Rather than showing why the report was to be believed, they assumed its credibility. Some hinted that it sounded to them something like a newspaper investigative piece -- an engrossing narrative followed by damning conclusions. The Cincinnati Post was not alone in finding "relentless, convincing, excruciating detail." The editorials I read rarely made clear that the report was an extended accusation rather than a verdict -- the first straw rather than the last.

Behind the content of the editorials lay an assumed authority, the belief that the press has every right to tell the public that its elected president should remove himself from office forthwith. Says Robert Giles, head of the Freedom Forum's Media Studies Center: "Their editorial page staffs spend a lot of time reading and discussing the important issues of the day, and that gives a great deal more weight to what they have to say as opposed to public opinion polling and what's said in a two-minute telephone interview."

Of course, the press is free under the First Amendment to recommend almost anything it chooses. But it might find its positions taken more seriously if it were to explain itself better. Journalism rarely reveals that it is not just a detached onlooker but a participant in government, a loosely organized Fourth Branch. Its functions are well defined by tradition: it provides a check on government and a check on abuses of the Executive power in particular. In pursuit of this end it makes alliances with legislative investigators, whistle-blowers, and prosecutors.

The resignation editorials failed to acknowledge that the credibility of the Starr report was built to a great degree on eight months of preparation in the news media, a melange of reporting, leaks, and speculation that made the scandal, as Clinton remarked in his grand jury testimony, "the most important issue in America." Editorial writers may believe they are sealed off from all that turmoil. Wrong; they are part of the machinery.

The tacit alliance of prosecutorial agencies and the press has served the country well enough in the past, starting with Teapot Dome, through the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. Yet editorial writers in this instance pretended that the press merely looked on while Clinton self-destructed (which, to a certain extent, he did). Did they have a sneaking sense that the Lewinsky scandal would not resonate as gloriously as Watergate? Bad luck; even the most inattentive readers and viewers had to know that some elements in the press have been as avid as Kenneth Starr to get rid of the president. And the newspapers that called for his resignation were bound to be read as trying to take a shortcut.

It soon became clear that when newspapers ran their Clinton resignation editorials, the issue was by no means ripe for such measures. By contrast, the editorials that called for the resignation of Richard Nixon in November 1973 -- notably the first editorial that Time magazine had run in half a century of existence -- came at a much later point, after a summer of Senate hearings, after the firing of the special prosecutor, after Nixon had reached, in Time's words, a widely recognized "tragic point of no return." Then, the press helped to build a public consensus rather than trying to wish one into being.

There was no published tabulation of other editorial reactions to the Starr report -- of newspapers that favored letting the constitutional processes move forward for now. These included such major voices as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. But the most pointed warning against haste appeared in the New York Daily News: "The American public must reserve judgment. As in ordinary trials, the prosecution goes first, the defense follows. Only then is the verdict rendered." The segment of the press that called immediately for resignation was in effect asking for the verdict right after the prosecution's opening statement.

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe