Is the news media about to "redefine" what is and isn't off-limits in terms of the personal lives of political candidates? Yesterday's news conference with Rudy Giuliani in which his estrangement from his adult children due to his second divorce (see previous post), suggests the answer is yes, and the redefinition is well under way, says reporter Steven Thomma, chief political correspondent for the McClatchy newspaper chain.
Thomma's commentary reflects on the changes over the years in how the media has covered the private lives of public officials - from hiding FDR's wheelchair and JFK's adultery to exposing Gary Hart's monkey business and digging into Bill Clinton's intern-al affairs - and wonders if there is any privacy still possible in the era of the Internet and blogs.
Presidential campaigns for 2008 and reporters are wondering whether we’re about to write new rules about candidates’ personal lives and whether their children, their affairs and their divorces are fair game. This week’s story about a rift between Republican presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani and his son, rooted in Giuliani’s divorce from the son’s mother, prompted the speculation. Officials from Giuliani’s and John McCain’s campaigns asked whether the media will keep children off limits, as they largely have done in recent years.
During a break Monday from a Harvard University discussion of the 2008 campaign, the manager of McCain’s campaign [Rick Davis] told me he’s worried that the rules are changing and candidates’ children are at risk of being stalked by television cameras.
I asked Davis what difference it would make in the Internet age of blogs for the traditional media to agree to restraint if the information got out anyway.
“The numbers for these blogs are pretty small by themselves,” he said. “It’s not until it gets picked up that it gets big. If you don’t print it, who’s going to read it?”
Lots of people, potentially. The Monica Lewinsky scandal broke on a Web site - the Drudge Report - that alone had a big enough following to make it the talk of the nation. Restraint by traditional media would’ve been pointless after that; Clinton’s enemies already were trumpeting the news.
Nevertheless, reporters and their editors should decide in advance how they’ll cover the children of candidates this time around. Personally, I think they should be off limits unless they advise mom or dad on Iraq policy - or are used as political props.
Political candidates today should take to heart the words of Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy, who famously said a few years ago, "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it."
The mainstream media may show a modicum of restraint, but there will be political blogs, especially those that are more ideologically to the far Left or far Right, that will not. Eventually, what they publish will be reported on by the media. It is inevitable. It may not be healthy, but it is inevitable. And it will be brutal.
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