Media holds Clinton to higher moral standards

WASHINGTON - For months now, many media commentators have been saying, in private and on television chat shows, that the public would come to share their outrage about President Clinton soon enough. Once ordinary Americans learned the steamy details of Clinton's conduct, once the independent counsel's findings became public, the president's poll ratings would surely plummet.

Yet less than a week after the release of Kenneth Starr's sexually explicit report, there has been no such public explosion. Sizable majorities still tell pollsters they approve of the president's job performance and oppose impeachment or resignation.

The contrast with the media's collective sense of betrayal has never been starker. USA Today has joined such newspapers as the Philadelphia Inquirer, Des Moines Register, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, San Jose Mercury News and Detroit Free Press in urging Clinton to resign over the Monica Lewinsky affair. The weekend talk shows were filled with indignant questions and harsh commentary, as were the newsmagazines that came out this week.

All this underscores what David Corn, Washington editor of the liberal Nation magazine, calls "the umbrage gap."

The Lewinsky saga is, after all, hard to escape. Americans are bombarded daily with what news executives regard as a story of grave consequence - on the front pages, on the nightly news, on talk radio, on the Internet.

This leaves many journalists, who gauge public opinion for a living, puzzled that so many people can give Clinton such low marks for honesty and integrity and yet approve of his performance as president.

"The greatest surprise in this whole story is the ongoing gap between the elites - who now almost uniformly despise Clinton - and the people, who have stuck with him so far," writes Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter.

In Corn's view, the story feels personal for the Washington press corps.

"There's a yuppie revenge attitude going on here," Corn said. "We in the media class know Bill Clinton or people who work for Bill Clinton; he's in the same college dorm as we are. He's the guy raising his hand in the front of the classroom, always getting away with stuff. But the public looks at politicians and says, 'We care about whether you care about US. We're the story, not you.'"

Cokie Roberts, co-host of ABC's "This Week" and the daughter of two members of Congress, described the journalistic view of public officials this way: "We admire them more. We hold politicians in higher regard than the public does and therefore we expect more of them. The notion that 'they're all like that' offends us. . . .

"I'm sure that for some (media) people there's a sense that we're going to prove ourselves to be right, the people who said early on that he'd never live through this. I have more of a sense of sadness."

In recent days, many media commentators have expressed disgust both with Clinton's behavior and his insistence that he did not commit perjury when he denied under oath having had

09-16-98