excerpt:
Since Jan. 21 the news program I do for the MSNBC cable network has been devoted to what we have euphemistically called "the Clinton-Lewinsky investigations." Virtually every night, for an hour, sometimes two, I have presided over discussions about this stuff, so intricate, so repetitive, that it has assumed the characteristics of the medieval religious scholars arguing for months and even years over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
At first I genuinely believed this was a relevant matter for fairly constant discussion. I used my moral force to keep sex out of it whenever possible. I didn't allow the word "scandal" or even "affair" to be used. I tried to be non-partisan and skeptical about both the accused and the accusers.
But as the weeks have gone by, it has become more and more clear to me that there is no moral force at work in this process, whatsoever. Nobody is doing the right thing. Let's review this briefly and see if we can spot anybody doing something because it's better for somebody else, or because of their own ethical standards.
If the worst that all is alleged is true, the president runs a job exchange program. Simple as that. Thank you, seniors! That was me not using my Moral Force, I'm sorry.
A willing participant in this, a Miss Lewinsky, blabs proudly to her gossipy friend, a Ms. Tripp, who is just paranoid enough to think that she'll lose her own job because she knows this.
I must at this point quote a man with whom I shared a work cubicle at ESPN, the humorist, and former overnight-shift worker at UPS, my friend Craig Kilborn, who himself paraphrased the comedian Mike Myers by saying "Linda Tripp is a man, baby!" That was also me not using my Moral Force.
Anyway, this Tripp person, at the urging of her friend, a book agent ---"Lucianne Goldberg is a man, baby" -- she secretly and at least unethically, records hours of conversations with her young friend Monica ... and takes them to the FBI.
The FBI then cleverly tries to force the young woman into stinging the president of the United States! A news magazine finds out -- it makes the rare moral choice to delay publication of the story (because it'll be a juicier one later, and they've been promised an opportunity to listen to these sleazy tapes).
Then the magazine gets scooped by an idiot with a modem who has decided that his job is to take any rumor he hears and put it out onto the Internet.
All of this comes to the attention of an independent counsel who may or may not be politically independent, but who is dumb enough to have accepted in advance a future job at a university, a job funded by a rabid hater of the president that the independent counsel is investigating.
Then, my network starts covering this story 28 hours out of every 24, and six days after the story breaks more people watch my show than watch my old show Sportscenter. And while I'm having the dry heaves in the bathroom because my moral sensor is going off but I can't even hear it, I'm so seduced by these ratings that I go along with them when they say do this not just one hour a night, but two, thus bringing my own skills and talents to bear on the process by which the snowball runs faster and faster down the hill.
In the ensuing four months ending day before yesterday, we are visited by the chairman of a committee investigating the president who publicly announces that the president has no morals or character and who then reveals his own character by calling that president the term for a previously owned prophylactic device.
A speaker of the house who divorced his own wife while she was in the hospital being treated for cancer first tells his colleagues to stay out of this mess, then after reading some research about how his constituents are angry that he hasn't pointed a moral finger at the president, he turns into a self-proclaimed judge and jury and tells his colleagues to stop referring to what the president may or may not have done as "scandals" and start calling them "crimes."
The networks, including my own, then each broadcast stories about a private investigator who claims a man in Arkansas told friends that a woman he knew 20 years ago told him she'd been assaulted by the president even though she swears she wasn't and his only evidence is a letter he wrote to her expressing his sympathy for the terrible thing that didn't happen to her.
A convicted felon and attorney then has a series of very odd phone calls to his wife and his lawyer. Though he is standing next to a sign saying "All phone calls are recorded," he is surprised when tapes of these calls are released publicly by the politician who had made the remark about the used device.
The politician then assumes responsibility for his "error in judgment." As the comedian David Frye said during Watergate, while doing his perfect impression of Richard Nixon, "The difference between responsibility and blame is that those who are to blame lose their jobs. Those who are responsible do not." The responsible politician thus fires his chief investigator.
All the while, the operatives of the president who are howling over how their personal lives are being improperly investigated, are themselves investigating everybody else, spending taxpayer dollars to release information about how Linda Tripp was arrested on a dismissed vagrancy charge 29 years ago, and to chase down a story about whether or not one of the president's key opponents used to like to wear dresses when he was 6 years old.
In the interim, as this tepid and not steamy story of maybe sex registers no impact whatsoever on the American public, the president's opponents then switch to the campaign finance issue, then to the Chinese influence on our elections issue, and then finally to the we gave the Commies secrets issue. That same politician who used that very unfortunate term says, day before yesterday, "Is this treason? No, right now I don't think it's treason." Meaning I got to say the word treason without saying the word treason. The president's people reply by insisting they didn't sell a change in policy -- this was the policy that the previous Republican president wanted.
I'd love to tell you the punch line to this story. But, I can't because it ain't over yet. All I know is that if even the slightest part of any religion known to man is factually correct, all of these people are going to meet again some day -- in hell. (Extended applause) And I haven't mentioned Paula Jones' attorneys yet.
A month ago I went to Washington for the White House correspondents' dinner, where two people who jokingly admit to being a part of the "vast right-wing conspiracy" told me that even they were sick to death of this story and only my jokes about it kept them going. I was proud of this for about a week until it dawned on me that if I never had joked about it, they might have stopped participating in it.
But at that dinner, I was also seated next to a fellow member of what will in 24 hours be your alumni association, a former congressman. He told me about how his roomate led the armed takeover of the Straight and that as nuts as all that group was, and how nobody then or now really thought that was an appropriate expession of political or social activism, they actually did believe in something. I told him of the day in 1979 when we VBR types rushed to Day Hall upon the news of a takeover there. Our takeover turned out to have been by six students who were late on their tuition and were going to hold the place until they got extensions.
This was my first hint that the idea of Moral Force had been declining for some time.
Anyway, my fellow Cornellian and I got talking about a prominent politician, and I said, "At least he believes in this stuff he's saying" and he said, "No he doesn't. He gets focus groups to tell him what to believe." And I asked how many members of Congress really believe in something, and he thought for a moment and then he answered... "Six." He then named them.
I went back to the hotel and prayed that I would wake up in a more honorable time, like maybe the McCarthy era.
I'm going on like this for a reason. If I live so long, eight months from now I'll turn 40, and I hope I'll still be surprised and saddened that there are only six congressmen who believe a damn thing. And I hope that eight months from now, or whenever, my moral sensor will be a little sharper than it has been.
There are days now when my line of work makes me ashamed, makes me depessed, makes me cry. And it occurs to me that this moral sensor has been fine-tuned within the walls of this campus. Forty years ago the great news broadcaster Edward R. Murrow got up in front of the convention of the radio and television news directors and announced that without moral direction all this great medium would become was "wires and lights in a box," and there are days when I wish it would still be even that idealistic.
About three weeks ago I awakened from my stupor on this subject and told my employers that I simply could not continue doing this show about the endless investigation and the investigation of the investigation, and the investigation of the investigation of the investigation. I had to choose what I felt in my heart was right over what I felt in my wallet was smart. I did not tell them they had 24 hours. I did not threaten them. I let them balance for themselves their professional and moral forces and set their timetable. I await their answer. Of course, I am not buying any new furniture for my home.
I heard an interview the other day with a brilliant British television screenwriter named Dennis Potter. He was ruminating on society and TV from a position which commands my attention: He knew he had less than three months to live. Potter described the change in society so well that I actually transcribed it. He said that in the mid-80s, quote, "Everything was given, in a sense, its pricetag. And the pricetag became the only gospel. And that gospel, in the end, is a very thin gruel indeed. And if you start measuring humankind in those terms, everything else then becomes secondary, or less important, or, in some sense ... laughable."
So this, ultimately, is my point. You are about to go out there and be confronted with choices. This is a real world and you may actually only be able to do this one time out of 10. But that seems to be about one time more out of 10 than those of us out here are pulling off.