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CNN Saturday Morning News
Reaction to Condit Interviews has Been Harsh
Aired August 25, 2001 - 09:03 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JEFF FLOCK, CNN ANCHOR: For the most part, reaction to Condit's network interview has not been kind.
CNN's Brian Cabell now, who has been taking the pulse of the nation.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
BRIAN CABELL, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It was a day when only those who were sleeping could have escaped the reports of Congressman Gary Condit's TV interview. And most Americans, it seemed, weren't impressed.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He seemed more like a criminal who had done something wrong and who was trying to hide that he seemed like a congressman that we should trust to make laws for us.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It was clear he was lying.
CABELL: Some of the tabloids predictably skewered Condit following his interview, and the more moderate press pundits weren't much kinder.
Howard Kurtz of "The Washington Post" called the interview, "...a half hour of bobbing and weaving and filibustering and, finally, stonewalling."
Monica Collins of "The Boston Herald" wrote that, "Condit's appearance was slick and soulless."
Niles Latham of the "New York Post" wrote, "Condit looked like an aging Ken doll, coldly and dispassionately discussing the emotionally wrenching issues of the Levy case as though he were sitting in on a lengthy agriculture committee hearing."
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ANNOUNCER: From NBC News, this is "TODAY."
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CABELL: TV news shows Friday scarcely had time for anything but Condit analysis, and bashing.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BILLY MARTIN, LEVY FAMILY ATTORNEY: He was not contrite. He was not remorseful.
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CABELL: Fox News channel's morning show had some fun at Condit's expense.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How about him looking like some kind of geisha?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Huh?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I don't know what that is.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Did they have enough makeup on that cat?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE (singing): Your cheatin' heart...
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CABELL: Imus in the morning on radio and MSNBC was equally irreverent with guest Mike Barnicle.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MIKE BARNICLE, "NY DAILY NEWS": He's a total sleazeball. He is indeed a sociopath. He doesn't blink. He sits there and stares, totally prepared, only in the context framed up of his own political future. Not this woman.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And of course, he's alive.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CABELL: All in all, bad reviews for a man trying to repair his battered image. But if you search had enough in his home district in central California, you'll find a defense, of sorts, for Condit's refusal to bear his soul on national TV.
VIRGINIA MEDINA, MODESTO RESIDENT: I think it's nobody's business. I don't want to know all of the gory details. I don't need to know. I have a fertile imagination.
CABELL: That may be, but, clearly, others want to know, and talk about it.
Brian Cabell, CNN, Atlanta.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: The media, and television in particular, lives and dies by the big interview. Read that "ratings."
CNN's Anne McDermott has some historical perspective on big interviews.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ANNE MCDERMOTT, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Gary Condit is one big get, the interview TV types kill for. The greatest get of all, maybe Monica.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "20/20," ABC, 1999)
BARBARA WALTERS, ABC NEWS: You have said that all sex is not a sexual relationship, that you call it what?
MONICA LEWINSKY: Messing around.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MCDERMOTT: Barbara Walters is the mother of all good gets, but she's had competition in recent years, like Diane Sawyer, who once got Michael Jackson and then-wife Lisa Marie Presley to confess that, yes, they actually slept together.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "PRIMETIME LIVE," ABC, 1995)
LISA MARIE PRESLEY: Yes. Yes, yes.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MCDERMOTT: Such interviews make ratings zoom while providing the Condits of the world with confessionals.
JOE SALTZMAN, MEDIA ANALYST: They hope that this will create a new image for them in the public mind, and sometimes it works.
MCDERMOTT: It worked for Hugh Grant. Remember his meeting with a prostitute?
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "THE TONIGHT SHOW WITH JAY LENO," NBC)
JAY LENO, HOST, "THE TONIGHT SHOW," NBC: Let me start with question No. 1: What the hell were you thinking?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MCDERMOTT: That interview worked. He's still a star. And it worked for this couple from Arkansas who went on "60 Minutes" in 1992 to answer questions about the husband's alleged affairs.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "60 MINUTES," CBS, 1992)
HILLARY CLINTON, FIRST LADY OF THE UNITED STATES: You know, I'm not sitting here, some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MCDERMOTT: OK, Tammy Wynette didn't like it. But they went to the White House. And so did this man, who may have invented the whole genre of televised comebacks in the '50s with his famous Checkers speech.
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RICHARD M. NIXON, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I come before you tonight as a candidate for the vice presidency and as a man whose honesty and integrity has been questioned.
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MCDERMOTT: "Nightline" would later question the honesty and integrity of PTL ministers Jim and Tammy Faye Baker, then at the center of a financial scandal. And sure enough, Tammy admitted to the sin of shopping.
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TAMMY FAYE BAKER: And I enjoy shopping. It's kind of a hobby to help my nerves.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MCDERMOTT: You call that a confession? Evangelist Jimmy Swaggert showed the Bakers how it's done.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JIMMY SWAGGERT: I have sinned against you, my Lord.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MCDERMOTT: O.J. Simpson wasn't admitting to any sinning at all when BET's Ed Gordon got this get.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, BET, 1996)
O.J. SIMPSON: I'm as innocent as anyone else out there.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MCDERMOTT: That's what the Ramseys were saying when CNN got them just days after the death of JonBenet.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, 1996)
PATRICIA RAMSEY, JONBENET'S MOTHER: We have to find out who did this.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MCDERMOTT: We're all still waiting.
But you never wait too long for the next great get. Shortly after Connie said she got Gary, Walters piped up and said she's got Carey.
Anne McDermott, CNN, Los Angeles.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
FLOCK: Well, for those of us who do what we do, the Condit interview was huge. It was sought after by many, landed by few.
Joining me from New York now to talk about it all is Seth Minookin, a correspondent for "Brill's Content" and Inside.com, which are publications that we here on the -- who do what -- we do read religiously, but not everybody does.
Seth, go ahead. Are we making too much of all of this? Have we gone too far? Was this too big a deal over not that big a deal? What do you think?
SETH MINOOKIN, INSIDE.COM: I think absolutely we've made too much of it. But I also think it's understandable. August is a notoriously slow news month. George Bush felt that there was so little going on he could take the entire month off. So the news media is often left sort of grasping at straws...
FLOCK: So you don't mean to tell me that if this was not August, if there were other things going on, we would not have Gary Condit on the front burner?
MINOOKIN: I think we would still have Gary Condit on the front burner. I don't know if we would have the wall-to-wall 23 1/2-hour-a- day coverage, especially cable networks over the last couple days have acted as if it's all -- it's Gary Condit's world and the rest of us are just visiting it. That'll probably die down.
And now especially after he's come forward and had such a disastrous appearance, not only on television but also his interviews to "Newsweek" and "People" have not been very successful from his point of view, I think probably we're going to start to see this die down a little bit.
FLOCK: All right, they weren't successful, everybody seems to agree, from his point of view. But what about the point of view of the reporters? How did they do in all of this? Connie Chung, obviously, the most visible, but, you know, nobody got anything out of him. Did we screw up somehow?
MINOOKIN: Well, Connie Chung, I think, should probably get a middle-of-the-road mark. I mean, it wasn't horrible. She was obviously very persistent and very dogged and kept going after Condit, asking him specifically about the affair. I thought there were a couple of things she could have done that would have made that interview a lot more effective.
FLOCK: Go ahead, give me a couple.
MINOOKIN: When Congressman Le -- when Congressman Condit insisted on saying that the Levy family had asked him not to disclose the nature of their relationship, Connie Chung could have gotten the Levys on the phone and said, OK, if you're saying that, why don't we get them on the phone, and if they give you permission, I assume that you'll be free to talk about anything that you want to talk about.
FLOCK: But now we understand that there were certain parameters on this interview. This was going to be a half hour, it was going to be over and when it was over, and it was designed, basically, not to let her do things like that, or to huddle with a producer who might say, Well, gee, let's try to follow up on this. I mean, was that not his design?
MINOOKIN: That absolutely was his design, and specifically, I think, not giving her the time to sort of mentally regroup and prepare for new questions. But I would have rather seen three minutes of that interview spent in a very dramatic fashion with her trying to contact the Levys than 15 minutes of that interview with Gary Condit saying, "I've been married for 34 years, I'm not a perfect man, that's all I'm going to say." I think the whole country got sick of that pretty quickly.
FLOCK: Well, let me ask you this. You know, they agreed, ABC agreed to these parameters on the interview. Don Hewitt suggested at "60 Minutes," that perhaps that was not a good idea and that he wouldn't have agreed. Was it a good idea? Did they give too much to get what they got?
MINOOKIN: Well, after we've seen the interview, I'm not sure if Connie Chung had had six hours with Gary Condit, if he would have said anything different from what he said. I think he was determined to stick to his script. Any time a news organization makes concessions on how an interview's going to be done, it raises some questions.
On the other hand, no interview can go on forever. It's a reality that subjects say, OK, I'm going to give you a half an hour, 45 minutes, an hour and a half. And I think in the end, actually, it could have made Condit look worse, because some of that stonewalling, some of the going back over the same answers, probably would have been edited out. And at his insistence, the tape had to be shown from beginning to end.
FLOCK: So you think this may have, by the way he structured it, may have worked against him.
MINOOKIN: I think pretty much everything he did worked against him. I think the way he structured it probably wasn't the smartest thing. Whoever was advising him on his answers was not doing a good job. It had the fingerprints, I thought, of a lawyer and not of a PR adviser on it...
FLOCK: You wrote that, as I recall, on the Web site, that it was Abbe Lowell, largely, that structured it. MINOOKIN: Well, certainly Lowell was doing some of the negotiations with the news outlets. And if that does end up being the case, I think that was probably somewhat of a mistake, although, on the other hand, we still don't know what he said to the police, and what kind of legal trouble he might be in.
FLOCK: Well, as he pointed out, this is not a court, this is not, this is not church, this is TV here. Gary Condit is the focus of today's Reporter's Notebook. Seth will -- if you didn't think I grilled him hard enough, stick around, you get your own chance.
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