Newt Has Been Brocked, Not Borked
August 17, 1995|By FRANK RICH and The New York Times
So much for Rupert Murdoch's loyalty to Newt Gingrich. When Gail Sheehy's profile of the Speaker surfaced in Vanity Fair this week, no one in American journalism did more to promote it than Murdoch - devoting the front page of The New York Post, where he holds the title editor-in-chief, to the headline "Who's a Newty Boy?" along with the teaser "Aide: He made whoopee on an office desk.
"And Murdoch did this even as Gingrich was touring the country hawking "To Renew America" for his own (as well as Newty Boy's) financial benefit.
In case you missed The Post and haven't yet caught up with Vanity Fair, the passage in Ms. Sheehy's 12,000-word article that most caught Murdoch's expert eye was a brief interlude discussing Gingrich's alleged sex life during his first marriage. How did journalism reach this pass?
One answer to that question is provided by Joseph Nocera, a liberal journalist, in a forthcoming piece titled "Getting Borked" in the September issue of GQ magazine. Nocera argues that the savage media campaign that defeated Ronald Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987 "marked some kind of turning point in the disintegration of civil discourse in American politics."Using "ugly distortions" of the judge's record, liberal Democrats demonized him as the ideological heir to Simon Legree.
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So who took Borking to the next plateau of meanness? When did the journalistic pursuit of current political leaders' past sexual history become de rigueur? Any Gingrich fan who reads Vanity Fair in disgust should turn to the January 1994 issue of the conservative monthly, The American Spectator, in which David Brock recounted Bill Clinton's alleged sexual past with anecdotes almost indistinguishable from those Sheehy uses to describe contemporaneous peccadilloes of Gingrich.
Unhappily for the Speaker, Sheehy is a better-known writer than Brock and her piece is appearing in a magazine with four times the Spectator's circulation.
Sheehy's psychobabble aside, she is also a better journalist than Brock - so much so that there was no need for her to sink to his level. Her on-the-record quotes from Gingrich, his family and his close aides are enough in themselves to hang a supposed paragon of family values as an unreligious, undisciplined, draft-ducking opportunist.
And what could be a more devastating judgment on the Speaker than his own wife's statement that he shouldn't be president?
Already the Gingrich camp is dismissing the Vanity Fair piece as tabloid trash, and soon enough it will be decried as another liberal exercise in Borking. But the tabloid that made the article's most salacious paragraphs front-page news is run by the Speaker's own publisher, a true-blue conservative. And the mean form of journalism practiced against Gingrich is not the nasty liberal vice known as Borking but its even nastier right-wing mutant. Newt wasn't Borked - he was Brocked."
http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1995-08-17/news/9508160294_1_borking-ms-sheehy-vanity
"The Inner Quest of Newt Gingrich" by Gail Sheehy. Vanity Fair, September 1995.
