These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

the rise of round-the-clock cable news produced a veritable army of political commentators and pundits, and gave officeholders and office seekers nearly endless airtime, creating a political class of television celebrities. “It created a high-profile blur of People on TV whose brands overtook their professional identities,” wrote the New York Times’s Mark Leibovich. “They were not journalists or strategists or pols per se, but citizens of the green room.” They were pretty and handsome and they looked alike, and they sounded alike, too. They never said, “I don’t know,” or “Let me think about that.” They scowled and flared their nostrils and attacked one another, cocks in a cockfight. The White House became a cockfight pit, too. In 1995, Michael McCurry, Clinton’s press secretary, began opening daily press briefings to televised coverage. The Clinton campaign was chronicled in The War Room and his White House, in a way, on West Wing. When people from Clinton’s campaign and from his administration left politics, they made piles of money, hawking their access to policymakers. In the two and a half years between when senior adviser Rahm Emanuel left the Clinton White House and when he ran for Congress, he pocketed more than $18 million, chiefly working for an investment banking firm. The opportunities for corruption and ethics violations were endless. The opportunities for ratings, driven by scandal, were limitless. In 1996, CNN had 60 million subscribers; MSNBC, 25 million; an...