Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) (11 page)

Some don’t think women have any business being in locker rooms. With five hundred women sports reporters working today and the locker room still the place where reporters interview athletes, this view seems anachronistic. But it is a reasonable view if you believe the closest women should come to pro sports is the cheerleading squad or the backseat of a limousine.

Some also believe women are in the locker room for the express purpose of staring at what my sons, who have the same delusion of universal interest because they are small boys, call their “private parts.” This is a red herring, this idea that somehow athletes must be naked in a locker room when reporters arrive. This week the coach of the Cincinnati Bengals decided to bar women from his locker room, a violation of law and of league policy, and said, “I will not allow women to walk in on fifty naked men.”

Here’s a tip, genius: Have them put on underwear.

Ordinary locker-room behavior doesn’t have much to do with the organized harassment the league is investigating in the Olson case. And female sportswriters say lots of athletes are decent guys. The women sports reporters I know are very smart, smart enough to know who gets blamed for the sins of the jocks. At the Patriots game last Sunday, it was Lisa Olson the fans hooted.

This incident has changed her life, perhaps shortened her career as a sportswriter. Professional athletes know about short careers. Twenty years from now Lisa Olson will still be able to write, but there probably won’t be one of the guys on that team who can still play football. Twenty years from now we will still have this bad bargain: You don’t have to play by our rules as long as you perform. So long as you can dunk or pitch or block, you can get away with murder. Of course, when the legs and the arm are gone, all bets are off.

JOURNALISM 2001
April 12, 1992

I feel like one of those cartoon characters who have a little angel on one shoulder and a little devil on the other. The reporter—the one some people would say is carrying the pitchfork—says one thing, the human being another. There’s a lot of this going around.

The subject is Arthur Ashe: the news is AIDS. This week the gentleman tennis player became a reluctant symbol. He had known since 1988 that he’d been infected by a transfusion, but he and his wife and a few close friends kept the secret for an obvious reason: they feared the shunning. Then someone tipped
USA Today
, and
USA Today
called and asked. Confirm or deny. That’s how we do these things. Mr. Ashe called a press conference and went public.

Welcome to Journalism 2001. Anyone who tries to make readers believe the questions are simple ones, who automatically invokes freedom of the press and the public’s right to know, is doing a disservice to America’s newspapers and straining the
credulity of its people. Naming rape victims. Outing gay people. The candidate’s sex life. The candidate’s drug use. Editors are making decisions they have never made before, on deadline, with only hours to spare, with competitors breathing down their necks.

I am disquieted by the Arthur Ashe story. I can’t help feeling that in the medical sense we outed him, a practice that, in the sexual sense, I deplore. That’s the human being talking. The reporter understands: public figure, big news. An editor argued rather persuasively on television that if Mr. Ashe had been in a car accident or been hospitalized for cancer, we would have written about it.

But listening to those arguments was like listening to others I’d heard not so long ago. We publish the names of victims of muggings, of murder; why not the names of victims of rape? The answer is that rape is not like other crimes. There are good arguments to be made that our newspapers shape our mind-set, and that by withholding the names of rape victims we perpetuate the stigma. You can make the same argument about reporting AIDS.

But, like the women who were raped, perhaps the victims of this illness deserve some special privacy.

Privacy, privacy. The white light of the press and the closed doors of our homes are two of the most deeply prized aspects of our lives as Americans. It just so happens that, just like those two little cartoon characters, they are often in direct opposition to each other.

Is Arthur Ashe still a public figure, this many years after his days at center court? If he is, need we know the medical condition of every public figure? If we are entitled to expose a reluctant patient, what about a reluctant gay person? What are the parameters? Mr. Ashe argued eloquently that he was neither running for office nor running a corporation, and that his health was no one’s concern but his own. At a convention of newspaper editors, my colleagues argued otherwise.

I don’t usually put this many questions in a column, but it’s
questioning that is going to serve the press best. Actually, there is no “the press.” We are a collection of men and women, the good, the bad, and the nondescript. We know the dangers of knowing too little: we remember the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam, and, more recently, the arid historical record of the Persian Gulf war.

We know about the man who was a member of the American Nazi Party and a leader of the Ku Klux Klan, who, in the face of a story that he had been born and raised a Jew, committed suicide. It was a very good story; the hypothetical is always whether you’d publish it, knowing the aftermath.

We tell people what we think they need to know. We hurt people, sometimes without reason. Sometimes we are kind. Mr. Ashe described a “silent and generous conspiracy to assist me in maintaining my privacy” on the part of some reporters. I would have joined up. This story makes me queasy. Perhaps it is the disparity between the value of the information conveyed and the magnitude of the pain inflicted.

But kindness is not the point. Information is the point of the product, and questioning the point of the process. We are making a lot of this up as we go along. In the newspaper business we assume certainty; when you spell Steven with a
v
it is because you know that’s how Steven spells it. But we are moving these days into areas of great uncertainty. Arthur Ashe has already begun to turn his exposure into education. I hope we manage to do the same.

SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN
July 26, 1992

Remember thirteen? Remember waking up in the morning never certain of exactly who you’d be? Remember being self-conscious about everything from your hair to your feet? Remember wild crushes, endless self-examination, stormy silences?

Corinne Quayle is thirteen. And she should be left in peace.

Oh, there was a certain satisfaction in watching what her dad did on television. Larry King personalized a question about abortion, asking the vice president what he would do if Corinne, when grown, discovered she was pregnant. The vice president launched into what abortion-rights advocates think of as the “my daughter” response.

People are troubled by abortion, even outright opposed. And then their daughter, their real daughter, not a poll question, not a hypothetical situation, turns out to be pregnant. And the world tilts.

That tilt is how Mr. Quayle, who has been an unwavering opponent
of legal abortion, came to say of Corinne that he would “support her on whatever decision she made.”

And that response is how his wife, Marilyn, came to say peremptorily, “If she becomes pregnant, she’ll take the child to term.”

And that is how I come to say “Enough.” The right answer to Larry King’s question was not about abortion but about privacy. Remember being thirteen. Imagine your mom and dad arguing on the national news about what they’d do if you got pregnant. Imagine P.E. class the next day.

Wow.

We have had one argument after another about privacy in this campaign. My sympathies have not been substantially aroused by the invasion of privacy that accompanies running for president.

But I feel for these kids. When I see Chelsea Clinton standing small at the center of the convention celebration, her braces glittering in the limelight, or when I think about Corinne Quayle being the most famous hypothetical in health class, the perimeters of privacy loom large.

I never liked Bill Clinton half so much as when, asked what he would do if Chelsea were pregnant, he replied, “I wouldn’t talk to the press about it.”

Political parents collaborate in this process. I thought Senator Core was way over the line between illumination and invasion when he described his little boy’s near-death experience in his acceptance speech. And I winced at the suggestion that Chelsea Clinton was upbeat about her parents’ appearance on
60 Minutes
during the Gennifer Flowers adultery brouhaha. At twelve, I didn’t even want to think about my parents having sex with each other, much less with someone else.

I appreciate the balancing act. I’ve written about my own kids, wrestling with what is telling and what is merely tattling. The personal approach often yields the secrets of the heart; witness Larry King. But we have to count the cost.

The press exposure is not a new problem—ask Lynda Bird
Johnson Robb, who dated George Hamilton with a pop-eyed nation waiting up for her, or John F. Kennedy, Jr., who in some way will be forever three. But the kind of exposure is different now, tougher, more invasive, less fan mag, more social policy. Less fashion and dating, more drugs and abortion.

The exposure is so taken for granted that recently Linda Chavez, a former Reagan aide, suggested there was something odd about Chelsea Clinton’s low profile during the primary season, as though political parents are suspect when they keep their children’s lives private. Ms. Chavez remarked snidely that perhaps there was a problem, not with the quality of Clinton kids but the quantity.

“The one-child family is still the exception in America,” Ms. Chavez said, “and I think that this whole image again sort of looks like the Democratic liberal version of what a family looks like.”

There’s a word for this kind of judgment. The word is “reprehensible.”

I remember being thirteen. I remember how my mother would say “How was your day?” and I would think she was prying. No kid of that age should be pressed into service as a poster child. After years of lunches and train rides and shared beach houses we never learn so much about our friends as we do when we know their kids. Children are surely a character issue. But it’s wrong to turn them into a campaign device. Remember thirteen.

A MISTAKE
April 21, 1991

I put my notebook on the kitchen table and pointed to the top line of a page.

“Who’s that?” said my husband, looking at the name scrawled in my handwriting.

“The Central Park jogger,” I said.

There were many of us in the news business who knew that name, and there were others in the financial community in New York City, her co-workers and classmates and clients, who knew it, too. I sometimes thought as many people in this big city knew that name as could populate a small one—say, Palm Beach, Florida. And we all had our reasons for not revealing it: some because they loved her, some because they respected her, some because their newspapers forbade it.

I fell into that last group, but I had another reason too. I did not use her name when I wrote about her because I thought it was the right thing to do. She had lost her balance, her memory, and, finally, on the witness stand, her anonymity. I thought that
was enough. And I believed the reader lost nothing at all by not knowing.