The Lewinsky Scandal

November 15th, 1995: Miss Monica Lewinsky, a 23 year-old intern, and President Bill Clinton have their first affair of nine at the White House. The streak of affairs would end a bit less than two years later in March 1997, but the scandal regarding the sexual content of the affair was only beginning.

After it became clear to the public that there was something between Lewinsky and Clinton, she was transferred to an office in the Pentagon in order to dilute rumors about the two. However, rumors still circulated and Mr. Clinton was asked to confront them directly in an interview on live TV. In this interview, he explicitly denied such affairs. But when a trusted friend of Lewinsky’s, Linda Trapp, came forward with evidence that he could not deny, Clinton was compelled to restate his testimony and thus confessed to having a sexual affair with Lewinsky.

The Drudge Report

A year later, a man named Matthew Drudge made a daring journalistic move. He was the proud owner of a news aggregation site that he titled The Drudge Report. The site itself was nothing special, just a simple layout with a standard font and large headlines. The blog was largely unknown – until he made the decision to blog about the Lewinsky scandal. He was the first news outlet to do so, so in exploiting the President’s sexual history with a young woman he actually made history himself. He didn’t see it as a large accomplishment at first, but he soon realized that what he had done would change journalism permanently. In posting what would later become one of the most well known blog posts in history, Drudge set the standard for all online articles to come.

My Experience/Opinion

After watching Adam and Martin’s presentation, McKenna and I became very interested in the details of the Lewinsky scandal itself. We went on YouTube and watched the most well known interview of her on 20/20 in order to acquire more information. After watching a few parts of it, we learned that there was a lot more to the case than exploited in The Drudge Report. Lewinsky not only seemed to have a difficult past, but it was revealed that Clinton was not her first or only affair – she previously had one with a married man while she was a senior in high school.

Through watching her on 20/20, I began to connect her story to that of John F Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe during his presidency in 1962. I remember reading an article a while ago about her thoughts on the affair and how upset she was at being portrayed as a sexual object. I have every reason to believe that Monroe was a good person at heart and didn’t mean any harm by her actions, but for some reason I could not feel the same sympathy for Monica Lewinsky. It occurred to me at one point that perhaps she just wanted to be loved and was looking for the type of attention that her father never gave her, but I couldn’t see her side of the story very well through her laughing and smiling in the interview. I do see many similarities between her and Monroe in terms of the situation itself, however I feel that Lewinsky’s intentions were not as innocent as Monroe’s seemed to be.

I do respect Drudge’s decision to put the information regarding the Lewinsky/Clinton affair out there. It was an important step for journalism and an even bigger one for the US.