The Name Is the Game

I was happy to read the other day that rookie reporters are finally getting paid a living wage.

When I was starting out, I made a hundred bucks a week. That required me to live humbly, subsiding on Corn Flakes, pancakes and street corner hot dogs. Since we considered beer to be an important food group, we consumed a fair amount of that as well.

Now, a young lady whose family can be best described as an aspiring political dynasty has signed on to the NBC network to do some reporting. She’s inexperienced so she won’t be covering the White House or Congress but will do the odd feature story here and there.

Her name is Chelsea Clinton. Yeah, that Chelsea, daughter of Bill and Hillary. Her salary: $600,000 per. To put that in perspective, it’s three times more than her daddy made as President of the United States.

I caught her act recently on the NBC Nightly News and while she was competent, she exhibited all the charm and warmth of a lamp post. For 600,000 big ones, I would expect a combination Edward R. Murrow and Katie Couric.

She was somewhat less than that. I guess you don’t always get what you pay for.

But the greatest obstacle facing Chelsea the Reporter is herself.

She grew up in the White House as we watched, transforming from an awkward teen to a self-assured young woman who maintained her demeanor despite tasteless attacks from the likes of Rush Limbaugh who once said, “Everyone knows the Clintons have a cat. Socks is the White House cat. But did you know there is also a White House dog?” The punchline was a picture of Chelsea.  She was 13 at the time.

She has spent her life, not reporting the news, but being the news. So when I saw her on television, my reaction was, “Hey, that’s Chelsea Clinton.” I cannot for the life of me remember the topic of the story she was reporting. 

Who She Is overshadows What She Says. It’s sort of like Angelina Jolie doing the weather on the 6 o’clock news. Who knows if it’s going to rain?

There are celebrity journalists --- Walter Cronkite, Barbara Walters, Woodward and Bernstein, Christiane Amanpour and Tom Brokaw come to mind --- who achieved fame through dedication to their craft.

But celebrities as journalists? It’s marquee value and little else.

Undaunted, Vanity Fair magazine has also gone the celebrity route and in the process made NBC’s hiring of Chelsea look like a stroke of genius.

They have brought Monica Lewinsky into the fold, a woman whose claim to fame was her hands-on relationship with President Clinton when she was a White House intern.

She will be contributing to the magazine’s website on an “ongoing basis,” according to Politico. With any luck, Monica and Chelsea will bump into each other covering the same story.

Lewinsky recently wrote a piece for Vanity Fair’s about online rebuttals to personal attacks. In June she wrote an essay about being in the public eye and her "10 years of self-imposed reticence." 

She also appeared on a National Geographic Channel special on the ‘90s in which she said she went from being “a virgin to humiliation” to “the most humiliated woman in the world.”

I guess if you’re Monica Lewinsky, you’ve got lemons so you make lemonade.  Unfortunately, almost anything she says or does will be followed by a snicker.

I feel sorry for her. I believe she was an impressionable young women enamored of a powerful and popular President who as it happened was lecher-in-chief.

It may be cathartic to write about her affair with Clinton, and I suspect she needs the money, but the last thing she should pursue is a career in journalism whose practitioners have already portrayed her as a one-dimensional trollop.

She needs to move on with her life. Run a non-profit. Feed the hungry. Shelter the homeless. Advocate for animals. Work for world peace.  Define herself as something other than Bill’s bimbo.

She said in her Vanity Fair piece that “When I hear of Hillary's prospective candidacy, I cannot help but fear the next wave of paparazzi,  the next wave of 'Where is she now?' stories, the next reference to me in Fox News' coverage of the primaries.”

If that’s true, then she should hold a press conference, declare she has no interest in Hillary’s presidential aspirations or, for that matter, the entire Clinton family. She should then announce she will never revisit the topic again, ever.

Alas, by accepting the Vanity Fair job, she has thrust herself back in the spotlight where the whole sordid affair will be replayed again and again.

Someone needs to tell her that Vanity Fair didn’t hire her because she is a deft and compelling writer. The magazine is exploiting her just like her president did.

Robert Rector is a veteran of 50 years in print journalism. He has worked at the San Francisco Examiner, Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Valley News, Los Angeles Times and Pasadena Star-News. He can be reached at Nulede@Aol.Com.