The Gary Hart affair began a sea change in the way the media cover the personal lives of politicians.
Handling the Hoyt sex story with restraint
Updated: 08/24/08 9:48 AM
The handsome former senator from Colorado was the Democratic front-runner for president in 1987 when rumors of his womanizing began to plague his campaign.
In response, Gary Hart invited disaster: “Follow me around,” he told the press. He defiantly predicted that the reporters’ experience would be boring.
Far from it. Hart’s promising presidential bid came crashing down amid tabloid images of a 29-year-old blond model named Donna Rice, a motorboat ever-so-memorably named “Monkey Business,” and reporters from the Miami Herald staking out his Washington townhouse.
Both titillating and tragic, the Gary Hart affair began a sea change in the way the media cover the personal lives of politicians.
Suddenly, the long era was over in which revered politicians such as the Kennedys and Franklin Delano Roosevelt could count on reporters to know about their extramarital dalliances and, with a wink and a nod, conceal them from the public.
Twenty-one years later, two prominent stories — one national, one local — are part of that legacy.
Former presidential candidate John Edwards, after originally denying it, recently acknowledged his affair with noted party girl and video producer Rielle Hunter, an admission made more distasteful to many because of his wife Elizabeth’s necessarily public struggle with cancer.
And just this week, Western New York has been abuzz over charges that longtime Buffalo Assemblyman Sam Hoyt had affairs with State Legislature interns.
The story bubbled under the surface for a long time before it broke on The Buffalo News Web site on Tuesday evening and then in Wednesday’s print editions.
The Hoyt story brings forth all sorts of challenging questions. When do rumors turn into legitimate news? When does a politician’s personal life merit public scrutiny? What ought to be considered adequate sourcing for such a story?
And more: How should such a story be displayed — with banner headlines above the fold on the front page, or in a brief story buried in the back pages of the paper? Should it become a major breaking story on the Web site’s home page, merely be an item in “Latest Local News,” or should you have to search to find it?
And, on a deeper level, how much should we be concerned that we are playing a part in perpetuating dirty politics? After all, the common fare of blogs — which often have their own axes to grind and their own less-than-admirable motivations for publishing — often does not meet the standards of a responsible news outlet.
Ultimately, two factors prompted us to go ahead with the Hoyt story. One was the assemblyman’s public statement, acknowledging only that he had, as he put it, broken his marriage vows. Once an elected official comes forward, at least that much is fair game.
Second was the news that the State Legislature would investigate the matter to see if Hoyt had violated ethics policies on fraternizing with interns, rules that went into place in 2004.
Given those developments, we felt the public had a right to know. On Tuesday night, Bob McCarthy interviewed Hoyt by phone and that, too, produced newsworthy material. Our story broke at the top of the Web site’s “Latest Local News” column, and, the next morning, appeared below the fold on the newspaper’s front page.
We’re continuing to follow it, looking at the political implications for Hoyt, both in his hotly contested re-election efforts this year and as a likely factor in his surprise withdrawal from the Buffalo mayoral race in 2005.
Unable to confirm their veracity and uncertain of their newsworthiness, we haven’t published e-mails between Hoyt and a former Legislature intern that appeared on a local blog. As of Thursday, when this went to press, we were withholding the names of the women apparently involved in consideration of their privacy.
In short, in the post-Gary Hart era, we’re trying to cover the Hoyt story responsibly. You can comment by writing to me at The News or join the discussion by posting a comment on buffalonews.com’s Inside the News blog.
