Strategies of Illumination: U.S. Network News, Watergate, and the Clinton Affair

This study examines the metaphors of publicity that structured U.S. network television news coverage of Watergate in 1973-74 and the Clinton affair of 1998. During both Watergate and the Clinton affair, the networks understood publicity to be the light of public inquiry. The two sets of coverage, however, differ substantially in the nature of that light. The Watergate coverage gives explicit voice to the metaphor of publicity as a searchlight, an apersonal and disembodied agent of surveillance that illuminates the political in a rational-institutional light. By contrast, the Clinton coverage implicitly rests upon a metaphor of publicity as a floodlight, a dramaturgical exposure of the political process that celebrates instead an emotional, personal, and narrativistic frame for the political and a subjective, embodied approach to journalism. While the floodlight model is often maligned, this analysis concludes that it is expanding the assumptions and boundaries of public discourse.