JFK and the intern - Blurring boundaries of news and titillation

Titillation and 'tabloidisation' is a disease deadlier than SARS ravaging the media across continents - from Delhi to Detroit, from Mumbai to Mexico. America has been obsessed by reports that the youngest president in its history had a romantic dalliance with a mysterious 19-year-old intern at the White House, writes Binay Kumar

A retail chain which operates more than 2200 grocery stores across America recently decided to cover up all copies of a popular magazine on its news stands, allowing only the magazine's name appearing at the top to be shown. The idea was to hide its colourful cover page displaying its racy stories with graphic headlines such as Sex and Size: Is He Too Big? and 20 Earth-Quaking Moves That Will Make Him Plead For Mercy - and Beg For More. All over America, newsagents' shelves are today bursting with magazines showing sex on their covers and so are the television screens and billboards.

The problem is that the 'offending' magazine is not alone in doing what it did to accelerate its sales. Titillation and 'tabloidisation' is a disease deadlier than SARS ravaging the media across continents - from Delhi to Detroit, from Mumbai to Mexico. Sexually explicit headlines and contents adorn news stands everywhere and no matter where you look, things are appearing more and more titillating. Within a short span of a week, for example, I found two stories displayed prominently on the website of a well-known Indian newspaper bearing headlines such as "No holiday for sex"! and "Once in three days, game for new ways".

The retail chain in question defended its action by saying that they were responding to customers' complaints who did not want their young children exposed to such explicit content. Nobody can deny that such content is not suitable for kids accompanying their parents for an innocuous trip to their local grocery store. But whose fault is it? Is the media to blame?

Titillation comes couched in several ways. If it's not bare flesh, it lurks in the bony structure of words. For several days now, away from the gloom and doom of the economy, wars and SARS,  America has been obsessed by reports that the youngest president in its history had a romantic dalliance with a mysterious 19-year-old intern at the White House. The long-lost affair was revealed in a sealed 17-page 1964 interview with 77-year-old former White House press aide Barbara Gamarekian, which she agreed to disclose to historian Robert Dallek as research for his ongoing President Kennedy biography, "An Unfinished Life."

Interviewed about his forthcoming book, Dallek started a media blitz by telling NBC news that a young intern, despite lacking clerical skills of any sort, was hired by the JFK White House because she had caught the fancy of the President and was good at expending sexual favors to him. The comment spurred a massive response. Newspapers and television channels went full throttle into high steam culling together experts and commentators making graphical descriptions and barraging readers and viewers with sexual innuendoes concealed in cynical comparisons between the much-loved Kennedy and his truly deserving illustrious successor, Bill Clinton.

It was a field day for them. God knows who won in the end - the profiteering news corporations or the innocent public? Surely, the audiences did not emerge any wiser from these debates.

What is so important about the President's sex life that it merits the release of detailed reports of his sexual encounters to the public after more than forty years of its occurrence? Does it make any difference to the record of Kennedy's presidency, which surely would not be judged on the basis of his performance in the bed? The latest episode is particularly irksome because it blatantly violates two cardinal principals of public debate: One, it rakes up accusations (only because they are titillating) when the accused is not alive to defend himself, second, it takes up an issue that is not germane to the discharge of duties publicly mandated to the accused. The only purpose it serves is to shore up media sales.      

But, can you sell something that the public doesn't demand? Criticising the offending newspapers, magazines and the television channels is not of any help. After all, the ideas, ideals and messages conveyed through social discourse, whether in words or visuals, are a manifestation of a society's morals. In all its true dimensions, its literature functions as a mirror, a reflection of the ways of the mainstream culture. Should we not therefore ask ourselves whether the media's behaviour is only a reflection of our societies becoming desensitised? Can nothing shock us anymore?

It may also be that with our sexual freedom and liberty, we need material that will always be slightly over the edge. The problem here is that this edge is getting quite extreme. A quick glance at print ads and television commercials indicate the high degree of sexuality pervasive in our society. And, let us not point fingers at America alone. This is one common denominator that brings urban India closer to the American experience. And that is the key - the pervasive nature of sex in urban social settings at large.

The naked truth is that pornography has gradually managed to edge its way from the margins into the mainstream. Courses in porn studies are taught on American campuses including the University of California at Santa Barbara and Berkley. Running parallel with this academic interest, pornography has even become chic in pop culture. And Hollywood has played its role in making it acceptable, if not altogether respectable, thereby sanitising the business of sleaze. 'Basic Instinct' is rabidly mainstream. 'Fatal Attraction' is natural destiny.

And nothing succeeds like success. The rapid spread of the Internet has spawned a social morality of its own. It has its own language, idiom and vestiges of culture. The internet has perhaps given the biggest fillip to pornography. So, as long as it took a physical form - books, magazines, videos - pornography could always be seized and destroyed. But lately, pornography has shed its physical form and gone digital.

Moreover, the internet offers the consumer not just every kind of imaginable sexual encounter but also the opportunity to reach out and touch someone with the same rarefied interests within the secure confines of his home or office.

The tragedy is that the sense of pornography as something shameful and transgressive seems to have faded away in modern liberal societies. Today's society swirls in what you can describe as a pop-porn milieu. And nothing showcases this milieu better than the Kennedy-intern scandal being played out on the media stage like a soap. It's nothing more than selling sex through the back door. While hardcore pornography may still be largely unacceptable, we have succeeded in circumventing this by creating pseudo-porn.

('An Immigrant's Diary' appears every Thursday. The writer is a resident of California in the United States.)