American Politics Journal

Gresham and Chandra: An Objective, Scientifically Verifiable Exposé
By John F. X. Gillis

Click here to order John F.X. Gillis' unique analysis of the Lewinsky Scandal, Jove Laughs, They Say.
July 19, 2001 (APJP) -- No, no, no. This is not some exposé regarding the possibility of an adulterous affair between long-dead financier Thomas Gresham and recently-missing Chandra Levy.

Back in the 16th century, Gresham proposed a principle of economics and money: "bad money drives out good." Thanks to a rare confluence of events, the Chandra Levy story allows us to determine if some variation of Gresham's Law is applicable to the contemporary media. Do bad stories drive out good?

Coronologists study the corona of the sun. For the most part, their lives and studies revolve around total eclipses of the sun. That is because those rare natural phenomena offer them unique opportunities to study the corona while the rest of the sun is blocked out by the moon. Even more rare than a total solar eclipse is for a story to emerge in the mass media which is covered heavily by most outlets but which is completely ignored by one. Yet such a rare phenomena has just occurred. Like a coronologist who decided to schedule a vacation during a solar eclipse, we would be less than committed "scientists" in our study of the mainstream media if we did not take full advantage of this unique opportunity.

As Chandra-obsessives are well aware, during the last two months, as the disappearance of Chandra Levy has garnered a steadily increasing share of media space/time, the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather has devoted not one moment of time to the story. According to The Hotline, there was a joke going around the CBS newsroom to the effect that "Chandra watches CBS News -- she doesn't even know that she's missing." Temperaments seemed to be straining, though: the July 18 New York Post reports CBS staffers becoming critical of the Evening News' continued disdain for the story. The 18th turned out to be the very day, in fact, that the CBS Evening News finally broadcast a report on the Levy case.

Although media-watchers as varied as Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post and Bill O'Reilly of the Fox News Channel have criticized the Rather-dominated CBS show for its refusal to cover the story, it is not the purpose of this essay to defend or attack the editorial judgments of any media outlets. Maybe the Levy coverage is about right for those media outlets covering it; maybe it's too much or too little. Those are subjective judgments. The purpose of this essay is to perform an objective scientifically verifiable experiment.

During the long year when the Lewinsky Scandal dominated the national media, one argument frequently proposed by some of Clinton's defenders and a few media scholars was that the Lewinsky Scandal drove out potentially important stories that were either not covered or given only nominal coverage because the Lewinsky stories soaked up so much media space/time. Unfortunately, such arguments were by definition hypothetical because we can never know what the mainstream media would have covered without the Lewinsky stories because the fact is, those stories were produced and did absorb media interest.

Similar arguments might well be advanced in the case of the missing Chandra Levy but, fortunately this time, the argument need not be hypothetical because we have verifiable objective evidence of how a mainstream media coverage would differ in the absence of the Chandra Levy story.

You can click on each of the following links to see the web-page summaries for the major network flagship news broadcasts for July 17, 2001, captured during the following afternoon.

First, CBS Evening News;
then, ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings;
and finally, NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw.

Although the major network nightly news broadcasts are never exactly similar, they are never completely different, either. We can see, for example, that the death of the Washington Post's Katharine Graham was covered by all three outlets and, given it's positioning, was given approximately equal prominence. And, at the "back of the book," near the end of the broadcasts where each network places their own continuing series and it covers smaller or human interest stories, each network's coverage was entirely different. All this is to be expected.

So now we get to the crux of our objective, scientifically verifiable experiment. In the place of the major story on Chandra Levy which NBC and ABC placed in their newscasts, what story did CBS give us? At least one good answer seems to leap out:

Phillip Morris: Dead Smokers Cheaper. A report commissioned by the world's largest cigarette maker cites the financial benefits from premature smoking deaths.

Here's the rundown for those who happened not to see the CBS report (or the story on the same subject by the US-distributed BBC World News). Tobacco advertising law in the Czech Republic is out of line with European Union law. The Czechs, who hope to enter the EU in 2004, are pondering whether to ease that entry by strengthening their tobacco regulations. The Phillip Morris Company, which holds about an 80% market share in the Czech Republic very much likes the present state of the law there and wants the government not to further restrict tobacco advertising. Hence, they commissioned a study to demonstrate that the government of the Czech Republic benefits from the present law and would incur added costs if the law were brought up to EU standards. Among the various aspects of the issue as analyzed by Phillip Morris, the report suggested that between $24 and $30 million of the total of about $140 million in net benefits to the government from smoking comes from premature death of smokers.

As was stated earlier, it is not the intention of this objective, scientifically verifiable investigation to determine whether the Chandra Levy story or the Phillip Morris story is more important. The purpose is to show to a high degree of scientific certainty that one sort of story, of which the Chandra Levy story is an exemplar, drives out other sorts of stories, of which the Tobacco Report is an exemplar.

Let's see. A Fortune 500 American corporation directly interferes in the political process of a potential member of the European Union. They produce a report coldly calculating the benefits of human deaths in monetary terms, employing the standards of ruthless economic efficiency.

That story, in turn, might raise numerous questions that might be addressed in further news stories. For example, a few weeks ago, the Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert harshly castigated the anti-trust regulators of the European Union for "interfering" with "American businesses" by quashing the proposed GE/Honeywell merger. (Never mind that, according to The Economist, American anti-trust regulators had earlier rejected the all-European takeover of BOC by Air Liquide.) It would be tempting to ask the Speaker, "If European meddling in American business is so bad, is American business meddling in the European Union equally to be condemned?" But that question will probably never get asked because the story will never get the media exposure that would prompt the questioning.

So now we have objective, scientifically verifiable evidence of how the Gresham's Law of media coverage works: Sex scandals drive out coverage of corporate mis- or malfeasance. Of course, like all objective, scientifically verifiable experiments, we can't be sure that our experiment has proved our hypothesis until it has been replicated or until we've milked every last dollar from every last potential grant giver. But, as they say in the objective, scientifically verifiable experiment biz, "We have, we hope, at least opened a fruitful line for future inquiry."