Conor Friedersdorf writes about sex scandals in general, in response to revelations about Rep. Anthony Weiner sending pictures to women online:
Meanwhile, there is a significant cost to obsessing over these things. The opportunity cost, for the media, is covering lots of other matters that are actually of greater import to the public, whatever one thinks of sex scandals. And for the politician in question, scandal consumes all the time he'd otherwise be dedicating to his official duties. President Clinton's behavior was inexcusable, but was the country better off for having its head of state focused on the fallout for months on end? If the press cannot cover sex scandals without getting carried away by their salacious aspects -- and it cannot! -- perhaps it would be better off abstaining altogether than lavishing many times more attention on sexual impropriety than every other kind that's evident in public life.Friedersdorf is right that in the grand scheme of things, most sex scandals are pretty trivial. I think it's not so much the fact that the media covers them but the way they're covered; Americans' puritanesque cultural impulses driving them to express disgust even as they pore over every little detail, like teenagers briskly flipping through the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition in the hopes the drugstore clerk won't catch them. This goes for both scandals that involve some kind of impropriety and incidents like this one, which seem (so far) to simply involve reckless and selfish behavior. There is, as Glenn Greenwald writes, something noxious about this kind of "vicarious titillation."
While Andrew Breitbart's motivations were wholly partisan, he was on some level acting in the public interest. Whether or not John Edwards did anything illegal in trying to cover up his affair, Edwards supporters were justifiably angry at the thought that a candidate they had worked for, voted for, and given money to had a public-relations time bomb just waiting to go off. The same can really be said of Weiner, who was reportedly mulling a run for mayor of New York City. His potential supporters had an interest in knowing whether or not racy photos of him would show up on the Internet, even if his sex life has nothing to do with how well he does his job.
This is sort of a weird position to take, because the media is deeply involved in defining what "matters" and what doesn't, and saying that a candidate's supporters have an interest in knowing whether or not their pick has some terrible scandal brewing creates an incentive to make these stories a bigger deal than they should be. If we were more mature about sex as a country, we would have fewer sex scandals. But I think the public appetite for this stuff isn't entirely the media's fault, and as long as that exists, it's hard to say there aren't certain things about politicians' private lives that people have an interest in knowing about.
At the same time, as Amanda Marcotte writes, we're setting ourselves up for a world where really nothing is off limits, and there's no such thing as privacy for public servants -- or even really anyone involved in politics. There's a line somewhere here that shouldn't be crossed, but I don't know exactly where to draw it. Anyway, I may change my mind on this, but this is where my head is at at the moment.
