The imprint of the electronic media on the impeachment of Clinton began when rumors of an affair between Clinton and Lewinsky appeared in an Internet gossip column, the Drudge Report, on January 19, 1998. The column alleged that Newsweek magazine had postponed running a piece on the relationship, and the Drudge website is reported to have received up to 300,000 hits per day as a result of this column (up from the typical 60,000 at that time). Television network news programs first aired the story on January 21, 1998, and television coverage would play a pivotal role in informing Americans about the fate of Clinton’s presidency for the next 14 months.

The investigation of Clinton, and the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, prompted considerable television attention. During the summer of 1998, the Clinton investigation was the top news story, receiving more coverage than all other prominent events at that time combined (e.g., the civil war in Kosovo, the Russian economic crisis, the Asian economic crisis, the monitoring of Iraqi weapons, the crash of Swissair Flight 111, the U.S. retaliation for East African bombings, the campaign finance investigation, and baseball’s home run record).

Burgeoning 24-hour cable news channels also allocated resources to this story, and one new cable network, MSNBC, was dubbed “all Monica, all the time” for its extensive treatment of the investigation. To prevent losing viewers to cable news stations, the network news programs expanded their evening coverage to a full hour, the first time since the Gulf War in 1991.

Late-night television comedians and reporters told a considerable number of jokes about the scandal. President Clinton was reported to be the subject of 1,712 jokes in 1998, more than in any other year of his presidency (Media Monitor, January–February 1999). When jokes about all individuals involved in the investigation of the Clinton scandal were tallied (Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp, and Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr), 2,461 jokes about the scandal were shared on television (Media Monitor, January–February 1999).

Research on the quality of the coverage reveals that few sources were employed in reports on the investigation. Lawrence Grossman found that many of the allegations by major television programs, newspapers, and magazines “were not factual reporting at all . . . but were instead journalists offering analysis, opinion, speculation, or judgment.” Jeff Elliott reported the findings from another study that found that only about half of the news in the New York Times came from a named source and that anonymous sources were used 84 percent of the time by the Washington Post. After the impeachment, journalists admitted that they had a difficult time finding sources that would go on the record on this sensitive story.

Those who did go on the record largely critiqued the president. A Media Monitor study (September– October 1998) discovered that more than 1,000 sources criticized Clinton on the evening news shows in a period of less than two months in 1998. Moreover, reporters’ comments on Clinton were seven times more negative than positive. A primary reason for the negative coverage, according to communications scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson, is that the investigation team was building a case against Clinton and was selective in the evidence it shared with the media; exculpatory material was not offered by the investigation team, so it did not appear in news reports on the Clinton scandal.

An irony throughout the investigation of Clinton was that he was the most publicly shamed president of modern time and also one of the most popular. After the first month of coverage, Clinton’s public approval ratings increased in the Gallup poll from 60 to 67 percent. Over the course of the next year, citizens learned about his personal transgressions, and became even more adamant that he was performing well in office. Political pundits often doubted the president’s approval in public opinion polls, suggesting that Clinton’s public opinion ratings would decrease as citizens learned more about the scandal. This was not the case. Approval for Clinton in March 1999 hovered around 65 percent, a paradox that has been explained by several factors. Political scholars believe that despite 14 months of damaging news coverage, the American public approved of Clinton’s moderate policies, rewarded him for the relative peace and prosperity of the late 1990s, questioned the motive of his accusers, disliked his accusers more than they disliked him, understood the pattern of lying about intimate sexual relations, and viewed the exhaustive coverage as an invasion of his privacy.