‘My Life’ in the eye of the perfect marketing storm

I haven’t read Bill Clinton’s autobiography yet. Scratch the “yet.” I don’t intend to read it. Ever.

It’s not that I don’t like Clinton. His manifest flaws notwithstanding, I voted for him twice and would vote for him again, especially if the only alternatives were George (“Saddam and Bin Laden Were Secret Lovers”) Bush and John (“I’ll Tell You What I Think As Soon As I Know Myself”) Kerry.

But I’ve read a lot of the coverage of the Clinton book, and I have yet to encounter a single nugget of news -- unless you count his disclosure that he’d slept on the couch for at least two months after finally confessing to Hillary that he’d had an affair with Monica Lewinsky. Even leaving aside the unlikelihood of this couch claim -- last time I checked there was more than one bedroom in the White House -- it hardly qualifies as newsworthy 3 1/2 years after Clinton left office.

Oh, wait. There was some real news in the book: Clinton revealed that he still hates Kenneth Starr and still loves Elvis Presley.

Stop the presses.

Has the book perhaps received all this attention because it’s a literary masterpiece? The critics have rendered no such judgment. Michiko Kakutani, the Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic for the New York Times, called it “sloppy, self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull.” And those were the parts she liked.

Clearly, the book is yet another excursion into self-examination and self-justification by a politician who was born for the Age of Oprah.

So why have we been treated to this avalanche of coverage on Clinton’s “My Life”? A one-hour interview with Dan Rather on “60 Minutes.” One-on-one appearances with Oprah and Larry King. A 12-page cover story in Time magazine. A Page 1 book review in the New York Times. Audio excerpts posted on the AOL website. Page 1 news stories in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today and Kansas City Star, among others.

Some of the coverage fed on itself -- stories about what Clinton would say on “60 Minutes,” then stories on what he did say on “60 Minutes,” stories on whether the book would sell well, then stories on how it is selling well (so far); stories on the large crowds anticipated for Clinton’s book signings, then stories on the large crowds that showed up for Clinton’s book signings.

Rather was particularly ubiquitous on Clinton’s -- and CBS’ -- behalf, giving out interviews to print and broadcast reporters in advance of his interview with Clinton, touting “60 Minutes,” the book and its author but being careful not to give anything away that would undermine his “exclusive.”

The CBS News website has also been carrying a link to Amazon.com, with CBS getting a percentage of the profits from any sales resulting from that click-through.

Neither CBS nor Amazon would say just what that percentage is -- “small ... negligible” was as far as CBS would go -- but conversations with Amazon and an examination of the Amazon website suggests the figure ranges from 5% to 10% of the sale price of each book, depending on how many copies are sold through the link.

What bothers me most about this arrangement, though, is not that I think it gave CBS a profit incentive to devote so much time to the Clinton book.

No, what’s truly troubling is that deals like this demonstrate the degree to which Clinton and his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, have been able to turn the nation’s major news gathering organizations into their personal marketing and public relations firms. I mean, a paid ad is one thing; a for-profit link is quite another.

Politicians refer to “paid” and “free” media, and in this case, Knopf couldn’t have paid for a better media reception than they got for free. They blanketed the airwaves with morning, afternoon and evening interviews, some of them touting each other and virtually every one sounding like the “buy this book” plug that the CBS News link makes explicit.

It’s a further blurring of traditional lines, what Marty Kaplan, associate dean of the Annenberg School of Communication at USC, calls “a mega-example of what’s increasingly happening on a smaller scale every day -- the dysfunctional coupling of media and marketing, where news is now a profit center.

“The purpose of news now is to attract eyeballs to advertisers, not to provide the information the people need to be good citizens,” he says. “It’s a strange, sick cycle in which no one stops to ask, ‘Is this worthy of attention?’ They only ask ‘How many hits will it get online, what kind of share will it get on the air, how many copies will it sell?’ ”

The media could not, of course, ignore a 957-page autobiography for which a prominent publisher paid a more than $10 million advance and printed 1.5 million copies -- an autobiography written by a living ex-president, a voluble, still-controversial ex-president as famous for his philandering as for his politicking. There may even be legitimate questions to be asked about what impact this book and Clinton’s reemergence are likely to have on Kerry’s campaign this year and on Hillary Rodham Clinton’s White House prospects four years hence.

But it’s a bit premature to pay so much attention to the latter, and as Jeff Greenfield said on CNN when “My Life” was published, “the idea that a media dust-up [over this book] in June is going to have a lot of influence on a November election ... is a little overwrought. Actually, I think it’s a lot overwrought.”

Still, with the presidential campaign not yet heating up, the Clinton book does offer a sexy substitute, a prelude to the real thing -- “displaced political news,” as one friend put it.

Fueled by nostalgia

Under normal circumstances, I’d attribute the media frenzy over Clinton’s book to the traditional early-summer news vacuum. But with bombings, beheadings, the bogged-down nation building in Iraq and depressing news about the war on terrorism coming out almost daily, this is hardly your typical midyear doldrums.

In fact, some folks I’ve spoken with suggest that the obsession with Clinton’s book derives from a nostalgia of sorts for the pre-9/11 world -- “a desire to re-experience what, in retrospect, almost seems to some like a golden age, a less confusing and less dangerous time represented by Clinton and his term in office, no matter what he did,” says Leo Braudy, a cultural historian at USC and the author of “The Frenzy of Renown.”

Conservatives, of course, would disagree. Just tune in to Rush Limbaugh, check out Fox News or click on virtually any conservative website, and you’ll quickly see that Clinton’s revival, between hard covers, makes the right wing froth at the mouth more than anything other than a suggestion that his wife will one day take up residence within the walls of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Tim Graham, director of media analysis for the Media Research Center, a conservative media watchdog group based in Alexandria, Va., says it’s not so much the quantity of the Clinton coverage as its “uncritical, unchallenging character” that distresses him.

But it’s hard to be critical or challenging when you’re swept up in a marketing frenzy.

Although Clinton-bashing by the conservatives has fed the “My Life” publicity mill, that may not have been necessary.

“Clinton is an utterly fascinating person, a living soap opera,” says Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia and author of the book “Feeding Frenzy.” “Half the people are in love with him, and the other half hates his guts, but everyone has to read the stories and watch the TV pieces.”

Not everyone. Not me.

David Shaw can be reached at [email protected]. To read his previous “Media Matters” columns, please go to latimes.com/shaw-media.