You Were Wrong Senator Ensign, This Is Your Problem!

This was originally published in The Huffington Post on April 22, 2011. 

It was New Year's Eve 2009 and Republican Senator John Ensign seemed destined for political glory, maybe even a shot at the presidency. And why not? All the stars were aligning for the brash, handsome Republican superstar from Nevada. All except for one. My producer Gary Daughters and I had information that Ensign may have helped his best friend get a lobbying gig to shut him up. It didn't take long to find out why.

Ensign had slept with his best friend's wife. I asked him about it. In fact, I peppered him with questions. His lack of a response and his combativeness for my even asking spoke volumes.

Doug Hampton, Ensign's best friend and chief of staff, was hurting. Hurting a lot. Wouldn't you be too if you caught your boss and best friend having an affair with your wife?

When we reached out to Ensign's office, the last thing I expected was that he would grant me an interview. He had to know what I knew, right? After all, it wasn't like we picked up the story from the National Enquirer. It had already been picked up by the New York Times and the Washington Post. But nobody had asked Ensign about it fully and directly.

It was a holiday. Usually, those are slow news days. Maybe that's why Ensign agreed to do the interview. Or maybe he thought I wouldn't bring up such an embarrassing topic, even though he was the senator who did everything he could to impeach Bill Clinton for the Monica Lewinsky affair. Yes, that left him wide open. But that's not why I chose to confront him about his peccadillo fully and directly.

"Aggressively" is how the interview was described in countless stories. I confronted him because I knew that he was the subject of both an ethical and legal investigation. The interview went viral overnight.

As I told Ensign, "there is a law that says that someone who is an aide for a senator like yourself has to wait one year before they start lobbying." It's a law that Ensign should have been certainly aware of.

I gave him the opportunity to clear the air and set the record straight. His response? "That's his problem [Hampton's], that's not my problem... All that stuff will take care of itself over time... "

That "stuff" included Ensign allegedly arranging meetings for Hampton to get lobbying jobs. That "stuff" is what the law was meant to prevent.

When Ensign said, "that's not my problem," he clearly wasn't thinking -- just like he wasn't thinking when he slept with Hampton's wife and attempted to appease him by getting him lobbying jobs.

So who's problem is it senator? You want to try that answer again, because yesterday you resigned, and the Senate Ethics Committee, which includes many Republicans, chose to continue its investigation. They aren't doing that because you had a moral indiscretion. We all make mistakes. They are continuing to investigate you because of exactly what I asked you about: "public malfeasance." The problem is whether the public can trust that you and other elected officials won't use your lofty positions to cover your sins.

When you disconnected from reality during our interview and said that this was "his" problem, Senator Ensign, at that moment, you became America's problem.

Luckily, your resignation solves that. And it shows you finally realized what you should have known two years ago: This isn't someone else's problem. This is clearly your problem.

Rick Sanchez's Official Website: http://ricksancheztv.com/
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Do Cable TV Wars Cause Real Wars?

We tend to think that the three major cable news networks just compete against each other. They do, but they also compete for our attention against the entire universe of cable networks. Whether it's E!, Bravo or ESPN, they all want us to watch. It's a war -- a cable TV ratings war -- to get and keep our attention.

The daily rundowns of any cable news network can be unexciting. There's a limit to the number of medical breakthroughs we have each day. There aren't all that many dogs that save their owners by dialing 911. And when the news itself is boring, it's hard to keep people watching. That's only attained with big stories. Gone are the days when news divisions were "loss leaders" for a network or a company.

So what happens? News networks naturally become desperate for the big stories, the ones that allow them to roll out emblazoned graphics that say "BREAKING NEWS" along with dramatic music and sound effects to remind us that this news, unlike yesterday's, really is breaking.

News networks get so jacked up about big stories, they literally throw all their resources at them -- even to the exclusion of the rest of the news.

It's as though networks can't hold two competing thoughts in their heads at the same time. It's Egypt or Wisconsin, Japan or Libya, Libya or domestic politics, one or the other. Sometimes it's a matter of resources, but mostly it's a matter of ratings.

In the case of our politics, the need for the "big story" may be one of the reasons our discourse has degraded, why there's so much anger and vitriol. Each side yells louder, and says more extreme things, in order to get heard and get covered most. And if our politicians aren't being extreme, pundits and opinion shows will do it for them.

Bipartisanship, cooperation and civility just aren't "entertaining." They don't pay the bills. The guy who's willing to say each side has good ideas and tries to find practical, workable solutions is boring. If he weren't, he'd get a lot more coverage and we might get a lot more done as a country.

The same holds true when it comes to international events. The "big story" gets more coverage, because it feeds the ratings monster. And with more coverage, it seems even bigger, more serious and important than it often really is. In the case of war, that attention -- taken to the extreme -- may even make it seem like something needs to be done by us. Coverage can drive a short-sighted outcry for intervention.

My point is not to take away from the seriousness of wars or debates on important domestic issues and government policies, or to question the coverage of these issues or our involvement as a country. My point is to question the relative amount of coverage a story gets and why it gets that coverage.

In other words, do ratings wars drive us toward actual wars?

If Libya weren't good for ratings, would we have seen the pictures of death, destruction and brutality for the past month to the extent we have? Would we have seen the constant stream of reports showing how events in Libya affect not just Libyan men, women and children -- or even the region -- but us? How often has someone reported on whether we will "pay more at the pump?"

And if we hadn't seen those stories, would we be enforcing a no-fly zone right now? If we had seen that same level of reporting on Rwanda, all day long, night after night, with the story leading most if not all newscasts as "breaking," would we have done something to stop that genocide?

What drives the difference in coverage between the two stories? What drives the difference in determining US intervention? That Libya is part of a revolution -- and potentially democracy -- sweeping the Arab world? That Gaddafi is crazy? That Libya is an OPEC country with the ninth-largest oil reserves in the world? That Rwanda has virtually no natural resources, its economy is centered on subsistence agriculture and that it's ranked as one of the world's poorest countries? All of the above?

Some may believe that this is a chicken-and-egg situation: it's impossible to know whether the coverage is driving the story or if the story is driving the coverage. They also believe that our national interest, not the degree of coverage, ultimately drives our response as a country.

National interest undoubtedly is the motivation. But I believe it's also the case that cable news fuels the fire and "sells" us on a course of action. Too much coverage carries with it the risk of creating a false sense of importance or urgency. Example: we're now knee-deep in a military intervention in Libya, and we still don't really know who these Libyan rebels are. We're supporting a group that no one -- at least in the media -- has really bothered to take a closer look at.

There's no easy solution to controlling extreme coverage and overexposure other than restraint, a sense of fair play and what my University of Minnesota writing professor called the most important tool of our craft: good judgment.

The solution is recognizing the difference between reporting and over-reporting, between informing and inundating, between highlighting and hyping. The solution is to have good individual judgment -- by reporters, producers, network news heads -- prevail over the need for ratings and profits by their owners, the large media conglomerates. It's a tall order, but there's no other choice. Otherwise, we run the risk of having what's good for cable news becoming what's good for our country. That's not something we need to just be aware of, but also wary of.

This piece originally appeared in The Huffington Post

Rick Sanchez's Official Website: http://RickSanchezTV.com
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