When she learned that she had a fatal illness, the British feminist writer Jill Tweedie was much comforted by her friend Jon Snow, the Channel Four television news presenter. He was a big friendly bear of a man, she wrote, and he hugged her and talked to her and visited her frequently through her ordeal. I was impressed by that and after reading it, took an ever greater interest in his show. He was always woman-friendly, a matter of no small importance given the power of television to influence our lives.
So I was content when he was chosen to interview Monica Lewinsky, whose life and times have had a great bearing on ours, especially on the lives of Irish people Clinton is necessary to the peace process here and more especially on the lives of the people of Iraq Clinton bombed them to distract attention from Congressional attempts to impeach him over his relationship with that young woman.
Alarm bells began to ring when I read a preview of the interview Snow wrote for the Daily Telegraph. He had this to say before he met her: Never once did I try to imagine Monica s life beyond the big hair; this was Bill Clinton s tragedy, not hers.
Really? Well, yes, really from this man s point of view. All men? Hopefully not. Hopefully, there are men who can see that it is a tragedy for Monica Lewinsky that her name is a synonym for lewdness in striptease joints around the world. This column has already reported neon-lit advertisements in clubs in Toronto for Monica and the Cigar sketches. Clinton at least, still has a job and the respect that goes with it. Nobody waves a cigar in his face. They still play Hail To The Chief when he walks into a room.
Snow couldn t see that. If he can t and this is a man who claims to respect feminism what is going through the minds of the other men who dominate our television screens here and in Britain? We have already had an insight into the mind of Mr. Television himself, Gay Byrne. Rather than wish Annie Murphy well in the job of single mother to her son Peter, Byrne thought the boy had a great future, if he turned out to be half the man his runaway father Biship Eamon Casey is.
Casey good, Murphy bad; Clinton good, Lewinsky nothing, in the minds of Byrne and Snow. As it happened, Snow changed his mind somewhat when he met Lewinsky. Maybe these guys should spend a bit more time with women? Or exercise their imaginations a little?
I seriously wondered whether we could find enough to talk about Snow thought before he met the woman he was to interview. Which invites the question: does this current affairs presenter pay attention to the news before he goes on air?
For a year before Snow met her, Lewinsky had been one of two people at the centre of a political storm which rocked the world. The fall-out had implications around the globe, fatally so in Iraq. Was Lewinsky aware of that, is the question which springs to the inquiring mind but that implies that the interviewer believes the interviewee has a mind to begin with. All Snow thought was that Lewinsky had big hair . He is not the only man to have thought of Lewinsky solely in terms of her physical parts.
There is no reason to think that Snow and his ilk see other women any differently. It never even occurred to him, in his lengthy article an entire page of the Telegraph to explain why he thought of this woman only in terms of her hair, or if he brought a deeper intelligence to bear on other women. It didn t even occur to Snow that his superficial thoughts on Monica Lewinsky were insulting, offensive and dangerous to all women. Yes, dangerous. For him, human tragedy is measured by its effect on men, not on women. This was Bill Clinton s tragedy, not her s.
Or does he mean the effect on white men? Brown-skinned men, women and children died by the dozen when Clinton had them bombed, are dying daily now for want of medicine, denied them by American Presidential will.
In the most narrow terms, it never occurred to Snow before he met Lewinsky that Clinton had behaved abominably in throwing her to the wolves to save his own skin. He had the White House portray her as a stalker and he denied he ever had sex with her. This moved Jon Snow not one whit. He had not the imagination to wonder if Lewinsky s feelings were hurt by that most public rejection and betrayal.
He is not alone. Long before Snow came along, Kipling was raising a laugh in the men-only clubs with his little aphorism A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke. How much have things changed, do you think? n