Did the Internet Invent the Intrusive Media? Not So Fast!

Consider these episodes in the lives of three women caught in the spotlight:

● A publisher offers $1,000 in 1874 for a photograph of Elizabeth Tilton, the woman said to have committed adultery with her husband's best friend, the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher.

● "Playboy is the winner of the Jessica Hahn sweepstakes," United Press International reports in 1987. "Hahn, who had previously made much of her Christianity and desire for privacy, will tell all about her tryst with evangelist Jim Bakker."

● Monica Lewinsky tells a TV documentary that the Starr Report left her with “my narrative ripped from me." A news story continued: “But as intrusive as the report was, Lewinsky said, it was the media attention that was scarring.”

More than a century separates Elizabeth Tilton from Jessica Hahn and another 25 years divides her from Monica Lewinsky’s recent TED talk on media shaming. At first glance, they each appear to inhabit different universes in women's relationship to scandal.

Much recent commentary is premised on an assumption that Lewinsky’s experience was, as one writer put it, “at the tip of the spear of this invasive culture” created by the Internet.

The media's abolition of privacy seems so self-evident today that it is hard to look beneath today’s outrage to discover its sources. While websites undoubtedly added new dimensions to Lewinsky’s treatment, the recent coverage assumes too much was unprecedented.

Before the Internet demolished some barriers to privacy, the news media had been debating its role as investigator of private lives for a century. To understand what happens when everyday individuals, particularly women, are caught in the media spotlight there’s much to be learned from the 1870s’ “scandal of the age" or one summer of scandal in the 1980s.

They may look like playground exercises compared to any recent morning’s trending topic, but the notion that once the Internet arrived everything changed is to miss a more complicated and interesting story.

In the 1870s most public figures who appeared in the press were men involved in civic and business pursuits. Women posed a problem: how should a private, "respectable," person suddenly made public be treated?

The accusation that Henry Ward Beecher had committed adultery with a parishioner dominated almost every newspaper for more than a year from 1874 to 1875. The scandal is a landmark for historians mapping transformations in Gilded Age culture.

When the newspapers talked about Beecher-Tilton, the Tilton in question was Theodore, who had accused Beecher of adultery. "This is too narrow a view," said the New York Herald. "There is a third person whose relation to this unfortunate scandal cannot be ignored ... and something is certainly due to her sex, wounded in its most sensitive point, and to her utter helplessness in such a controversy as this" (emphasis added).

Elizabeth Tilton made only occasional appearances in the spotlight. Newspapers attempted to protect her. Once a court trial began, her husband brought suit against Beecher for “criminal conversation,” the press treatment changed.

Most upsetting to the papers was that Elizabeth Tilton seemingly ignored the newspapers' protection by attending the trial daily. The New York Times offered an assumption about her relationship to the public: “The woman about whom all this dismal exposure has arisen goes to the court every day as to a show, is stared at to her heart's content, and doubtless feels herself to be a very important personage. This is probably the happiest time of her life, and she is making the most of it.” In fact, Elizabeth Tilton had retreated from virtually all contact with the press or any attempts to capitalize on her notoriety.

The press had struggled to manage women’s entrance into the public sphere. While their rhetoric was one of protecting the innocent and helpless, the implication of their actions was that the papers knew best who belonged in its pages. When women appeared where editorialists deemed they should not be, the women were depicted as at best ill-used by male advisors and at worst immodest scandal-mongers.

A century later, the culture of celebrity was a given, as was rhetoric that celebrated women's expanding opportunities and control over their destiny. Women enmeshed in scandal, however, had little choice but to have an entirely new persona forged in the fire of media scrutiny.

In 1987, a reporter for the Charlotte Observer was in the midst of investigating a story he had been told about the Rev. Jim Bakker's 1980 sexual encounter with a woman, Jessica Hahn. The questions resulted in Bakker’s resigning from the ministry.

Editors in the 1870s argued that the sole point of importance was to learn if Henry Ward Beecher had committed adultery. Twentieth century writers, by contrast, believed that Jim Bakker's financial misconduct was far more significant than any sexual misdeeds. While the Beecher scandal became a metaphor for (among many other things) a crisis in Protestantism, columnists saw Bakker's significance in the context of corporate takeovers and junk bonds. The actions of Jessica Hahn, however, remained framed by more traditional "moral" boundaries.

What would Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had defended Elizabeth Tilton, have thought of Jessica Hahn? Her experience with Bakker was called by most papers a "tryst," an "encounter," occasionally, an "affair," or a "one-night stand." Her charge that the minister raped her remained contested ground.

Reporters camped outside her home, waiting for her to comment. The New York Daily News reported that "Hahn, weeping and pleading with reporters to leave her alone, appeared briefly outside her home."

She would not, as an Associated Press story put it, "discuss the specifics of her relationship with the television evangelist." Many papers quoted Bakker's charge that Hahn was an experienced seductress, knowing "all the tricks of the trade."

Hahn's fame became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Scant days after her identity became known, while she refused all contact with reporters, a story ran on the United Press International wire headlined " ‘Instant Celebrity’: Is Jessica Hahn the new Fawn Hall?" The story compared Hahn to "the attractive Washington secretary who helped Oliver North destroy documents." While Hahn asked to be left alone, the implication in the story was that she could not remain isolated.

The next month Hahn started talking to reporters and sympathetic articles followed. The New York Times noted, "part of Miss Hahn's problem seems to be that she is an instant celebrity with no clear idea how to manage her image." In this account, the machinery of publicity was at once mysterious—someone was an "instant celebrity"—but at the same time it represented a commodity that the subject of attention should be prepared to "manage." The press, by implication, was uniquely qualified to comment on fame's effects and advise the new celebrity on appropriate responses.

Then coverage began to turn on Hahn.

A columnist in the St. Petersburg Times voiced sentiments often heard in the 1870s: North and Bakker "are public people about whom the press and the public have a legitimate interest. The same could not be said ... about the women who have been dragged along for the ride."

Media accounts dramatically reconstructed her past history to match its “instant celebrity” narrative. The Miami Herald erased the weeks of reporters staking out the silent Hahn when it recalled: "Hahn is savvy in a merchandising sort of way. She welcomed the media from the very beginning, and when the flashbulbs faded, created yet another frenzy through bizarre self-promotion."

Public celebrity in the nineteenth century was a scarce resource. A private figure was supposed to stay that way. When it was reported that money – $1,000 – had been offered for Mrs. Tilton's photograph it was assumed that great credit was due to those who possessed such photos and did not give them up. Jessica Hahn's new status, however, was supposed to transform her immediately. She must wear the clothes set out for her by the media, especially when they objected to the ones she had on (early coverage had made much of her tight-fitting outfits).

When she literally took her clothes off the press, seemingly uninterested in charges of Bakker’s sexual assault, branded Hahn unreliable. While the minister's morality was now connected to his financial dealings, the moral issue for the woman in the scandal remained linked to her sexuality.

The White House scandal of the late 1990s and today’s universe of cyber-shaming are chapters in this story for another time. Certainly the traditional news media no longer holds a monopoly on determining who enters the public realm. The just-published So You've Been Publicly Shamed, in fact, assumes a “public” unrecognizable even 25 years ago—with websites and social media at the center of the public realm that leaves mainstream news outlets following the online buzz.

Many of the assumptions and frames in this new universe, though, remain structured by an older history and we should remain skeptical as we read accounts that assume a major transformation because of the presence of a new technology. Something new under the sun? Maybe not.

Consider this juxtaposition.The Playboy pictorial that made Hahn an unreliable figure was titled, “Jessica, On Her Own Terms." The New York Times story on Lewinsky reclaiming her story from the cyber-shamers was headlined: “Monica Lewinsky Is Back, but This Time It’s on Her Terms.”