Letterman an excuse to talk about sex

Extortion plot provides cover for media to go wild

By BRIAN LOWRY

When David Letterman disclosed an extortion plot against him -- allegedly executed by a CBS producer threatening to expose the host's sexual escapades with "Late Show" staffers -- the media was instantly filled with questions: What would happen to Letterman's image, and ratings? Did he violate workplace policies? What motivated the suspected blackmailer?

Ultimately, though, those matters were peripheral to the underlying source of fascination with the story, which offered newspaper editors and cable news producers an excuse to talk about sex.

Letterman is hardly alone in this regard. Indeed, he has been among those who have profited handsomely -- as he humorously acknowledged during his monologue -- by riffing on the indiscretions and infidelity of others.

Everyone loves a sex scandal; Americans just tend to be a little uncomfortable talking about sex. So they hide behind ancillary factors -- whether Jon and Kate Gosselin are doing what's right for their children, say, instead of whether he cheated on her with a twentysomething schoolteacher -- as cover in order to dive in, elbow-deep.

Some cultural observers attribute this to a lingering Puritan streak in the American ethos. When New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer was forced to resign for hiring prostitutes, U. of Chicago professor Martha Nussbaum wrote that such a scandal "could only happen in America, where the topic of sex drives otherwise reasonable people insane."

More recently, Harvard professor Judith Surkis -- exploring the rift between response to the Roman Polanski case in the U.S. and France -- said the reaction fits "well-worn media scripts" about both countries, capturing the former's tendency toward " 'Puritanical' sexual morality and overt anti-intellectualism" and the latter's image as "libertine elitists."

"Late Late Show" host Craig Ferguson -- a Scotsman by birth, and now Letterman's lead-out and employee -- sounded slightly mystified by the whole circus. "If we are now holding latenight talkshow hosts to the same moral accountability as we hold politicians or clergymen ... I'm gone," he told his audience.

Whatever the underlying cause, there's little doubt the media conflate the importance of scandals as convenient cover when the sex is what sells. As such, Letterman's ratings and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford's potential abuse of his travel schedule become the focus because it would be so tawdry to dwell on what truly fascinates the media (and public). The same goes for the recent HBO documentary "Outrage," whose provocative nature stems not so much from exposing hypocrisy (any straying politician fits that bill) as naming names of closeted gay Republicans.

Plenty of reality TV franchises, in particular, have been built on a foundation of scandalous sex, starting with E!'s Kardashian brood, whose fame can be traced largely to daughter/sister Kim's well-circulated sex tape. Indeed, for unscripted shows a sex video -- or at least the rumored existence of one -- has become a near-mandatory accessory.

The breaking Letterman blackmail attempt was not surprisingly Page One news, offering an intoxicating mix of scandal, crime and celebrity -- tethered to one of TV's most notoriously private celebrities. But in the days since, the story has been kept alive by titillating details, like a so-called "secret love den" above the "Late Show" set where Letterman supposedly did some of his, er, entertaining.

In this context, the trashiest news sources often end up looking the most honest. At least celebrity magazines and tabloid websites don't hide behind bigger issues of grand significance; they just want to know who's screwing whom.

More respectable outlets, by contrast, labor to make the sex appear secondary, even if that's really why they're interested. So MSNBC's Dr. Nancy Snyderman had sex expert Laura Berman on along with legal analyst Dan Abrams to simultaneously explore Letterman's sex life and whether he crossed any boundaries, legal or otherwise.

To his credit, Abrams zeroed in on how much of the reporting seemed to miss the point, focusing on the sex while cloaking that in whether the workplace relationships ran afoul of sexual-harassment guidelines in the absence of any complaint.

"You can make a sort of moral judgment ... about older men and younger women," Abrams said. "When we start talking about illegal ... we need more than moral judgments at that point."

To press a legal case, perhaps. But in the court of public opinion, nothing delivers quite like yelling "Sex" in a crowded theater.