A historical precedent was set Monday when the world watched a sitting American president testify under oath. But those who saw President Clinton's grand jury testimony in streaming video on MSNBC's Web site didn't see between 30 and 60 seconds of the prerecorded videotape.
The content of that segment -- a list of sexual behaviors including the president's now-infamous employment of a cigar -- was deemed inappropriate viewing for children by the network's executive editors.
Though the unedited testimony was broadcast on MSNBC cable TV, the segment was bleeped for the webcast because "the Internet is a ubiquitous medium, widely available to kids in schools and libraries without direct adult supervision," said Debby Fry Wilson, director of public relations for MSNBC.
Though a parent is generally aware that a child is watching television, "it's not always obvious to a parent when a child is using the Internet," Wilson said.
She said the decision to omit portions of Clinton's testimony was made "after a great deal of internal discussion about editorial policy and the technical issues involved."
Michael Silberman, MSNBC.com's executive editor, downplayed the decision as a precedent-setting act of Internet censorship: "Journalists edit all the time. Do you go live with a White House briefing? Do you decide to cover a particular story? Tonight on NBC [Nightly] News, they'll choose what are the most salient points of the testimony."
Though Silberman acknowledged that the network has a responsibility to show the testimony "in its full context," he said the presence of the Net in educational settings -- and the "highly unusual nature of who was talking and what he was talking about" -- led the network to make its decision.
Richard Matthews, deputy director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association, called the decision to edit the netcast -- but not the TV broadcast -- "extraordinary." Libraries are "forums of free expression that are supposed to have greater protection of First Amendment rights than television," he said.
The webcast was bleeped in much the same way a live broadcast on television would be, by introducing a slight delay before transmission. In MSNBC's media pod, located just off the glassed-in newsroom on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, editor in chief Merrill Brown and Silberman took turns listening to the streaming broadcast through headphones.
When the president began answering a series of questions about specific sexual behaviors, Silberman clicked on a mouse that cut off the audio portion of the netcast for "30 seconds to a minute," he says. The archived portion of the testimony, and the written transcript, were not edited.
MSNBC began broadcasting the testimony at 9:25 a.m. EST, immediately after receiving two copies -- one by satellite and one by fiber-optic line -- from the NBC cable headquarters in Secaucus, New Jersey, where the testimony was downlinked via satellite from the House of Representatives.
Mike Godwin, author of Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age, defended the network's freedom to exercise editorial control over the content of its broadcasts, but called MSNBC's justification for its decision "a little incoherent."
While acknowledging that "many kids will probably learn the word 'genitalia' from the testimony," Godwin observed that television can still offer a more user-friendly interface for kids than the Net. "Certainly anybody who's tried to get streaming video on the Web versus turning on a TV knows which is easier."
