Caveat lector

THE LOGIC OF LIBERAL BIAS (PART 4)! Teddy White described bias when Jack battled Dick. But by 2K, the bias had changed:

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2003

WE WERE YOUNG THEN, AND LIBERALLY BIASED: Some people still drive in their Model T Fords. Some people still swear by the Flat Earth Society. And—after ten years in which the press corps trashed Clinton, then trashed Gore—some of our pundits still pull on their chins and lament that ol’ debbil, liberal bias. They should probably take a lesson from Clinton. This week, the wise ex-POTUS chatted up Katie Couric. Republicans say that the mainstream media is massively liberal, Katie reminded. “They say that,” Clinton masterfully sighed. “But that hasn’t been true for a long, long time.”

When was “liberal bias” really real? We’re not experts on that matter, but in his landmark book, The Making of the President, 1960, Theodore White seems to describe a Golden Age of the much-maligned press corps preference. By the end of the 1960 campaign, reporters covering Candidate Kennedy had abandoned all pretense of objectivity, White says. Scribes amused themselves on the Kennedy plane singing satirical songs about Nixon (with JFK staffers singing along). Why did reporters favor Jack so? Because he pandered, White seemed to suggest:

WHITE (page 337): He would ask advice of newspapermen, which, though he rarely followed it, flattered them nonetheless…There is no doubt that this kindliness, respect and cultivation of the press colored all the reporting that came from the Kennedy campaign.

With Nixon, though, things were different. The Republican “held himself aloof,” White said. “[E]rratically, he would sometimes permit reporters to ride his personal plane and other times forbid it.” And according to White, “the hostility between the press and the Nixon campaign” was, at least in major part, “a fruit of this trivial disdain.” Reporters have feelings too, dear reader. “[T]he sense of dignity of these men, their craftsmen’s pride in their calling, was abused by Mr. Nixon,” White says. And guess what? “Nixon’s personal distrust of the press colored the attitude of his press staff, too.” The results of this axis of evil weren’t pretty. “At the beginning of the campaign,” White judged, “the reporters assigned to Mr. Nixon were probably split down the middle between those friendly and those hostile to him.” But by the end of the race, “he had succeeded in making them predominantly into that which he had feared from the outset—hostile.”

Wow! There’s the very image of that very well known and much bruited ol’ debbil, “liberal bias!” Reporters sang songs on JFK’s plane and rolled their eyes when thrown in with Tricky Dick! The irony, of course, is that similar images emerged from Campaign 2000—but the party affiliations were plainly reversed. In Campaign 2000, major scribes penned detailed reports about the Big Party on Bush’s plane—and about the poisonous relations between corps and Gore. According to a string of reports, it was Bush (and McCain) who fawned to the press, and Gore whom reporters now hated.

On Bush’s plane, the livin’ was easy. In April 2000, the New York Times’ Frank Bruni described a new “sociable course” which Bush had adopted toward his chroniclers. Bush “not only slaps reporters’ backs but also rubs the tops of their heads and, in a few instances, pinches their cheeks,” Bruni wrote (without a hint of embarrassment). “It is the tactile equivalent of the nicknames he doles out to many of them and belongs to a teasing style of interpersonal relationship that undoubtedly harks back to his fraternity days.” And Bruni was gulled, just as White had once been: “[N]ow that Mr. Bush is among [the press], he gives every appearance of enjoying being there.”

Others chronicled this embarrassing process, which became known as the Bush “charm offensive.” In his post-election report in Newsweek, Evan Thomas described the way Bush won the affection-starved press corps’ affection. His description could have come straight from White’s writing, executed some forty years before:

THOMAS: By the Spring of 2000, George Bush was spending so much time back in the press section of his campaign plane that reporters were beginning to half-seriously complain. With his restless energy and infinite desire to charm, Bush, who began calling himself “Mr. Accessible,” made a campaign of winning over the traveling press corps. Though the reporters grumbled that Bush was a little too accessible, most of them were flattered, and in some cases privately thrilled, by his attention…

THOMAS: With a few exceptions, the Bush charm offensive paid off. Reporters began to show signs of losing their impartiality toward the GOP candidate. An otherwise tough-minded Wall Street Journal reporter kept a photo of Bush with her two children on the screen saver of her laptop…Reporters asked Bush to pose with them for photos, or to make mobile-phone calls to their homes to surprise their spouses. Only some of the old hands from earlier presidential campaigns, crusty pros like Jules Witcover and Jack Germond of the Baltimore Sun, remained unmoved by Bush’s attempts at intimacy. They warned against getting too close to the candidate.

Reporters “began to lose their impartiality toward” Candidate Bush, Thomas said. But Thomas (and others) described a different tone from reporters toward Candidate Gore. In August 2000, for example, Seth Mnookin penned a cover story, “The Charm Offensive,” for Brill’s Content. After several trips on Bush’s plane, Mnookin described reporters’ affection for Bush—and their open hostility toward Gore. “He acts like he’s the fucking president already,” one tough-talking typist now tattled.

Is your press corps driven by liberal bias? Some people still drive their Model T Fords—and some pundits describe a long-gone press era. Liberal bias? “That hasn’t been true for a long, long time,” someone said. But don’t worry. Goony pundits will praise this Flat Earth—until ridicule of their silly spinning finally persuades them to stop it.

PUZZLED THEN, PUZZLED NOW: White’s account of press-pol relations was perfectly echoed in Campaign 2000. And indeed, many scribes blamed Gore for his hostile press, as White had once blamed Nixon. But why did Nixon, then Gore, shut the press corps away? Perhaps because they were professional pols who had good professional judgment. By the time of Campaign 2000, Gore was an obvious press corps target—and pols who are targets of the press simply can’t hand them rope for the hanging. In late 1997, for example, Gore was still hanging out with the press—and they turned a pointless remark about Love Story into a three-year referendum on the veep’s troubling character. (Indeed, the Love Story foolishness made it official: Gore had a bulls-eye on his chest.) Basic rule: If the press is on a major pol’s case, that pol simply can’t hang out with the press. And by the way, Bush surely understood this basic point too; he too shut reporters away until Saint McCain was defeated in March 2000. It was only after McCain left the race that Bush began his “charm offensive.” When McCain emerged in the polls in late 1999, the pandering press began pushing his interests—and Bush shut himself away from the press, probably judging that they were now looking for meaningless flubs they could flog. By the way, no one foofawed like the fickle Frank Bruni; for a full report on his foolish flip-flopping, see THE DAILY HOWLER, 2/18/00. You’ll enjoy the flavor of Valentine’s Day we brought to this deathless report.

To Teddy White, it was all Nixon’s fault. He couldn’t make himself say the obvious—that his colleagues engaged in gross misconduct as they sang their songs on the Kennedy plane. Forty years later, it was Gore who was trashed—and pundits said it was all his fault, too. Remember the immutable, Hard Pundit Law—when the press corps engages in egregious misconduct, it’s always the other guy’s doing.

VISIT OUR INCOMPARABLE ARCHIVES: “I was sort of appalled to see the way it played in the media…The degree to which it became a symbol of the man’s integrity I thought was very unfair.” That, of course, was Karen Tumulty, one of only two reporters who heard what Gore actually said about Love Story. But tough sh*t. By late 1997, the press corps was ready to make Gore a target—and when your press corps reaches Group Judgment, it makes up tall tales that support its appraisal. Three years later, pundits were thoroughly puzzled by Gore’s strange aloofness. For the full text of Tumulty’s comment, see THE DAILY HOWLER, 11/25/02.

The Daily update

SNOW JOBS: We cringed when we read about John Snow’s trip to support the Bush budget plan. Edmund Andrews did the reporting. At one point, the Snow man said this:

ANDREWS: Mr. Snow told several hundred executives [in Detroit] today that Mr. Bush’s plan is based on what some people call “a radical idea.”

“I don’t think it’s radical,” he said, “but some people in Washington think it’s radical, and that is that people ought to be able to keep more of their money.”

Meanwhile, will someone give Richard Cohen warm milk and send him away to a snug and warm bed? Last Thursday, he rushed into print to praise Colin Powell’s masterful, compelling, persuasive presentation at the United Nations. (Cohen was part of a next-day stampede by Washington’s script-reading pundits.) But by yesterday, he’d had a chance to review Powell’s work, and he offered a now-troubled cow-tow:

COHEN: In fact, to be perfectly frank, sir, parts of your presentation to the United Nations seem, in retrospect, to have overstated the case.

COHEN: You, sir, are in a different category altogether. The nation looks to you as the voice of reason…I sleep better knowing that you are in this administration—making policy, I hope, and not propaganda.

COHEN: Sir, in his kiss-and-not-tell book, David Frum, the former White House speechwriter, tells us about George W. Bush’s insistence on honesty—on refraining from even politically acceptable exaggeration. I accept what he has to say.

By the way, Mary McGrory wrote the same op-ed that Cohen wrote last Thursday. (No surprise—the whole pundit corps wrote it.) The headline on her version read, “I’m Persuaded.” Quoth McGrory: “[Powell’s] voice was strong and unwavering, He made his case…with no verbal embellishments.” But by yesterday, McGrory had done some flip-flopping too. No, she didn’t present any dissing of Powell. But her headline said: “Shield Us From War.”