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In anticipation of the new administration, Beltway media
insiders are busy laying the groundwork for how reporters and pundits will
treat the new team on Pennsylvania
Avenue.
"Once a president takes office ... an adversarial relationship usually
flourishes, at least with beat reporters," wrote
Howard Kurtz in The Washington Post. And
former New York Times reporter
Judith Miller, discussing
the press corps on Fox News, agreed: "They are inevitably going to turn
on him, as all -- this
happened to every administration. I don't see why we should be surprised. It is
the natural turn of events."
The conventional wisdom is quite clear: The press always turns skeptical and becomes
combative when new presidents come to town.
Except, of course, when the press does not.
In truth, the
model being touted today by media insiders didn't apply to the previous
two administrations. That model didn't apply to Bill Clinton in 1993
because the press wasn't simply skeptical about his administration, the
press savaged it. And the model didn't apply to George W. Bush in 2001,
because instead of turning combative toward him, the press rolled over for the Republican.
In terms of how the press has treated the last two new
presidents, there's the Democratic model (i.e. overly hostile), and the
Republican model (overly docile).
At the outset of the Bush presidency,
when it became obvious that the press had adopted a softer standard for judging
the new Republican president, author Jeffrey Toobin noted that "the high
emotional temperature of the Clinton
years left a lot of people, including journalists, kind of exhausted." He added, "I think it will probably take
a while to sort of gin that back up again."
Over the course of eight years of covering Bush,
I'm not sure the press ever recaptured the fever it displayed during the Clinton years. So it would
be deeply
suspicious if, in 2009, the press managed to turn
up that emotional temperature just in time to cover another Democratic
administration.
It would also be troubling for journalism if the press
responded to conservative claims today that reporters had been too soft on the
Democrat during the campaign by reacting the same way journalists did when
those claims were lodged during the 1992 campaign: by trashing the victorious Democrat to prove
the press corps wasn't "in the tank."
That's what helped fuel the stark double standard in
terms of early coverage of
the past two
administrations.
One quick example: On January 31, 1993, 12 days after Clinton had been sworn into office, Sam
Donaldson appeared on ABC and made this jarring announcement: "Last week, we could talk about, 'Is the honeymoon over?' This week, we can talk about, 'Is the presidency over?' " (At the time, Clinton's approval rating hovered
around 65 percent.)
By contrast, on February 10, 2001, three weeks after Bush
had been sworn into office, The New York Times' Frank Bruni
penned a gentle, honeymoon-mode review
about how authentic and at ease
Bush seemed with his new role. "George W. Bush is
establishing a no-fuss, no-sweat, 'look-Ma-no-hands' presidency, his exertions ever measured, his outlook
always mirthful," wrote Bruni. "The gilded robes of the presidency
have not obscured Mr. Bush's innate goofiness -- or, for that matter, his
insistent folksiness."
Bruni's piece was a classic
example of what in journalism is called a "beat-sweetener."
It's where a reporter assigned to a new beat ingratiates himself with key
sources by writing flattering profiles. There were precious few White House
beat-sweeteners published in 1993.
"Perhaps never in our nation's history -- certainly
not in its recent history -- has a President so early in his term been
subjected to a greater barrage of negative media coverage than Bill
Clinton," wrote the Los Angeles Times'
late media critic David Shaw in 1993. (The headline to Shaw's piece:
"Not Even Getting a 1st Chance; Early Coverage of the President Seemed
More Like An Autopsy.")
"The level of hostility in the [White House] pressroom,
I think, was extraordinary," Newsweek's
Eleanor Clift told the Los Angeles Times in 1993. For example, days after the Waco siege between federal forces and Branch Davidians
ended in a deadly fireball in April of
that year, a USA Today
poll showed 93 percent of Americans did not blame Clinton for the outcome. Clift said she thought to herself,
"The other 7 percent are in
the White House press room."
And Washington Post
editorial page editor Meg Greenfield conceded she'd never seen any
administration "pronounced
dead" so quickly by the press.
The conventional wisdom today is that it was a cacophony of
missteps made by the new Clinton-led Democratic team that generated the bad
press in 1993. That reporters and pundits simply responded to the bungled attempt at transition. What's
been erased from that equation,
though, is the acknowledgement that with or without the miscues, the press had
already adopted an entirely new, contentious, and often disrespectful way of
treating an incoming president.
What's also glossed over is the fact that eight years
later, the press then
radically adjusted its standards -- again -- for
the new Republican president.
For lots of people, recalling Clinton's chronic
battles with the press likely conjures up impeachment flashbacks featuring
a cavalcade of conservative pundits chattering incessantly about the rule of
law. Or maybe the Clinton
battles remind them of reading mind-numbing Whitewater updates, which, even
after four years of hype,
never seemed as dire or spectacular as the press made them out to be.
If the past is prologue, it's
important to remember two things as
the new Democratic administration prepares to take up residence. First, the
press in 1992 was tagged as being overly affectionate toward Clinton in the general election. By early
1993, there had been a
sea change in how journalists treated the Democrat. And second, Clinton's bad press
started years before impeachment and months before any kind of official scandal
machinery was put in place inside the U.S. Capitol. The hostile and at times overbearing press coverage started during
the transition period and before Clinton
even had time to do much of anything wrong.
"Judging by today's press
conference, the traditional media honeymoon seems already on the wane," ABC
News' Diane Sawyer announced on January 14, 1993, one week before Clinton was inaugurated.
Yes, there were several embarrassing tactical mistakes made
early on by the inexperienced new administration that sparked bad press,
including the withdrawal of Zoë
Baird as Clinton's
nominee to be attorney general because she had employed undocumented immigrants as
her nanny and driver. And Clinton
created controversy when he tried to
keep his campaign promise to allow gays to serve openly in the
military, an initiative
the administration bungled, in part, by not doing enough preparation with
allies on Capitol Hill or the Pentagon before the initiative was unveiled.
Looking back,
though, the so-called scandals that the press claimed were derailing Clinton's entire
presidency just days into his first term seem pretty tame. (The hullabaloo over
Baird's domestic help seems positively quaint in retrospect.)
At the time though, it was pure doomsday, according to the press. Here was an utterly
typical dispatch from Clinton's
first weeks in office, courtesy of Time
[emphasis added]:
No
sooner had Clinton
emerged from the embarrassing miscalculation
about Zoe Baird than he found himself in an even stickier political quagmire. After promising in his
Inaugural Address to end an era of "deadlock and drift," Clinton was suddenly at war with the Joint Chiefs of Staff as
well as members of his own party in Congress. Worse yet, the spectacle of Clinton clinging so resolutely to his gay-rights
pledge after breaking broader promises on taxes, the deficit and spending
projects raised questions about his judgment.
Aside from the heavy-handed language,
note how Time ridiculed Clinton for
"clinging" to a long-forgotten campaign promise. The irony was that
one of the key themes of the nasty coverage of Clinton's early
presidency was that he was weak and
excessively political (i.e. "Slick Willie"), that he gave in for
political reasons, and that he refused to keep controversial campaign pledges.
("Clinton
guaranteed himself a spate of bad press by backing off campaign
promises," The Washington Post explained two weeks after his inauguration.)
But when Clinton stood up on the campaign pledge
regarding gays in the military, journalists not only were not impressed, they
mocked him. (Perhaps they had different ideas about which of Clinton's campaign pledges were
important and which ones were not.)
"My colleagues and I, like
journalistic Dr. Strangeloves, are ready to nuke Mr. Clinton at the slightest
provocation," New York Times
columnist Leslie Gelb conceded just one month after the Democrat became the 42nd president.
The press pile-on simply gained momentum
through the weeks and months. In the spring, the Washington Post Style section featured the headlined,
"Another Failed Presidency, Already? Sure, It's Early. But What's That
Sound of No Hands Clapping?"
Around the same period, Time offered
up this headline on its cover: "The
Incredible Shrinking President." (Weeks earlier, the doomsday
Time headline on newsstands around the country asked, "Anguish Over Bosnia: Will it be Clinton's Vietnam?")
By the following year, The New York Times Magazine
casually announced,
"In mainstream
journalism ... President Clinton is routinely
depicted in the most unflattering terms: a liar, a fraud, a chronically
indecisive man
who cannot be trusted to stand for anything -- or with anyone."
Today, the evidence suggests the over-the-top press coverage of early 1993
sprang from a conscious decision the press made to lock and
load on the Democratic White House -- just
as it appeared the press chose to
pull back when Bush's first term played out in 2001, the way a blanket of calm
suddenly descended over newsrooms that
had spent the previous eight years in nonstop scandal-and-high-dudgeon mode. ("Good for Washington
in giving a new president a break at the start," the hometown Washington Post cheered in the spring of
2001.)
The press not only treated Bush with loving
hands, but also dialed back its White House coverage, which meant Bush did not
have to battle the media's constant glare.
A study by the Project for Excellence in
Journalism found that 41 percent
fewer news stories were produced about Bush between January 21, 2001, and March 21,
2001, than there were produced about Clinton during the same two-month period eight years earlier. Newsweek, in particular, practically
unplugged its Bush White House coverage, publishing
59 percent fewer stories about the new Bush vs. the new Clinton.
The news blackout came despite the fact that the newly elected President
Bush came into office under the extraordinary
circumstances of losing the popular vote and securing the office only after a
divided Supreme Court ordered the vote-counting
in Florida to
cease.
And yes, Bush aides were quite content in 2001 with the
reduced coverage of the new president. The White House's Mary Matalin
told The Washington Post in April
2001 that Clinton talked too much --"[he] would just get out there and
talk about anything, any time, any place" -- and that Bush would be more
"efficient" in the way he made news.
What a coincidence. The White House wanted less coverage and
scrutiny from the press in 2001 (when
Bush often appeared unsure of himself in public settings), and the GOP White
House got less coverage and
scrutiny.
The double standard in how the press treated the incoming
Democratic and
Republican presidents remains glaringly obvious today. For instance, in 1993, journalists complained that
the new Clinton
communications team limited their access (by closing off portions of the White
House to reporters), that aides didn't sufficiently schmooze reporters,
and that the new president did not have enough formal press conferences. Also, they complained that
the Clinton
team was trying to "bypass" the mainstream media by embracing other
outlets, like conducting waves of satellite-feed interviews with local television
stations. That's why the
Fourth Estate piled on the Democrats with hypercritical coverage. Because their
feelings were hurt and
their egos were bruised.
"They're dissing us," David Lauter, Los Angeles Times White House reporter,
complained to author Tom Rosenstiel in April 1993.
"A press corps that has been avoided and ignored and
treated in a way that is Nixonian is not going to cut [the president] any breaks," announced
George Condon of the Copley News Service in 1993, while serving as president of
the White House Correspondents Association. His point was that the Clintons had some of bad
press coming to them.
Paul Richter, White House correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, agreed. He said the treatment of the media
by a president and his
staff "really does affect the coverage."
Some journalists even admitted that that was the reason the
press treated some relatively minor 1993 news stories, such as the firing of
seven members of the White House travel office, with such ferocity. (A ferocity
that, viewed from the distance of 15 years, seems absolutely perplexing.)
The travel office is a nonpartisan
department within the White House staffed by aides who help make life easier
for reporters traveling with the president by arranging meals and
communications. Journalists
get to know the office staffers and rely on them to help make life on the road
less bumpy.
In May 1993, the White House fired all
seven travel staffers for gross financial mismanagement and announced the FBI
had been asked to investigate.
As Shaw at the Los
Angeles Times noted, when hearing about the clumsy travel-office firings, the press
corps erupted in outrage. "At
one briefing, they asked 169 questions about
the travel office firings. Neither Bosnia nor the President's
deficit-reduction package, both major news stories at the time, received a
fraction of that attention that day" [emphasis added].
In the days following the firings, the
travel-office
story (aka Travelgate) landed on Page One of The Washington Post six times, and four times on A1 of The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Tribune. The press pitched the
story as a blockbuster. In less than three weeks, the Post published nearly 20 news stories,
editorials, and commentaries on the subject, even though its White House
correspondents eventually conceded the firings were "relatively
trivial."
Newsweek summed up the
media phenomenon at play
with its Travelgate headline:
"Don't Mess With the Media: The White House Press Corps Gets Its
Revenge."
Weeks later,
when the media hyped
the phony
story that Clinton had held up traffic at Los Angeles International Airport
while getting a $200 haircut as Air Force One idled on the tarmac, they enjoyed another round of
payback. Suggesting the story revealed all sorts of deep character flaws
embedded in Clinton
(namely that he was a phony and a hypocrite), the press treated the haircut as an even bigger deal than Travelgate.
The so-called scandal was mentioned 50 times by The Washington Post alone, including nine times in front-page stories.
Six weeks later, though, when Newsday revealed
that Federal Aviation Administration records showed no planes had been delayed while
Clinton got a trim, virtually every news organization that initially hyped the
story either downplayed (the Los Angeles Times) or completely ignored (The New York Times, ABC,
CBS, NBC) the correction.
The Post was so unresponsive to the facts that
the paper's ombudsman had to devote an entire column to the matter,
slapping reporters' hands for doing the absolute minimum to clear up any
confusion about nonexistent flight delays caused by Clinton.
And why the pile-on? Simple: The
press was still angry with how their pals in the travel office had been
treated. "There was a clear sense of retribution" in the media's
haircut coverage, Newsweek's
Mark Miller said at the
time, because the media were "pissed off."
Indeed, the resentment was growing,
"whether it was conscious or subconscious," said John King, then
working as White House correspondent for The Associated Press. "[S]o
when people had a legitimate reason to kick [Clinton] as a buffoon, they went
overboard."
Try to recall, however, a single instance in early 2001 when
the press went "overboard" and kicked Bush as a
"buffoon" on the front pages for days on end regarding an
essentially trivial process story. Cautious and respectful, the press did no
such thing.
"The truth is, this new president
[Bush] has done things with relative impunity that would have been huge uproars
if they had occurred under Clinton,"
The Washington Post's John Harris wrote
in May 2001.
Harris continued:
Try
to recall this major news story during Clinton's
first 100 days: Under pressure from Western senators, the president capitulated
on a minor part of his 1993 budget deal, grazing fees on ranchers using federal
lands. A barrage of coverage had an unmistakable subtext: Clinton was weak and excessively political
and caved to special interests. Bush has made numerous similar concessions on
items far more central to the agenda he campaigned on, such as deemphasizing vouchers
in his education plan and conceding that his tax cut will be some $350 billion
smaller than he proposed. For the most part these repositionings are being cast
as shrewd rather than servile.
But if the press went easy on Bush in early 2001, if it
looked the other way when
he flip-flopped on campaign promises, that must have been thanks to the way the
White House pampered reporters, right? Because journalists were quite open in
1993 about being offended by the White House's treatment and how being slighted, or
"dissed," translated into tougher coverage. Recall that the press
was angry about the way Democratic aides were uncommunicative and how few
formal press conferences Clinton
had held, and the way the Democrats were trying to go around the mainstream
media.
In truth,
of course, if the Clinton
team was guilty of slighting the press in 1993, the Bush team absolutely
humiliated it. The Bush White House openly advertised its disdain for the press
(former chief of staff Andrew
Card famously dismissed the press as just another D.C. special interest group
desperately seeking access), aides quickly formed habits of not returning
reporters' calls, and Bush immediately canceled formal press briefings
with reporters. And even the informal ones he held were rare in the first term.
In fact, Bush held
just 17 press conferences compared with Clinton's 44. (Despite the media's early grumbling, Clinton actually set a
new mark for the most press conferences by any first-term president in the
modern era.)
Over time, it became clear to the entire country that the
Bush White House did not respect the press, that it was dissing the press corps. The way
the White House for years waved into press briefings a former $200-an-hour male
escort with no journalism background
and no serious press affiliation; the way the administration churned out misleading
video news releases that crossed the legal line into "covert
propaganda";
and the way the administration audaciously paid
off pundits like Armstrong Williams to secretly hype White House
initiatives.
The media,
though, didn't punish the
Republican president with bad press. Contrary to the edicts laid down in the
1990s, the early Bush coverage was not affected by how the president and his
staff slighted and controlled the press. Instead, the press sheepishly fell in
line, nervous about having its already limited access even further restricted.
The kowtowing was at times startling to watch. As Media Matters Senior Fellow Eric Alterman noted
in 2003's What Liberal Media?:
[T]he
Bush team plays a kind of hardball that the Clintonians were never able to
master. When Houston Chronicle
reporter Bennett Roth asked press spokesman Ari Fleischer about underage
drinking by the president's daughters, Fleischer informed him, Don
Corleone-style, that his question had been "noted in the building."
The implication was clear to all: More such unfriendly questions and Roth could
be cut off, unable to do his job, and useless to his employers. The outcries of
solidarity from Roth's colleagues in the press corps in the face of this
public threat would not have disturbed the sleep of a napping newborn.
There were other dynamics at play, as well. For instance, as
the first Clinton term unfolded,
there were open discussions among journalists about how they were anxious not
to be tagged as being "in the tank" for Clinton. How they
didn't want to be called out by The New Republic's running "Clinton
Suck-Up Watch," which mocked journalists who the magazine saw as overly effusive in their praise of
the new president. It was that professional anxiousness (i.e. that peer pressure) that
led some to view the new Democratic administration through an unprecedented,
hypercritical lens.
It was also a phenomenon fueled by right-wing critics such
as Rush Limbaugh who accused the press of having a liberal bias. Naturally, one
way for the media to disprove that theory was to be especially hard on the new
Democratic administration.
"If you dared say anything
complimentary [about Clinton] ... you were looked at like
some sort of pathetic fool who was obviously in the tank," said Newsweek's Miller during Clinton's first year
in office.
At the time, observers suggested that get-tough approach
toward Clinton
simply reflected journalism's DNA. Brit Hume, then a White House correspondent for ABC News, insisted, "We live in
a time when the worst thing that can be said about a journalist in Washington is that he or
she is not 'tough.' "
In 2001, however, very few
journalists appeared concerned about being "in the tank" for Bush.
In fact, the tank was quite crowded.
It turns out, that urge among Beltway journalists to bend
over backward for incoming Republican administrations goes back many years.
Former Washington Post editor Ben
Bradlee explained the phenomenon
to Mark Hertsgaard in his book about the press, On Bended Knee:
Stressing that it was "all totally
subconscious," Bradlee explained that when Ronald Reagan came to Washington in 1980,
journalists at the Post sensed that "here comes a really true
conservative. ... And we are known -- though I don't think justifiably
-- as the great liberals. So, [we thought] we've got to really behave
ourselves here. We've got to not be arrogant, make every effort to be
informed, be mannerly, be fair. And we did this. I suspect in the process that this
paper and probably a good deal of the press gave Reagan not a free ride but
they didn't use the same standards on him that they used on Carter and on
Nixon."
Just like with Reagan, the D.C. press corps went out of its
way to behave itself with Bush,
to be "fair" to the new conservative president.
Looking ahead, that desire among journalists to be tough on
Democrats in 2009 for fear of being tagged liberal or "in the tank"
could certainly come into play when Obama is inaugurated. Because just as the
press was derided by Republicans for going too easy on the Democratic baby boomer candidate in 1992 ("Liberal-Media Lynch Mob" buttons and
T-shirts were seen at the GOP convention that year), reporters
and pundits have been under constant attack in 2008 for going too soft on the
Democratic baby boomer candidate.
So, in order to "prove" their independence,
will journalists
unleash an assault on the new Democratic White House the way they did in 1993?
And will the press pick seemingly random beefs to make its case against the
Democratic president, the way it lashed out at Clinton for being overly interested and
engrossed in the issues?
And the way it said his transition team
was too deliberative and close-mouthed when selecting the most senior members
of his new
administration? Believe
it or not, in 1993, those were deemed to be serious strikes against Clinton.
In terms of the latter, restless reporters resented how,
during the transition period in late 1992, Democrats didn't dole out
enough information about key appointments. "The transition ruined any good feeling that there
might have been," Jeffrey Birnbaum, then a Wall Street Journal reporter, said in 1993. "The dark days of Little
Rock after the election, I think, are what soured the press
relations with the Clintons."
The National Journal
concurred in a report
that year:
The amity suffered,
however, as the campaign continued -- as the crowd of reporters grew and Clinton's
accessibility dwindled. It deteriorated more during the transition. Reporters
ensconced in Little Rock, Ark.,
and in pursuit of a story each day focused on Clinton's leisurely pace in making
appointments and on the campaign promises he'd forsaken. By Clinton's last press conference before
moving north toward his new home, the tone of the questioning had grown
nasty.
Note that when Clinton's
team didn't leak enough transition-team information, the press got mad and said that's when
the relationship began to sour. But eight years later, when the Bush team didn't leak
transition-team
information in late 2000, the press praised the new White House for its
discipline and message control, an obvious double standard.
Meanwhile, one of the deepest ironies of examining the hostile/docile press models
for the two previously inaugurated presidents is that one of the personal traits that the
press relentlessly mocked in Clinton during his first months in office was his
high intellectual metabolism,
how he wanted to debate every subject and engage around the clock and hear all
kinds of opinions about the day's most important topics. The press saw
that as a very troubling sign because sometimes it forced Clinton to delay his final decisions.
"This has
led to a perception of weakness and indecisiveness," NBC's Andrea
Mitchell announced at the time. (Bush's lack of intellectual curiosity eight
years later did not seem to worry the press.)
From the media's
perspective, Clinton
was too engaged in the pressing
topics of the day.
Let's hope the press doesn't foolishly hold that
against the next hands-on, issues-oriented president.Media Matters - Covering new presidents: the media's double standard {...} Published: November 19, 2008, 9:50 pm - Indexed: November 21, 2008, 1:24 pm - Page Size: 40KB |