Bush's free ride

From the attack dogs of the Clinton era to the lapdogs of today, the White House press corps sure isn't what it used to be

by Dan Kennedy

A LONG FEATURE in the business section of this past Sunday's New York Times tells you everything you need to know about the comfortably cushy flight the media have been providing for our leisurely First Passenger, George W. Bush.

The piece, by Richard Stevenson, is a profile of Bush's economic team, which is pushing an ultraconservative line of dramatically lower taxes, less government spending, a privatized Social Security system, and fewer regulations.

Stevenson pays lip service to the notion that the president's "ideological opponents" have accused him of an agenda that is "fiscally irresponsible, a payoff to its corporate patrons and an effort to repackage right-wing policies in a centrist guise." Then Stevenson weighs in with this assessment: "But even some of the administration's harshest critics say they have been impressed by the discipline and political touch that the president and his team have brought to pursuing their agenda, especially the tax cut."

Hey, the White House may be populated by right-wing kooks who will wreck the economy and destroy the environment in their zeal to serve their wealthy patrons. But you've just got to admire how competent they are.

Sorry for the turbulence, Mr. President, but it looks like clear skies ahead. Would you like an extra pillow?

WHEN BILL Clinton took office eight years ago, he was knocked senseless before he could even get his feet under him. There was the maladroit manner in which he advanced and then abandoned his plan to let gay men and lesbians serve openly in the military; his stumbles alienated both homosexuals and homophobes. There was the controversy over his first two nominees for attorney general, Zoë Baird and Kimba Wood, both of whom withdrew over nanny-tax problems. There was even the high-priced designer haircut Clinton received on an airport runway, the subject of days' worth of sneering commentary.

Bush, by contrast, has enjoyed a remarkably untroubled transition. Some of this is his own doing: when his first nominee for secretary of labor, Linda Chavez, was found to have a nanny problem of her own, she was cut off at the knees before she could even begin to defend herself. Bush's lack of visibility, and the capable but colorless way his superannuated Ford-era staff has gone about setting up shop, have given the media little to do and little to report on in the way of chaos and controversy.

But chaos or no chaos, the media are supposed to subject the president to tough scrutiny. Superficially, Bush may be conducting himself in a more admirable manner than Clinton -- no blowjobs in the Oval Office, no sexual-harassment suits, no unfathomable home-state financial tangles of dubious legality (after all, there's no need to flirt with the outer boundaries of the law when you can trade on your father's name). Still, George W. Bush, who entered office despite having lost the popular vote by a half-million ballots, is moving ahead with the most conservative agenda since Ronald Reagan became president in 1981. You'd think the media would ask some tough questions.

Now, four months into the Bush presidency, the media's transformation from attack dog to lap dog is finally beginning to attract attention. Unfortunately, the most visible example -- a piece by political reporter John Harris in the Washington Post on May 6 -- attempts to divert blame away from the media and onto Hillary Rodham Clinton's favorite bogeyman, the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. According to Harris, the principal difference between Bush's early days and Clinton's is that Clinton, from day one, had to contend with a mobilized corps of conservative activists -- interest groups, commentators, and members of Congress -- who continually sought to undermine his presidency.

"They succeeded in many ways," Harris wrote. "One of the most important was their ability to take all manner of presidential miscues, misjudgments or controversial decisions and exploit them for maximum effect. Stories like the travel office firings flamed for weeks instead of receding into yesterday's news. And they colored the prism through which many Americans, not just conservative ideologues, viewed Clinton. It is Bush's good fortune that the liberal equivalent of this conservative coterie does not exist."

Well, now. According to Harris, the reason Bush is getting better press than Clinton is that liberals are not attacking Bush the way the VRWC went after Clinton, and therefore the media have no one from whom to take dictation. As Kenneth Doran, a bankruptcy lawyer and author from Madison, Wisconsin, put it in a letter to Jim Romenesko's MediaNews.org, Harris "sets out to defend the Washington press corps against the charge of being George W. Bush's puppy dogs, but the result reads more like a confession." In the webzine Slate, Joshua Micah Marshall recently blasted the Democrats' ineffectiveness in criticizing Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott's sleazy, politically motivated firing of the Senate parliamentarian. In a tip of the computer to John Harris, the piece was titled WANTED: A VAST LEFT-WING CONSPIRACY.

On CNN's Reliable Sources last weekend, co-host Bernard Kalb told Harris, "John, when I first read your piece . . . I thought it was brilliant. And a moment later I was smitten by a second thought, which essentially is this, and let me overstate it. Didn't you do a portrait of the media as a stenographer for the right wing?"

Harris's response: no, no, no.

But oh, yes, yes, yes.

THERE IS, of course, no shortage of Bush criticism in the media. The editorial and op-ed pages of the Times have attacked Bush continuously for his irresponsible tax-cut and anti-environmental positions. Even columnist Maureen Dowd, who loathes policy and is reportedly friendly with Bush's father, has gotten into the act.

All three political weeklies -- the left-liberal Nation, the moderate-liberal New Republic, and even the moderate-conservative Weekly Standard -- have been on Bush like a pissed-off loan shark. The webzine Salon has produced a huge quantity of important reporting about Bush's nominee for solicitor general, Theodore Olson, who barely escaped a perjury rap during his Reaganaut days, who has been accused of lying about his role in the Richard Mellon Scaife-financed "Arkansas Project" (aimed at digging up dirt on Clinton for publication in the right-wing American Spectator), and who helped mastermind Bush's disingenuous legal case during the Florida recount.

By last week, the Olson affair finally appeared ready to break into the mainstream. And it should. Journalist David Brock, an Arkansas Project alumnus who wrote the "Troopergate" story early in Clinton's first term, went so far as to charge that Olson had urged the Spectator to "report" that the suicide of Clinton aide Vincent Foster may actually have been a political murder -- an ugly bit of paranoia that Olson himself supposedly didn't even believe.

Nevertheless, Olson is still a long way from becoming a household name the way, say, Lani Guinier was. And that's because Bush-whacking has not trickled down in any significant way to the media from which average Americans receive most of their information.

The disparity between anti-Bush elite opinion and pro-Bush mainstream opinion was quantified several weeks ago in a report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism titled The First 100 Days. Most of the coverage of this report has focused on the bottom-line finding that coverage of Bush was actually more negative than coverage of Clinton during the first three months of their presidencies (28 percent negative for both; 27 percent positive for Clinton, but only 22 percent positive for Bush). But this is actually a complete misinterpretation of the report's findings.

In fact, the report looked at coverage by the Big Three networks, PBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Newsweek. When you remove Newsweek plus the editorial and op-ed pages of the Times and the Post from the mix, coverage of Bush has been 24 percent positive and 18 percent negative -- a marked improvement over Clinton's 23 percent positive and 28 percent negative coverage. And, of course, despite their declining influence, the three commercial networks still do more to shape public perceptions than any other medium.

Add to that the finding that Clinton got about twice as much coverage as Bush, and the reality becomes clear: in contrast to the relentless pounding to which Clinton was subjected, coverage of Bush has been low-key and polite.

NUMEROUS THEORIES have been advanced to explain the media's somnolence, and all have at least some validity. In the New Republic, Jonathan Chait joins an old theory -- that reporters like politics but hate policy -- with a new one: that old-fashioned ideas about objectivity, abandoned long ago when covering purely political stories about strategy, polls, and the like, remain the coin of the journalistic realm when it comes to actual proposals, such as the Bush tax plan. Thus, reporters feel obligated to seek out opposing positions and give them equal weight even when they know that one side is telling the truth and the other is lying -- as the Bushies surely are when they claim their tax cut will cost "only" $1.6 trillion, and that it won't harm Social Security when in fact it is a bold raid on the Social Security trust fund.

Chait's colleague Franklin Foer, in a commentary on TNR's Web site, blamed the pro-Bush tilt of the media on liberal bias -- that is, reporters are so afraid of being accused of bias that they are bending over backward. Certainly that would explain the self-congratulatory tone of Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz's recent column in which he fairly bragged of all the e-mail the Post has received from liberals complaining about the paper's alleged newfound conservative bias.

Then, too, there's the thuggishness of the Bush press operation. The Clintonistas often disdained the media, and were sometimes criticized for failing to suck up to reporters. The Bushies, though, threaten to make life difficult for anyone who isn't with the program. Take Houston Chronicle reporter Bennett Roth. After Bush urged parents to talk to their kids about the dangers of drinking and drugs, Roth had the good sense to ask White House spokesman Ari Fleischer whether Bush had talked to his daughters -- one of whom, after all, had recently been arrested for underage drinking. The Post reported that Fleischer tracked Roth down after the briefing and told him ominously that his question had been "noted in the building."

And, reportedly, that's not the first time Fleischer has delivered such a message to a wayward correspondent. Do you suppose that could explain why there has been so little criticism of, say, Dick Cheney's secret meetings with well-heeled oil-industry representatives in drafting his anti-conservation energy policy -- and why there was so much criticism of Hillary Clinton for crafting her health-care plan behind closed doors?

But though there's something to all these particulars, at root the most important difference is cultural. Clinton's enemies hated him -- really hated him -- in a way that Bush's enemies do not. This hatred extended from Whitewater to Lewinsky and even, on Clinton's way out the door, to the phony White House vandalism story, whose dismissal last week by the General Accounting Office was barely reported by the media. This irrational hatred was even on display during the recent China crisis, when Senator John Kyl, an Arizona Republican, affably admitted to National Public Radio that if Clinton had acted as obsequiously as Bush, he would have gone ballistic.

"I have more confidence in the Bush administration than I did the Clinton administration when it comes to the conduct of foreign affairs," Kyl said. "So I am naturally much more willing to assume that they are making good decisions than I was after we began to see what the Clinton administration did."

Marbled into all this is the element of generational betrayal. Clinton was the first baby-boomer president, and his attitudes -- like those of many of the reporters who covered him -- were shaped by the ethos of the 1960s. Some of those reporters, like Sidney Blumenthal, went to work for him. Others, like Joe Klein, saw their initial infatuation turn to repulsion as they learned more about his personal flaws and excesses. An early Newsweek essay by Klein, in which he referred to Clinton's massively disorganized, omnibus approach to governing as "promiscuity," helped set the tone for much of the subsequent press coverage. By late 1994 Clinton was, as an amazed Pete Hamill wrote in Esquire, "the most hated president in memory."

Clinton was, and is, a sleazeball, a man whose human flaws were too grotesque to be ignored. But at some point, isn't policy more important than personality?

ON THE Wall Street Journal's Web site, you can purchase a CD-ROM, in both Windows and Macintosh formats, called Whitewater: The Collection, in which you can relive those halcyon days of Vince Foster and Webb Hubbell, of Susan McDougal and David Hale, of Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky.

Those were great times for the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. Now there's nothing left but nostalgia.

The media, though, have a president to cover. They damn well ought to start doing it.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.