November 1992, Page 17, 18, 84
Media Watch
The Middle East Factor in Negative Media Coverage of Bush Campaign
By Richard H. Curtiss
"Annoy the media, re-elect Bush! They wouldn't know good news if it hit them in the face. Have you heard this on television at night: That unemployment claims have gone down to the lowest in two years? Have you heard that inflation is down, that interest rates are down, that total employment is 93 percent, inflation 2.5 to 3 percent, home mortgages are 8 percent?"
-President George Bush at Montgomery, AL election rally, Oct. 24, 1992
Never in the 15 presidential campaigns I've watched closely has there been such an extraordinary media gang-up on a major party candidate as that against George Bush in 1992.
In the final two weeks of the campaign, when it was unlikely to make a difference, some of the media offenders expressed qualms about their performance. Host Ted Koppel on an Oct. 20 ABC "Nightline" program entitled "The Media: Reporting or Predicting?" noted: "You can understand why supporters of President Bush would be dismayed. The networks are continually citing polls suggesting, if not an unsurmountable, then certainly a daunting Clinton lead. . . Are the media reflecting reality or creating it?"
Ombudsman Joann Byrd, in an Oct. 25 response to a reader complaint that The Washington Post consistently selected photos that made Gov. William Clinton look presidential and President George Bush look like the village idiot, gave the following breakdown:
Of 144 pictures of the three presidential candidates printed by the Post between Aug. 20 and Oct. 21, Governor Clinton looked "confident and enthusiastic" in 28 photos, Bush in 20 and Perot in 8. Of photos that made them look "gawky," there were "21 of Mr. Bush, 13 of Gov. Clinton and 6 of Mr. Perot," Byrd reported. "In the eyes of this beholder," she continued, "six of those made the president look particularly silly, and even if the 13 weren't flattering to Gov. Clinton, I think we'd agree none of them made him look foolish."
Then, amazingly, after revealing her own damning figures, the ombudsman concluded: "I don't find photographic favoritism here, and the accidental differences hardly constitute a smoking gun."
Right. in this visual age, the Post used a Big Bertha to assure that, regardless of how much sense the president's words made, anyone who read them in The Washington Post would think that he couldn't talk with both eyes open.
The Post editorially endorsed the Clinton-Gore ticket on Oct. 11. America's other "newspaper of record," The New York Times, also endorsed Clinton. In fact, no New York newspaper endorsed the Bush-Quayle ticket. The New York Daily News, whose ownership is in transition from British news tycoon Mortimer Zuckerman, endorsed the Democratic ticket, and neither The Wall Street Journal nor the New York Post had taken a stand, at this writing.
Washington Post managing editor Leonard Downie, Jr., in an unusual Oct. 18 article, explained to readers that the Post's endorsement was reached by a triumvirate consisting of Board Chairwoman Katherine Graham (daughter of the Post's long-time owner, the late Eugene Meyer), her son, Donald Graham, who is the Post's publisher, and editorial page editor Meg Greenfield.
"Neither I nor any of the editors and reporters who cover the news under my direction has anything to do with these endorsement decisions or any of the other opinions expressed on the editorial page," Downie wrote. "Neither Miss Greenfield nor any of the editorial writers has any involvement in our coverage of the news, including the election campaign."
Actually, very few editorial writers influence how managing editors cover the news, any more than commentary writer John Chancellor influences how anchorman Tom Brokaw covers the nightly news on NBC. But publishers and network owners do influence news coverage. If a newspaper editorially supports a candidate, or if network executives personally support a candidate, does anyone seriously believe that their preferences have no effect at all on coverage of the presidential campaigns by editors and reporters on their payrolls?
It's fair to conclude from editor Downie's careful wording, which omitted any disavowal of the influence of Mrs. Graham or her son on the newspaper's handling of the campaign, that The Washington Post isn't different in this respect from other newspapers, including The New York Times, all of whose voting stock is confined by the terms of its character to members of the Sulzberger family.
There also is food for thought in another of Post editor Downie's statements: "Journalists are people, too, and cannot be expected to completely cleanse their professional minds of human emotions and opinions, especially when covering highly charged political campaigns or controversial issues."
A Perceptible Gang-up
It appears, however, that the collective "professional minds" of America's mainstream media were not adequately "cleansed." The resulting gang-up became perceptible to any but the most willfully ignorant observers after Bush publicly linked U.S. aid to Israel to Israel's performance at the peace table. The president went public on this issue in his Sept. 12, 1991 press conference, asking Congress to delay consideration of U.S. loan guarantees for 120 days until after the beginning of Middle East peace negotiations.
Bush added, quite accurately, that on that very day there were "a thousand lobbyists" on Capitol Hill supporting the bill and only "one lonely little guy down here" opposing it. A poll right afterward showed he wasn't as lonely as he feared. An unprecedented 86 percent of the American public supported his request.
Within days, however, he was called "anti-Semitic" by a member of Yitzhak Shamir's Israeli cabinet, and there was virtually no protest against that viciously unfair remark from the highly organized and normally articulate "American Jewish community." In fact, it had American echoes. Both President Bush and Secretary of State James Baker were called "enemies of the Jews" on radio call-in shows. And from then right up to election day there were predictions in the political columns of America's Jewish weeklies that Bush would get no more than 10 to 20 percent of the "Jewish vote."
If, as the Jewish press still reports, more than 80 percent of Jewish voters opposed the re-election of George Bush because of his Middle East policy, it is reasonably to suppose that about the same percentage of Jewish journalists opposed him. Is it therefore unreasonable to suggest that some of this personal opposition seeped into the opinion columns written by Jewish journalists? Or into editorials in Jewish-owned newspapers like The New York Times or written by Jewish editorial writers like Meg Greenfield? Or, consciously or unconsciously, into some of the actual reporting about the campaign?
Most people suspect that injecting such a suggestion into polite conversation is a quick way to find out what it's like to be one "lonely little guy" facing 1,000 mainstream journalists screaming "anti-Semitism." In fact, however, few would deny that in 1992 the media was glaringly unfair and that most of those picking on the president concentrated on what they called his "failed economic policies."
Bush/Quayle campaign chairman Robert Teeter put it ever so politely on the "Nightline" program when he complained: "I think in this particular case the press has been very negative, not only about our candidate and our campaign. . . but also about the conditions of the country. . . It seems the press over a sustained period of time, a year now, has really reported the conditions in the country and the economy much more negatively, probably, than is warranted."
His complaint was borne out by the Center for Media and Public Affairs. As described byWashington Post television columnist John Carmody on Oct. 20, the media-watching group reported that the economy had been the number one domestic news story on U.S. television networks over the previous two years. There were 2,531 stories and 63 hours and 36 minutes of air time on ABC, CBS and NBC nightly newscasts alone devoted to the economy between October 1990 and September 1992. Since July 1992, 96 percent of the economic evaluations and 83 percent of the predictions about the economy had been negative.
In 11 of the past 12 months, according to this television monitoring organization, unemployment had been the top economic story, followed by the recession itself. Yet, in an Oct. 16, 1992 New York Times article entitled "Economic Scare Stories," Stanford University economists Robert E. Hall and John B. Taylor pointed out that while the U.S. economy was growing by 2 percent in the first half of 1992, "press reporting about the economy has become so pessimistic that it has completely lost touch with reality."
Losing Touch With Reality
For example, U.S. unemployment rose above 25 percent in the 1930s, and reached 10.8 percent in the early 1980s. The current unemployment rate is 7.5 percent.
"In the late 1970s and early '80s, interest rates and inflation were in double digits," the Stanford economists wrote. "Today inflation and interest rates are lower than they have been for 30 years. . . They are a sign that the rest of the 1990s could be very good."
If it's that easy to prove unfair reporting, it isn't much more difficult to demonstrate why the unfairness occurred. Israel's U.S. lobbyists say 80 percent of the "Jewish vote" went to Clinton because of Israel. Below are statements that lead to similar conclusions about the motives of pro-Israel journalists, and those who follow their lead. Those quoted include journalists who are paid to write good things about Israel and bad things about "enemies of the Jews." With apologies to H. Ross Perot, who described Washington lobbyists "in their thousand dollar suits and alligator shoes," I'll label these professional apologists "The Alligator Shoes Crowd."
Then there are journalists who use their positions in the mainstream media to purvey many of the same lines laid down by the paid lobbyists. Let's call them, in the immortal words of Spiro Agnew, "natering nabobs." And, finally, there are the pack journalists who seem to have no personal stake in Israel but who echo some of those same lines, for reasons of their own. With apologies again to Agnew, we'll call them "pusillanimous pussyfooters."
To fully appreciate the degree of conformity, as the line passes from alligator shoes through nattering nabobs to pusillanimous pussyfooters, bear in mind that it is de rigueur in pro-Israel circles to depict George Bush and James Baker as small-minded critics of Israel and, by contrast, 1996 Republican hopefuls Jack Kemp, Dan Quayle and William Bennett as Israel's potential friends. On the Democratic side, Bill and Hillary Clinton are considered "under control," and Sen. Al Gore is so well-disposed to Israel that, as Gore Vidal recently wrote in the magazine GQ, if Al Gore became vice president, Israel would be able to move its American "command post" from the Senate to Gore's office.
So keeping that media guide to the honestly perplexed in mind, read on:
What the Alligator Shoes Crowd (Whose Jobs Depend Upon Israel's U.S. Lobby) Wrote:
Columnist for Jewish weeklies and former American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) legislative director Douglas M. Bloomfield:
"If George Bush had done nothing else but challenge the loyalty of American Jews on national television and attack their right to lobby their elected representatives, that would be sufficient to forfeit any claim to Jewish votes. . . But there is more. . . Bush was more Arab than the Arabs when he tied Israel's request for loan guarantees to the peace talks and his demands for a settlement freeze. . .
"The Israeli guarantees have been approved, but the man responsible for that and the turnaround in administration policy Yitzhak Rabin. It is Bill Clinton. Were it not for the Arkansas governor's support for Israel, his wide lead in the polls and George Bush's desperate need for every vote, notwithstanding Jim Baker's dismissal of Jewish voters, it is doubtful Bush ever would have signed the loan guarantee legislation. . .
"Bush and Baker have demonstrated they do not even qualify as honest brokers. . . Baker has already said the Bush administration intends to offer 'concrete proposals' for the peace talks if no agreements are reached soon. That smacks of an imposed solution, and knowing Bush and Baker's tilt and the fact they feel Israel is the only party they have any leverage over, it's clear who would feel the brunt of their pressure once more."
-Washington Jewish Week, Oct. 22, 1992
Liberal New York Jewish weekly Forward:
"Let us just say as Governor Clinton and Senator Gore roll into the general campaign that this newspaper, for one, does not regard Israel as the single issue in this campaign. These columns have been critical of Mr. Bush's pro-Arab tilt in the Middle East, but even on foreign policy the Middle East is not the top issue. The most pressing foreign policy issue is the failure of the Bush administration to assert American leadership overseas in the wake of America's own victory in the Cold War. . .
"The Bush administration's failures abroad stem from its failure to keep the American economy going at home. . . In selecting Mr. Gore as his running mate, Mr. Clinton has so far stayed true to the central strategy of his campaign. This has been to return the Democratic Party to its fundamental, centrist roots."
-July 24, 1992
Ruth King, Republican and treasurer of the "Jewish Election Committee":
"It is precisely [former Republican Sen. Rudy] Boschwitz's support for Israel which makes it doubly shameful that he is permitting himself to be cynically manipulated into becoming one of the lone Jewish voices on behalf of the most pro-Arab U.S. administration since the dark days of John Foster Dulles. . . In his speech introducing Bush at the recent B'nai B'rith convention, and in numerous recent articles, Boschwitz has put forward the absurd claim that the Bush administration has been good for Israel. . . The same Bush who triggered a wave of anti-Semitic fan mail to the White House with his incendiary rhetoric about Jewish lobbyists besieging Washington. The same Bush whose secretary of state has used foul incentive in dismissing American Jews on the grounds that 'they didn't vote for us anyway.'"
-American Jewish World, Minneapolis, MN, Sept. 25, 1992
What the Nattering Nabobs (Israel's Dependable Media Supporters) Wrote:
Columnist William Safire, a former Nixon speechwriter and long-time personal friend of George Bush:
"[Bush] is not the candidate of change; he is the candidate who changes. . . Here am I, a lifelong Republican, a card-carrying conservative, a right-wing pundit with four-square opinions on anything you can name. . . not yet sure about which hole in the card to punch for president. . . Should we cast a 'clothespin vote,' so named for those who must put a wooden clothespin on their noses before grimly voting for the party, not the candidate?. . . We're having a hard time this fall because this campaign centers on a decision about George Bush. Not about Dan Quayle, who many of us think is getting a derisive rap from a horde of wise guys who replace argument with ridicule. . . Thus, at the closely watched start of this campaign, any Republican hoping, in Bill Bennett's apt phrase, 'not for four more years but for four different years,' he was quickly let down. . . I wanted to know if he [Bush] planned to reappoint James Baker as Secretary of State-which would be a sure sign of no change to come. . . An alert Larry King popped that question to Bush, who said yes. The prospect of Baker and his crew at Foggy Bottom again was a real downer."
-The New York Times Magazine, Oct. 18, 1992
Columnist Charles Krauthammer:
"His party facing annihilation, his colleagues deserting, his ammunition gone, Quayle seemed determined to go down fighting. It was a display of frantic combativeness that verged on courage. Such a performance does not add dignity or gravitas to his public persona, but it does add guts."
-The Washington Post, Oct. 20, 1992
What Pussillanimous Pussyfooters (Pack Journalists) Wrote:
Tara Sonenshine and Jay LaMonica, producers for ABC's "Nightline":
"George Bush's assertions about the Iran-contra scandal have seemed less and less plausible."
The New York Times, Oct. 20, 1992
New Yorker Staff Writer Mark Singer:
"What we have witnessed so far in the presidential and vice presidential debates is the spectacle of George Bush and Dan Quayle singing and dancing to tunes played by James A. Baker 3rd."
The New York Times, Oct. 16, 1992
Columnist Richard Cohen:
"The areas in which Bush concedes error-tax policy and the prelude to the Gulf war-virtually represent the sum and substance of his administration. His foreign policy trophy is tarnished; his economic plan is a failure. . . Bush has not been a good president, which is why he could not be a good debater. In two weeks, the polls say, the American people will vote him out of office."
The Washington Post, Oct. 21, 1992
Columnist Anthony Lewis:
"At the end of this political campaign we are seeing what an overweening love of power can do to a president and to the institutions of government. We are seeing the rot of corruption. . . The Iran-contra story is a metaphor for George Bush's presidency: sacrificing integrity to political ambition. In the end the process exacts its price. Like murder, corruption will out."
The New York Times, Oct. 16, 1992
Columnist Hobart Rowen:
"Some clues to the major political upheaval in the works can't be ignored. One key is the admission in a New York Times Magazine cover piece by Nixon speechwriter and lifelong Republican William Safire. . . that he may. . . hold his nose and vote for Clinton. . . Polls after the final head-to-head battle in East Lansing, MI, Monday night indicated that Bush gained a few points, but not enough to really matter."
The Washington Post, Oct. 22, 1992
Columnist Mary McGrory:
"Bush has had his 60 seconds as the comeback kid. That's it. His delayed-reaction campaign-his misreading of the shelf life of his Desert Storm acclaim, his refusal to acknowledge the recession. . . have brought him to the point where one good night in front of the cameras can't revive his wilted fortunes."
The Washington Post, Oct. 22, 1992
Vanity Fair writer Marjorie Williams:
"Baker seems to feel no innate sympathy toward Israel. . . and it is possible that this coolness may be to some degree a function of his insular WASP background."
Quoted in Detroit Jewish News, Sept. 25, 1992
Resting the Case
The arrant racism in the final attack above demonstrates that you don't have to be Jewish to play this game. Nor do you have to be bothered by the facts. Confonted on Oct. 25 by "McLaughlin Group" moderator John McLaughlin with a perceptible uptick in virtually all U.S. economic indicators, three of the panelists on the NBC television show responded as follows:
New Republic Editor Fred Barnes:
"The economy is going up a little, but not enough to help George Bush."
Newsweek Editor Eleanor Clift:
"It's a faltering recovery."
Roll Call Editor Morton Kondracke:
"Next year we will have a recovering economy. . . But it's too late to help George Bush."
So, with these citations I rest Mr. Teeter's case alleging biased media reporting about the candidate and the U.S. economy. And with the direct quotations, I rest my own case as to the reason why.
Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
