BROWN OUT: Most of the press still feels a responsibility to steer the nomination toward candidates it considers acceptable. Time magazine’s much-hyped “Clinton vs. Tsongas” cover–out of date before its March 23 cover date–was yet another attempt to write Jerry Brown out of the race. If ignoring Brown doesn’t work, ridicule might: That same issue of Time called him “Samuel Gompers in Earth shoes,” a “walking Experiment in Living” with “terminal flightiness” and “deeply flawed” policy proposals. The corresponding issue of Newsweek used the word “pander” three times to refer to the “mad monk of presidential politics” and “masterful annoyance.”
The emerging media take on Brown is that he used to practice the same big-money politics he now runs against. If you denounce the wealthy contributors you once depended on, this is seen as hypocrisy; if you still depend on them, this is seen as electability.
GOV. TERMINATOR: “How did Bill Clinton take so many shots and keep on coming?” Maureen Dowd asks in the Feb. 16 New York Times. A big part of the answer, as Dowd acknowledges, is the “smitten and worshipful” press corps.
An example that Dowd could have used: the handling of Jerry Brown’s criticism that Hillary Clinton’s law firm does business with the state of Arkansas. Most news outlets treated this as a low blow by Brown, even as an indication that Brown, a bachelor, doesn’t understand marriage. “The one thing he knows nothing about–zilch, nada, zero–is marriage,” wrote the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen (3/18/92). Cohen and others at the Post seemed to be discounting their paper’s strong March 15 piece, by Michael Weisskopf and David Maraniss, that was the source for Brown’s charges.
Although Brown exaggerated when he said the Post charged Clinton with steering business to his wife’s firm, the article did paint a striking picture of an “inbred” political system where conflicts of interest are treated as a matter of course. The Rose law firm, to which Hillary Clinton belongs, gets much of its income from the state, and regularly lobbies the government on multiple issues. “If you want something special from the state, you go to the Rose firm,” a Clinton rival is quoted.
REPORTING MORE THAN DENIALS: While many news outlets simply quoted the Clintons’ dismissals of Brown’s charges, NBC News (3/16) looked at how other governor’s spouses handle the problem, and reported that four other lawyers married to governors have stopped practicing, and a fifth (Indiana’s Susan Bayh) has changed jobs to avoid a conflict. The New York Post (3/17) noted that when Mario Cuomo’s son Andrew “practiced law, his firm took no business from New York state.”
The New York Times found no space for any of this, though it did have room to quote Hillary Clinton’s “cookie-baking” soundbite four separate times in its March 16 edition. Most media treated Gov. Clinton’s potential conflicts of interest as a non-issue–a stance that certainly helped Clinton weather yet another mini-scandal.
HONEYMOON ENDING?: Clinton’s seduction of the press will not last forever, as media increasingly incorporate Republican criticisms into their coverage to the extent Clinton seems to have clinched the nomination. A taste of things to come was provided by Lisa Meyers’ March 18 NBC report, which could have been ghosted by the White House. Meyers accused Clinton of practicing “class warfare” and of doing “an imitation of Walter Mondale, with unbridled appeals to special interests.”
CHECKS AND BALANCE: The amount of media space devoted to the congressional check- bouncing scandal contrasts sharply with the meager attention paid to the S & L scandal’s potential impact on the campaign. While Clinton’s relationship with the collapsed Madison Guaranty has gotten passing attention, George Bush’s far more direct role as head of the Reagan administration’s taskforce on financial institutions has gotten almost no play during the campaign. (Paul Tsongas also got little attention for being one of the Senate architects of S & L deregulation–The Nation, 3/30.)
While Congress’ Rubbergate is trivial in its impact on taxpayers compared to the S & L looting, that does not excuse reporting like Lindsay Gruson’s New York Times piece (3/16) on the financial troubles of Rep. Steven Solarz (who wrote 600-700 bad checks over 39 months). In what amounted to a front-page press release, sourced entirely to Solarz and his wife, Gruson managed to mention the congressmember’s dental bills, family illnesses and “invalid mother-in-law,” but never gets around to noting that Solarz’s House bank account was more than $7,000 in the red in 30 out of 39 months. Solarz, according to Gruson’s article, was too busy battling Saddam Hussein to worry about such “minute details.”
(Jim Ledbetter and Michael Tomasky in the Village Voice–3/3, 3/24–have done a good job on the bipartisan flacking Gruson has done for both Democrat Solarz and Republican Al D’Amato.)
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