PEROT FOR REAL: News media seem to have realized that H. Ross Perot might, in fact, become president, and the prospect has prompted some good journalism. Associated Press (5/7) examined the cozy relationship between Perot and Nixon, as revealed in White House memos, such as the document indicating Perot offered to buy a TV network and newspaper for Nixon. CNN (6/10) reported on how his insider government connections enabled Perot to make billions off of welfare programs. Michael Tomasky in the Village Voice (5/26) compiled several episodes of shady dealings that benefited Perot’s EDS.
But there seems to be a reluctance to incorporate the facts about Ross Perot, wheeler-dealer, into the daily coverage of the campaign, which still features the myth of outsider Ross Perot. For example, an article in the New York Times as early as May 8, following AP’s lead, documented Perot’s history as a political insider, with intimate access to the White House going back to the Nixon administration. Yet when covering the June 2 primaries, the Times’ subhead could refer to exit polls showing support for Perot as “Signs of Outsider’s Power.”
COWBOY JUNKIE: One journalist who seems to have largely bought the Perot myth is Cokie Roberts of NPR and ABC. In a New York Times op-ed (6/2), she described Perot approvingly as “a man who seems to be able to fix things,” “a man not tied to either party,” a “cowboy…with no responsibilities or record,” someone who “instead of surrounding himself with political consultants… recruits armies of volunteers,” “someone who says what he thinks and seems ready to act on it without worrying about whom it offends.”
This analysis is awfully naive. Perot has a LONG record of involvement in public life, which many of Roberts’ colleagues have written about. Perot had already hired political consutants at the time of Roberts’ column; since then, predictably, he’s hired more. No ties to either party? It would seem that someone who has given at least $349,000 to Republican causes over the last 20 years (Time, 5/25), and can have House Speaker Jim Wright help him get his own federally funded airport, is tied to both parties. And Perot’s penchant for deflecting any uncomfortable line of questioning by attacking the press is not the mark of someone who says what he means regardless of whom it offends.
Roberts’ affection for Perot’s brand of “outsider” campaign seems to be in marked contrast to the media’s reaction to genuine outsiders. The 1980 campaign of Barry Commoner, for example, was basically invisible without the credential of $100 million in petty cash. The National Organization for Women’s proposal to join with allies to form a third party was greeted with general media scorn–including that of Cokie Roberts, who now belatedly recognizes that “nobody trusts the politicians of either party, or the government, to fix the problems.”
ATTACK DOG: Perot’s way of dealing with the less appealing aspects of his past will be to attack the media–the same strategy that Bush used when he attacked Dan Rather in 1988, thereby putting Iran/Contra off the campaign agenda for most of the media. As part of this approach, Perot has retained as press secretary former Chicago Tribune editor Jim Squires, who has expressed his own contempt for the press: “Candidates have been giving answers to very pointed and in many cases hostile questions on 30-minute television shows [for years] and that has not produced a very good democracy.” This is the same Squires who said that he hoped reporters covering Iran/Contra would not repeat the “excesses” of Watergate.
DECODING QUAYLE: Who is Dan Quayle talking about when he condemns the “media elite”? Clearly he isn’t talking about his family, which controls the Indianapolis Star, the Arizona Republic and other media holdings worth more than a billion dollars. Nor, one presumes, is he talking about newspaper owners in general, most of whom faithfully endorse the Republican presidential candidate every four years.
So what does Quayle mean when he says, “I know exactly who the cultural elite, the media elite and the Hollywood elite are”? What group, different from “the rest of us,” is associated in popular stereotypes with the media, Hollywood–and especially New York City, his favorite symbol of the “cultural elite” run wild?
It’s instructive to analyze the evolving comments of Spiro Agnew–the vice president Quayle seems to be imitating. In 1969, Agnew scored the “media elite” in Danforthesque terms: “To a man, these commentators and producers live and work in the geographical and intellectual confines of Washington, D.C. or New York City. The views of this fraternity do not represent the views of America.”
In 1976, having left office in disgrace, Agnew was freer to say what he really thought was wrong with the media that were “running the country”: “All you have to do is look around and see who owns the networks, who owns the Washington Post, the New York Times…. As you look around in the big news business, you see a heavy concentration of Jewish people.”
NIXON-ERA ANTI-SEMITISM P.S.: Why wasn’t it a story when Bush named Fred Malek as his campaign manager, a person who was forced to quit Bush’s 1988 campaign when it was revealed that he carried out Nixon’s order to count Jewish employees in the Bureau of Labor Statistics?
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