Bill Clinton received favorable coverage from reporters when he followed the pro-establishment agenda. (cc photo: Alan Light)
Before we can talk about the media’s attitude toward Bill Clinton, we need to understand what the media are.
Nearly every major news outlet in the United States is owned by a large for-profit corporation—whether a media conglomerate like Time Warner or Disney or a diversified industrial giant like General Electric (which owns NBC) or Westinghouse (which owns CBS).
The orientation of news corporations may not always be conservative—they probably don’t care much whether there are prayers in schools or gays in the military—but it certainly isn’t liberal. Big business strongly opposes redistribution of wealth to working Americans and resists corporate regulation that protects workers, consumers or the environment. You’ll seldom see people advocating such progressive policies on media outlets that big business owns. (In place of genuine progressives, you’ll generally see centrists such as Sam Donaldson, Mark Shields or Michael Kinsley masquerading as “the left.”)
When looking for evidence of “liberal bias” in the media, conservatives generally ignore the fact that journalists have employers, and that these employers usually belong to the Fortune 500. It’s much easier to look at the private views of reporters and then assume, against all evidence, that rank-and-file journalists are free to say or write whatever they please.
As employees of large, hierarchical institutions, reporters generally will suppress their personal viewpoints if they are out of sync with strongly held positions of the companies that pay their salaries. And in any case, the majority of mainstream journalists are proudly middle-of-the-road; whether by selection or acculturation, most share the corporate centrism of their bosses, seeing “moderate” as the mark of virtue and the establishment as the source of all (conventional) wisdom.
So what does this mean for Clinton? Initially, it meant very good things. The Arkansas governor was exactly the sort of candidate that media pundits love: “tough” in foreign policy, friendly toward business and “liberal” only on social issues such as abortion. The favorable buzz in the press helped the candidate attract key contributors and supporters.
These supporters included many members of the working press. In early 1992, every journalist in the New Republic’s informal quadrennial poll of the press corps covering the New Hampshire primary said that he or she would pick Clinton as the Democratic nominee. “Such unanimity is unprecedented,” the New Republic’s Hendrik Hertzberg noted. But far from evidence of a liberal bias, this survey shows that when facing a wide spectrum of Democratic candidates—from Jerry Brown and Tom Harkin on the left to Clinton and Paul Tsongas on the right of the party—journalists gravitated to the rightward edge, picking a candidate near the establishment center.
Indeed, the most liberal candidates received strikingly hostile treatment from the “liberal” press corps. Harkin’s early wins in his home state of Iowa and neighboring Minnesota were virtually ignored, while Clinton’s similar favorite-son victories in the South were trumpeted. Brown was denounced in the press as a “political assassin,” a “mad monk,” an “odd, fringe actor”—a level of vitriol usually reserved for leaders of Third World countries that the United States has invaded.
But along with a preference for Clinton over his Democratic rivals, primary coverage also reflected a media obsession with what euphemistically is called the “character issue”—an obsession that still dogs Clinton’s presidency.
Those who believe that Clinton got a free ride from the press during the campaign should reread some of the coverage. In the month before the New Hampshire primary, fully 10 percent of campaign articles in the “quality” press were devoted either to questions about Clinton’s draft record or to Gennifer Flowers’ allegations of marital infidelity. (This was almost as many articles as those covering all policy issues combined.) Later, whether Clinton had inhaled while at Oxford was added to the list of burning media questions.
It’s fair to assume that a poll of reporters’ private belief would have turned up few who felt that a perfect marriage, abstinence from marijuana or service in Vietnam were the prime attributes to look for in a presidential candidate. Yet these concerns—essentially a new-right agenda—became the most heavily covered issues of Campaign ‘92.
Media had little interest in whether George H.W. Bush was lying when he claimed to be “out of the loop” on Iran/Contra.
Lest one imagine that the press merely was interested in debunking candidates’ dissemblings, consider the contrast between the abundant coverage of Clinton’s draft record and the sparse coverage of President George Bush’s involvement with the Iran/Contra scandal.
In comparable periods of the campaign, four mentions of the draft occurred for every mention of Iran/Contra in major media. Campaign coverage scrutinized every contradiction in Clinton’s account of his draft maneuvers but largely ignored evidence that Bush was not “out of the loop” about illegal arms shipments to the Nicaraguan Contra rebels. Incredibly, not a single campaign story in the newspapers of record mentioned the smoking gun of Bush’s involvement—a scheduling memo to the vice president informing him that he would be briefed on “resupply of the Contras.”
Of course, the two issues are not strictly comparable. One scandal involved what a college student had done more than 20 years earlier to avoid fighting in a war he opposed; the other concerned things a vice president did six years earlier to pursue a secret foreign policy in possible violation of the Constitution. When the former gets far more media attention than the later, is it really possible to pretend that the press’ bias is liberal?
It’s commonplace to say that President Clinton received no honeymoon from the press following the 1992 election. But this is not strictly true: Both before and after his inauguration, Clinton received favorable coverage from reporters and influential pundits—when he followed the pro-establishment agenda of the press.
There’s much rewriting of history concerning how Clinton actually won the 1992 election: Conventional wisdom would have it that he won over voters by positioning himself as a “New Democrat”—in other words, as a center-right candidate who appealed to white males as a proponent of welfare reform and capital punishment.
But those weren’t the themes Clinton emphasized during the general election: His campaign’s two biggest issues were job creation (“It’s the economy, stupid”) and the healthcare crisis, and he stressed his support for abortion rights.
Immediately after the election, pundits began urging Clinton to back off from the more progressive elements of his campaign. US News’ Steve Roberts penned a remarkable post-election column listing a number of liberal campaign promises—on abortion, family leave, urban aid and campaign-finance reform, for example—that Clinton should consider breaking.
In Roberts’ view, these would be crucial tests for the new president: “Is he really a new form of Democrat? Or is he what Bush accused him of being: a free-spending liberal dressed up as a moderate?” In this Orwellian formulation, Clinton is suspect if he meant what he said during the campaign; only by breaking public promises can he somehow prove he was honest.
As it turned out, Clinton did break a number of his promises—generally to the applause of the media. Most pundits cheered, for example, as his economic program shifted immediately from job creation to deficit reduction. Any criticism came from the far right, with the ubiquitous Robert Novak suggesting that Clinton’s tax increases on the wealthy amounted to “socialism.”
When Clinton did keep promises, it got him into trouble; the most obvious example was his attempt to allow gays to serve openly in the military. The basic media reaction: How foolish of Clinton to do what he said he was going to do.
Clinton never received better media support than during his push to pass NAFTA.
There is a clear pattern in press coverage of Clinton’s national career: He has received positive, sometimes gushing coverage when he follows a center-right course; when his commitment to that agenda is seen to have flagged, he has received tough scrutiny.
Clinton never received more sustained, broad-based media support than during his push to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement—over the objections of a majority of his party; most labor, consumer and environmental groups; and, indeed, the bulk of the US citizenry. On an issue of great controversy among the public and great consensus in the business community, the press’ conventional wisdom reflected the business consensus.
Similarly, the press presented a united front against a Canadian-style, single-payer healthcare system which would replace insurance companies with government-supplied health insurance. Despite public and congressional support, this option barely was mentioned in most media accounts of the healthcare reform debate. ABC World News Tonight mentioned the single-payer plan only once during 1993. Tellingly, Clinton’s byzantine reform proposal—which would have maintained the power of giant insurance companies over the healthcare system—received largely positive reviews when it appeared to be an alternative to a more radical (yet simpler) reform. As more conservative options emerged, however, it faced more and more criticism.
The pattern continues through the ’96 campaign: The more Clinton adopts Republican stances on matters of policy, the more he is praised for his shrewdness. Indeed, when Clinton rushed to beat Bob Dole to the punch in endorsing Wisconsin’s welfare plan, an NBC correspondent admiringly described Clinton as someone who “refuses to cede any ground.”
It certainly is true that coverage of the Dole campaign often has dwelt on the negatives—the candidate’s lack of energy, eloquence and ideas, for example. And reporters often are quite skeptical of Dole’s attempts to paint Clinton as a dangerous radical. But one of the difficulties in assessing media bias is agreeing upon the reality from which the media are supposed to be diverging.
Presumably, some campaigns really are tired and idealess; isn’t it bias to pretend that they aren’t? Maybe it is preposterous to call Clinton a liberal extremist. And just as preposterous to call all instances of media support for Clinton—even when he’s heading full speed rightward—evidence of left-wing bias.
This article originally appeared in Insight on the News.
