Boehlert's Tale Of Two Presidents & The Press

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sun Nov 23, 2008 at 10:40

If the past is prologue, it's important to remember two things as the new Democratic administration prepares to take up residence. First, the press in 1992 was tagged as being overly affectionate toward Clinton in the general election. By early 1993, there had been a sea change in how journalists treated the Democrat. And second, Clinton's bad press started years before impeachment and months before any kind of official scandal machinery was put in place inside the U.S. Capitol. The hostile and at times overbearing press coverage started during the transition period and before Clinton even had time to do much of anything wrong.

"Judging by today's press conference, the traditional media honeymoon seems already on the wane," ABC News' Diane Sawyer announced on January 14, 1993, one week before Clinton was inaugurated.

And once he took office, things got really bad...

One quick example: On January 31, 1993, 12 days after Clinton had been sworn into office, Sam Donaldson appeared on ABC and made this jarring announcement: "Last week, we could talk about, 'Is the honeymoon over?' This week, we can talk about, 'Is the presidency over?' " (At the time, Clinton's approval rating hovered around 65 percent.)

By contrast, on February 10, 2001, three weeks after Bush had been sworn into office, The New York Times' Frank Bruni penned a gentle, honeymoon-mode review about how authentic and at ease Bush seemed with his new role. "George W. Bush is establishing a no-fuss, no-sweat, 'look-Ma-no-hands' presidency, his exertions ever measured, his outlook always mirthful," wrote Bruni. "The gilded robes of the presidency have not obscured Mr. Bush's innate goofiness -- or, for that matter, his insistent folksiness."

Bruni's piece was a classic example of what in journalism is called a "beat-sweetener." It's where a reporter assigned to a new beat ingratiates himself with key sources by writing flattering profiles. There were precious few White House beat-sweeteners published in 1993.

"Perhaps never in our nation's history -- certainly not in its recent history -- has a President so early in his term been subjected to a greater barrage of negative media coverage than Bill Clinton," wrote the Los Angeles Times' late media critic David Shaw in 1993. (The headline to Shaw's piece: "Not Even Getting a 1st Chance; Early Coverage of the President Seemed More Like An Autopsy.")

While the piece itself is brilliant on its own terms, and an incredibly timely reminder of what we're going to have to push back against in general, it's also useful for pushing back against the silly revisionist history that Clinton got into trouble the first two years because he tried to pass all sorts of "far left" policies.  To the contrary, Clinton was already be criticized for backing off of his most progressive economic policy promises, and for not backing down immediately on gays in the military:

Looking back, though, the so-called scandals that the press claimed were derailing Clinton's entire presidency just days into his first term seem pretty tame. (The hullabaloo over Baird's domestic help seems positively quaint in retrospect.)

At the time though, it was pure doomsday, according to the press. Here was an utterly typical dispatch from Clinton's first weeks in office, courtesy of Time [emphasis added]:

No sooner had Clinton emerged from the embarrassing miscalculation about Zoe Baird than he found himself in an even stickier political quagmire. After promising in his Inaugural Address to end an era of "deadlock and drift," Clinton was suddenly at war with the Joint Chiefs of Staff as well as members of his own party in Congress. Worse yet, the spectacle of Clinton clinging so resolutely to his gay-rights pledge after breaking broader promises on taxes, the deficit and spending projects raised questions about his judgment.

Aside from the heavy-handed language, note how Time ridiculed Clinton for "clinging" to a long-forgotten campaign promise. The irony was that one of the key themes of the nasty coverage of Clinton's early presidency was that he was weak and excessively political (i.e. "Slick Willie"), that he gave in for political reasons, and that he refused to keep controversial campaign pledges. ("Clinton guaranteed himself a spate of bad press by backing off campaign promises," The Washington Post explained two weeks after his inauguration.)

But when Clinton stood up on the campaign pledge regarding gays in the military, journalists not only were not impressed, they mocked him. (Perhaps they had different ideas about which of Clinton's campaign pledges were important and which ones were not.)

"My colleagues and I, like journalistic Dr. Strangeloves, are ready to nuke Mr. Clinton at the slightest provocation," New York Times columnist Leslie Gelb conceded just one month after the Democrat became the 42nd president.

Of course, things were to get much, much worse than this.  As Gene Lyons showed, first in Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater, then (with Joe Conason) in  The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton, the elite media--particularly the New York Times and the Washington Post, played an absolutely vital role in turning a baseless rightwing witch-hunt into arguably the dominant political narrative of the Clinton presidency.

That's where they ended up.  But this is how they started out.  And it should be "perfectly clear" (as one of America's greatest war criminals would say) that it had nothing at all to do with Clinton going off on some crazy, unpopular far-left policy agenda.  Quite the contrary--even before things really got started, Clinton had already begun moving rightward, and was getting criticized as weak for doing so--which then meant he could be criticized as "weak" for not standing up to "Democratic special interests" when he failed to move right on other matters.

Sweet, isn't it?

But that's the way media narratives go in fact-free Versailles.