Clinton’s Legacy
A partisan press.
By Henry Payne, editorial cartoonist and a writer for The Detroit News
As the Washington press corps bids farewell to Bill Clinton and chews over his tenure, there is one important legacy of the last eight years that, not surprisingly, is getting little mention: an entrenched, partisan, Democratic media.
This partisan press has played as prominent — even decisive — a role in the Clinton years as any factor in politics. Indeed, it is common belief in Washington that a Republican president could never have survived impeachment if he had been caught coaching his intern lover on perjury while facing a sexual harassment suit — and then lying to the American people and his own Cabinet. "The press would not have allowed it," is the phrase used by one Republican consultant friend — and I have heard it repeated by others.
Furthermore, if the tables had been turned in Florida last November, George Bush would never have considered filing suit in three Republican counties to change the count to his liking. As even some Democrats conceded at the time, the press never would have allowed it.
In other words, at least two major political events in two years would have unfolded quite differently because of press coverage. That should be a sobering thought for any historian.
While a liberal press bias has been an issue in American politics for some time, it was the 1992 election of Bill Clinton that really defined its extent. A Roper/Freedom Forum poll taken after Clinton's victory found an astonishing 89 percent of Washington editors had voted for Clinton — versus just seven percent for Bush.
As anyone who has worked in a Washington newsroom will tell you (I myself worked, until 1999, in D.C. for 13 years), this partisanship is palpable. It influences news judgement every day on every beat. Today's newsrooms are actively Democratic in their world view simply because there is no alternative voice at hand. There is no debate. No dissent. Everyone is a Democrat.
Washington politicians are quite aware of this bias and instinctively take it into account in their daily routine. When I covered Newt Gingrich for one 24-hour news cycle at the height of his power in 1995, I was struck by how much time he and his colleagues spent strategizing on how to break through the Democratic media filter to the American people. Gingrich even scheduled interviews with individual congressional reporters just to explain the elementary math that Medicare reductions were not, in fact, cuts. It was comical to watch these reporters, marinated in Democratic theology, as they looked disbelievingly at figures showing Medicare spending was still going up under the Republican plan (albeit at a slower rate).
Republican and Democratic conventions have taken on dramatically different tones in recent years, because Democrats do not fear the partisan press distortion of their words. Thus, a Democratic speaker in 1992 could accuse Ronald Reagan of causing AIDS — without a peep of derision from the assembled media — while Republicans one month later would be caricatured as extremists for the duration of the campaign because of one Pat Buchanan speech.
In heartland America, Washington's bias has a direct impact on what average citizens know about their elected officials. Upon my arrival in Detroit in late 1999, I was disturbed at how little voters knew about the details of Clinton's impeachment ordeal. I have yet to speak to anyone who knows the basic facts of the Lewinsky case — that Starr opened the investigation because of Lewinsky's links to the same people that had paid off Web Hubbell, that Lewinsky was deposed — not because she had an affair with the president — but because she was a witness in a sexual-harassment suit; that Clinton aides tried to destroy Lewinsky as psychologically unbalanced; that Larry Flynt — with a wink from the White House — tried to blackmail senators before they voted on Clinton's future.
People don't know these things because they were never reported by the daily press. Instead, they know what they were told — that a "Republican prosecutor" (as Dan Rather repeatedly referred to Ken Starr) tried to indict a president for having sex.
Into this news void has stepped media outlets as varied as cable's FOX News Network, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the National Review Online edition, The Weekly Standard, talk radio, and various Internet sites. Recognizing the one-sidedness of daily news coverage, they have become an alternate press in today's market, providing essential facts that Washington's partisan press ignores.
The Florida election controversy illustrated how essential these organizations have become. While the partisan networks parroted the sensationalist rhetoric of Democratic operatives, FOX News kept its eye on Democratic canvassing boards' ever-changing definition of the rules. Wall Street Journal editorial columnist Paul Gigot — not trusting beat reporters — traveled to Florida and filed a breaking news story on the facts behind Republican activist's protests of the Dade County recount. And National Review Online provided essential legal analysis of Florida court decisions to balance left-wing network analysis from the likes of Jeffrey Toobin and George Stephanopolous (that ABC News would hire a former Clinton partisan and trot him out as a "political analyst" is evidence of how blatant the network's bias has become).
This coverage followed a campaign in which the establishment press utterly failed to communicate basic facts about the Democratic candidate.
By virtue of his book, Earth in the Balance, Gore was arguably the most radical major party candidate since WWII. Gore's belief that the environment — not liberty or democracy — is the central organizing principle of mankind was a troubling departure for an American leader. Expanding on this principle, Gore's book sketched the architecture of a global government (via international treaty) that would assume war-time powers in order to fight the "holocaust" of global warming (imagine the outcry if Bush had made such an argument to fight the "holocaust" of abortion).
In the Midwest, Gore's vision of the auto industry as a fundamental threat to man's survival should have been a major issue. But not a single major news organization ever did a series on Gore's book, much less a major story. Why? Because Washington reporters essentially agree with Gore that government must step in before capitalism chokes us all. To quote one New York Times reporter at a post-Kyoto news conference organized by environmental groups: "How do we get rid of these immoral sport-utility vehicles that Americans insist on buying?"
Again, the alternate press was left — not just to analyze — but to report the basic facts of Gore's radical theology.
But the alternate press reaches only a sliver of the American public — a public that is still largely dependent on TV networks and a daily monopoly newspaper (the power of the notoriously leftist New York Times Washington bureau deserves special mention here — with national newspaper budgets in decline, the NYT News Service has become a universal source of news, not just for New Yorkers, but for all but the largest media dailies).
So crucial is Washington's press partisanship to the course of events that I began "interviewing" correspondents in Washington during the Lewinsky ordeal about their perception of events. One interview with a prominent, female Washington correspondent from a major Midwest paper (not The Detroit News?) was shocking, though not atypical, and I think illustrates how intellectually corrupt Washington's establishment press has become:
Q: Do you think Clinton should be impeached?
A: No. Republicans just want to impeach him because he had an affair.
Q: But if you read The Starr Report, you know that he's being prosecuted because he committed perjury in a sexual-harassment suit, not because he had an affair.
A: I haven't read The Starr Report, but I think that's nonsense. Starr just uses that as an excuse.
Q: Well, even if you don't accept the legal basis for impeachment, would you accept Clinton's behavior if it came, say, from your newspaper's publisher?
A: What do you mean?
Q: If, while in the midst of a sexual-harassment suit, your publisher used an intern for oral sex in his office, then gave her a job for it, then coached her on perjury in the suit, then lied to his board (as Clinton lied to his Cabinet). . . if he did all that, you wouldn't demand that he lose his job?
A: Well, that sort of thing goes on all the time.
Q: I doubt it, but let's say it does. If your own boss did it, and you found out about it, wouldn't you be outraged?
A: No.
Q: C'mon. You'd be OK with it?
A: Well . . . OK, maybe I wouldn't. But I think of Clinton differently. (chuckling) I can compartmentalize too. I would describe such bias, not as liberal, but as Democratic. There is no principle at stake here, only the partisan reflex to circle the wagons against the "enemy." That enemy is the Republican party.
This bias is now barely disguised in TV news reports or in journals such as Newsweek or Time. But for an unedited look at media bias, one need only read the columns of the Wall Street Journal?'s Al Hunt or the Washington Post's E. J. Dionne. These journalists were until recently their publication's top news reporters in Washington. Today they are columnists who wear their partisanship on their sleeve. They are simple shills for the Democratic party.
Now, the Clinton era's press legacy is carrying over into the Bush years. Witness the Ashcroft persecution.
The news media has largely served as a conduit for any Democratic slur against Ashcroft's character. On the charge of racism, for example, the partisan press has parroted the line that Ashcroft voted against a black Missouri judge, while rarely pointing out that Ashcroft was an advocate for the controversial Martin Luther King Day while Missouri governor.
To know this essential fact, a newspaper reader would have to flip to the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, where Jerry Hunter, a black lawyer from St. Louis, reports on this and other facts — all on the public record — that demolish any suggestion that Ashcroft is a racist. Indeed, the record shows that Ashcroft was an advocate for minorities in government.
But why isn't Hunter quoted in news stories? He is obviously willing to go on the record to defend Ashcroft. The reason is that reporters in Washington's newsrooms have few sources in the Republican party and so they never hear anything but the Democratic chant. Ideologically deaf to conservatives, they never hear the Republican buzz.
The legacy of a partisan press in Washington was a boon to Clinton, because it helped him demonize his enemies and save his political skin. But it will ultimately be ruinous for the nation's press. The simple fact is that readers are not getting the truth from Washington's media, and many know it. And as that number grows (FOX News viewership is climbing steadily), they will tune out the partisan press, and tune in alternate sources.
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