Looking at other heads of the Hydra

There will be a Part 3 to follow up and, please God, finish off the points I started to make in Why oh why can't we have a better press corps? and It's always been about Whitewater, but this isn't it.    This is more of an aside or a "For Further Reading" that refused to wait to go in its proper place at the end.

Ezra Klein disagrees with me that the Media hated Bill Clinton.  He also disagrees with Digby's argument that the Media had it in for Gary Hart in 1988.  And he thinks Paul is wrong about the Press being afraid of George Bush.  Ezra sees the Media Hydra as a stupid and purely reactive beast incabaple of the sustained and concerted efforts of a truly antagonistic animal and that both Hart's and Clinton's troubles with the Media were pretty much all their own doing.  Ezra makes his case here and follows it up here. 

In his follow up, Ezra adds Shakespeare's Sister to the list of people he's disagreeing with on the subject of the Media's treatment of George Bush.  This is the post of hers Ezra's taking issue with, Our Pathetic Press.  Shakespeare's Sister is now a weekend contributor to Ezra's page, so she posts her rebuttal right there.

By the way, Ezra is no uncritical admirer of the Press.  He's just more interested in Media's utter incompetence in reporting on policy issues than he is in whether or not they like George and didn't like Bill.  Their problem, as he sees it, isn't bias.  It's ignorance.

Meanwhile...in his first post blaming Hart and Clinton for their own bad press, Ezra seems to come close to accepting an idea that drives Bob Somerby mad:  That the Media is a ghost hovering over the doings of the rest of us mortals with no say in or influence on what is happening on earth.  At the Daily Howler, Bob reviews John Harris's new book on Bill Clinton, The Survivor (same book Digby was writing about in his post on Hart), and says that while Harris is pretty good at explaining how the "scandals" of Clinton's first term, Whitewater, Filegate, Travelgate and the like weren't scandals at all, when it comes to explaining how these non-scandals came to dominate the front pages and opening five minutes of the network news shows, Harris writes as if the Media wasn't there.

Harris, says Bob, has a knack for making the Media disappear from a story that is largely about the Media.

Should note that of course Bob but also John Harris take it for granted that the Washington Media Elite despised Bill Clinton.

So does Avedon Carol.  What puzzles her though is just when the contempt took root.  She remembers the Press' coverage of Clinton during the 92 election as being fairly glowing. (Here she is taking issue with Digby.)  But by the time he took office the affection had died and the animosity was in full force.  So something happened between November of 92 and January of 93 and Avedon would like to know what and just exactly when it happened.

(Corrective update:  Avedon has pointed out that she wrote that the Press changed their minds about Clinton and started hating him before the election.  See her comment, where she identifies a big story that the Media failed to cover in 92.)

That's enough to keep you busy.  But one last thing:  For the record, Ezra thinks that I think that Bush is popular with the Press.  Obviously, certain members of the Media Elite are smitten with the man.  But he has plenty of critics too and part of my point has been and will be that Bush has had to endure long periods of intense and critical Media scrutiny---Bush's nosedive in the polls didn't happen because the people have been tuning in en masse to the Daily Show and reading the Liberal blogs.  They've been reading the newspapers and watching the news.

Bush's personal popularity with the Media is besides the point to me.  What has been popular with the Media and what they've been promoting and defending all along has been their own vanity.  Over the last dozen years they've been telling three big stories and they've gotten all three of them wrong.

The first was---and is, because they still continue to tell it among themselves---that Bill Clinton threw away his chance to be a great president because fundamentally he was a bad character, a lying, no account, philandering snake who'd have been better off if he'd stayed back home in the swampy politics of Arkansas.

The second was the George W. Bush was a a good and pious man of the people, the kind of regular guy you'd enjoy having a beer with, who came to office a bit unprepared but who grew into a giant as soon as Crisis loomed.

If the book that took hold of the Media's imagination about Clinton was Primary Colors, then it was Bob Woodward's Bush at War that gave them their "insight" into the character of George Bush.

The third story was that the War on Terror was a good and noble and soon to be victorious enterprise.

They have been reluctant to recognize or acknowledge any evidence that those stories are wrong and they have been loathe to give them up.

And that was my teaser for Part 3.

Comments

[Ezra Klein]

You know, I think I need to disagree with some more people. I'm just too damn conciliatory lately...

[sfmike]

Ezra Klein is wrong. "Ignorant" writers are not the principal problem, though I'm sure the ones in Washington, D.C. get very insular and provincial, with a severe case of tunnel vision. The real problem lies in who owns the press at present. Since starting my blog in San Francisco, I've gotten to know a few paid journalists both in person and through emails, and it's been revelatory.

Here's one example. I wrote about a demonstration in front of a poor person's residence hotel called the "Civic Center Hotel" which was owned by the local Plumbers' and Steampipe Fitters' Union next door to the hotel. The union wants to tear down the wonderful old structure with its 75 rooms and replace it with fancy condos.

Anyway, I Googled for info about the union and found some rather hair-raising articles about it being sued by the Department of Justice for a $26 million pension fund scam going to their casino/entertainment center at the nearby Konocti Harbor Spa, along with an article about how they were being sued by the city for not bothering to put in fire sprinklers into their Civic Center Hotel.

The latter article was written by J.K. Dineen, and I wrote to ask him for permission to lift from his year-old article in the San Francisco Examiner, which is presently owned by the Christian right-winger Phillip Anschutz of Colorado. Dineen was pleased with the request, liked the blog, but had this stunning confession to make:

"I wanted to go to the protest yesterday, but I felt my odds of getting the union's side were unlikely, and that would have been a requirement to selling the story to my editors. I can't afford to run out on a story and come back empty-handed these days."

The writers don't get to decide what goes where, or what stupid and misleading headline is printed over their copy. It's time to take a slightly closer look at how things actually work.

[Shakespeare's Sister]

Is this a new invention--trailers for posts? :-)

I've got another little thought here, about the media's opinion of its own role in the political process.

[coturnix]

I love this. I'll wait on the third part and then I can post a huge LINKFEST to all of this!

Michael Kelly in "The Great Limbaugh Con" looks at the roots of Clinton-hatred in 1992-1993. An interesting thesis and, as far as I know, the first one to look at 'framing' by the Right.

[Shakespeare's Sister]

Interesting piece in the Aug. 15 edition of The Nation by Eric Alterman, too, to which I was directed by Toast.

[Avedon]

No, they didn't start hating Clinton after he was elected, they started somewhere between the primaries and the election. Without that, they never would have gone anywhere with Whitewater, because it was obvious early on that the Clintons were just victims of an associate who had gone round the bend and embezzled from them.

Something had to happen that suddenly old-line whacko segregationists in Arkansas were being given more credibility than not just the Clintons but also all the investigators who had gone over the Whitewater case already and found there was nothing there. Even the other journalists - many of them experts in this kind of case - were ignored. The Clintons had already been exonerated when Spikey was convicting them in The New York Times.

Meanwhile, the really hot story about how President Bush and his minions had been trying to gin up all these false stories went uncovered. Considering that the press didn't love Bush either, that's very strange indeed. So much for the idea that the media is just looking for things that sell papers - that's a story that could have sold plenty of papers.