Media continue to fawn over Bush

ABC News Anchor Cokie Roberts told aspiring IU journalists the other day that George W. Bush's current "honeymoon" with the press is because he's busy pushing his campaign promises through Congress. Bill Clinton enjoyed no such indulgence during his first 100 days because he got embroiled in the controversial issue of gays in the military.\nIn actuality, the media's fawning over Bush started with the election coverage and continues through the first months of his presidency.\nRoberts' statement is what we pointy-headed intellectuals call a false antithesis -- that is, an attempt to draw a distinction that isn't there. And you don't even need access to alternative media to dismantle it; all you need is a working memory.\nOn the Clinton side, it's true he made some controversial moves, from his half-hearted attempt to lift the ban on gays in the military to his proposed national health care plan (or more accurately, his proposed federal subsidy for HMOs), but those were also campaign promises he was trying to fulfill.\nOn the Bush side, he has done things that could have been controversial, and in the real world have been so: reinstating the gag rule on abortion in federally funded clinics abroad, appointing a highly controversial attorney general, advocating "charitable choice" (now under attack even from Christian-Right pontiff Pat Robertson) and bombing Iraq, to name just a few, all within a month of taking the oath of office. Roberts' false antithesis, then, doesn't explain why Bush gets so much lovin' from the national media while Clinton did not.\n(Parenthetically, I hate being in a position of seeming to defend Clinton. He was vile in so many ways, but mostly in ways his enemies in the media preferred to see as "moving toward the center," such as welfare reform and bombing Baghdad. Mostly the media hated him, as far as I can tell, for being pudgy, for having an intelligent wife and for successfully defying their best efforts to help the Republicans destroy him.)\nAll this leaves aside the minor matter that Bush himself is a controversial president, whose legitimacy even to occupy the office is viewed with -- what was Roberts' term? -- "healthy disrespect" by a good number of Americans.\nLed by Bush's unbiased cousin John Ellis, the national (I won't say "corporate" because it upsets liberals) media declared Bush the Lord's New Anointed with unseemly haste, and repeatedly declared their impatience that the Florida vote be resolved -- or better, ignored -- so that the healing process could begin. An interesting concept: elections wound us, the media heal us. This, despite polls that showed pretty clearly that many Americans were willing to wait for an accurate count. \nBush's inauguration was greeted with the largest counter-inaugural demonstrations since Richard Nixon took office, but again, the wise heads in the newsrooms knew best and preferred to concentrate on the glitz, the glamour and the 10-gallon hats.\nAnd the soft ride Bush has been getting from the press didn't begin with his inauguration. Even before the honeymoon, there was a hot flirtation and much heavy petting between the press corps and the Republican candidate. The media watch group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) has documented, for example, that far more attention was paid to Gore's lies than to Bush's, and quoted Cokie Roberts to the effect that the press considered Bush too dumb to be a "serial exaggerator" (Washington Post, Oct. 15, 2000).\nBack at IU, Roberts evaded questions about bias by playfully admitting she believes that "Congress should exist" and that "the founders of our country had the right idea." Cute; so she wants to keep the Electoral College? I'm more interested in Robert's declaration Monday night that she thought Clinton would never leave Washington, just hover over the strange bedfellows Bush and the Democratic Party like the Ghost of Christmas Past.\nIt would be nice if the press corps' coziness with the Bush administration were to lay to rest the long-standing myth about "liberal media." Mark Hertsgaard's book On Bended Knee, which showed how thoroughly the media fawned over Reagan, should have done the job.\nWhat truth that myth contains has more to do with the media occupying the leftward pole of a political spectrum that keeps moving to the right (so that George Bush is more "liberal" than, say, Benito Mussolini) than with any actual liberal content or bias.\nThe more a journalist is a toady to power, the more he or she likes to think of him or herself as a bold, independent voice. For some time now I've preferred to speak of "the near right" (with the Clintons and Dole scurrying toward the right end of that zone) and "the far right" (Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh).\nYou don't like the left? Fine; just don't confuse us with Hillary Clinton -- a nice woman perhaps, but not a leftist, or even a liberal.