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This beauty contest is rigged
By stressing personality rather than issues, lazy media have given
Bush license to lie
By Eric Alterman MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR
Oct. 31 � During the 1992 election, supporters
of President George Bush regularly
complained that media coverage was openly
biased in favor of the challenger, then
Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton. They were
right. After 12 years of covering Reagan/Bush,
reporters were excited about the idea of a
baby-boomer president whose experiences at
Georgetown, Yale and Oxford matched many
of their own. By and large, Bush the elder
could not get a break in that election. Still, it is
arguable that this bias had any overall impact
on the election. What defeated the elder Bush,
quite clearly in retrospect, was the sense
among many voters that the economy had
stalled and that he, while devoted to foreign
policy and the creation of a �new world order,�
had little interest or inclination to address it.
The media could have gone all out for Bush,
but given the sorry state of the economy and
the general sense of pessimism it created, Bush
was bound to lose to any credible Democratic
candidate who focused voters� attention on his
inadequacies.
THIS BIAS HAD nothing to do with ideology. The
conservatives� belief in a �liberal media� has been
obsolete for
years. As Weekly Standard editor and conservative
commentator
William Kristol has acknowledged, �The liberal media
were never
that powerful, and the whole thing was often used as
an excuse by
conservatives for conservative failures.�
Reporters are biased for sure, but not in
favor of the poor, the
powerless, the black or the brown. They are biased in
favor of
newness over sameness, of personalities over
substance, of
laziness over scrupulousness, of clich� over complex
truth, and
above all, in favor of themselves.
A WELL-WORN SCRIPT
Media bias in this election has given George Bush a license
to lie.
This year, media bias is no less concrete than
eight years ago,
but far more important. That�s because the nation is
basically
satisfied with the current direction of the economy
and most public
policy, and hence, has no burning problem to guide
its choices.
Thus the media portrayal of the race becomes the race
itself.
Almost since the moment
this election season began, the
media portraits of George Bush
and Al Gore appear to have
been etched in stone, with nary
a fact nor a figure allowed to
intrude upon the well-worn
script. For Bush, the unstated
question from the beginning has been, �Is he too
stupid to be
president?� For Al Gore, it�s �Is he too dishonest
and/or too
annoying to be president?� Virtually nothing else,
including the fact
that the two men represent wholly different
constituencies, differing
philosophies of governance, and differing futures for
the country
has been considered relevant to the main story line.
MINIMAL EXPECTATIONS
America has already had one dimbulb as
president and he
was re-elected by landslide. The rose-colored
nostalgia for Ronald
Reagan, a president who reportedly could not
recognize his own
son at his high school graduation, has set a bar for
Bush so low
that would be difficult for him to miss if he were
genuinely
retarded. Bush could not help but perform up to this
minimum level
of competence. After all, all that was required of
him was to give a
decent speech at the Republican convention �
something any
minimally trained actor could do � and to �hold his
own� against
Gore in three debates. Bush, himself is aware of
this, as he
explained to David Letterman, �a lot of folks don�t
think I can
string a sentence together so when I was able to do
so, the
expectations were so low that all I had to do was
say, �Hi, I�m
George W. Bush.�� The net result is that the media
have given
George Bush a pass on pretty much everything that
matters in a
president. Like the increasingly incautious Ralph
Nader, (perhaps
because of him), reporters have simply assumed the
enormous
policy differences between Gore and Bush � on Social
Security,
prescription drugs, education, abortion rights,
affirmative action,
the environment � to be of trivial importance, and
hardly worth
the time and effort to explain or investigate. As
survey data
consistently tell us that these issues favor Gore and
the Democrats,
reporters� willingness to treat this election
exclusively as a
popularity contest between two individuals, rather
than a political
contest between two governing ideologies, is already
an implicit
endorsement of the Bush campaign strategy.
A RIGGED BEAUTY CONTEST
But even with beauty
contest coverage, the
media has favored George
Bush to amazing degree.
For while it was focusing
on �Bush the dummy� and �Gore the liar,� reporters
did
not notice that Bush had a far more serious
credibility
problem than the vice president. Bush has proven
himself untrustworthy on issues of considerable
public
import, rather than on those of trivial aspects of
his
biography. But, as Cokie Roberts points out � in
defense of herself and her colleagues I might add �
�The story line is Bush isn�t smart enough and Gore
isn�t straight enough. In Bush�s case, you know he�s
just
misstating � as opposed to it playing into a story
line
about him being a serial exaggerator.� In other
words,
media bias in this election has given George Bush a
license to lie.
LOOK AT THE COVERAGE
Reporters are
biased, for sure.
They favor of
newness over
sameness;
personalities
over substance;
laziness over
scrupulousness;
clich� over
complex truth,
and above all,
they favor
themselves.
Don�t take my word for it. Here are just a few
areas where
George Bush has proven himself to be exactly the
opposite of man
the media has portrayed himself.
George Bush consistently lies about the
policies he plans to
implement:
Bush declared, �I don�t want to use food as a
diplomatic
weapon from this point forward. We shouldn�t be using
food. It
hurts the farmers. It�s not the right thing to do.�
This despite the
fact that he does support using this exact diplomatic
weapon
against Cuba.
Bushed promised �to have prescription drugs as an
integral part
of Medicare,� when in fact, this is true of the Gore
Medicare plan,
but not of the Bush plan
Bush explained, �I hope our European friends become
the
peacekeepers in Bosnia and in the Balkans. I hope
that they put
the troops on the ground, so that we can withdraw our
troops and
focus our military on fighting and winning war,�
ignoring the fact
that 85 percent of peacekeeping troops in Kosovo are
already
European.
George Bush is also dishonest about his record
as Governor
of Texas.
Bush took credit during the debates for a Texas HMO
patients
bill of rights that he vetoed in 1995, and that
became law in 1997
without his signature after he again opposed it.
Bush took credit in the same debate for a hate
crimes bill that he
had opposed.
Bush overstated health care spending for the poor in
Texas, by
insisting it was $4.7 billion, failing to note that a
full $3.5 billion of
this amount derived not from his government but from
charity care
and local institutions.
George Bush is deceptive about his record as a
private
citizen.
Bush claims to have a stellar record of
honesty and integrity as
both an oil man and part-owner of the Texas Rangers.
But Talk
Magazine and the Center for Public Integrity told a
different story,
one that has been largely ignored by mainstream
media:
As a director of Harken Energy Corporation, Bush
failed to
comply with SEC regulations regarding the legal
deadlines for
revealing his purchasing and selling of the company�s
stock. As a
result, Bush profited by concealing the fact that he
was buying and
selling hundreds of thousands of shares of stock.
Bush also appears to have misled the SEC when he
insisted that
he had dumped his failing company�s stock in 1990
without any
knowledge that the stock was about to tank. In fact,
he had been
warned of the trouble at least twice and was on
Harken�s internal
audit committee.
While Bush claims publicly to �do everything I can
to defend the
power of private property and private property
rights,� he and his
partners in the Texas Rangers arranged for Texas
authorities to
expropriate private land to allow the investors their
new baseball
stadium. When some resisted, or balked at the low
prices being
offered, their land was condemned and expropriated it
by force of
law. This involved 270 acres of land, even though
only about 17
acres were needed for the ballpark. The rest was used
by Bush
and his cronies for commercial development, and has
provided the
basis of his personal fortune.
Bush cannot be trusted to tell the truth about
service in the
Texas Air National Guard, either.
As the Boston Globe has reported, in his
autobiography, �A
Charge to Keep,� Bush claimed he flew with his unit
for �several
years� after finishing flight training in June 1970.
His campaign
biography states that he flew with the unit until he
won release from
the service in September 1973, nine months early, for
graduate
school. But both claims are false. Bush flew with the
111th for 22
months, until April 1972, and never flew again. Bush
and his
campaign have said that he performed �alternative�
duty at the
187th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron in Montgomery
from
May to November 1972, while he was working on a
Senate race
in Alabama. But, the Globe notes, Bush�s own records
contradict
that assertion. In May 1972, Bush sought a permanent
transfer to
a postal unit in Alabama that didn�t require weekend
drills or
active duty. Guard headquarters overruled that
decision. Bush did
not do any drills from May through September 1972. In
September 1972, Bush won approval to do temporary
�alternative� training at the 187th Squadron in
Montgomery.
He was cleared to attend
weekend drills in October and
November. But two of the
187th�s officers said Bush
never appeared. One of them,
retired Brig. Gen. William
Turnipseed, says he is
�dead-certain he didn�t show
up.� Bush, who refuses all
interviews on the subject, says
he was there, but can�t
remember anything he did. His
campaign can find no records
to corroborate this.
OBLIVIOUS TO THE FACTS
Now I am no Bob Woodward. It did not take any
superior
investigative efforts on my part to learn any of the
above. Every
one of the quotes used above is drawn from a
respectable
journalistic (i.e. non-Drudgelike) source, available
somewhere on
the Internet. Yet not one of them has been able to
engage the
sustained attention of a critical mass of reporters,
much less
capture their imagination to the degree of say,
whether or not Al
Gore toured a Texas disaster area with the director
of the Federal
Emergency Management Agency � as he claimed � or one
of
his deputies, as he apparently did.
Pundits are fond of claiming that they never
tell voters what to
think, only what issues to think about. In the case
of the 2000
election, there can be no greater indictment of our
political tutors
� and no greater bias toward the candidacy of George
W. Bush.
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