http://www.drudgereport.com/Weiss/weiss.htm
A VIEW FROM HERE
by deb weiss
1994 Redux: U.S. Press Prepares For Electoral Worst
June 12, 2000
During the spring of 1994, 'deep' polling revealed that Republicans were poised to win both houses of Congress. Alarmed, the establishment press pulled out all the stops in hopes of averting this looming catastrophe.
You couldn't possibly have known, from the buzz that filled the ensuing months, that Republicans were headed for a win.
Instead, the public was fed a steady diet of canned polls suggesting a Democratic advantage, paired neatly with hit-pieces targeting Republican 'extremists' -- those notorious clinic-bombers and flag-wavers of the ultra-right.
To the unsophisticated news consumer, unaware of the depth of public disgust with Democratic rule, it seemed uncertain that the GOP could hold on to its existing seats, much less take the majority. The national press was so determined to forestall a GOP victory that voters were utterly unprepared when it arrived
Depending on your perspective, then, the 1994 Republican landslide came out of the blue nowhere either as a hideous shock -- a kind of hurricane-force political calamity -- or as a modern-day miracle, glorious, if thoroughly unexpected.
Dan Rather and friends never did bother to tell us it had been in the cards for months. They were much too appalled that it had happened at all
Even after the fact, establishment journalists refused to concede.
Why? Quite simply, because this election, more than any other in recent times -- more, even, than the Republican presidential victories of the 1980s -- challenged their assumption of unalterable moral and political superiority. It was a staggering rejection of their 1960s Boomer Revolution, and it hit them where they lived.
Determined to strike back, they now devoted their energies to undoing the result they had been unable to prevent, embarking on a marathon of venomous coverage that treated the GOP landslide as a sort of cataclysm, like a World War, or a plague.
Mr. Sidney Blumenthal's very good friends at The New York Times and The Washington Post engaged in the kind of revisionism we once associated with Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung (but which is now, alas, practiced routinely in American newsrooms).
Within days of the election, the myth of the 'angry white male' had been hatched. Long before the new GOP majority had even been sworn in, its image was hardening into a Dickensian caricature, dark and dangerous.
True, none of this was entirely new. The national press spent the 1980s in a state of near-hysteria -- remember nuclear winter? -- horrified that Mr. Reagan had won handsomely, not once, but twice, and that George Bush had defeated Michael Dukakis (through, they insisted angrily, a sinister strategy of race-baiting: they never did seem to grasp the simple fact that 'victim' Willie Horton really WAS a murderous thug).
Throughout the '80s, sympathetic journalists colluded with Congressional Democrats to inflame public outrage at various White House scandals, real and imagined. Mind you, tough coverage is not a bad thing in itself. On the contrary, America is best served by a skeptical, adversarial press. We can only speculate how different things might be today if Mr. Clinton's administration had received one-tenth the unfriendly scrutiny that was Mr. Reagan's daily bread.
At a minimum, it's unlikely that Haiti would now be the drug capital of the Caribbean, or that mainland China would have made its scarily destabilizing quantum leap in nuclear technology, or that Mr. Putin would recently have received an American president with undisguised contempt.
And 'Slumlord Al' would probably have been made to feel at least a little pain.
However, with the 1994 election, the establishment press crossed a line from tough, if partisan, journalism, to a kind of irrational loathing more pathological than ideological (by contrast, consider the British press: though largely left-of-center, it continues to practice something resembling real journalism, as Britain's once-popular Prime Minister Tony Blair is learning, to his grief).
Before 1994, there were still players in our mainstream press capable of gritty reportage -- does "the incredible shrinking presidency" ring a bell? -- even when it worked against their partisan sensibilities.
After 1994, most of them fell silent. What remained was an obsessive hostility to the right.
Subsequently, the most egregious Democratic scandals, the most ruthless Clintonian tactics, have been whitewashed or ignored altogether, in order to prevent the GOP from gaining any advantage: for when journalists say of Mr. Clinton that he is "lucky in his enemies," what they really mean is, "we hate them, too."
Republicans who don't understand this -- who fail to grasp the transformation in American journalism that was sealed by the election of 1994 -- will go into this fall's contest completely unprepared.
The fact is, they're not dealing with mere 'press bias,' but with a petulant Boomer elite whose very sense of identity depends on a GOP defeat at the polls, and who are preparing to stage a national tantrum the likes of which we haven't seen since 1968.
A VIEW FROM HERE
by deb weiss
1994 Redux: U.S. Press Prepares For Electoral Worst
June 12, 2000
During the spring of 1994, 'deep' polling revealed that Republicans were poised to win both houses of Congress. Alarmed, the establishment press pulled out all the stops in hopes of averting this looming catastrophe.
You couldn't possibly have known, from the buzz that filled the ensuing months, that Republicans were headed for a win.
Instead, the public was fed a steady diet of canned polls suggesting a Democratic advantage, paired neatly with hit-pieces targeting Republican 'extremists' -- those notorious clinic-bombers and flag-wavers of the ultra-right.
To the unsophisticated news consumer, unaware of the depth of public disgust with Democratic rule, it seemed uncertain that the GOP could hold on to its existing seats, much less take the majority. The national press was so determined to forestall a GOP victory that voters were utterly unprepared when it arrived
Depending on your perspective, then, the 1994 Republican landslide came out of the blue nowhere either as a hideous shock -- a kind of hurricane-force political calamity -- or as a modern-day miracle, glorious, if thoroughly unexpected.
Dan Rather and friends never did bother to tell us it had been in the cards for months. They were much too appalled that it had happened at all
Even after the fact, establishment journalists refused to concede.
Why? Quite simply, because this election, more than any other in recent times -- more, even, than the Republican presidential victories of the 1980s -- challenged their assumption of unalterable moral and political superiority. It was a staggering rejection of their 1960s Boomer Revolution, and it hit them where they lived.
Determined to strike back, they now devoted their energies to undoing the result they had been unable to prevent, embarking on a marathon of venomous coverage that treated the GOP landslide as a sort of cataclysm, like a World War, or a plague.
Mr. Sidney Blumenthal's very good friends at The New York Times and The Washington Post engaged in the kind of revisionism we once associated with Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung (but which is now, alas, practiced routinely in American newsrooms).
Within days of the election, the myth of the 'angry white male' had been hatched. Long before the new GOP majority had even been sworn in, its image was hardening into a Dickensian caricature, dark and dangerous.
True, none of this was entirely new. The national press spent the 1980s in a state of near-hysteria -- remember nuclear winter? -- horrified that Mr. Reagan had won handsomely, not once, but twice, and that George Bush had defeated Michael Dukakis (through, they insisted angrily, a sinister strategy of race-baiting: they never did seem to grasp the simple fact that 'victim' Willie Horton really WAS a murderous thug).
Throughout the '80s, sympathetic journalists colluded with Congressional Democrats to inflame public outrage at various White House scandals, real and imagined. Mind you, tough coverage is not a bad thing in itself. On the contrary, America is best served by a skeptical, adversarial press. We can only speculate how different things might be today if Mr. Clinton's administration had received one-tenth the unfriendly scrutiny that was Mr. Reagan's daily bread.
At a minimum, it's unlikely that Haiti would now be the drug capital of the Caribbean, or that mainland China would have made its scarily destabilizing quantum leap in nuclear technology, or that Mr. Putin would recently have received an American president with undisguised contempt.
And 'Slumlord Al' would probably have been made to feel at least a little pain.
However, with the 1994 election, the establishment press crossed a line from tough, if partisan, journalism, to a kind of irrational loathing more pathological than ideological (by contrast, consider the British press: though largely left-of-center, it continues to practice something resembling real journalism, as Britain's once-popular Prime Minister Tony Blair is learning, to his grief).
Before 1994, there were still players in our mainstream press capable of gritty reportage -- does "the incredible shrinking presidency" ring a bell? -- even when it worked against their partisan sensibilities.
After 1994, most of them fell silent. What remained was an obsessive hostility to the right.
Subsequently, the most egregious Democratic scandals, the most ruthless Clintonian tactics, have been whitewashed or ignored altogether, in order to prevent the GOP from gaining any advantage: for when journalists say of Mr. Clinton that he is "lucky in his enemies," what they really mean is, "we hate them, too."
Republicans who don't understand this -- who fail to grasp the transformation in American journalism that was sealed by the election of 1994 -- will go into this fall's contest completely unprepared.
The fact is, they're not dealing with mere 'press bias,' but with a petulant Boomer elite whose very sense of identity depends on a GOP defeat at the polls, and who are preparing to stage a national tantrum the likes of which we haven't seen since 1968.