It’s been 30 years.
The 1992 presidential campaign was a decade before the media’s scandalous affair with Barack Obama or their open war against Donald Trump. Liberal journalists were frustrated at not being able to stop election victories by George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. So, ’92 frustrated reporters decided to promote Bill Clinton’s candidacy.
It’s amazing to see how shameless and blatantly shameless this spin was 30 years later. Sidney Blumenthal, a former Washington Post reporter, turned Clinton’s accusation of adultery into a moment about “family values”. Blumenthal wrote in The New Republic that George Bush, all whiteness, spoke about “family values”, while Clinton confessed to adultery.
After Clinton thanked the ROTC in a 1969 letter for saving him from the draft, Time editor-at-large Strobetalbott addressed damage control to the roundtable program Inside Washington. “It would be outrageous if he was done in by draft thing because that’s a bum rhyme.” Bill Clinton’s name is not included in any sentence that includes the word “draft dodging”.
For those who don’t know, Blumenthal and Talbott held powerful positions in the Clinton administration’s 1993 election.
Hendrik Hertzberg, senior editor at The New Republic, surveyed political reporters during the primaries. He asked them: “I asked each one of them this question: If I were a New Hampshire Democrat who would you vote for?” Many of them told me that Clinton …. is the most talented presidential candidate they’ve ever seen, JFK included.
If the press was already promoting Clinton vs. other Democrats in the primaries, there was no way for them to back down when it became Clinton (and Ross Perot in the general election). The “news coverage” of the Clinton/Gore ticket in summer 2001 became a lesson in hagiography.
“Bill Clinton and Al Gore appear together with their wives, Hillary Clinton, and Tipper Gore. They look like old college friends out on the town. They are either playing miniature golf with their wives or tossing a ball around at campaign rallies. The message and images are the same: Youth. Vigor. Energy. For a July 23 report, Edward Walsh from the Washington Post wrote “And change.”
Eleanor Clift, Newsweek’s editor, was a strong supporter of the Democratic ticket when it was first announced. “I must admit that I was shocked by their chests. She exclaimed, “They may have to put their stats out,” on CNN’s Inside Politics July 10.
Clift was still excited two days later on The McLaughlin Group: “Looking at some footage, it looks almost like the all-beefcake tickets.”
“Delighted Democrats love to say that Clinton and Gore have a partnership where 1 plus 5 equals 5, and when Hillary Clinton, Tipper Gore and the equation are added to it, 2 plus 2 equals 10 The power of their numbers does seem exponential at times, such as this afternoon when the eight-bus caravan stopped at a rest area near Bowling Green, Mo.,” Dave Maraniss, Washington Post’s Campaign Journalist, wrote in an August 6 article.
The press denounced any attacks on their heroes. “While Bill Clinton drives through the heartland, delivering a happy middle-of-the road message, Bush is conspicuously stroking his party’s conservative wings, echoing the cutting rhetoric from yore: antitax, anticrime, and anti-abortion. He’s using tried-and-true slime-and distance tactics,” Ann McDaniel and Howard Fineman of Newsweek wrote in an August 17 article.
The media felt the pain when the Clintons were criticized. Jane Pauley, NBC’s Jane Pauley, asked Hillary Clinton in a September 8 Dateline. “What was your worst record distortion?”
The September headline in New York Times captures the media’s overall spin: “Bush is Harsh, His Supporters Harsher.” On October 10, Bryant Gumbel stated that Bush would resort at all costs to low blows during a debate with Bill Clinton. John Chancellor asked Harry Smith: “How horrible do you expect George Bush?” Three days later, Harry Smith on CBS made his disapproval clear when he called Bush’s college-era trip from Moscow “red-baiting junk.”
“Through it all [Clinton] persevered. His resilience and toughness became antidotes for the attacks on his character,” Time’s Michael Kramer wrote in an October 19 piece. “His long career in politics gave him strategic savvy and tactical savvy. Clinton, like other Southern populists, seemed to instinctively know how to place the goats where they are.
“The swooning, the cooing on rope lines during the final days of the Clinton campaign were unavoidably reminiscent Kennedy. The scene in Louisville, Kentucky seemed straight out of Beatlemania,” Time editor Walter Shapiro wrote four months later, after Clinton had won. “Cheryl Russell (editor of The Boomer Report), a monthly newsletter on consumer trends captures a new dimension within the national psyche when, confiding, ‘Every woman that I know is having fantasies about Bill Clinton. We finally have a President of our own age with whom we can have sex. I don’t remember anyone dreaming of Michael Dukakis.
Although Clinton won only 43% of the popular vote, Bush won 38%. A poll of Washington media bureau chiefs/correspondents found that only 7 percent voted for Bush in 1992. Clinton received 89 percent and Ross Perot got 2 percent.
A few media professionals criticized the obvious bias of the 1992 campaign. Reliable Sources reported that CNN anchor Reid Collins complained about the “unfair” coverage.
Jacob Weisberg, a former Newsweek reporter, wrote in The New Republic after the election that “coverage of campaign vindicated exactly the conservatives’ assertions for years about liberal biases in the media.”
Thirty-years ago, most of the alternatives to the liberal media — conservative radio, Fox News, and the Internet — were still in their infancy. Therefore, the unrestrained coverage of the campaign in that year probably had more impact than it would have today.
The ’92 campaign was a significant departure from a news media that viewed its job as reporting facts and letting people decide. Instead, it marked a shift towards a media that wants to use its power to steer events in a liberal direction.
You can find more examples from our flashback series, the NewsBusters Time Machine, here.
