The Press's Double Standard About the Clintons

[Doug]

DOUG
The press chomps at the bit waiting for an opportunity to bash Bill or Hillary Clinton--whether it is deserved or not.

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Two recently published Beltway essays perfectly captured the media's schizophrenic and patently dishonest approach to covering Bush and Clinton.

The first was by Slate editor Jacob Weisberg, who wrote a January 28 op-ed for The New York Times. Weisberg looked back at Bush's first State of the Union address and its "compassionate conservative" theme and noted how Bush "intended to marry the liberal desire for more federal money to the conservative demand for higher standards."

Weisberg assured readers that "Mr. Bush seemed genuinely to want to be the kind of president indicated by that first address."

Of course, none of that came to be. The "compassionate conservative" routine turned out to be mostly empty rhetoric. Why? According to Weisberg's friendly interpretation, it was because Bush "was too distracted by war and foreign policy, and too bored by the processes of government to know if the people working for him were following through on his proposals."

See, Bush is not duplicitous or immoral. And nothing he has done in office would cause a CW scout like Weisberg to get angry or level charges about Bush's character. The president simply became misguided and lost interest. What's the big fuss, people? That's what presidents sometimes do -- they fail miserably and cause all sorts of pain and discomfort for millions of citizens. That's no reason to get excited.

But go out on the campaign trail these days as a Democratic ex-president and be charged with taking an opponent's comments out of context? Now that's reason for reporters to raise holy hell. That's why the pundits could barely keep their laptops steady -- their rage at Clinton was building so rapidly inside them. Clinton was guilty of "lying and cheating," of being "glaringly dishonest," and promoting an "idiotic, lowest-common-denominator political discourse." And that was just from one recent washingtonpost.com column.

According to Newsweek, Clinton's campaign attacks "insult[ed] voters' intelligence." Struck by that harsh rhetoric, I did a search of Nexis to see if during Bush's entire tenure Newsweek had ever claimed that any of the misinformation that routinely flowed from the Bush White House (WMD's, for instance) had "insulted the intelligence" of Americans. I could not find a single Newsweek example.

See here for the full story.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

The author was giving too much cred to the MSM - they aren't trying to ignore a monumental failure on their own part, they are just doing what they've been doing since poor, naive Jimmy Carter signed away the Fairness Doctrine (the initial result of which was the dirty 1980 campaign that cost him his second term, and yes, I know Clinton signed another media consolidation as part of another massive information upgrade in 1996 that hasn't helped any). It all comes back to who owns the media. Unless and until the media monopoly is broken up, industry lapdogs will get passes on whatever they do and potential threats will be cut off at the knees. Why do you think they've been after Hillary for the last 35 years. She is most assuredly not a "Free Trader" - even though I've read progressive bloggers state they'd never vote for Hillary because she signed NAFTA - and, while she is not anti-business, regulation is part of her economic plan.