Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.twt.life From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: Press takes left hook at an era Date: Mon, 16 Nov 92 17:03:26 EST Message-ID: \SE D;LIFE;MEDIA \HD Press takes left hook at an era \SH Reagan-Bush years pummeled; will media go easy on Clinton? \BY Elisabeth Hickey \CR THE WASHINGTON TIMES The '80s are not just "the '80s" anymore. A permanent qualifier has been attached to the term: Now they're "the greedy '80s." It all started a few years back, when journalists and pundits took to analyzing furiously the decade and the legacy of Ronald Reagan. "The Decade of Greed." Catchy. It stuck. Now, with the defeat of George Bush - which many in the media insist on viewing as a referendum on the Reagan years, causing conservatives to tear at their hair - a once-tentative and fanciful term appears set in pop-culture concrete. And so the dominant media scribble their daily first drafts of history. The 1980s, the Reagan-Bush years, they opine, were a failure. Greed, sleaze, decline. Ugh. "The shorthand for the '80s is homelessness, greed, a bubble made of paper," says Tim Graham, an analyst for the conservative Media Research Center. "It is an outrageous lie and slander on a decade of enormous prosperity." During the Republican National Convention in August, New York Times reporters Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich summed up their impressions of the '80s in the following paragraph: "Adolfo. Ivan Boesky. Greed. Junk bonds. Ketchup as a vegetable. Designer freebies. The Evil Empire. Power lunches. Brown suits. Yellow ties. 'Cats.' Cat naps." Two years ago Newsweek's "Conventional Wisdom Watch" gave the '80s a thumbs down, dismissing the decade with: "Greedy yuppies screwed homeless. Big party on deck of Titanic." Today, disdain for the '80s is so pervasive among most journalists that it has become a cliche. "The typical juvenile at Oak Hill had not just come of age during the 'me first,' greed-infested years of Ronald Reagan and George Bush," writes Courtland Milloy in a Nov. 8 column in The Washington Post. Conservatives throw up their hands in despair. "It's a continuing Chinese water-torture drill on the Reagan record," says L. Brent Bozell, a conservative media watcher. "There is an effort on the part of the Democrats and their partisans in the media to convince the public that the prosperity enjoyed in the Reagan years was all artificial and based on bankrupting the country. "Wouldn't it be nice," he muses, "for someone to call the '80s 'the Decade of Growth' when 19 million jobs were created, or 'the End of Communism?' " Some conservative voices are getting through the media groupthink. "We do not buy the Democratic line about years of greed and jingoism; by and large, the '80s were years of prosperity and global success. But not lately," writes William Safire in a recent column for the New York Times. Bill Clinton's victory "does not signal some great ideological shift," scolds Charles Krauthammer in a post-election column. "Indeed, Bill Clinton ratified the country's shift to the right by demonstrating that only a centrist Democrat, running as a tribune of the middle class, can win national office." Mr. Bozell says the relentless drip, drip of media criticism can have a brainwashing effect on the public: They suddenly remember it as they are being told to remember it. He likens the phenomenon to the Clarence Thomas hearings. Polls done a year ago showed a public skeptical of Anita Hill's story. But after a year of "a nonstop barrage from the media to raise Anita Hill to sainthood," Miss Hill's credibility has increased enormously. To some on the left, the decade finally is getting the treatment it deserves. In the '80s, "The media got so cozy with power that they violated any standard of journalistic integrity," says Steven Rendall, a senior analyst with the left-leaning Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). "The Reagan/Bush years were the most scandal-ridden in the history of this country, and the press did not reflect that." But Robert Lichter, analyst for the Center for Media and Public Affairs, disagrees. "There is the odd school of thought from the left that says Reagan was treated extremely well by the media," Mr. Lichter says. "But every scientific study of Reagan's press coverage shows it was mainly hostile." Except for a brief honeymoon in 1981, the press was "relentlessly negative," he says. However, Mr. Lichter believes the jury is still out on whether the media beats up only on conservatives, or whether it's hard on incumbents in general. "A lot of journalists think their job is to give out the bad news," Mr. Lichter says. "The negative reporting on the '80s could be an expression of liberalism, or an expression of nonideological negativism. Or it could be the truth." The Clinton presidency will be a test case, the media analyst says. "I can't wait to see whether the conservatives are right, that journalists only bash conservatives, or whether reporters are right, and they are equal-opportunity bashers," Mr. Lichter says. "Here is a man [Mr. Clinton] that polls show reporters like, and whose political convictions are much closer to their own than other recent presidents. So, will they go after him, or treat him like JFK?" And so the media move into the '90s, searching hungrily for a buzzword to define a decade. So far, not so good, says commentator Michael Kinsley. In a Nov. 5 piece in The Washington Post, he blames Mr. Bush: "Like the late '70s, the early '90s will be frozen in people's memories - inaccurately - as a terrible time, far worse that it really was." But already there are rumblings that the Clinton presidency symbolizes a kinder, more giving, more healing, time. In the '80s we were a clinically depressed society, according to film critic Hal Hinson's diagnosis in The Post on Nov. 1. And, "In masking our symptons, Reagan only allowed the disease to progress and spread." Culturally we have been in a coma, Doc Hinson says. But we're coming out of it. Mr. Lichter holds out hope that the media will look at the Clinton administration with the same jaundiced '80s eye. "Ideally, the social reformist tendencies of reporters are held in check by the conventions of fairness and objectivity," he says. Ideally indeed. Working against objective, or even fair, reporting is the growing popularity of interpretive journalism, he says. Today, journalists are more likely to speak in their own voices in their stories. "Reporters are more openly subjective than they used to be, and they're losing public credibility because of it," Mr. Lichter warns. Indeed, Joann Byrd, ombudsman for The Washington Post, writes in her Nov. 8 column that journalists "wised up" over the years "and dismissed objectivity as a pretentious fantasy that made stenographers out of reporters and produced irresponsible journalism." "We don't want objectivity resurrected," she concludes. "But what we do want, I think we've learned, is a mechanism similarly incompatible with biases. Fairness - which was supposed to substitute for objectivity - is, it turns out, a very subjective successor." Mr. Lichter still finds reason to hope. "The notion of the journalist as permanent opposition," he reasons, "is so entrenched in the culture of journalism that professional pride may lead toward negative press toward Clinton." Fat chance, says working journalist Jacob Weisberg. In the Nov. 23 issue of the New Republic, he writes: "If reporters made less of Clinton's contradictions than Bush's and Perot's, it's not because they are fewer. Indeed, coverage of the campaign vindicated exactly what conservatives have been saying for years about liberal bias in the media. "In their defense, journalists say that though they may have their personal opinions, as professionals they are able to correct for them when they write. Sounds nice," Mr. Weisberg concludes, "but I'm not buying any." This article is copyright 1992 The Washington Times. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM