Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.twt.news From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: The year the media inhaled the ozone Date: Mon, 2 Nov 92 15:45:13 EST Message-ID: \SE A;NATION;PRUDEN ON POLITICS \HD The year the media inhaled the ozone \BY Wesley Pruden \CR THE WASHINGTON TIMES We'll get a winner tomorrow, even if we don't get a majority president, and the losers will be the people in my trade. Rarely has the credibility of the messenger taken such a beating. Nobody much trusted the media before this presidential campaign, and a lot of us have done all we could to give no one any reason to change his mind. Yesterday, with a growing possibility that the great yuppie baby-boomer victory might be slipping away from Bill Clinton, many of the yuppie boomers in the media dropped all pretense of being evenhanded messengers bearing information to join George Stephanopoulos, Jim Carville, Dee Dee Myers and the other up-front advocates on the Clinton staff. The Associated Press, whose dispatches once set the standard for brisk objectivity and grave impartiality but whose daily exertions in behalf of Slick Willie during this campaign have been a sorrow and a scandal, yesterday actually accused President Bush of unstable behavior on the stump. Frank Sesno of CNN argued so vigorously with Mr. Bush yesterday that at one point, after the president innocently remarked that Mr. Sesno in a question had accurately presented Mr. Clinton's case, the correspondent was moved to try, improbably, to correct the impression he had made: "I'm not trying to present the Clinton case." But when the president of the United States tried to talk about the new disclosure, based on affidavits of senior military officers who were there, that Mr. Clinton's staff used political pressure to retrieve his ROTC files at the University of Arkansas so he could destroy them, Mr. Sesno would not allow the discussion. He continued to press the president with old questions about Iran-Contra - questions that one national poll (commissioned by the Los Angeles Times) finds only 3 percent of the voters saying are likely to bear on their choice tomorrow. The networks and the wire services, which feel compelled to remark on every burp and sneeze of the president as reported by The Washington Post and the New York Times, studiously ignore disclosures of Clinton prevarications and lapses reported elsewhere, in the way of ignoring an elephant in the living room. For example, when Mr. Bush asked the governor to "come clean" on his trip to Moscow in 1969-70, on the draft issue and organizing anti-war marches, Mr. Clinton declined. He said he went to Moscow on his own, paying his own way as part of a European vacation; he participated in anti-war marches but never organized them. Maybe all that's true. He insisted that he had already answered the questions, which everyone knows isn't true. So how did this 22-year-old tale of a midwinter idyll in Moscow become news? A series of speeches to an empty House of Representatives, broadcast on C-SPAN, hinting darkly of unwitting reliance on KGB assistance, was seen by millions of news junkies, who began demanding more information from their newspapers. They didn't get it. The Associated Press wasn't interested. The Washington Times, which doesn't know any better than to investigate whatever it is that interests millions of Americans, ran a Page One story about the phenomenon. That moved the item to the category of "also in the news," part of the campaign coverage in the dominant media. The Bush-Quayle campaign faxed clippings to newsrooms throughout the country, making it something to print as a separate story on the inside pages. Then Larry King asked Mr. Bush about it and it exploded on Page One everywhere. The story of the toxic waste dump on the farm of Albert Gore the elder, first reported by The Washington Times, was also ignored by the dominant media. The Ozone Man said there was no dump; a Nashville television station hired a helicopter to fly over the farm, found the dump and put the film on the air; and Tennessee, where Governor Taxes and the Ozone Man had a 10-point lead a week ago, is considered dead even. (The Associated Press still hasn't discovered the story.) When this race is over, and the press hangover subsides, thoughtful editors will want to look to see what happened the year their reporters inhaled. 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