Bob Dole has angrily denounced the New York Times for pro-Clinton bias. By all accounts, Dole’s audiences have loved this media-bashing. But the working press has laughingly dismissed Dole’s pique as groundless. They have too covered Clinton’s “scandals” and “failures,” reporters say; Dole’s list of “overlooked” or “whitewashed” issues is drawn, after all, from stories appearing in, among other papers, the New York Times.
That’s not really the gravamen of Dole’s complaint, though. The bias Republican and conservative candidates moan about isn’t so much a matter of what the newspapers report as how they report it. The devil is in the details, in the little stage whispers a “serious” journalist tucks into his otherwise “straight” dispatches from the field.
For instance: On October 28 in San Diego, Dole delivered a reasonably serious speech about affirmative action and the anti-quota California Civil Rights Initiative. Adam Nagourney of the New York Times reported as much, calling it a “sober and tightly argued presentation.”
But then came the following passage in Dole’s address. “Every time I drive to work in Washington, D.C., or drive down North Capitol Street, and I see dozens and dozens of black men, without work, I say to myself: ‘What has [affirmative action] done for them?’ Absolutely nothing.”
This argument, the Times and Nagourney decided, required some clarifying “context.” North Capitol Street, you see, “runs north from the Capitol through some of Washington’s more impoverished neighborhoods.” But ” Mr. Dole lives at the Watergate, in one of the city’s more elegant neighborhoods, and there is, generally speaking, little visible evidence of poverty between that part of the city and where he used to work.”
The implication of this rather bitchy aside: Dole is a hypocrite who cares not a whit for the poor and is using affirmative action purely as a “socially divisive” wedge issue.
Actually, Bob Dole’s campaign headquarters in Washington is located just off North Capitol Street. We suspect he sees those unemployed black men fairly often. And a larger question remains: Why is Dole singled out for snotty commentary like this?
On the day that Dole spoke in California, anti-CCRI organizers released their first campaign commercials. The television ad, produced by Democrat Bob Shrum, begins with images of David Duke and a burning cross. “Newt Gingrich, Pat Buchanan, and David Duke want you to vote yes” on CCRI, its voice-over intones.
Four radio ads unveiled by the anti-CCRI crowd descend even lower into the muck. Ellen DeGeneres reads one of them and says, apropos of nothing, that Buchanan, Gingrich, and Duke are “all anti-abortion.” And those three men are also “all supporting” CCRI. In another spot, Bruce Springsteen claims (falsely) that CCRI would “legalize discrimination against women and girls in jobs, in education, and in sports.”
Did news of this amazing, repulsive, thoroughly dishonest media campaign find its way into Adam Nagourney’s story on Bob Dole and the politics of affirmative action in California? No, it did not. Has the Times mentioned it? No, it has not.
Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as media bias.
