There’s major nostalgia in the media this morning for former President George W. Bush after he told NBC’s Matt Lauer that a free press is “indispensable to democracy.”
It was a stark change in tone from the treatment journalists are getting used to under the Trump administration. But that nostalgia shouldn’t cloud memory. The 43rd president regularly and openly clashed with the free press.
Long before Steve Bannon joined Breitbart, Bush was pioneering a new operating doctrine on how Republicans deal with the press. While the Texas president never went so far as to call journalists the “opposition party,” as Trump has done, he never pulled any punches either. “They reject an assumption embraced by most reporters: that we are neutral and represent the public interest,” the New Yorker’s Ken Auletta wrote at the conclusion of Bush’s first term. “Rather, they see the press as just another special interest.”
Since then distrust of the mainstream media has become a common conservative trope. Trump just took it farther, labeling outlets as fake news, dismissing false reporting as “the enemy of the people,” and skipping the White House Correspondent’s Dinner.
More than anything, the current president’s tone and approach are a product of his character and the shifting media landscape. In one of the most candid moments of the interview, Bush observed as much. “When I was president,” Bush told Lauer, “you matter a lot more because there were three of you.”
Now that trending topics and viral stories have transformed the news cycle, the relationship between the press and president has evolved. But while Bush was subtler in his approach than Trump, he was more combative than some people seem to recall.
Bush first told the media how he really felt during a hot-mic moment on the campaign trail in 2000. “There’s Adam Clymer—major league asshole—from the New York Times,” Bush told Dick Cheney at a campaign stop in Naperville, Illinois. “Yeah, big time,” his running mate returned.
Then-Vice President Gore’s campaign seized on Bush’s assault of the free press, complaining that the Texan was “using expletives to describe a New York Times reporter in front of a crowd of families.” Bush didn’t respond but he didn’t become any less combative once in the White House.
Matt Lauer knows this better than most. In a particularly testy Oval Office interview on the fifth anniversary of the September 11th attacks, Bush repeatedly stuck a finger in the reporter’s chest for emphasis. Again a week later, the president literally shouted over Lauer’s colleague David Gregory during a Rose Garden press conference.
Did Bush make attacks on the press a pillar of his platform like Trump? No. Did his White House put on kid gloves when journalists attacked the president? Not at all. Any misty-eyed members of the press corps who argue that Bush somehow broke with Trump on the issue should go review the record.
Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
