The Right Wing Echo Chamber
POSTED BY: rue
UPDATED: Tuesday, August 18, 2026 20:26
VIEWED: 1136
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Covering new presidents: the media's double standard
by Eric Boehlert
In anticipation of the new administration, Beltway media insiders are busy laying the groundwork for how reporters and pundits will treat the new team on Pennsylvania Avenue.
"Once a president takes office ... an adversarial relationship usually flourishes, at least with beat reporters," wrote Howard Kurtz in The Washington Post. And former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, discussing the press corps on Fox News, agreed: "They are inevitably going to turn on him, as all -- this happened to every administration. I don't see why we should be surprised. It is the natural turn of events."
The conventional wisdom is quite clear: The press always turns skeptical and becomes combative when new presidents come to town.
Except, of course, when the press does not.
In truth, the model being touted today by media insiders didn't apply to the previous two administrations. That model didn't apply to Bill Clinton in 1993 because the press wasn't simply skeptical about his administration, the press savaged it. And the model didn't apply to George W. Bush in 2001, because instead of turning combative toward him, the press rolled over for the Republican.
In terms of how the press has treated the last two new presidents, there's the Democratic model (i.e. overly hostile), and the Republican model (overly docile).
At the outset of the Bush presidency, when it became obvious that the press had adopted a softer standard for judging the new Republican president, author Jeffrey Toobin noted that "the high emotional temperature of the Clinton years left a lot of people, including journalists, kind of exhausted." He added, "I think it will probably take a while to sort of gin that back up again."
Over the course of eight years of covering Bush, I'm not sure the press ever recaptured the fever it displayed during the Clinton years. So it would be deeply suspicious if, in 2009, the press managed to turn up that emotional temperature just in time to cover another Democratic administration.
It would also be troubling for journalism if the press responded to conservative claims today that reporters had been too soft on the Democrat during the campaign by reacting the same way journalists did when those claims were lodged during the 1992 campaign: by trashing the victorious Democrat to prove the press corps wasn't "in the tank."
That's what helped fuel the stark double standard in terms of early coverage of the past two administrations.
One quick example: On January 31, 1993, 12 days after Clinton had been sworn into office, Sam Donaldson appeared on ABC and made this jarring announcement: "Last week, we could talk about, 'Is the honeymoon over?' This week, we can talk about, 'Is the presidency over?' " (At the time, Clinton's approval rating hovered around 65 percent.)
By contrast, on February 10, 2001, three weeks after Bush had been sworn into office, The New York Times' Frank Bruni penned a gentle, honeymoon-mode review about how authentic and at ease Bush seemed with his new role. "George W. Bush is establishing a no-fuss, no-sweat, 'look-Ma-no-hands' presidency, his exertions ever measured, his outlook always mirthful," wrote Bruni. "The gilded robes of the presidency have not obscured Mr. Bush's innate goofiness -- or, for that matter, his insistent folksiness."
Bruni's piece was a classic example of what in journalism is called a "beat-sweetener." It's where a reporter assigned to a new beat ingratiates himself with key sources by writing flattering profiles. There were precious few White House beat-sweeteners published in 1993.
"Perhaps never in our nation's history -- certainly not in its recent history -- has a President so early in his term been subjected to a greater barrage of negative media coverage than Bill Clinton," wrote the Los Angeles Times' late media critic David Shaw in 1993. (The headline to Shaw's piece: "Not Even Getting a 1st Chance; Early Coverage of the President Seemed More Like An Autopsy.")
"The l
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Morris, Hannity, Limbaugh implicate Obama in stock-market decline -- analysts disagree
Summary: Conservative commentators have asserted that President-elect Barack Obama is to blame for the decline of the stock market since the election. But several analysts disagree, citing weak corporate reports and the release of unemployment statistics.
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Silence is consent.
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JESSICA YELLIN, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: I think the press corps dropped the ball at the beginning. When the lead-up to the war began, the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president's high approval ratings.
And my own experience at the White House was that, the higher the president's approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives -- and I was not at this network at the time -- but the more pressure I had from news executives to put on positive stories about the president.
I think, over time...
(CROSSTALK)
COOPER: You had pressure from news executives to put on positive stories about the president?
YELLIN: Not in that exact -- they wouldn't say it in that way, but they would edit my pieces. They would push me in different directions. They would turn down stories that were more critical and try to put on pieces that were more positive, yes. That was my experience.
Katie Couric yesterday said that threats from the White House and accusations of being unpatriotic coerced the media into suppressing its questioning of the war. But last September, Couric revealed even more specifically the type of pressure that was put on her by NBC executives to refrain from criticizing the administration, after she conducted a "tough interview" with Condoleezza Rice:
After the interview, Couric said she received an email from an NBC exec "forwarded without explanation" from a viewer who wrote that she had been "unnecessarily confrontational."
"I think there was a lot of undercurrent of pressure not to rock the boat for a variety of reasons, where it was corporate reasons or other considerations," she said in an interview with former journalist and author Marvin Kalb during "The Kalb Report" forum at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
In April of 2003, then-MSNBC star Ashleigh Banfield delivered a speech at Kansas State University and said that American news coverage of the Iraq war attracted high ratings but "wasn't journalism," because "there are horrors that were completely left out of this war." She added, echoing Couric:
The other thing is that so many voices were silent in this war. We all know what happened to Susan Sarandon for speaking out, and her husband, and we all know that this is not the way Americans truly want to be. Free speech is a wonderful thing, it's what we fight for, but the minute it's unpalatable we fight against it for some reason.
That just seems to be a trend of late, and l am worried that it may be a reflection of what the news was and how the news coverage was coming across. . . . I think there were a lot of dissenting voices before this war about the horrors of war, but I'm very concerned about this three-week TV show and how it may have changed people's opinions. It was very sanitized.
Shortly thereafter, Banfield was demoted, then fired altogether, and -- as Digby put it in her great analysis of Banfield's speech -- "she's now a co-anchor on a Court TV show."
At the same time, MSNBC fired the only real war opponent it had, Phil Donahue, despite very healthy ratings (the highest of any show on MSNBC, including "Hardball"). When interviewed for Bill Moyers' truly superb 2007 documentary on press behavior in the run-up to the war, Donahue reported much the same thing as Yellin, Couric, and Banfield revealed:
BILL MOYERS: You had Scott Ritter, former weapons inspector. Who was saying that if we invade, it will be a historic blunder.
PHIL DONOHUE: You didn't have him alone. He had to be there with someone else who supported the war. In other words, you couldn't have Scott Ritter alone. You could have Richard Perle alone.
BILL MOYERS: You could have the conservative.
PHIL DONOHUE: You could have the supporters of the President alone. And they would say why this war is important. You couldn't have a dissenter alone. Our producers were instructed
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I think the best we can expect out of the mainstream press is a sideshow in any case. Even with Clinton they never managed substantial critique, it was scandal page crap at best. And they were positively cowed by Karl Rove. Precious few of them care enough to do any of their own reporting and are all too happy to whore themselves out whichever sources give the most titillating talking points.
The real question is, why does anyone still pay attention to them?
SergeantX
"Dream a little dream or you can live a little dream. I'd rather live it, cause dreamers always chase but never get it." Aesop Rock
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"The real question is, why does anyone still pay attention to them?"
Because it's easy ?
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Silence is consent.
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I prefer this Boehlert column.
http://mediamatters.org/columns/200811250012
BTW, notice how I provide a link to it, rather than copying the whole thing, but not providing attribution.
"Keep the Shiny side up"
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maybe interwebs conspiracy changed a lot of things
The QAnon paedophile conspiracy is back to haunt Trump
https://inews.co.uk/news/world/qanon-paedophile-conspiracy-back-haunt-
trump-4081486
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Quote:
Originally posted by rue:
Morris, Hannity, Limbaugh implicate Obama in stock-market decline -- analysts disagree
Summary: Conservative commentators have asserted that President-elect Barack Obama is to blame for the decline of the stock market since the election. But several analysts disagree, citing weak corporate reports and the release of unemployment statistics.
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Silence is consent.
So where are you now? And where are the rest of you. This is when you are needed most.
T
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Needed for what? Bolster your numbers for your eternal campaign of hate online?
Shut up, Ted.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick. 
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