L. Brent Bozell on Bush in the Media

by J. Lawrence Scholer

Face it. The national media is liberal. Dan Rather is speaking at Democratic fundraisers. President Bush gets lambasted for the way he handled China. John McCain steals attention from the Bush tax cut with his campaign finance reform plan. Fortunately, the Dartmouth Review managed to get in touch with L. Brent Bozell, founder the Media Research Center, to elucidate the subject and to provide some of his own insights.

TDR: You ran an article on April 12 concerning the national media and its liberal slant. Let’s start with the Dan Rather incident. I know you demanded an apology on the air. Rather never did it. What do you think should be done now?

Brent Bozell: There was an apology of sorts that was issued in a statement, which is better than the reaction to his colleague, Bryant Gumbel, who called a Christian spokesman a "fucking idiot" on national television and refused to apologize at all. But the point with Rather is that the apology that was owed ought not to have been a statement made by a press flack. It should have been an on-air statement made by him to his viewers. That’s whom he owes his apology to.

TDR: Could you comment on Peggy Noonan’s article in the Wall Street Journal concerning Rather? She seemed to come down easy on him.

BB: Her point was that it makes abundantly clear for all to see just what the political proclivities of these people really are. That was her way of saying, "it’s a good thing he did this" - so they can’t pretend anymore.

TDR: How pervasive a problem is this in the national media? In an April 12 column you have statistics on the terminology used to describe Bush’s tax cut? For instance, you cite examples where Rather and Brokaw use terms like "big" or "very big."

BB: The problem with a liberal slant in this business is as pervasive as snow in Vail in the wintertime. It is a consistent, underlying ideological mantra in so-called "news," and "reporting." It is neither reporting, nor is it objective.

TDR: Is this a recent phenomenon? Or has it always been a problem? Is it becoming more of a problem?

BB: It’s been a problem for forty years. It’s now something the media no longer can pretend doesn’t exist, which is what they spent thirty years doing. It’s now something that has become ingrained in the public conversation. When you have a Pew Center poll come out as it did last fall that shows that now 89% of the public believes that journalists insert their opinions into news stories. That’s almost unanimous. When you’ve got six out of ten voters believing there’s a left wing slant in the press – that’s almost two out of three.

TDR: How did the public become more aware in the last ten years if for thirty years they were unaware?

BB: Flippantly, I can credit the Media Research Center for that. But more profoundly, I will say that we have had a huge impact. But so has Rush Limbaugh. So has the National Review. So has the Dartmouth Review. It is something that conservatives have taken up almost as a cause to discuss in the public conversation. In some cases it has become so blatant and so flagrant that the most casual of observers picks it up. Witness Dan Rather’s coverage of the Florida election debacle. He might has well have been wearing a Gore bumper sticker.

TDR: Since most of the public is now aware of this slant, is it still harmful?

BB: It’s terrible. The effects can be terrible. Ask yourself this question: What defeated the Contract with America? It sure wasn’t Bill Clinton. If you go back and look at news reports, the man didn’t do a bloody thing throughout 1995. It certainly wasn’t the Democratic Party. They were in retreat with him. It was a non-stop jihad by the press that set out to repackage the Contract with America as the Contract on America.

TDR: I remember Rush Limbaugh ran that as a joke.

BB: And they succeeded. They succeeded with the Medicare campaign. Scaring seniors. Scaring minorities. I mean when you’ve got an ABC anchor saying - I’m paraphrasing, but it’s almost word for word – "Clean air, clean water, safe transportation – you have these things now, but you may be about to lose them. Stay tuned for a report on the Contract with America." That is a news report.

TDR: Back to your April 12 article. You wrote, "CBS even censored its own poll finding support for the tax cut, relying instead on a woman-on-the-street interview concluding that the tax cut was, you guessed it, too ridiculously big." How can the media ethically get away with this?

BB: It is the arrogance of power. It is the ultimate contradiction. Here you have a media whose constant mantra is the people’s right to know, but that stops at the water’s edge of any discussion having to do with the media. They never explain themselves. For them to acknowledge making mistakes is like the Fonz from Happy Days saying he was wrong. They can’t do it. [Acknowledging mistakes] would probably do the most to erase their slide into oblivion – which they are in right now. Mistakes can’t be made. People do make mistakes, but when one makes mistakes, one ought to, especially if one is in a position of responsibility, acknowledge those mistakes. For CBS to run national stories about public opposition to the tax cut, while their own poll show overwhelming support for it, was a mistake, and they ought to acknowledge that once they’re caught. And we caught them.

TDR: China. It seemed as if no media were pleased by the outcome – conservative or liberal. What did you think of the coverage?

BB: There was this bizarre coverage going on. One the one hand, they will say "applause, applause, you got them out." In the same breath, the word "but" has to rear its ugly head. They quickly add to that "but this could have been resolved better had it not been for the militant tone of the Bush administration." As if it was the "militant" tone of the Bush administration that caused this. As I pointed out on MSNBC last Friday, I’ve only seen one anchor, Brit Hume of Fox, ask the obvious question. Everyone has been asking the question: Had we just apologized couldn’t we have gotten them out sooner? But only Brit Hume asked the question: Why aren’t we insisting that they apologize? They caused it.

TDR: Could Bush have done anything to please the media? Was it just a no-win scenario?

BB: No. He can’t win. Bush inherited a bucketful of problems on foreign policy – many of them in dealing with China. Many of which we haven’t seen yet. But he inherited that mess from Clinton. Anything that [Bush] does as an attempt to straighten out that mess is going to be interpreted by the press as somehow militant - because for the first time in eight years someone will have stood up to China.

TDR: Was Bush’s handling of the situation one of the more effective ways to handle it?

BB: Sure. I don’t know what more he could have done short of apologizing and being humiliated and apologizing for something we didn’t do. Would it have brought them home a few days earlier? Quite possibly. Would it have caused a traumatic international problem for the United States? You betcha. And, damn it, we didn’t need to.

TDR: So what will come of this? Will it hurt Bush in the future?

BB: It’s going to help. Look, this was a test. China was testing George Bush. And everybody expected a test. This was a test of the resolve of this administration. And they got their answer. This administration is resolute. The same people who are whining about how America is being seen as militant were the same worrywarts who were thoroughly hysterical in the early 1980s when Ronald Reagan placed Pershing II missiles in Europe – which brought about the end of the Cold War.

TDR: How will this affect the United States’ relations with China in the future?

BB: A foreign policy wag told me before the election, in asking how China was going to behave toward a new administration - not knowing which administration at the time it was going to be – look for China to test the next president. The test is going to determine if it was just Bill Clinton who was a weakling or if it was the nation that’s a weakling. And what they have gotten out of this test is that George Bush is not a weakling and that this country is not a weakling.

TDR: These problems were caused by the previous administration.

BB: Well, they had their election campaign funded by them. (laughs) It’s kind of hard to all of a sudden show some sort of moral authority over them when you allow them to bankroll your campaign. That’s the problem. That’s the problem they had. These guys were in bed on the aerospace deals, on the campaign financing, which was illegal as hell. When you are behaving in that manner with a Communist government, you lose all moral authority to stand up to the Communist government and stop their venturism.

TDR: Would China have tested Al Gore, the man who raised money a at Buddhist Temple?

BB: It would have been a different kind of test. It would have been a test to humiliate him and exert some muscle power over him because he wouldn’t be able to stand up to them.

TDR: John McCain. Is he bitter? What is the media’s obsession with him?

BB: When John McCain was running in the South Carolina primary . . .

TDR: I’m from South Carolina.

BB: You might remember this. A reporter went to Mike Murphy, McCain’s strategist, and, pointing out that Bush was catering to the religious right, he asked Murphy what constituency McCain was catering to in South Carolina. Without missing a beat, Murphy answered right back: the entire McCain political strategy is built around the idea of ingratiating itself with the press and it’s worked. Here’s a guy - who, with the exception of New Hampshire, which with all due respect is a bizarre state and loves to play games during the political season, and his own state of Arizona – couldn’t win a single primary with Republican voters.

TDR: I saw that first hand. South Carolina has no Democratic primary. And, in my town, he catered to the prominent Democrats, holding functions at their houses.

BB: Sure. He made no bones about it. Look at what he did in Michigan. In Michigan, the labor unions all turned out for him, and then they were asked after the vote - what’s going to happen if it’s a Gore-McCain general election campaign – who are you going to vote for then? And they, without blinking, said Gore. This is all political adventurism on the part of the Democratic party and on the part of McCain. But it was the only way for him to establish himself as a national figure. Well, look at the three issues that John McCain has run on: taxes – increase taxes, abortion, and campaign finance reform. Or, to put them in their right order: campaign finance reform, abortion, and taxes. Now, what are the three darling issues of the press? The same exact thing. Look at the national surveys that show only one percent of public cares about campaign finance reform. And yet, night after night after night, the networks, morning after morning after morning – the newspapers’ front pages will cover stories on campaign finance reform. This entire government ground to a halt when big, bad John opened his mouth last month, and the entire agenda of tax cuts, which is what the public wanted, was all put onto the back burner because of what he wanted. Why? Because the media were going to report it. And it so intimidated the Republican Party and, like the dutiful cattle that they are, they followed. Now that’s the kind of power he’s got when he’s in bed with the press.

TDR: Is McCain aware of his power with the press?

BB: Believe me. Believe me, my friend. It is their strategy. Mike Murphy was not making that up. He was just being bluntly honest when he said the media is the targeted audience for the McCain campaign. It is geared to the press.

TDR: What’s motivating him? What does he want?

BB: He would like to be president. And there’s no way he could become president with his voting record and a standard Republican primary field with a half dozen other conservative Republicans. So he set out to have them all neutralize one another – check each other out – where he would carve out that niche of the liberal Republicans, and there are those, and take that to victory. That might have worked – it might have worked – but it’s like Goldwater carving out the conservative niche of the Republican party in 1964. Look how far that got him.

TDR: Bush’s approval rating is very high, yet the press continually dwells on the fact that he delegates his power, taking a very businesslike approach. Is this an accurate portrayal?

BB: Well, I think there is a tremendous amount of accuracy about the delegation part. Guess what – that’s what makes him a good president. Ronald Reagan was a hell of a delegator, and I’ll take him anyday. But Ronald Reagan took the best people he could – or that he saw for the job – and put them in positions of real authority. Bill Clinton micromanaged things. It always amazed me how Bill Clinton never had Cabinet meetings. He only had a handful in eight years. Ronald Reagan had them on a regular basis. He ran it like a good CEO runs a company. Bush has got his mission. He’s got his agenda. He hand-picked the people who will carry that agenda through. That’s what a president is supposed to do. And the media are trying to turn this into a negative. But look, they spent eight years doing that with Ronald Reagan and look how far it got them. That won’t work. The reason Bush is doing well popularity-wise really is twofold. First is that he has been the beneficiary of a stroke of luck which was the two, three, four scandals that Bill Clinton created as he left office – which were the news of the first month. And just not being Bill Clinton and just being the exception to that is going to make you look good no matter who you are. There was luck involved. But I think also, where Bush is concerned, he’s doing something that might be strategic genius. The standard Republican strategy is to speak with quite a conservative, rhetorical message, but then legislate with a moderate agenda, and that’s the standard. Bush reversed that, or has reversed it, so far. He is speaking in a very moderate tone, yet his agenda is quite conservative. And I think that’s got the pundits just off track, just off kilter. They’re not quite sure what to make of him. They spent the first month talking about what a moderate he was going to be, and then about three weeks ago out started popping the stories–"but wait a minute. This guy’s cabinet is more conservative than Reagan’s." And so they are scratching they’re heads, not quite sure which way they are going. And the moment they start going on that tack, he names a member of the Log Cabin Club to head up his AIDS policy. He’s just got them off kilter. From a political standpoint I find it rather fascinating. I might not agree with some of the things he’s doing. But I think its rather fascinating. He really is thinking outside the box. So to the press that says this guy is a dummy who took his daddy’s job, I think he’s proven to be a lot wilier than any of them.

TDR: Do you think Bush is responsible for the shift you mentioned?

BB: I really do. I thought all along that–again–no matter what he did, he was going to come out better than we thought, simply because he was underestimated so much, because he was packaged as such a dunce. He just could not live down that expectation. No matter what he did, it was going to look better than what they packaged him as. And that’s what is happening.

TDR: Dinesh D’Souza was recently on campus. He mentioned that he had recently been at NYU with P.J. O’Rourke. George W. Bush was the issue on the table, and the NYU students were calling him dumb, stupid, an idiot. Then O’Rourke said that he went to a better college than they did.

BB: Throughout the campaign, Gore was the cerebral intellectual. Bush was the dummy. Yet it was Bush who got an MBA and Gore . . .

TDR: . . . who failed out . . .

BB: . . . who flunked out of divinity school. Yeah, there’s a lot of dumbing down at Ivy League colleges – sorry to say that – but maybe Bush did learn a couple of things. Was he so dumb that he surrounded himself with what he found to be the best minds in the country – even if some of them came from his father’s administration, even knowing that he would be ridiculed as being a Bush retread administration needing adult supervision? Or was it with great confidence on his part that he knew what he was doing? I think it’s turning out that it was the latter. And look what happens when you have a China situation – they handled it.

Could you see Sandy Berger handling this?