Promoting a new fishing memoir during a recent swing through his native South, former New York Times editor Howell Raines met with some readers who quizzed him about the state of politics. A Mobile Press-Register reporter in attendance wrote, "Raines, who throws in zingers in his memoir criticizing the Wall St. Journal editorial page, Fox News, and the current administration, wryly answers that the only thing that might make him return to journalism would be 'a third term for George Bush.'
"He adds, as well, that 'the Democratic party is in collapse.'"
Assuming that second Raines quote is accurate, read it again and marvel. The former editor of the New York Times insists the Democratic Party is "in collapse." Forget the fact that a recent national poll showed a majority of Americans prefer Democrats over Republicans on every major issue, Raines, still feeding off the Beltway culture he inhabited for so long, can't resist mocking Democrats in public. The knee-jerk response is telling and utterly predictable since the D.C. press elite appear to be unable for any sustained period of time to report bad news about Republicans without habitually noting things are just as bad, if not worse, for Democrats. So spooked have journalists become to the charge of 'liberal bias' that they've become afraid of the facts and the consequences of reporting them.
Raines is hardly alone. Throughout 2005 for instance, the narrative of the political press corps was this same pending demise of the Democratic Party; that Democrats had no answer regarding Iraq and that Democrats were being run circles around them super-savvy Republicans. Time magazine's Joe Klein has made a career out of bashing Democrats. From my new book "Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over For Bush":
Heading into 2005, TV pundits were certain that the party worth watching, the party whose demise was going to dominant the political calendar, was the Democratic Party. In June Time columnist Joe Klein, often booked by TV producers to fill the slot of a Democrat, pronounced on MSNBC, "At this point the Democrats are a party with absolutely no redeeming social value. They're doing nothing. It's a really boring and flat party." Yet months later it was the Democrats who had opened up a 14-point lead over Republicans in a Pew Research poll that asked which party was doing a better job handling the nation's top problems. No matter, Klein was still belittling the Democratic leadership.
The Note, for one, was certainly not rooting against Republicans. Just the opposite, which was why Bush's second term collapse in 2005 was not the story the Note was busy chronicling--The Note completely missed the story of the year. (Or did everybody just assume that twelve months after re-election Bush's job ratings would be down nearly 20 points, one of the worst fifth-year presidential slides in modern history?) It was not until January 2006, that the Note finally figured out the previous year for Bush had been "disastrous and defensive." In real time though, the Note refused to clearly and consistently document the obvious. Instead, through much of 2005 The Note was pre-occupied with mocking Democratic leaders. Despite the fact it was Republican chiefs like Rep. Tom DeLay and Sen. Bill Frist who were hiring lawyers to fend off campaign indictments and to deal with insider trading subpoenas, the Note again and again emphasized how Democratic leaders were the ones floundering.
Big deal, you might say, press elites too often tweak the Democrats while making nice with conservatives. So what? Because sometimes the stakes are much higher. Like when Raines was overseeing the Times during the run-up to the Iraq war in 2002 and 2003. It appear that same nervousness about being tagged too liberal--that professional desire to please conservatives-- helped drive the paper's coverage right off the cliff. Again, from "Lapdogs":
As the MSM watched Fox News post big rating numbers with its openly conservative reporting, while at the same time journalists were being dogged by accusations of being too liberal and out of touch--and unpatriotic--in a time of national crisis, pressure mounted to prove they could play nice with a Republican administration and forcefully back a war. That was particularly true at the New York Times, which knee-jerk conservatives had singled out as being too pro-peace in its reporting. Executive editor Howell Raines wanted to prove his right-wing critics wrong. "According to half a dozen sources within the Times, Raines wanted to prove once and for all that he wasn't editing the paper in a way that betrayed his liberal beliefs," wrote Seth Mnoonkin in his 2004 Times expose, Hard News. Mnookin quoted Doug Frantz, the former investigative editor of the Times, who recalled how "Howell Raines was eager to have articles that supported the war-mongering out of Washington. He discouraged pieces that were at odds with the administration's position on Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction and alleged links of Al Qaeda." The New York Observer later reported, "One senior Washington bureau staffer said that as the Bush administration edged closer to invasion, the editorial climate inside The Times shifted from questioning the rationale for military action to putting the paper on a proper war footing. "Everyone could see the war coming. The Times wanted to be out front on the biggest story," the staffer said. "It became the plan of attack."