Saturday, October 24, 2009
Interesting piece by Joan Walsh in Salon today on the way the media treated Clinton.
"[F]rom start to finish, President Clinton was besieged by a vicious just-say-no GOP abetted by the perversely, inexplicably, cruelly anti-Clinton leaders of the so-called liberal media -- from the New York Times' lame crusades against Whitewater and Chinese donors and Wen Ho Lee, to the integrity-free "opinion" journalism by Maureen Dowd and, sadly, Frank Rich, to a whole host of other liberal media characters who couldn't shake their feeling that Clinton was a fraud, a poseur, a hillbilly, a cynic. Their trashy eight-year oeuvre will likely go down in history as the most spectacularly malevolent and misguided White House coverage ever -- and politically costly, since it also encompassed Vice President Al Gore and probably made George W. Bush president in 2000."
That's pretty much how it looked to me. It's one thing when the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal attacks a Democrat, but there was no excuse for the NYTimes to carry on that way, and I'd love to know why that happened. It would be an interesting J-School project to go back over the front pages of the NYTimes during the Clinton years and count up how many times Ol' Bill and (especially) HRC were shown in unflattering photographs, and it would be an even better study if you contrasted it with St. Reagan-- or GWB. Walsh continues with an anecdote about Tim Russert, whose canonization has always been a mystery to me.
Bill Clinton was far from the president I wish he'd been, but he was a capable, intelligent president wh deserves a lot more credit than he ever got. He towers over Reagan, but we'll all be quite a bit older before that gets said aloud by very many.
"[F]rom start to finish, President Clinton was besieged by a vicious just-say-no GOP abetted by the perversely, inexplicably, cruelly anti-Clinton leaders of the so-called liberal media -- from the New York Times' lame crusades against Whitewater and Chinese donors and Wen Ho Lee, to the integrity-free "opinion" journalism by Maureen Dowd and, sadly, Frank Rich, to a whole host of other liberal media characters who couldn't shake their feeling that Clinton was a fraud, a poseur, a hillbilly, a cynic. Their trashy eight-year oeuvre will likely go down in history as the most spectacularly malevolent and misguided White House coverage ever -- and politically costly, since it also encompassed Vice President Al Gore and probably made George W. Bush president in 2000."
That's pretty much how it looked to me. It's one thing when the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal attacks a Democrat, but there was no excuse for the NYTimes to carry on that way, and I'd love to know why that happened. It would be an interesting J-School project to go back over the front pages of the NYTimes during the Clinton years and count up how many times Ol' Bill and (especially) HRC were shown in unflattering photographs, and it would be an even better study if you contrasted it with St. Reagan-- or GWB. Walsh continues with an anecdote about Tim Russert, whose canonization has always been a mystery to me.
Bill Clinton was far from the president I wish he'd been, but he was a capable, intelligent president wh deserves a lot more credit than he ever got. He towers over Reagan, but we'll all be quite a bit older before that gets said aloud by very many.
// posted by Bill @ 5:37 PM 
Post a Comment