Presswatch/Quayle's New Level
Eastland, Terry
Quayle's New Level by Terry Eastland 1 n early January, the Washington Post published its much-anticipated seven-part series on Vice President Dan Quayle by Bob Woodward and David S. Broder. To the...
...Many sections could have been boiled down...
...The Journal and the Times may have been prodded to take their new looks at Quayle not only by the discovery last May of Bush's atrial fibrillation but also by what they—and the rest of Washington journalism—had known the Post was up to since last summer...
...By holding their magnifying glass so close to Quayle, Woodward and Broder are blind to the larger picture...
...The copy on Quayle's golf game could have been saved for the book...
...The coverage was partly Quayle's fault, partly Bush's, and very much the press's...
...Some serious charges made against Quayle—including allegations of academic failure or dishonesty and manipulation of National Guard rules—as well as descriptions of vast wealth, appear to be false...
...Focusing on what the country would get if Quayle were someday President, Gerstenzang and Lauter wrote that Quayle is "a key player" on domestic policy, "a quick study" who has surrounded himself with "an energetic, intelligent staff," and who has "handled his official duties smoothly...
...But Post editors should have bound the Bigfeet...
...Though no different in tone or conclusions from the earlier reconsiderations, it is their work that drew the fusillade from Rather...
...I'd expand the Sabato recommendation to say that the press is especially obligated to review the received wisdom and do, in Woodward's words, "a thorough job" on a public figure who is next in line to the presidency...
...The articles weren't bad, but forty thousand words was at least a third too long for a newspaper...
...The one part on Marilyn Quayle could have been sent to the Style section...
...While the reporting on Quayle was not uniformly bad, as a whole it helped freeze an image of the man that has gone unchallenged until now...
...He mentions Ben Bradlee, who, while at Newsweek, demolished the 1962 rumor about John F. Kennedy's "prior marriage" to a twice-divorced socialite...
...As for the press, it of course went mad...
...And it is their book that Simon and Schuster (the official publisher of Post writers, to judge by recent offerings) will publish in March...
...Third, the series was good on facts but sometimes short on analysis—a frequent failing in Woodward's work.2 The fifth installment treated Quayle's Competitiveness Council, whose "real role," according to Woodward and Broder, "is much larger than even its critics imagine...
...Someone not acquainted with the higher theories of journalism would have thought that plain old reporting was about letting the facts dictate—to the degree facts ever can...
...CI The American Spectator March 1992 51...
...hope that the book is better than the series...
...Quayle did not help himself by cryptically telling NBC's Tom Brokaw that "phone calls were made" when asked about how he got into the National Guard...
...I leave it to Dan Rather to describe that kind of journalism, which is well beyond the sweetheart stage...
...But the impact of the council is much less than the authors imagine...
...But the Post series promises to be more influential, 50 The American Spectator March 1992 mainly because of its Bigfoot authors...
...ure...
...1 n his excellent recent book, Feeding Frenzy: How Attack Journalism Has Transformed American Politics,1 Larry J. Sabato of the University of Virginia finds that, for nearly three weeks, coverage of the presidential campaign amounted to coverage of Quayle, the networks devoting from two-thirds to more than four-fifths of their evening-news campaign minutes to the vice-presidential candidate—almost all of it focusing on wealth, family connections, and charges of plagiarism, hardly any of it on the senator's public record...
...Having invested so much time and effort in the project, Woodward and Broder may have felt obliged to write all they had (notwithstanding their failure to find any bombshell...
...Left unaddressed, for example, were the Parkinson rumor of 1988 and the drug use charge made by a federal prisoner in 1988 and given new life in recent "Doonesbury" frames...
...Quayle and his aides have done mighty 2 See my discussion of Woodward's latest book The Commanders (TAS, July 1991...
...But Broder contributed his own bit: it was he and Helen Dewar who wrote, on August 17, 1988, that Quayle "is vastly wealthier than Bush, and stands to inherit a large share of a fortune worth hundreds of millions of dollars...
...Sabato argues that the press has an obligation to debunk any "persistent and debilitating rumor that may be unfairly inflicting great damage on a political fig1 The Free Press, 306 pages, $22.95...
...And while they do take on the plagiarism charge, that issue was raised not by the Post but by the Wall Street Journal...
...Terry Eastland is resident fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C...
...sweetheart coverage," Dan Rather called it...
...Such observations—notwithstanding others that were negative—were too much for some apparently outraged journalists...
...It is to Sabato's book that one must turn to find out which other news organizations also got it wrong on Quayle in 1988 (ABC, NBC, and CBS, for starters...
...The seven parts should have been no more than four or five...
...I'm all for new-level journalism, but this form will not have arrived until it gives the news business the same scrutiny it gives everything else...
...If Quayle begins to be taken more seriously, Woodward and Broder will have contributed mightily...
...t is a mistake, however—and one committed by a Washington Times eager to see a case of the Post versusthe Post—to regard the Quayle series as a "cleverly disguised 'correction' " of its own work...
...The press so often becomes central in a story—as in the making of the Quayle image—that to omit specifics about which newspaper or network once did what to whom and when is to fail to do the story justice...
...But call this journalism old or new, or new-level, it's an improvement over journalism that simply trades on conventional wisdom...
...On December 2, James Gerstenzang and David Lauter of the Los Angeles Times wrote a lengthier piece entitled, "Quayle Set on Getting Last Laugh...
...Too bad Woodward and Broder don't give this info...
...Second, despite its claims, the series wasn't thorough enough...
...It all started back in August 1988 when George Bush surprised the world by making the little-known junior senator from Indiana his running mate...
...In an interview with Howard Kurtz, the Post's own press-watcher, Executive Editor Leonard Downie defended the series, calling it a "new level of journalism," which he defined as finding out "everything there was to find out about Dan Quayle and Marilyn Quayle" and letting "the facts dictate...
...Finally, the series failed to give chapter and verse of "the sloppy journalism" they aimed to correct...
...work in trying to prevent "regulatory creep," but there is only so much the Vice President's office can do unless you also have good appointees at the regulatory agencies...
...On November 15, John Harwood of the Wall Street Journal wrote a profile in which he observed, "In many ways Dan Quayle never was the man the public thinks it knows...
...the same is true of the sidebar, "Quayles and Bushes, Almost Like Family...
...A good example, although, as Sabato points out, one cannot recommend the arrangement by which Kennedy got to read and approve the article before publication...
...Woodward is probably the only print reporter in America with celebrity status, and Broder is regarded within the business as one of its few sages...
...To the alarm of political Washington, Quayle not only survived the event but came out looking better than ever: Quayle has proved himself to be a skillful player of the political game, with a competitive drive that has been underestimated repeatedly by his rivals...
...By most accounts, he is more active . .. and more influential than Bush was as vice president...
...Sabato has shown both to be unfounded...
...Has the Post or any other newspaper ever devoted that amount of copy to anyone else, even a President...
...He has demonstrated "ingenuity iri creating instruments of power despite the inherent powerlessness of his own office...
...The only sloppy news organization cited is Newsweek, the Post's corporate cousin, which said Quayle's net worth was $50 million—about fifty times what it really is...
...Woodward and Broder were not the first journalists to take this obligation seriously...
...Quayle, too, has been the victim, not just of rumors but of his image in the media...
...Bush, who never had a conversation with Quayle about the vice-presidency or the campaign before selecting him, failed to provide his running mate adequate staff help, and James Baker did him no favors in anonymous comments to reporters...
...In a series so ambitious as the Post's, every single rumor and charge that contributed to the public image of Quayle deserved re-examination...
...Jack Shafer, editor of Washington's weekly City Paper, points out that Woodward and Broder do not challenge in any substantive way the Post's original (1988) reporting on how Quayle got into the National Guard or on his academic record...
...As all the world knows by now, under George Bush the executive branch is spewing out new regulations at a pace unmatched since the 1970s...
...Stories about Quayle's academic record, his wealth, his alleged affair with Paula Parkinson, and his National Guard service portrayed the man who would be Vice President as a callow child of privilege...
...I agree...
Vol. 25 • March 1992 • No. 3
