Presswatch / Jesse and the Victorian Gents
Barnes, Fred
JESSE AND THE VICTORIAN GENTS The Reverend Jesse L. Jackson was sitting amidst three dozen reporters in an elegant conference room of the Sheraton Carlton Hotel, two blocks from the White...
...Finally, Margolis questioned Jackson's claim that objective polls show him with "overwhelming support" among blacks...
...in a similar way," i.e., without benefit of a poll of the church group's 6.8 million members or 40,000 pastors...
...that would be impolitic, opening the politician to the firestorm of charges of warmongering, and so he shuts up and repeats piously 'all would be losers.'" Satire offered the required answer on hunger, too, calling it the politic "unfinished business" answer: "Despite the great strides we have made in only three years, I say to you Edwin Meese III, the White House aide, is the latest victim of reporters performing, in Tom Wolfe's words, as "the consummate hypocritical Victorian gent...
...We have watched our colleagues scrutinize the finances of William Casey, Bert Lance,-Billy Carter, Richard Allen, John Connally and on and on," said a Wall Street Journal editorial last November, one that a Jackson aide singled out as the most critical piece written about Jackson...
...Ronald Reagan must have read Satire's column...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 23...
...In the general election, the more conservative candidate, Ronald Reagan, was treated in friendlier fashion than was Jimmy Carter, the more liberal candidate against whom the press created the "meanness" issue...
...He tried to deal with a shibboleth question without properly pronouncing the shibboleth...
...Margolis characterized the motive for Jackson's complaint that minorities will have only token power at the convention as having "less to do with discrimination than with his status as a long-shot candidate...
...Moreover, Margolis said Jackson was painfully off-base in saying Pentagon cost overruns amounted to $750 billion...
...In Baltimore last August, Jackson said the filing of tax liens of $260,000 against a black mayoralty candidate was "just like burning that church in Mississippi...
...Publicly, they were bound to maintain a different posture, though, and Meese, not a rookie in the big leagues anymore, should have known that...
...Perhaps some candidate will attack Jackson's flair for demagoguery, though I wouldn't recommend betting the mortgage money on that...
...Indeed, it would be objectionable if the press were doing that...
...Last July, Lois Romano of the Washington Post raised the matter of whether Jackson had lied about his proximity to King at the time of King's assassination in Memphis in 1968 and whether he sought to exploit the shooting to get press attention...
...And in 1980, the most liberal candidate for the presidency, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, received the harshest coverage...
...There have been some adoring stories, for sure...
...The shibboleth questioner demands a 'no.' Certainly both sides in a nuclear war would suffer profoundly, but the purpose of our deterrent is to convince the other side that starting such a war would cause it to suffer more, even to 'lose.' The honest answerer is tempted to say, 'If the Russians think we would win, they won't start a war, so why should I say we wouldn't win?' But that as long as one American is hungry, then we have unfinished business in this country...
...But there are gaps in the coverage of Jackson, as the Journal noted...
...It isn't...
...You can't just step forward and declare, as Meese did on the record, that proof of hunger in America is nonexistent or merely anecdotal, and that some folks taking advantage of soup kitchens might not belong to the ranks of the truly needy...
...About hunger, for instance...
...But if Jackson starts to hurt another candidate by threatening to take a crucial number of primary votes from him--Mondale is the likeliest victim--that may change...
...Most of the polls don't show that," Margolis said...
...several times a week...
...In two areas, however, Jackson escaped negative coverage in the early weeks of his candidacy...
...One involves the seven other Democratic presidential candidates...
...The other area neglected in early reporting was finances, namely the troubles of Jackson's Operation PUSH with the government over PUSH's use of federal funds...
...JESSE AND THE VICTORIAN GENTS The Reverend Jesse L. Jackson was sitting amidst three dozen reporters in an elegant conference room of the Sheraton Carlton Hotel, two blocks from the White House...
...Yet they ran a chagrined George Romney out of the race for having said he had been "brainwashed" by American generals in Vietnam...
...Jackson, Raines wrote, received the backing of the National Baptist Convention, Inc...
...Since they weren't slamming him, there were no unkind words from them to report...
...So Meese was pilloried, pitied, and, worst of all, slapped with back-to-back front-page stories in the Washington Post about his cruel attitude (the first one stretching across eight columns at the top of the page...
...Dan Rather of CBS-TV went to the South a few weeks after Jackson's presidential announcement and put together a puffer that proclaimed Jackson the proper heir of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., an assertion that many black leaders heatedly dispute...
...Jackson has a tendency to use extravagant civil rights metaphors...
...At a press conference a few days later, he criticized press treatment of Mecse, adding that "if there is one person in this country hungry, tl~en it is one too many and we're going to do what we can...
...it enables the political opposition to pounce, and for the excitables to report a firestorm in a teapot...
...they savage everyone, even the liberal candidates with whom most reporters might feel ideological kinship...
...There is a point here, and it's not that Margolis, one of the best political reporters around, is carrying out a vendetta against Jackson...
...According to Safire, it isn't safe to answer honestly the question of whether a nuclear war is winnable...
...This doesn't happen, he said...
...As we watch the press make Mr...
...We keep wondering where the rigor of this scrutiny has gone when it comes to 22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 serious presidential candidates...
...Fred Barnes dent Walter F. Mondale for the Democratic presidential nomination...
...Now, I submit that most reporters would be willing to admit privately that what Meese said was not scandalous and might even be true...
...Jackson was there for the first time (it was midDecember) and the going-over he received was neither especially rough nor particularly mild...
...Margolis said Jackson was wrong in yapping about segregated "slate-making" by Democratic officials in the South...
...It is certain, for example, that political reporters were not eager to clear the way for Richard Nixon's capture of the Republican presidential nomination in 1968...
...If Jackson wants unswervingly favorable coverage, the last place he's going to find it is in a presidential campaign...
...In early December, Howell Raines of the New York Times harpooned Jackson for hypocrisy in criticizing AFL-CIO leaders for not polling union members before endorsing former Vice PresiFred Barnes is National Political Reporter for the Baltimore Sun...
...Quite the contrary is true, the reporter said...
...That does not convey the proper feelings...
...And sweetness and light, of course, never get much coverage...
...it was normal...
...But there have been many stories about Jackson that are tough and critical...
...As does the gent...
...And so the shibboleth was pronounced and the Victorian gent was pacified--except at the New York Times...
...Stay tuned to see if they are filled...
...The reason is that "the public, the populace, the citizenry, must be provided with the correct feelings...
...The whole defense budget is only $264 billion," he wrote...
...Next to the annual dinner of the Gridiron Club, a Sperling Breakfast is the most establishment--press establishment-gathering in Washington...
...The event was what is known as a Sperling Breakfast, named after the man (Godfrey Sperling of the Christian Science Monitor) who organizes Q-and-A sessions with politicians and officials at eight a.m...
...Jackson its latest pet, we keep thinking that it's one thing for black voters to crown him as their leader, and quite another if instead the crown is bestowed by a predominantly white press...
...To some questions reporters demand a certain type of response, writes Wolfe in The Right Stuff...
...Margolis noted that Jackson was misguided in his view that blacks and women are "locked out" of the Democratic national convention...
...Hunger lives, it asserted...
...The next day, Jon Margolis of the Chicago Tribune zinged Jackson mercilessly for his comments at the breakfast, noting that he "often displays an extraordinary ignorance of what he is talking about...
...It's gratifying to see the President pay tribute to a columnist's sagacity, but the real-life version merits no applause," huffed a Times editorial...
...The point is that just because Jackson is black does not mean the press is going limp in its coverage of him...
...As Tom Bethell noted in comments to the Philadelphia Society last November, presidential races bring out the non-ideological belligerence in reporters...
...Recall for a moment all those stories about his stammering, incoherent stump speeches, and all the re-examinations of Chappaquiddick, notably Roger Mudd's on CBS...
...But he stumbled into the trap we shall see often" in 1984, said William Satire of the New York Times in a brilliant column...
...That happened to George Romney with his 'brainwashed' remark...
...More recently, he said the Democratic presidential contest was, before he entered, a "white primary...
Vol. 17 • February 1984 • No. 2
