Presswatch/Parting Shots

...Moreover, the network newsies whispered to each other by telephone in the first hours of election day, the exit polls showed a surprisingly high vote for Dukakis...

...Theirreaders never learned what Bush said...

...And coverage of this event is going to be distorted by the desire of many journalists and editors that this not happen...

...Thus, we had the silly accusation that George Bush ran one of the dirtiest, or "most negative," campaigns in American history...

...handlers or his wife, they now expect us to listen respectfully while they tell us about the "Reagan Revolution" and the powerful ideas that are now said to have inspired the man all along...

...Each new victim is characterized as bereft of saving virtue or first-class intellect, and in order to do this, the victim's predecessor is knighted...

...Just like a messianic religious cult, the media await the day of judgment, when their vision will be confirmed and the heavenly city is finally established...

...President Bush can expect a very tough ride from our elite media, who, just as they did in 1984, worked very hard to elect the Democratic candidate...

...But, just as religious movements...

...Within eight years, we had the same theory, but this time on the left, with the McGovernites believing it...

...The headline read, "The Complex Machine Behind Bush...

...Iisa pity, because I also believe that we are witnessing one of the great historical events of modern times: the disintegration of the Soviet Empire...

...This was a far tougher position than anyone in the Reagan Administration had taken, and ran on the front page of Figaro on election day...

...From now on, I'll spend more time with the short-wave radio...

...And on election day, we had the very same rumors that we had four and eight years ago, rumors that correspond to a specific mythology: there was, it was said, an enormous turnout by the electorate, a vast groundswell of voters queued up at polls all over America...

...The Bush machine is then described with adjectives generally reserved for accounts of plowmen: "plodded," "dogged," "only occasionally inspiring," a campaign that "would prevail by dint of experience and calculation, not by inspiration or the power of ideas...

...The laudable movement to bring previously disadvantaged groups into full equality has become hopelessly mixed up with a concomitant movement to falsify the past condition and accomplishments of those same groups...

...For sheer fantasy, it is hard to match the Washington Post in full political dudgeon, and the lead story on the front page of the Sunday, November 13 Post may well stand as a paradigm of what the country has to deal with nowadays...

...Rather, it was the culmination of effort by an immensely complex, largely hidden machine that was painstakingly assembled and set in motion long before Democrat Michael S. Dukakis received his party's nomination...

...All of this turned out to be nonsensical, and the Bush vote was pretty much what most of the polls had predicted for a long time: a blowout of the Democratic candidate...

...And maybe even a novel or two...

...All those who doubt that this occurred should go back and read James Res-ton's unforgettable column in the New York Times the Sunday before election day in 1984, in which he said that never before had so many journalists and editors worked so hard to defeat any candidate as the American media to defeat Ronald Reagan—and failed...

...I thinkrm leaving the press in worse shape than it was in when I started "Presswatch," and it was at its absolute worst during and immediately after the presidential campaign...

...To my successor, the words of Edward R. Murrow: Good night...

...This, of course, was good for the Democrats...

...The answer was firm and explicit: "no untied loans to the Soviet Union...

...One of the great pleasures of writing for the Spectator about foreign policy instead of the media will be the end of the daily ordeal of reading the Post...

...But this is only a part of the falsification of history produced by the left-wing thought patrols,who believe that history can be rewritten from one day to the next, according to the political needs of the moment...

...After years of describing Ronald Reagan as the Washington version of the village idiot, a man who slept through every important meeting during his presidency, and an actor who read lines prepared for him by his Michael Ledeen is the author of Perilous Statecraft: An Insider's Account of the Iran-Contra Affair (Charles Scribner's Sons...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1989 33...

...And the lead paragraph of the story (written by David Hoffman and Ann Devroy) tells it all: George Bush's 40-state election victory last week was a triumph earned not by a crusade of ideas or a revolution like the one Ronald Reagan earned eight years ago...

...I suppose it's inevitable that political minorities believe that the majority secretly agrees with them, but in the present circumstances the national minority controls a great deal of the national media...

...Army of Ants,' Not Crusade of Ideas, Was Foundation of Campaign...

...Nearly two weeks later, the Washington Post wrote an arcane article, suggesting that this hadn't been an "interview" at all . . . and carefully omitting any mention of the explosive content of Bush's reply to my question(even though Bush officials confirmed that the President-elect's positions were accurately contained in Figaro...

...At the end of the campaign, I was asked by Le Figaro of Paris to try to get an interview with Bush...

...This is part and parcel of the Post's systematic attempt to rewrite history, and it is right out of the pages of 1984...

...I expect this trend to continue, because the young are more conservative than their elders in this country (indeed, throughout the Western world...

...Hence, as Yardley writes, obscure authors get elevated to "first rank" status simply because they are women, or black, rather than because they wrote masterpieces...

...PARTING SHOTS by Michael Ledeen FT" his will be my final "Presswatch" 1. column and I want to thank Bob Tyrrell and the whole crowd for giving me the chance to look at the Fourth Estate for the past several years...

...With the exception of the Washington Times, no American newspaper noticed the Bush statement on loans . . . or so it seemed...

...What fascinated me was that so many of the newsies I talked to in the last days and hours of the campaign had come to believe their own mythology, which, in simple language, is a replay of the old "silent majority" theory that conservatives clung to a generation ago...

...I had asked whether Bush believed—as many do—that the West should "help" Gorbachev with loans, credits, and technology...

...I obtained from the Bush organization answers to writ32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1989 ten questions for the Vice President, one of which was of major importance...

...But the nerve of these people...

...Remember how the Goldwater people convinced themselves that there weremillions of Americans who, although they were ashamed to tell pollsters how they would really vote, would, on election day, deliver Barry to the White House...

...And good luck...

...become ever more radical when their messianic expectations are not fulfilled, so the media, thwarted in their efforts to swing the political culture of the nation ever further to the left, are becoming more shrill...

...Jonathan Yardley, the Post's Pulitzer Prize-winning literary critic, noticed an important element of this on November 21: . . . a good deal of thought patrol goes on in this country . . . Customarily, it has been policed by those on the right—McCarthyite anticommunists, religious fundamentalists, isolationists—but in recent years it has been the left that has been doing the bullying...

...So, rather than focus on the truly newsworthy content of the interview, the Post elected to take the low road of quibbling over whether a staff member's communication of answers to written questions to Vice President Bush qualified as an "interview...

...For those of you who followed the farcical efforts to deprive Bush of a "mandate," these words will echo as part of the Post's opening salvo against the Bush Administration...