Presswatch: Fancy Man Fever
Corry, John
"Presswatch: Fancy Man Fever" by John Corry Fancy Man Fever The polls now show that Bill Clinton is up, while the congressional Republicans are down. Meanwhile, the voters are supposed to be in a funk, bereft of...
...A Wall Street Journal editorial noted that when Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan made some "ambivalent remarks" about Bill Clinton's tax plan in 1993, they received "huge publicity as a pure endorsement of the entire Clinton budget...
...Powell suffering from depression to the press...
...and even when he was wrong, at least he appeared to know what he was talking about...
...As an example, the Times gave us The Bell Curve, the book by Charles Murray and the late Richard J. Herrnstein...
...The review, by Malcolm Browne, a respected science writer, recognized The Bell Curve as a serious piece of work...
...Paul Patton had "generated much excitement...
...But it is not hard to imagine it if the thought police prevail...
...Indeed, Powell himself dismissed them...
...according to the Times, the attack machine includes among its components the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, Free Congress Foundation, Concerned Women for America, American Enterprise Institute, and Eagle Forum, not to mention the Bradley, Olin, and Scaife trusts, as well as the Washington Times, Wall Street Journal editorial page, and, of course, this magazine...
...Just above Lewis on the op-ed page, however, Bob Herbert was declaring that "Republican politics in the age of Gingrich are not just mean, they are vicious" —"deliberately crafted" to hurt the poor and the helpless...
...Its metropolitan circulation is down, while that of Rupert Murdoch's New York Post is up, and its political posture makes it look like a member of an ancien regime whose dominoes are all falling...
...Robert Novak wrote that she was "Queen of the Senate...
...This is a formidable array of organizations, and many of them have something to say...
...Dole's long-time chief of staff is probably tough enough to eat rusty beer cans for breakfast, but we were meant to think of her as a battered woman...
...None may dare call that liberal bias, of course, so give the press an allowance, and say it was only distracted...
...Apparently, Murray had hidden the book's lack of merit by refusing to circulate its galleys before publication...
...When he gracefully removed himself from consideration as a presidential candidate, he said his wife's condition was "widely known," not only by their "circle of friends" but also by "many in the media...
...What had happened at the Times...
...As invective goes, this may seem pallid, but the Times insisted it was strong stuff...
...Then Phyllis Schlafly called her "Hillary-lite...
...Nonetheless, the headline in the Times the next day said: "Republican Drive Fails to Advance Around Country...
...The same day that Greenspan spoke, the New York Times wistfully reported on page one that Democrat Dick Molpus was in "striking distance" of Republican Gov...
...The Sunday magazine article manages never to discuss them in its fulsome twelve pages...
...Now Fordice won handsomely, of course, and as appalling as it must have seemed to the Times, the machismo probably worked in his favor...
...Whether anyone listens to the Times on these maters is moot...
...James Reston may have been dull,but he was never nasty...
...If the book was to be taken seriously, its findings might threaten many social programs, from remedial reading through job training to affirmative action...
...Murray was anathema to liberals, and it seemed inconceivable that The Bell Curve had not been trashed...
...On the other hand, when Greenspan gave what the Journal called a "thundering endorsement" to Republican budget proposals in a speech in November, the speech was not reported...
...Meanwhile, the voters are supposed to be in a funk, bereft of hope in the absence of Colin Powell, and eager to embrace none of the above...
...A Wall Street Journal columnist said she had "undue policy influence...
...The Sunday magazine is giving away the game here...
...The article, entitled "The Campaign to Demonize Sheila Burke," was a neat, though cheesy, trick...
...they rejected Fordice's "bombastic brand of Mississippi machismo...
...Intellectual integrity had been served by accident...
...They dealt only in prejudices, rudely expressed and dishonestly delivered...
...Members of the attack machine say things like "Slick Willie," "feminazi," and "quota queen...
...Neither Republican Larry Forgy nor Lt...
...The governorships of Kentucky and Mississippi were at stake, as well as seats in assorted state legislatures, and presumably the results would suggest which way the country was going...
...The Kentucky election, however, was hardly worth the notice...
...The fancy men are on a different track...
...However, one of the few thoughtful reviews The Bell Curve did receive in a major publication was in the Sunday book review of the Times...
...Rich's insinuations were untrue...
...It was only because of a clever marketing strategy, the article insisted, that the book attracted the attention it did...
...Murray had played a cheap stunt by not circulating the galleys...
...Conservatives were not demonizing Burke so much as the Times was finding a new way to demonize conservatives...
...it was the "attack machine" — a supposedly well-financed, rigidly ideological, and decidedly gamy network of organizations and individuals, all intent on turning moderate, respectable conservatism toward its own nefarious and somewhat batty right-wing ends...
...The Bell Curve had slipped through the cracks...
...Apparently, it reflected the attack machine's fear of "a woman's achieving power...
...After all, he wrote, it was "a rather remarkable coincidence" that at the same time they were criticizing Powell, someone "peddled" a story about Mrs...
...To emphasize the point, his column had a nice little subhead: "The right unpacks its dirty tricks...
...It knows something is happening, but it is unsure just what, and so it looks for a defensible position...
...Kirk Fordice in Mississippi...
...Democrat Patton, though, was hedging his bets...
...he had sneaked his pernicious book past the gatekeepers through fraud...
...Times fancy men impugn the motives and methods of the one side but never of the other...
...Meanwhile Patton, despite having invoked "our conservative agenda," appeared all over television saying Kentucky had said no to Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich...
...On the facing page, a Times editorial characterized Republican tactics to force Clinton to accept a budget resolution as "an ugly game of political coercion...
...Queen of the Senate, it said, was "a particularly loaded phrase...
...The magazine article's special contribution was to posit the threat as a huge amorphous blob, darkening the political atmosphere mostly by its screechy voice and bad manners...
...Indeed, they probably are downright dangerous...
...As the Times reported on page 12, Kentucky voters were apathetic...
...That Mrs...
...But surely Kentucky had not done that, and since the Republicans also came within one seat of winning the Virginia senate, even though they have never controlled a Southern legislature in this century, it would seem they did well in the elections...
...There was no more to it than that...
...Murray is part of the conservative attack machine, and none of its ideas ever matter...
...Consequently, the Times said, "there was a blizzard of uninformed speculation on whether blacks are at a genetic disadvantage to whites, reintroducing to public debate a subject once thought to have been safely buried...
...Fervor is more important than fact...
...In his final television debate with Forgy, he asked voters to support "our conservative agenda for the citizens of Kentucky...
...The book review editor later told colleagues she had no idea The Bell Curve would be so contentious...
...Actually, not much...
...It is hard to imagine a democratic society," he wrote, "doing otherwise...
...Molpus, it seems, was forging a coalition between black voters and white women, and whatever his appeal to blacks, it was obvious why he was attracting the women...
...P R ESSWATCH by John Corry FancyManFever The polls now show that Bill Clinton is up, while the congressional Republicans are down...
...In his commentary on Powell's departure, Anthony Lewis wrote that "incivility is a mild word for the ugliness that has increas54 January 1996 • The American Spectator ingly marked American politics...
...The conservatives who made up the attack machine seemed to lack any substantive ideas...
...The politicallyincorrect review attracted enormous attention...
...The Times has never shown much sympathy for Dole, or any special interest in his staffers, but in fancy-man journalism they can have their uses...
...Whether they were informed or not, the reviews were mostly hostile, and some were simply venomous...
...she had assigned it to a science writer because it seemed to be a book about science...
...The real subject of the magazine piece was not Burke...
...If the Times should ever swallow its pride and listen, its circulation might stop declining...
...But that was hardly an accurate description of the reception that greeted The Bell Curve...
...Frank Rich, in way over his head, accused "anonymous smear artists" of a "particularly loathsome" strike against Colin Pow-ell's wife...
...Powell takes antidepressants, Rich wrote, is "completely irrelevant to American politics, except, of course, to those bullies on the far right who hope they can keep General Powell out of the race with preemptive strikes below the belt...
...So much for the anonymous smear artists: it seems they never existed...
...According to the Times, this left the critics ill-equipped to heap the opprobrium on The Bell Curve that it deserved...
...Burke, the story said, ran afoul of the network— exactly how was not clear—and so it set out to ruin her...
...The Times said JOHN CORRY, a former New York Times media critic, is the author of My Times: Adventures in the News Trade (Grosset/G.P...
...A cover story in the Times Sunday magazine championed Sheila Burke, Bob Dole's chief of staff, as a victim of the "conservative attack machine...
...Rich suspected they were "the leaders of far-right GOP auxiliaries with pious names like the Christian Coalition and the Family Research Council...
...He also said he had no problem with the way it was disclosed in the press...
...The American Spectator • January x996 55...
...Putnam's Sons...
...The Times once prided itself on the civility of its discourse and its attention to issues...
...Fancy-man journalism rests on the premise of a right-wing threat, and often it takes pains to invent one...
...Browne concluded his review by saying a society that ignored the subject of human intelligence would do so "at its peril," and he pleaded for further discourse...
...His principal example was the "vitriol" that he said was being poured on Bill Clinton...
...Greenspan spoke five days before the recent elections...
...That would not do, of course, and assigning Browne to review the book rather than some tame academic was inconsistent with book review practice...
...In real life, however, they say much more than that...
...One way or another, things do look grim, and while it is no good blaming all this on the media, their behavior of late has been more mischievous than usual...
...A day later, Paul Weyrich upped this to "Clinton-lite...
...It also defends a decaying political system with whatever weapons it can muster...
...Skip ahead now a year and then some to "The Campaign to Demonize Sheila Burke...
...When Democrats used the same tactics on Reagan and Bush, the Times never said they were ugly...
...Forgy lost, although he got 49 percent of the vote in a state where neither of the last two Republican gubernatorial candidates had gotten more than 35 percent...
...The old order it represented is passing away, and the liberal fancy men who write for the paper's editorial and op-ed pages have hysteria in their voices...
...It reduces them instead to sound bites...
...The Times is explaining away an old mistake...
...This was not quite true, but the Times finds the conservative resurgence distasteful, and it looks for comfort where it can...
Vol. 29 • January 1996 • No. 1
