Democrats complain of media bias

Democrats in Congress claim the mainstream print and broadcast media are giving the Bush administration and Republican leaders on the Hill a free ride.

These lawmakers complain that the press holds President Bush to a much lower standard of accountability than it did President Clinton. Bush’s predecessor weathered such media firestorms as Whitewater, Travelgate, and Monica Lewinsky.

Last month Democrats on the homeland security department held a press conference to highlight issues they called “of highest importance to our national security,” specifically that “the Department of Homeland Security is broken and needs to be fixed.”

Few reporters covered the event.

“We criticized the [department] and nobody showed up,” said Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), a member of the committee: “It’s very frustrating because people are asking us ‘Why aren’t you speaking out about things?’”

“The media institutionally is lazy, the news hole has shrunk, and there’s the corporatization of newspapers. They now put out newspapers to make money, They’re not making money to put out newspapers.”

The limited space allotted to government is nearly monopolized by the president and his efforts to fight terrorism, Frank believes.

Frank said if issues were more broadly discussed, “we’d be on the majority side.”

Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), who last year served as assistant to the minority leader, said the press needs to do a better job of probing and evaluating Republican policies.

“I think the media has the responsibility to … probe the ambiguous and ask the second, and third and fourth questions,” she said. “There’s been a lot of one-question stories being written.”

“I sent a letter to the president two days before we went to war in Iraq,” said Rep. Henry Waxman (Calif.), ranking Democrat on the Government Reform Committee. “It said ‘How could he say Saddam Hussein imported uranium when it was not true and the intelligence people knew it?’

“I put that in the letter and sent it around to the press, and there was no coverage,” he said.

Marvin Kalb, a former CBS and NBC diplomatic correspondent and senior fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, said Democratic complaints have some basis in reality.

“Their frustration is so deep that they attack the media,” Kalb said, adding: “There’s a genuine feeling on the part of many critics that the media went wild with Clinton and Lewinsky and the Clinton exit and the pardons and a whole range of other factors and that they’re giving Bush a free pass. There’s some merit to that.”

Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), a four-term veteran, marveled at the amount of positive press coverage Bush received for arriving on the deck of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln in a jumpsuit.

“There is the president’s obvious politicking on an issue, I wonder what [the press] would have done if Bill Clinton was in office,” Lautenberg said, an implicit reference to Bush’s handling of the war on terrorism. “They would have taken him to task.”

“The question is where’s the balance, where’s the fairness?” said Lautenberg. “We work hard to fashion policy that we can propose to the people, and it seems to get ignored.”

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) said: “I believe the press seems to have a different standard for Mr. Bush than for Mr. Clinton. They are simply not getting through to ask the tough questions.”

“This White House has made it known to everyone if you cross them you won’t have access, you won’t have any resources, you’ll be cut out of things,” he said. “The press corps in Washington likes to be invited to the White House, rub elbows with officials and get a leak now and then.”