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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
On Sunday the RNC sent out e-mails -- one complete with Suskind's photo and voter registration information -- that attacked him professionally and said the passages in question were "third-hand, made-up quotes" designed to "scare seniors." But the editor of the Times magazine, Gerald Marzorati, told Salon in an e-mail: "Ron Suskind's reporting was carefully reported and vigorously fact-checked."
If Times readers didn't already know the paper's relationship with the White House was in serious disrepair, they found out on Sept. 18. That day Times reporter Rick Lyman wrote a Page 1 piece about how, despite having been assigned by the country's most influential newspaper to cover Cheney's reelection campaign, he was not welcome on Air Force Two, where 10 seats were reserved for the traveling press corps. None was available for him, or for the previous Times reporter assigned to the Cheney beat. Lyman's article, headlined "Chasing Dick Cheney," was written with a slightly tongue-in-cheek tone (as much irony as the still staid Times allows) but could not mask the strain between the paper and the White House -- the kind of rift usually kept from public view as administration and news officials exchange behind-the-scene phone calls to try to patch things up.
Cheney had already made clear this summer that he had no intentions of maintaining cordial relations with the Times when he blasted its coverage of the 9/11 commission as "outrageous" and "malicious."
And in August, during his convention acceptance speech, just 10 blocks from the Times newsroom, Bush derided the paper, suggesting it was a fount of wrongheaded pessimism: "In 1946, 18 months after the fall of Berlin to Allied forces, a journalist wrote in the New York Times, 'Germany is -- a land in an acute stage of economic, political and moral crisis. [European] capitals are frightened. In every [military] headquarters, one meets alarmed officials doing their utmost to deal with the consequences of the occupation policy that they admit has failed.' End quote. Maybe that same person is still around, writing editorials."
Bush was referring to Anne O'Hare McCormick, the pioneering, Pulitzer Prize-winning Times journalist. And he twisted her dispatch about Germany; in fact, she was criticizing the "moral crisis" in the British and French sectors, while reporting that Americans were doing a better job of reconstruction. She also urged the United States to commit more troops to the occupation. Times columnist Maureen Dowd, discussing the speech, wrote: "Bush swift-boated her."
"It takes a certain amount of gall to criticize the New York Times in the middle of Madison Square Garden, on the paper's home turf," says Susan Tifft, co-author with Alex Jones of "The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times."
On one level the Times seems an odd choice for the White House's wrath. During the 2000 campaign, despite Bush's "asshole" remark, the paper's coverage of the candidate was considered to be among the most generous of any of the major dailies, particularly the work of beat reporter Frank Bruni, who traveled extensively with the Bush campaign. In his book about that time, "Ambling Into History," published in 2002, Bruni wrote that while watching the first debate from the audience, he thought Bush had done so poorly that he was sure he had lost the election. Yet Bruni never mentioned his sinking feeling to readers during his generally upbeat coverage of the Bush campaign. The Times was also very reserved in its coverage of the exposure during the final weekend of the campaign of Bush's old drunken-driving arrest.
During the period leading to the Iraq war, the Times was instrumental in the administration's political choreography of its case that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, in particular that he was producing nuclear weapons. But this year, the newspaper felt compelled to essentially apologize for what amounted to its participation in an elaborate disinformation campaign. "The Times didn't cover itself in glory during that period," says Michael Massing, author of "Now They Tell Us: The American Press and Iraq." "The paper," he says, "was for too credulous towards the administration during the run-up to the war. The irony is the Times helped the administration's case before the war."
The Bush White House's open feud with the Times represents a clear break with the tradition of most Republican presidents, including the current president's father, of tolerating the major mainstream press outlets despite misgivings or unhappiness with their coverage. The days when Times Publisher Arthur "Punch" Sulzberger Sr. traveled to the White House during the height of the Reagan administration for a cordial lunch with the president, Vice President Bush and Secretary of State George Shultz are long gone. While President Nixon "had no love for the New York Times ... even he felt he had to deal with them. Bush officials don't feel like they have to deal with the gatekeepers," says Tifft. "They've taken advantage of cable channels and talk radio and Web sites that are sympathetic toward them. What they've basically done by words and deeds is to say to the New York Times, 'We don't need you. We can get our message out without you.'"
Bush and his campaign apparently see little political downside to a public us-vs.-them fight with the allegedly "liberal" press. That very point was made in Suskind's Times magazine article, which quoted Bush political consultant Mark McKinnon: "All of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don't read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it's good for us. Because you know what those folks don't like? They don't like you!"
