MediaWatch: January 1993

Janet Cooke Award: Time's Lance Morrow, Margaret Carlson Promote the Clintons

Man of the Year -- And Four More?

Of all the reasons Time named Bill Clinton its Man of the Year, perhaps the best is his skill in keeping political reporters in love with him all year. For their magazine's tribute to Clinton (and presumably the effect of its own year-long biased coverage), Time earns the January Janet Cooke Award.

Time began 1992 with the cover headline "Is Bill Clinton For Real? Why both hype and substance have made him the Democrats' rising star." In the same January 27 issue, Deputy Washington Bureau Chief Margaret Carlson introduced the candidate's wife: "Friends of Hillary Clinton would have you believe she is an amalgam of Betty Crocker, Mother Teresa, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. She gets up before dawn, even on weekends, and before her first cup of coffee discusses educational reform. She then hops into her fuel-efficient car with her perfectly behaved daughter for a day of good works." Carlson only moderated the picture slightly: "Fortunately....[Hillary] is more interesting than that."

The next issue of Time, which covered the one-week-and-punt Gennifer Flowers controversy, also plugged for the candidate. Senior Writer Lance Morrow wrote a scolding pro-Clinton defense titled "Who Cares, Anyway?" Morrow insisted: "If the public is going to behave like an idiot on the subject of sex, the candidate will naturally do almost anything to avoid telling the truth about any behavior less than impeccable. The issue of a candidate's sex life is essentially a phony....It is time for America to get serious. At the very least, turn off the television set. And grow up about sex."

Both of these writers returned in the Man of the Year issue. Morrow effectively summarized all of Time's biased campaign articles from 1992: "Clinton's campaign, conducted with dignity, with earnest attention to issues and with an impressive display of self-possession under fire, served to rehabilitate and restore the legitimacy of American politics and thus, prospectively, of government itself. He vindicated (at least for a while) the honor of a system that has been sinking fast. A victory by George Bush would, among other things, have given a two-victory presidential validation (1988 and 1992) to hot-button, mad-dog politics -- campaigning on irrelevant or inflammatory issues (Willie Horton, the flag, the Pledge of Allegiance, Murphy Brown's out-of-wedlock nonexistent child) or dirty tricks and innuendo (searching passport files, implying that Clinton was tied up with the KGB as a student)."

Time didn't notice the discrepancy between this grandiose claim and Special Correspondent Michael Kramer's article about Clinton's post-election strategy in the same issue. Of Clinton's pounding of the issue of tax avoidance by foreign corporations and claiming tougher enforcement would raise $45 billion in four years, Kramer wrote: "Among those who have studied this problem seriously, Clinton is the only person left who still thinks such a windfall is possible. `Ain't no way,' says [budget director designate Leon] Panetta. 'Maybe we'll get $3 billion a year -- if we're lucky.'" But neither Kramer nor Morrow called the foreign corporation tax a phony issue or demagogic rhetoric.

Morrow also typified the magazine's divergent views of this year's party conventions. "The President permitted [Pat] Buchanan, the man who tried to destroy him, to speak at the Houston convention during prime time. Buchanan delivered a snarling, bigoted attack on minorities, gays and his other enemies in what he called the `cultural war' and `religious war' in America. Buchanan's ugly speech, along with another narrow, sectarian performance by Pat Robertson, set the tone of right wing intolerance that drove moderate Republicans and Reagan Democrats away from the President's cause in November. If Houston represented the Republican Party, many voters said, they wanted out."

But a page later, Morrow extolled the Democratic conclave as a healing wonder: "Clinton, whose stepfather's violent alcoholism shaped his early life, and Gore, who often borrows recovery language and concepts, turned the Democratic convention last summer into a national therapy session and display case for personal trauma and healing. Gore dramatically retold the story of his son's near fatal accident and the effect on his family.

"The subtext of the recovery-and-healing line is that America is a self-abusive binger that must go through recovery. Thus: the nation borrowed and spent recklessly in the 1980s, drank too deeply of Reagan fantasies about `Morning in America' and supply-side economics. And now, on the morning after, the U.S. wakes up at the moment of truth and looks in the mirror. Hence: America needs the `courage to change' in a national atmosphere of recovery, repentance and confession."

In her article "The Dynamic Duo," Carlson returned to puffing Hillary and Bill: "She is the disciplined, duty-bound Methodist, carrying her favorite Scriptures around in her briefcase and holding herself and others to a high standard; he is a more emotional Baptist who sings in the choir and gets misty-eyed when he introduced his boyhood friend Mack McLarty as his new chief of staff...Perhaps a First Lady who consults lawbooks rather than astrologers doesn't look so frightening after all. And perhaps Bill Clinton, rather than seeming weak by comparison with his wife, has proved that it takes a solid, secure man to marry a strong woman."

In an interview with MediaWatch, Carlson criticized her colleagues for being too quick to jump on the incoming First Lady. "I think that she's probably going to make some mistakes, and we're going to see them and report them. God knows the press was absolutely waiting with bated breath for the tea-and-cookies [remark], and mischaracterized that. So the minute she stumbles, people are going to leap on that, including me....The tea-and- cookies remark was about ceremonial duties as the Governor's wife. And it was reported as f she was saying that in some general way, and she wasn't. They didn't want to report the next sentence. It's like the supermarket scanner with Bush."

When asked if she thought her coverage of Hillary could be described as tough, Carlson replied: "I think it's down the middle. I try to be that way....I don't have a brief for Hillary. I think some of the facts were wrong."

The average observer would have a tough time telling the difference between the work of the Clinton-Gore press team and Time. The question for the next four years becomes: Is Time selling Americans the news or selling them the Clintons?

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