The Official Media versus the GOP

FOUR days after Bill Clinton linked conservative talk radio to the Oklahoma bombing, AP reporter Tom Raum delivered one of the most inane comments ever to come from the national press: “No one is suggesting Clinton is using the tragedy for political opportunity.” To be sure, Clinton had not named Rush Limbaugh or any other talk-show host—so why did everyone in the press? Because the media see the Tim McVeighs of the world as the militant extension of political conservativism. Never before, not during the days of Goldwater or even Reagan, have the liberal media exhibited such contempt for the Republican Party in general and conservatives in particular. Clinton didn’t have to name conservatives; he could count on the national media to do it for him.

That’s exactly what CBS’s Bob Schieffer was suggesting when he asked the White House chief of staff, “Mr. Panetta, there’s been a lot of antigovernment rhetoric, it comes over talk radio, it comes from various quarters. Do you think that that somehow has led these people to commit this act? Do they feed on that kind of rhetoric? And what impact do you think it’s had?” It’s what Time’s senior writer Richard Lacayo had in mind when he wrote, “In a nation that has entertained and appalled itself for years with hot talk on the radio and the campaign trail, the inflamed rhetoric of the Nineties is suddenly an unindicted co-conspirator.” Washington Post reporter Juan Williams agreed. “It seems to me that you have angry white men here, sort of in their natural state, gone berserk,” he suggested on CNN’s Capital Gang. “This is the essence of the angry white men taken to some extreme, some fanatic extreme, and I will grant you that. But it’s the same kind of idea that has fueled so much of the rightwing triumph over the agenda here in Washington.”

LB

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L. Brent Bozell III

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FOUR days after Bill Clinton linked conservative talk radio to the Oklahoma bombing, AP reporter Tom Raum delivered one of the most inane comments ever to come from the national press: “No one is suggesting Clinton is using the tragedy for political opportunity.” To be sure, Clinton had not named Rush Limbaugh or any other talk-show host—so why did everyone in the press? Because the media see the Tim McVeighs of the world as the militant extension of political conservativism. Never before, not during the days of Goldwater or even Reagan, have the liberal media exhibited such contempt for the Republican Party in general and conservatives in particular. Clinton didn’t have to name conservatives; he could count on the national media to do it for him.

That’s exactly what CBS’s Bob Schieffer was suggesting when he asked the White House chief of staff, “Mr. Panetta, there’s been a lot of antigovernment rhetoric, it comes over talk radio, it comes from various quarters. Do you think that that somehow has led these people to commit this act? Do they feed on that kind of rhetoric? And what impact do you think it’s had?” It’s what Time’s senior writer Richard Lacayo had in mind when he wrote, “In a nation that has entertained and appalled itself for years with hot talk on the radio and the campaign trail, the inflamed rhetoric of the Nineties is suddenly an unindicted co-conspirator.” Washington Post reporter Juan Williams agreed. “It seems to me that you have angry white men here, sort of in their natural state, gone berserk,” he suggested on CNN’s Capital Gang. “This is the essence of the angry white men taken to some extreme, some fanatic extreme, and I will grant you that. But it’s the same kind of idea that has fueled so much of the rightwing triumph over the agenda here in Washington.”