The press frets about Pelosi

By Eric Boehlert
Created Oct 25 2006 - 8:37am

During an October 22 profile of House Speaker-in-waiting Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)
on CBS' 60 Minutes, correspondent Leslie Stahl was busy fretting over
Pelosi's uncivil rhetoric and wondered how the Democratic leader could
possibly work with President Bush if her party prevailed in November.
Reading back some of Pelosi's quotes about the Bush administration being
"failed" and "arrogant" and -- gasp -- even criticizing the government's
inept response to Hurricane Katrina, Stahl insisted, "You're one of the
reasons we have to restore civility in the first place."

Pelosi disagreed, noting that rhetoric is the everyday language of political
debate in this country. And plus, she said, it was accurate. But an overly
anxious Stahl was unconvinced. "How does this raise the level of civility?"
she pressed.

Stahl is hardly alone when it comes to current-day hand-wringing over how
Democrats -- and Pelosi in particular -- will respond if they recapture
control of the House after 12 years in the minority. Time magazine worried
[0] that some Democrats "would undoubtedly try to use their majority power
to exact revenge for Republican overreach" in recent years. And MSNBC host
Norah O'Donnell went one better, demanding [0] Democrats go "on the record"
and "promise" that if they seize control of the House, they would not issue
subpoenas to the White House and make "the president's final two years in
office a living hell."

The flood of unsolicited advice about etiquette and manners coming
Democrats' way from Beltway insiders -- from the "make-nice crowd," as New
York Times columnist Paul Krugman calls them [0] -- rings hollow. The press
seems spooked that a Democratic victory would mean Congress would then
become too political, too partisan. Yet this is coming from the same Beltway
press corps that yawned while polarizing, partisan House Republicans, led by
Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-IL), discarded generations' worth of bipartisan
Capitol Hill traditions and protocol in order to radically alter the way the
legislative branch functions. But only now, with the specter of a Democratic
majority looming, do journalists consider partisanship to be a newsworthy
(and disturbing) issue.

The trend highlights two distinct media double standards on clear display
during the run-up to November. The first suggests that when Republicans are
in power, partisanship, even the jacked-up kind on steroids, is dubbed
healthy hardball. But if Democrats practice any (or even contemplate it),
that's deemed to be bad for democracy. The second is that Democratic Party
leaders are routinely held to a different press standard; a standard usually
constructed by Republican smears.

In this case, it's the false claim [0] that Pelosi is wildly unpopular and
out of the mainstream. It's those sorts of Republican talking points that
allow Today show co-host Matt Lauer to refer to Pelosi as "controversial"
without citing any reason for the unflattering description, as he did [0] on
October 20.

Not surprisingly, Fox News has become obsessed with Pelosi this campaign
season. Between September 19 and October 19, "Pelosi" was mentioned 330
times on Fox News, according to TVeyes.com, compared with 163 mentions on
MSNBC, and just 84 references on CNN. Fox News even found Pelosi's
little-known California congressional opponent and invited him on the air to
trash Pelosi's "San Francisco values." Meanwhile, Fox News host Sean Hannity
warned, "I don't think America has a clue who this woman is that would be
third in line to be president of the United States."

But does America have a clue, for example, who Sen. Mitch McConnell [0]
(R-KY) is? If Republicans manage to keep a thin majority in the U.S. Senate,
it's likely McConnell would replace Sen. Bill Frist (R-TN) as the Senate
leader. So why hasn't the press focused much attention on McConnell, a
fundraising machine who's badly out of step with a majority of Americans on
a whole range of issues, including teen smoking, the war in Iraq, and
regulating campaign contributions. Where are the "Is McConnell too
conservative?" cable-TV roundtable discussions and chat-fests? Where are the
news profiles that ask whether McConnell is a likable figure who can connect
with everyday Americans? A search of the Nexis database for news articles
and transcripts over the past 60 days that mention Mitch McConnell at least
five times retrieves 91 matches. But a similar search for news mentions of
Nancy Pelosi retrieves 493 matches.

Hastert as the Everyman

During the Bush years, Republican leaders of Congress have mostly been
shielded from aggressive press coverage. (The flamboyant -- and currently
indicted -- former Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX) was a notable exception to the
rule.) Just look at the mountain of fawning media clips Speaker Hastert
managed to assemble, most of which paint the enviable portrait of him as a
good ole boy, a sort of Accidental/Anti-Politician. U.S. News & World Report

dubbed him [0] "The Steady-Handed Hastert," while the Associated Press
described him [0] as "jovial," "low-key" and a "distinctly middle-American
politician" with "a reputation for courtesy and politeness." And that was
after the Foley scandal broke.

Indeed, try to find an article about Hastert in which his long-gone days as
wrestling coach aren't mentioned. It's as if Beltway newsroom keyboards are
hot-wired to spit out the phrase, "Hastert, a former schoolteacher and
wrestling coach ..."

"Hastert has absolutely gotten a pass from the press," says Thomas Mann, a
veteran, nonpartisan Congress watcher and co-author of the book Broken
Branch: How Congress is Failing America and How to Get It Back On Track [0]
(Oxford University Press, August 2006). "The image of Hastert as just a
regular guy who would never do any harm to the institution of Congress, that
everybody likes him. I think that has cushioned him from more rigorous
coverage."

Despite his almost grandfatherly press image, Hastert has acted as an
aggressive (radical?) partisan throughout his time in office, even stepping
in to personally remove the chairman and two Republican members from the
House ethics committee after they rebuked DeLay for misconduct. And don't
forget that during the final push of the 2004 campaign, Hastert publicly
attacked liberal donor George Soros, floating the idea that the billionaire
financier (and Holocaust survivor) is subsidized by overseas drug cartels.
(Hastert cribbed the loony allegation [0] from Lyndon LaRouche.)

The unspoken truth about Hastert, according to Noam Scheiber [0] at The New
Republic, is that the speaker is "a bumbling half-wit," a fact the Beltway
press politely avoids addressing. "Reading back over the last several years
of Hastert coverage, one is astonished by the lengths to which reporters go
to avoid outing him as a guileless nincompoop," Scheiber recently wrote.

Mann says the soft press coverage also cushioned Hastert from serious
questions surrounding a recent, sweetheart land deal of his, first
highlighted by the Chicago Tribune. (The deal ballooned Hastert's wealth to
more than $6 million; so much for his modest, good-ole-boy roots.) To date,
the national press corps hasn't shown the slightest interest in the details
of Hastert's miraculous land deal, in which he pocketed a 500 percent profit
in just four years' time, thanks entirely to the fact that Hastert used the
power of the speaker's office to personally ram through legislation that
directly increased the value of his own land holdings. Does that sound like
news to anyone? (Read the astonishing details here [1].)

Yet as Media Matters for America recently noted [1], CNN devoted 50 times as
much coverage to a recent allegation about a land deal by a prominent
Democrat, Sen. Harry Reid (NV), as compared to the allegations against
Hastert.

Corruption or hardball?

Set aside Hastert's get-rich-quick scheme. The real story of Hastert's
reign, and the one that has been criminally underreported, is the
extraordinary transformation Congress witnessed under his control, when
party leaders who saw themselves as White House lieutenants rather than
independent legislators literally rewrote the way laws are made in this
country, mostly to ensure that Democrats had no say in the process. Writing
in the current issue of Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi spells out [1] what so
many reporters have avoided discussing for years:

The Republicans who control this Congress are revolutionaries, and they
have brought their revolutionary vision for the House and Senate quite
unpleasantly to fruition. In the past six years they have castrated the
political minority, abdicated their oversight responsibilities mandated by
the Constitution, enacted a conscious policy of massive borrowing and
unrestrained spending, and installed a host of semipermanent mechanisms for
transferring legislative power to commercial interests. They aimed far lower
than any other Congress has ever aimed, and they nailed their target.

The sweeping changes instituted were radical, damaging, and clearly
newsworthy, yet for years the national reporters yawned, doing a dismal job
explaining how drastic the transformation on Capitol Hill was. "Their
attitude was, 'That's hardball, that's how it works. Our job is to tell them
who won and who lost,' " says Mann, who complains that the press even
ignored obvious, brewing scandals up on the Hill. "Everybody in town knew
about [disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack] Abramoff, yet most national
reporters and editors did not do anything. It was really quite stunning."
(Note that for years the Beltway press collectively boycotted [1] reporting
on the GOP's crooked K Street Project.)

And yet even today, when journalists belatedly address the ways of the
Republican Congress, it's done in an overly naive and understated manner.
For example, last week The Washington Post reported [1], "For years,
Republicans have been mostly deferential in scrutinizing the Bush
administration." [Emphasis added.] If, by "mostly deferential," the Post
meant that Republicans, after issuing more than 1,000 subpoenas while
investigating the Clinton administration during the 1990s, have yet to issue
a single subpoena as part of their oversight of the Bush administration,
then yes, Congress has been "mostly deferential."

Following Foleygate, Time magazine took a timid look [1] at life in Congress
under recent Republican rule: "Far more than in the past, they brought bills
to the floor with no chance of amendment and allowed the normal
appropriations process to be circumvented so that pet projects could be
funded without scrutiny." It's all true -- Democrats have essentially been
barred from introducing legislation (via amendments) for the past six years.
But why didn't the magazine report the phenomenon in real time? Searching
the Nexis database, I cannot find a single previous article published in
Time that detailed the extraordinary measures taken by the arrogant Hastert
Congress to ensure that Democrats were clinically neutered.

And that's to say nothing of the GOP's naked abuse of power:

a.. In July 2003, hothead Rep. Bill Thomas (R-CA) summoned [1] the Capitol
Police to disperse Democrats who were meeting in the House library.
b.. In November 2003, desperate to pass Bush's Medicare prescription plan,
the normal 15-minute final House vote was held open [1] for nearly three
hours while Hastert broke tradition by lobbying on the floor of the House
himself during the vote. Keep in mind that back in 1987, when
then-Democratic Speaker Jim Wright of Texas extended a crucial vote for an
extra 10 minutes, Republicans went bonkers, claiming abuse of power.
c.. In June 2005, Rep. James F. Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-WI), chairman of the
House Judiciary, became so annoyed with the questioning taking place during
a hearing on the USA Patriot Act that he shut the hearing down [1], turned
off the microphones as well as the lights, and stormed out of the room with
the gavel in his hand.
In truth, the wildly partisan Hastert Congress should have been a godsend
for reporters eager for muckraking and detailing and all kinds of
institutional abuses of power. Instead, reporters snoozed. Only now are they
being roused in time to fret about whether Democrats, and Pelosi, will play
fair.
_______

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson