Team Bush declares war on the New York Times

During the closing weeks of the 2000 presidential campaign, at a campaign rally, George Bush spotted a veteran political reporter and turned to Dick Cheney, standing next to him on the platform, to remark: "There's Adam Clymer, major league asshole from the New York Times." "Oh yeah, big time," replied Cheney. Unbeknownst to them, their locker room exchange was caught by an open microphone. Four years later, nobody connected with the Bush-Cheney campaign appears even slightly concerned about being caught denigrating the Times; they are more than happy to do it on the record, as the White House has all but declared open warfare on the nation's leading newspaper. The latest volley came over the weekend when Republican campaign officials accused the Times's Sunday magazine of fabricating a provocative quote from Bush in which he bragged - behind closed doors and speaking to wealthy supporters - that he would announce plans for "privatising of social security" early next year, after his re-election. When Democrats jumped on the remark, dubbing it the "January surprise", the Republican National Committee chairman, Ed Gillespie, dismissed the Times's work as "Kitty Kelley journalism", insisting Bush had never uttered the phrase attributed to him. But the Times stands by the 8,300-word story by Ron Suskind, author of The Price of Loyalty: George W Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O'Neill, a revealing account of the former secretary of the treasury published earlier this year.

That confrontation, and the Bush campaign's harsh accusation that respected journalist Suskind and the editors of the Times are liars, come on the heels of a series of denigrations by the White House: the Times reporter was recently banned from Cheney's campaign plane; and in his acceptance speech before the Republican Convention Bush mocked the paper by distorting, out of context, one of its columnist's writings of almost 60 years ago. Early in his administration, Bush set the contentious tone when he broke with tradition by refusing to sit for an interview with the Times. He finally granted the paper a sit-down, just 30 minutes long, in August.

"Presidents like spin and secrets; journalists don't, so this is a relationship fraught with potential discomfort," says Times executive editor Bill Keller. He observes that the paper has dealt with difficult episodes with various White Houses in the past, but adds. "I admit we're puzzled over what seems to be a more intense antipathy at this White House, especially since the campaign heated up.

"I can only speculate, but some of it may be that they think whacking a big newspaper with 'New York' in its name plays well with the [conservative] base. Perhaps they think if they beat up on us, we'll go soft on them. Or maybe they have decided to blame the newsroom for our opinion pages, though they certainly know that the editorial writers and columnists operate completely independent of reporters and editors." (On Sunday, the Times published an endorsement of Senator John Kerry, in which it commented: "The Bush White House has always given us the worst aspects of the American right without any of the advantages. We get the radical goals but not the efficient management.")

The controversial quote from Suskind's story came near the end of a lengthy feature article, Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W Bush, which examines the extraordinary degree to which Bush and his senior aides rely on their "faith" and their "gut" to make key policy decisions, and how those who raise questions based on facts or "reality" are cut out of the inner circle. According to Suskind, Bush recently told a closed meeting of major contributors: "I'm going to come out strong after my swearing in with fundamental tax reform, tort reform, privatising of social security." Suskind reported that the statements were relayed to him by sources present at the event.

On Sunday the RNC sent out emails - 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 email: "Ron Suskind's reporting was carefully reported and vigorously fact-checked."

If Times readers did not already know the paper's relationship with the White House was in serious disrepair, they found out on September 18. That day, Times reporter Rick Lyman wrote a front-page piece about how, despite having been assigned by the country's most influential newspaper to cover Cheney's re-election campaign, he was not welcome on Air Force Two, where 10 seats were reserved for the travelling 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 criticising the "moral crisis" in the British and French sectors while reporting that Americans were doing a better job of reconstruction. She also urged the US 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 criticise 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 Frank Bruni, the beat reporter who travelled 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 drink-driving arrest.

During the period leading up 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 apologise 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 far 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 - tolerating the major mainstream press outlets despite misgivings or unhappiness with their coverage. The days when the Times publisher Arthur "Punch" Sulzberger Sr travelled to the White House during the height of the Reagan administration for a cordial lunch with the president, his vice-president, George Bush Sr, and the 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 do not feel like they have to deal with the gatekeepers," says Tifft. "They have taken advantage of cable channels and talk radio and websites that are sympathetic toward them. What they have 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 fight with the allegedly liberal press. That very point was made in Suskind's Times magazine article, which quoted Bush political consultant Mark McKinnon as saying: "All of you ... 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 two to one 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 LA 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!"

One night in 1880, John Swinton, a preeminent New York journalist, was the guest of honor at a banquet given him by the leaders of his craft. Someone who knew neither the press nor Swinton offered a toast to the independent press. Swinton outraged his colleagues by replying:
"There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it.
"There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty four hours my occupation would be gone.
"The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press?
"We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."

(Source: Labor's Untold Story, by Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, published by United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America, NY, 1955/1979.)

John Swinton was born in Salton, Haddingtonshire, Scotland, 12 December, 1830. He received his early education from his uncle, the Reverend Robert Currie, emigrated in 1843 to Canada, and afterward to the United States, with his family, learned the printer's trade in Illinois, and practiced it for some time in New York city. He then received a course of classical instruction at Williston seminary, Massachusetts, and afterward traveled extensively through the United States. Feeling an abhorrence for slavery, he left Charleston, South Carolina, where he resided at the time, in order to take an active part in the free-state contest in Kansas. He returned to New York city in 1857, and began the study of medicine. While thus engaged he contributed articles to the " Times," afterward accepted an editorial place on that paper, and soon became managing editor. During the absences of Henry J. Raymond he had the sole control, and wrote a large number of the leading articles. He resigned the post of managing editor at the close of the war, on account of impaired health, but continued his connection with the journal as an editorial writer till the death of Mr. Raymond. Subsequently he was managing editor of the New York "Sun." He became a leader in the movement for labor-re-forms, and in 1883 severed his connection with the "Sun" in order to expound his political and social views in a weekly journal that he called "John Swinton's Paper," which he ceased to publish in 1887.

As an aside, his brother his brother, William, was born in Salton, Scotland, 23 April, 1833, was educated at Knox college, Toronto, and at Amherst, with the intention of becoming a Presbyterian minister, and in 1853 began to preach, but adopted the profession of teaching. He was professor of ancient and modern languages at the Edgeworth female seminary, Greensborough, North Carolina, in 1853-'4, and afterward went to New York city to take a professorship in Mr. Washington collegiate institute. While in the south he contributed to "Putnam's Monthly" some critical and philosophical articles, and a series of etymological studies that were afterward published under the title of "Rambles among Words : their Poetry and Wisdom" (New York, 1859; London, 1861). Having previously contributed articles to the New York "Times," he was taken on the staff of that journal in 1858, and in 1862 went to the seat of war as a correspondent. He was equipped for this work by close study of military art, and he discussed tactical movements with such freedom that in 1864 General Ambrose E. Burnside, whom he had criticized in his letters, procured an order for his exclusion from the camps of the army. He also, at a later date, incurred the displeasure of General Grant. In 1867 he traveled through the southern states and collected material for a history of the war from the military and civil leaders of the Confederacy. Returning to the office of the "Times," he resumed the work of literary criticism, in which province he had gained a reputation before he became a war-correspondent. Before abandoning journalism, he published in newspaper articles and in a pamphlet an exposure of the machinations of railroad financiers to procure subsidies. In 1869 he became professor of belles-lettres in the University of California, where he remained for five years. Subsequently he made Brooklyn, New York, his residence, devoting himself to the composition of educational works, most of which were widely adopted in public and private schools. For a series of these, which cover most of the studies pursued in schools, he received a gold medal at the Paris exposition of 1867 "for educational works of remarkable originality and value."

In 1917, Congressman Oscar Callaway inserted the following statement in the Congressional Record:

"In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interests, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press of the United States.

These 12 men worked the problem out by selecting 179 newspapers and then began, by an elimination process, to retain only those necessary for the purpose of controlling the general policy of the daily press throughout the country. They found that it was only necessary to purchase control of 25 of the greatest papers. The 25 papers were agreed upon; emissaries were sent to purchase the policy, national and international, of these papers; an agreement was reached; the policy of these papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers...

This policy also included the suppression of everything in opposition to the wishes of the interests being served." Feb 9, 1917, vol 54, pp.2947-48

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