Posted on 10/06/2003 3:50:25 AM PDT by calcowgirl
Arnold Groped Us! Six Women's Horror Stories"
"Schwarzenegger Shocker: I Admire Hitler."
No, these scoops did not appear first in the supermarket tabloids The National Enquirer, The Star or The Globe. The news breaks, albeit with significantly more subdued headlines, actually came from mainstream news organizations like The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and ABC News.
The top supermarket tabloids, as of Sunday morning, had let such news about Mr. Schwarzenegger alone, content in the last seven weeks of the California recall campaign to stick to the ups and downs of Ben and J. Lo or Demi and Ashton.
Like everything related to the election Tuesday, the news media landscape has turned topsy-turvy.
Two forces are at play in the apparent role reversal, newspaper editors, television executives and journalism critics say.
Mainstream news outlets, like the candidates themselves, are struggling with a shorter-than-usual campaign. While it forces candidates to find new and quicker ways to convey their message in a cluttered field, the compressed campaign propels the news media to present potentially explosive articles closer to Election Day than they might prefer.
And past hesitance among some news organizations to break big news about a leading candidate close to Election Day seems to be ebbing in the news environment of three major 24-hour cable news networks and the Internet.
As for the tabloids, executives and editors at American Media, which owns The Star, The Globe, The Weekly World News and The National Enquirer, say they have not published many articles about Mr. Schwarzenegger because they have simply not found news to break and because accusations about his groping of women are not new. David Perel, editor of The Enquirer, said Friday in an interview that his staff had been trying to dig up sensational news about Mr. Schwarzenegger, so far unsuccessfully.
But on Sunday afternoon, The Enquirer’s Web site posted an article with the headline, “Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Love Child Scandal,” elaborating on claims in The Daily Mail of London that he had fathered a child out of wedlock, which he and the woman the newspaper identified as the child’s mother denied.
Before this, American Media outlets had not been Schwarzenegger-free. Last month, the company published a glowing tribute magazine dedicated to him, called “Arnold, the American Dream.”
In late August, The Star published a gushing article about his marriage to Maria Shriver. It read, in part: “She’s the daughter of an American political dynasty. He’s the son of an Austrian cop who was also a Nazi. She was a brain. He was Mr. Universe. But somehow their marriage is a stunning success.”
And The Weekly World News recently revealed on its cover a previously unreported endorsement for Mr. Schwarzenegger, “Alien Backs Arnold for Governor.”
But there is no shortage of conspiracy theories about the glowing coverage, offered by people within American Media and without. The leading theory, offered recently in The San Jose Mercury News and The Los Angeles Times, holds that American Media is loath to upset Mr. Schwarzenegger because of his ties to the fortunes of the company’s latest acquisition, Weider Publications, which publishes Men’s Fitness, Flex and Muscle & Fitness.
Not only is Mr. Schwarzenegger close to the Weider founder, Joe Weider, who is credited with bringing him to America in 1968, he is also an important selling tool for muscle magazine covers. Tarnishing that image could alienate readers and Mr. Schwarzenegger himself.
Adding credence to the tabloid blackout theory are comments attributed to Mr. Weider in The Daily News, that American Media’s chief executive, David J. Pecker, promised him in merger discussions last winter, “We’re not going to pull up any dirt” on Mr. Schwarzenegger.
Mr. Pecker said in an interview that he had not promised Mr. Weider preferential treatment for Mr. Schwarzenegger. He acknowledged that The Enquirer’s past coverage of Mr. Schwarzenegger had come up — namely a report in 2001 when he was considering a run for governor that said that he had had an affair.
Mr. Pecker said that Mr. Weider mentioned that Mr. Schwarzenegger might again consider running for governor and asked whether The Enquirer was planning to write more harmful articles. He said that he answered that he did not know of any new accusations against Mr. Schwarzenegger, and that he did not plan to rehash old ones.
"When I cut that deal, what I said at that time was that I'm not going to rerun stories that were run before because our readership has no interest in them," he said. Eric Weider, Mr. Weider's nephew, was present at the discussion and backed Mr. Pecker's version of events.
For all the head scratching in news media circles about the dearth of Schwarzenegger news in the tabloids, others expressed surprise that mainstream news outlets had released such tough articles about him so close to the vote.
Tom Rosenstiel, director for the Project for Excellence in Journalism said it was a change in how mainstream news organizations approach election news this late in the race.
“I think there is a traditional kind of window of two weeks, usually, that news organizations have considered a place at which you don’t drop a bomb on a candidate because you want to have some time for a scandal to sort itself out,” he said. “That traditional window, like a lot of press mores, appears to be changing.”
There is no consensus, however, about how to handle campaign-altering news close to an election. In 1992, The Washington Post held an article about sexual harassment charges against Senator Bob Packwood until three weeks after he won re-election. He ultimately resigned while an investigation into the matter picked up steam.
Leonard Downie Jr., executive editor of The Washington Post, said the article was delayed only because it was not ready.
The news media at large did not hesitate when two Maine television stations unearthed the news a few days before the 2000 election that George W. Bush had been fined for drunken driving in 1976. Most major news outlets followed it — which Bush aides have said cost him votes.
California political analysts said the groping accusations against Mr. Schwarzenegger reported last week in The Los Angeles Times would hurt him with some voters. The Schwarzenegger campaign has called the timing of the article “suspicious” and referred to it as “dirty politics” — an insinuation that it came from the campaign of Gov. Gray Davis. The Los Angeles Times said it contacted the six women on its own.
John S. Carroll, The Los Angeles Times editor, said, “I’d prefer to have done it a month earlier, but we didn’t have even a shred of a story a month earlier. We put it in the paper on the very first day it was ready.”
He added that he would have published it on Election Day, if it had come to that. “I don’t consider it my business to judge the political impact of what the paper publishes,” Mr. Carroll said. “That’s up to the politicians. But it is a paper’s job to disclose anything it knows that bears on a candidate’s fitness for office — before Election Day, not after.”
Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, said the newspaper might have held off from publishing its article about a book proposal that quoted the young Mr. Schwarzenegger expressing some admiration for Hitler if it had not been ready by Friday.
“You don’t want to drop this the day before the election,” Mr. Keller said. “We sort of had in our mind the notion that if we reached the weekend, then we probably wouldn’t have run the story.”
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Interesting... I wonder though, there seems to be more accusations coming still maybe they should have held the story for another couple of months so they could get all the incidents!
Or did they have some sort of deadline they were working against? Hmmmmm, can anyone think of a reason they needed to report the story now instead of a couple months or even a couple of weeks from now?
Hmmmm, curiouser and curioser....
Campaign finance reform is around the corner.
Why anyone subscribes to the NY or LA Times is the question.
But The Times was so eager to publish negative news about Arnold it ran the story even though it wasn't ready, didn't you Bill. You misstated what Arnold said about Hitler getting it exactly 180 degrees wrong, didn't you Bill. You had to retract the smear, didn't you Bill.
WRONG. WRONG AGAIN!!
Usually the left dominated media has chosen to ignore rumors of bimbo manhandling by leftist democrats like Clinton and Condit. Only the tabloids would touch it when it was a halo wearing Democrat.
Now they have a couple of rumors about a REPUBLICAN!!! WOW!!! Now there's something.
Just another vivid demonstration of the true bias of the press. It's amazing that the NY Times is even pointing it out... then they try to spin it differently.
So the story behind the story is...
Newsweek will kill the story about Monica... why?
The LA Times will hold a story about a Republican for release just before an election? Why?
Oh, and they didn't have 24-hour news networks when Clinton and Condit were raping and killing? CNN has been around since well before the Clinton gang was around. The Internet has been with us since the mid nineties. (1993 by my counting, but you can say 1995 when Netscape made it prevalent.)
How about the truth this time? The press suppresses damaging stories when they are about liberal Democrats. When there is a damaging rumor, or even a lie that can be somewhat plausibly twisted... this should be held and released JUST BEFORE AN ELECTION where the Republican is deemed to have a chance.
Mr. Dalrymple states that Bobby Ann has disappeared from Little Rock and both her sister and mother now refuse to discuss the matter. They have not taken out a "missing person's warrant." Thus it is safe to assume that they know where she is. Little Rock sources have informed this publication that she now lives in Australia where Danny, now age 13, is attending a private school. Dalrymple charges that the liberal media refuses to report this story and is thus helping Clinton as part of a "massive cover-up." He says that a politician could never get away with this in England. 
Let's see the times run the above story? Let's see it run a story on Hillary's bribe from Tyson's Chicken before her Presidential bid.
This article is just more lies and spin from the NY Times. Another attempt to point out egregious evidence of extensive media bias and describe it as something else. Again, telling people what to think.
"Oh, it's all because of 24 hour cable news and the Internet!" As if they were invented just last week. Right.
One wonders of Goebbels works there. After all, this is a manifestation of the formula devised by the arch Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels: "Invent the lie and repeat it often enough and it becomes the truth, no matter what the facts actually are." .
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