Clinton skewered amid baying of talk-show pundits
ONE hundred days and counting since the November 3 election, and the American news media haven't recovered their equilibrium. Like drug-starved addicts, they lurch single-mindedly from one story to the next, alternating between euphoria and depression, adoration and scorn.
Witness the love-hate coverage of Mr Clinton. On election night, the President-elect was painted with a halo of sainthood, cast as the man who could walk on water and balance the budget at the same time. Then, during the first phase of a rocky transition, he was upbraided by the same journalists for his inexperience.
A few weeks later the media flipped again and showered him with praise for his commanding performance at a two-day economic conference. Finally, a week before office, Mr Clinton was lambasted for breaking campaign promises and for chronic tardiness in keeping appointments.
The inauguration itself was a media love-fest, the sentimental coronation of an elected king, but no sooner had cleaning crews finished sweeping up the Mall than the press skewered the new president for trying to lift the ban on homosexuals in the military and nominating a law-breaker for Attorney General. (Her crime: hiring an illegal baby-sitter.) At this point, some commentators went so far as to suggest Mr Clinton was washed up. So what's wrong with the media? Why does the collective mood swing so violently? What would inspire otherwise intelligent journalists to pronounce, with ludicrous certainty, that a fledgling administration is ''mortally wounded'', and ''irreparably damaged'' one week, and ''on the right path'' the next? First we should say what the problem isn't. With a Democrat in the White House perhaps we can finally dismiss one long-standing explanation for the media's unrelenting aggressiveness: liberal bias.
There may, indeed, be a plurality of card-carrying Democrats among rank-and-file journalists (as there is among the population at large), but that does not hold for the media owners and publishers who pay their salaries. Besides, as flawed as the journalistic tribe may be, political loyalty is not among their professional sins.
No, the reasons for such tomfoolery lie elsewhere. I can think of two.