he Hotline political tipsheet labeled it ''The November Surprise'' as the story of George W. Bush's 1976 drunken driving arrest dominated headlines yesterday and threatened to ripple into the weekend political talk-show circuit and reverberate to election day.
''I would say it was pretty much on the level of a 100-year storm,'' said Hotline editor Craig Crawford, of the intense media interest. ''If you look at the morning news shows, it was wall-to-wall. To me, the [cable] news channels remind me of the scandal revelations of the Clinton years.''
There were tart tabloid headlines, like the New York Post's ''D-Dubya-I.'' By late afternoon, Yahoo!News' online poll asking whether the story was relevant had generated 190,000 responses. Then there was the drumbeat of cable and broadcast television.
The news commandeered the opening minutes of all three network newscasts last evening, with each outlet playing it as a potentially pivotal event with unpredictable impact. ABC's Dean Reynolds warned that ''the whole episode has added a dose of uncertainty to the Bush campaign ... at the worst possible moment.'' CBS examined whether the episode raised damaging questions about the ''truthfulness'' of the GOP candidate. On NBC, anchor Tom Brokaw asked Al Gore during a live interview whether Gore had any skeletons in his closet.
For a story of this magnitude ''to explode with four days left in the election kind of sucks up all the media oxygen,'' said Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz on an edition of CNN ''Talkback Live.'' And some observers suggested, half-jokingly, that in a grinding election bereft of much excitement, journalists might have been eager to seize on a scandal story.
The media ''have been bored for six weeks,'' noted political analyst Steve Stark. ''This is like a gift from heaven.''
Larry Sabato, author of ''Peep Show: Media and Politics in the Age of Scandal,'' said the Bush revelation ''is absolutely a legitimate story,'' but not worthy of Page 1. And he detected a difference between how print and TV treated the news.
''I think people tuned in and saw the cable networks hype it as World War III,'' he said. ''I think the print people looked at that and said `not on your life.'''
To be sure, the tabloids had a field day. The ew York Daily News chose ''George DWI,'' as its screaming front headline and the Boston Herald splashed with ''Dubya Trouble.'' The Washington Post played the story above the fold on the front page. Others, however, gave it less prominent treatment. USA Today mentioned the arrest on Page 1, but ran the main story on Page 11. The Boston Globe synopsized the news in three paragraphs on Page 1 and published the full story on Page 25. The New York Times also noted the arrest on the front page, but ran the story well inside the paper.
And even as TV pundits began debating the story's political significance, media analysts were discussing whether journalists were guilty of overkill. While the news was broken by a Portland, Maine, TV station, the Associated Press reported yesterday that the Portland Press Herald had actually learned of the arrest several months ago and that an assignment editor there decided it was not relevant enough to publish.
''I think it's absolutely a front page story,'' said Hotline's Crawford. ''Because it wasn't revealed [earlier], the issue becomes the handling of it, not the incident itself.''
''It's not a huge story,'' countered CNN analyst William Schneider. ''It's really a one-day story unless the tributaries lead somewhere. [But] you ask me who's to blame for this? George W. Bush. They should have let this out months ago.''
''Bush has alluded to problems in the past,'' added Carl Gottlieb, deputy director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. ''You wonder why an aggressive press hasn't turned this up sooner ... The question is, what else will turn up?''
Yesterday, the initial story had already splintered off into some unpredictable subplots. A Dallas Morning News reporter said that during an earlier interview, Bush denied being arrested after 1968. And after a Democratic activist emerged as the source for the 1976 arrest story, the Bush campaign called its unearthing at this late date a ''dirty trick.''
''You see where this is going,'' said Schneider as the story took new turns yesterday. ''The other part of this is whether any of this can be connected to Gore.''
Sabato thinks that when the dust finally clears, the big loser in all this may be the media. Yesterday, at a local convenience store, he ran into one voter who offered this opinion of the latest frenzy: ''You know, the press just loves this stuff and the people just hate it.''
