n the waning days of his failing 1992 campaign against Bill Clinton, the incumbent president used the slogan, ''Annoy the media, reelect George Bush.'' In the late stages of his losing 1996 race against Bill Clinton, Bob Dole tweaked the media, most notably The New York Times, for giving him short shrift.
Now, in the stretch run of the 2000 campaign, we have a new twist. The quadrennial charge of media bias is surfacing from the other flank, the liberal/Democratic side of the spectrum.
Writing on MSNBC's Web site, commentator Eric Alterman argues that the ''media have given George Bush a pass on pretty much everything that matters in a president.'' That echoes a recent critique by Slate.com editor Michael Kinsley, who cited ''journalists' reluctance to call someone who may well be our next commander in chief a moron.'' Writing in yesterday's New York Times, columnist Paul Krugman complained that ''reporters have failed to call Mr. Bush to account on even his most outrageous misstatements.''
Given the growing chorus charging the media with overlooking concerns about Bush's competence, CNN's ''Reliable Sources'' tackled the matter Sunday, with the Los Angeles Times's Doyle McManus dismissing the idea as ''liberal claptrap.''
Frankly, he's right. Bush's gray matter has gotten plenty of media attention, just as Gore's shifting personas and claims require scrutiny. Given recent history, the bias charge may well reflect desperation by Gore supporters (or Bush haters) who fear the Nov. 7 verdict. But the mere fact that it's the left that's now crying foul - along with some empirical evidence that Gore is getting the tougher coverage - may finally marginalize the hoary old war cry of liberal media bias. That would surely be one positive outcome of the campaign.
On Tuesday, the Washington-based Committee of Concerned Journalists released a study analyzing more than 1,100 campaign stories from 17 media outlets (including TV, newspaper, and Internet sites) for three weeks in September and October. One key conclusion: ''George W. Bush was twice as likely as Gore to get coverage that was positive in tone.''
An earlier committee study also found that ''George W. Bush has had the better of it on the question of character'' since journalists were far more likely to pick up on Bush's core theme of compassionate conservativism and reform than they were to trumpet Gore's pet theme of competence and experience.
In explaining the results of this week's survey, the committee's associate director, Amy Mitchell, says, ''The most prominent issue covered [in the three weeks studied] was the debate. Most of the coverage of debates was about performance and Gore got the worst of it.'' Asked if there were any underlying reasons for the tenor of coverage, Mitchell said, ''It's hard to tag the whole media universe, but clearly I think that coverage of Gore has been more negative.''
But content studies are only random snapshots, completely dependent on the content studied. The Washington-based Center for Media and Public Affairs (whose president, Robert Lichter, coauthored a book, ''The Media Elite,'' that became a bible for believers in liberal media bias) tracks political stories on the nightly network newscasts. Monitoring comments made by nonpartisan sources, it found that ''every week save one since Labor Day, Gore has received more favorable coverage,'' according to the center's media director, Matthew Felling.
Still, the overall spread between the two candidates' coverage (38 percent positive for Gore to 35 percent positive for Bush) is marginal, says Felling, adding that ''claims of media bias in this campaign have been a little louder on the left [since] coverage is just more critical than Democrats have been accustomed to in recent years.'' Asked if Gore's slightly better shake might reflect liberal bias, Felling counters that bias ''is in the beholder.''
Those beholders have been blaming the liberal media for so long that their own biases are proving hard to shake. In September, a survey for Editor & Publisher magazine found that more than 50 percent of Bush's supporters believe in a media tilt, and of that group, about 80 percent thought Gore was the beneficiary. In October, a Pew Research Center survey revealed that 43 percent of the Republican respondents thought the media were being unfair to Bush, 66 percent thought journalists often let their political views get in the way of their coverage, and 67 percent thought most journalists were rooting for Gore.
To be sure, much of the infrastructure for demonizing journalists as liberal toadies remains intact. That includes the Virginia-based Media Research Center, which posts daily examples of what it considers egregious liberal bias in campaign coverage. Also factor in the emergence of the Fox News Channel, whose slogan ''We Report, You Decide,'' is a shrewd way of accusing its competitors (notably CNN) of liberal bias while the Fox operation - run by former Republican guru Roger Ailes - leans noticeably to the right.
One election - or a whole slew of content analyses by the Committee of Concerned Journalists - will not quickly change minds at Fox, the Media Research Center, or among Republican partisans. But if enough Democrats start screaming about pro-Bush bias, we might have the ingredients for a truce that finally buries this nonissue and returns the focus to the more meaningful failures of American journalism.
