9/05/00 6:35 p.m.
Is Adam Clymer That Bad?
Yes.

Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center.

eorge W. Bush has always faced two media strategies. One, engage the media head-on as a hostile force, and take their fire. Or two, charm the media by suggesting you're not the usual reporter-loathing Republican, and lament the bitter, uncivil tone of Washington, and take their fire as a flip-flopper the first time you whisper something negative.

Bush clearly chose Plan B, and the expected media reaction landed on Monday, when an open microphone caught him telling Dick Cheney that New York Times reporter Adam Clymer was a "major league a-hole." Network news programs quickly suggested a desperate Bush was losing control of his message. The most precious spin came from CBS star Bryant Gumbel, who declared "Bush may have taken yet another step backwards by sticking his foot in his mouth with a vulgar comment." That's quite a spin from a man recently caught calling conservative expert Bob Knight a "f---ing idiot," a remark that neither Gumbel nor CBS has had the decency to admit or deny.

Predictably, the network stars did not ask the question: Did Clymer deserve the bad rap? Times Executive Editor Joseph Lelyveld loyally underlined Clymer's decades of experience and claimed "His work is both fair and accurate." But that claim doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Here's a few reasons George W. Bush might not like Clymer's work.

Most recently, on August 29, Clymer trashed Bush's ad on a prescription drug benefit plan. Clymer declared that for accuracy, Bush's ad had "zero. . . . Political advertisements that are flat wrong in essential elements are rare, and that failing may handicap their effectiveness." Clymer decided Bush did not have a plan even if a plan would be announced shortly. On his website kausfiles.com, Mickey Kaus quickly called Clymer's critique "heavily biased against Bush. . . Ad-checking boxes that are as biased as this one are rare." Kaus also knocked an earlier Clymer piece on Bush's health record in Texas: "He seems so convinced that all civilized men would agree with him that he doesn't really bother to hide his viewpoint."

That article came on April 11. Clymer began with a flourish: "Texas has had one of the nation's worst public health records for decades. More than a quarter of its residents have no health insurance. Its Mexican border is a hotbed of contagion. The state ranks near the top in the nation in rates of AIDS, diabetes, tuberculosis and teenage pregnancy, and near the bottom in immunizations, mammograms and access to physicians. But since George W. Bush became governor in 1995, he has not made health a priority, his aides acknowledge." To feign balance, Clymer then talked to state health director Dr. William Archer, followed by other Texas sources making fun of Archer for being either misinformed or stupid.

On December 5, 1999, Clymer concluded a review of Bush's campaign biography by suggesting Bush was a lightweight: "One might criticize A Charge to Keep (taken from the title of a Methodist hymn of commitment to God) as a wasted political opportunity to explain a potential president. But that is Bush's problem. A greater concern is that this book is an honest reflection of all there is in a potential president."

Clymer was also less than sympathetic when the media was fishing around without evidence for answers about Bush's alleged drug use in the 1970s. That was nothing, Clymer insisted on August 21, 1999: "what he has been through this week does not even remotely compare with the interrogations faced by Senator Gary Hart before he dropped out of the Democratic race in 1987, or by Bill Clinton, who withstood accusations of adultery and draft-dodging before winning the Democratic nomination in 1992." Actually, reporters dutifully accepted Clinton's answers about both adultery and draft-dodging. Like many other outlets, the New York Times found no resonance when it was revealed a few months later that Clinton had received a draft notice and weaseled out of service.

But Clymer's story implied that unlike Hart or Clinton, Bush's hypocrisy resonated: "One reason for the resonance of the issue has been Mr. Bush's claim to success in fighting crime and drugs as Governor. In the state's prison system, 13,501 inmates are being held for convictions on various cocaine charges."

Some reporters may lean to the left, yet project respect for the right. Clymer is not one of those people.

His wider body of work is provides even clearer evidence of his smash-mouth partisan tendencies. Clymer's loving 1999 biography of Ted Kennedy insisted that the senior senator from Massachusetts is one of the all-time Senate greats: "his achievements as a Senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne. . . . He deserves recognition not just as the leading Senator of his time but also as one of the greats in the history of this singular institution."

As Janet Reno investigated the possibility of an independent counsel for Clinton's foreign fundraising, Clymer insisted Nixon and Reagan made Clinton look like Jimmy Stewart in this October 15, 1997 news story: "President Nixon was investigated for obstruction of justice. President Reagan was investigated for not telling investigators what he knew of the Iran-Contra scandal. President Clinton is being investigated for making telephone calls from the wrong room in the White House."

Perhaps Clymer's boldest attempt at Democratic party spear-carrying came on January 10, 1997, when he forwarded an illegally recorded cell-phone leak from Rep. Jim McDermott (D., Wash.) to try to force an abrupt end to Speaker Newt Gingrich's career by suggesting he was violating an agreement with the House ethics committee. Six days later, when the story's impact was less momentous than he hoped, Clymer complained the Democrats were not partisan enough: "Last weekend the Democrats effectively failed to make their case that the taped conversation, whatever its ancestry, showed that Mr. Gingrich had broken his promises to the ethics committee."

In every campaign season, the media trash candidates as lightweights, stiffs, extremists, dissemblers, and character assassins, all the while demanding politicians bring more civility to politics. When will reporters question whether Adam Clymer needs to "change the tone" of Washington reporting?