Nick Jimenez

Sunday, September 10, 2000

Pols just love to beat up on journalists

There are not many classes of people one can safely abuse these days. The Communists (they were so feared that they took the capital) were once good for a thorough verbal pummeling, as in "those dirty, God-hating Communists." But now there are no Communists, only a lot of down-at-the-heels Russians trying to stay out of the way of the homegrown Mafiosi (now they are so feared that they take the capital).
   Trial lawyers are still good for a pejorative term now and again. But then, as more than one driver of an Explorer with Firestone tires has come to find out, you just might need one, so there must be some restraint in that regard.
   There is the guy who just cut you off on the freeway ("you S.O.B."), but that hardly counts: The shouted curse is mostly made with the assurance that said S.O.B. won't hear you since the profanity is uttered within the insulated cocoon of your vehicle.
   And then there is the very real probability that if said S.O.B. hears the endearment, he will pull out his trusty concealed weapon and take matters considerably beyond the "and your mother wears combat boots" retort.
   The fact is that in this excruciatingly politically-correct world, the targets of opportunity for the uniformly accepted verbal blast, the pin cushions for the barbed slur that can be given with the comfort that your bar mate will join you in chortling, are practically extinct.
   With one exception: journalists. That's a point made plain last week by George W. Bush, who, in some circles, is said to be the product of good breeding.
   The outlines of the episode are well known. Bush, irked by the reporting of one New York Times reporter, Adam Clymer, called the journalist a "major league (expletive deleted)" in an unguarded remark heard over a loudspeaker. Suffice it to say that the vulgarism is the technical term for the working end of the large colon.
   Two thoughts struck me when I heard this story: Bush felt perfectly safe making that remark because no one ever went down in the polls for verbally roughing up journalists. And, two, Bush never went drinking at the 1-2-3 Club.
   There seems to be some license given that allows otherwise perfectly reasonable people to unlimber their bitterest words and assign the darkest motives when it comes to journalists. That seems to be particularly true when it comes to politicians. Perhaps that's because reporters, like cats, refuse to be herded.
   There's a good reason for this. The job of a political campaign is to sell, and reporters, by nature, are not in the business of buying. They poke the merchandise, hold it up to the light, sniff it and often turn up their noses at it.
   I covered a political rally for a gubernatorial candidate coming through and wrote, after talking to a couple of cops on the scene, that no more than 1,000 supporters were on hand. Before I could even get the copy out of the typewriter (it was a few years ago), the candidate's coat-holders were on the phone, insisting to the night editor that no fewer than 2,000 rabid followers were in attendance. They must have been in the candidate's imagination.
   In other words, the job of a reporter is telling the difference, as LBJ would have said, between chicken salad and chicken offal. (Well, LBJ would have been more plainspoken.)
   The 1-2-3 Club, long since vanished, was a local establishment that regularly appeared in my dispatches as a police reporter. It was, to say the least, a place where the patrons were not shy about defending their honor. The police wagon and ambulance made regular calls.
   The 1-2-3 was not a place where a man's character was impugned without a price being paid. Those foolish enough to do so soon found themselves en route to the emergency room, and that's if they were lucky.
   Bush made the kind of remark that a man makes when he knows that the subject won't strike back. Clymer, veteran that he is, probably considered it just part of another day.
   Bush isn't the first and won't be the last politician to blast a reporter. But just remember what's being sold.
  
  (Nick Jimenez can be reached by phone at 886-3787, or be e-mail at jimenezn@caller.com)
  
  

 
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