Media
101 Do the Tabloids Really Affect Elections?
Today Dick Morris is a virulently anti-Clinton columnist
for the right-wing media. Not too long ago he was a Friend of Bill and one
of the Inside Circle of Clinton advisors and confidants. Beginning in 1995
"over the course of the first nine months of 1995, no single
person had more power over the president" than Morris",
according to Clinton's communications director George Stephanopoulos.
What happened to turn him around 180 degrees? My personal
opinion is that he felt the Clintons weren't loyal enough to him when he
faced his own sex scandals and unceremoniously dumped him in the 1996
elections when they should have stood by him. Morris was brought down by
the tabloids, specifically The National Enquirer and Star,
long before Matt Drudge became a household name over Monica Lewinsky. The
story quickly exploded into the mainstream media, including the cover of
Time.
Within two years after Clinton won re-election, Roger
Altman, a Clinton aide and contributor, bought controlling interest in
American Media, Inc., owner of The National Enquirer and several
other tabloids. If anything, this demonstrated the power that the tabloids
held over the white blue collar, high school-educated, lower-income
demographics - the same demographics that Hillary Clinton is today
claiming will propel her to the White House in 2009.
Morris became an adviser to the Bill Clinton administration, particularly in regards to marketing and "selling" policy decisions. A shrewd expert on polls and trends, Morris encouraged Clinton to pursue so-called third way policies of triangulation that merged traditional Republican and Democratic proposals, rhetoric, and issues to achieve maximum political gain and popularity.
The president consulted Morris in secret beginning in 1994.[1] In the words of Clinton's Chief of Staff Leon Panetta,
"I always had the feeling that the president wanted to listen to the dark side, even though he clearly knew in his guts where the issues were and what he wanted to do. He always wanted to listen to the Morris voice to kind of say, what are the thoughts of the most kind of manipulative operation that could go on in politics? I want to hear that voice. I want to hear what he's thinking."
Clinton's communications director George Stephanopoulos has said that
"Over the course of the first nine months of 1995, no single person had more power over the
president".[1]
Morris went on to become Campaign manager of Bill Clinton's successful 1996 bid for re-election to the office of President of the United States.
His tenure on that campaign was cut short two months before the election, when it was revealed that he had allowed a prostitute, Sherry Rowlands, to listen in on conversations with the President.
Morris then turned his focus to media commentary. He now writes a weekly column for the New York Post which is carried nationwide, and he appears regularly on the Fox News Channel for political commentary. He is also President of VOTE.com.
More recently, Morris has emerged as a harsh critic of the Clintons and has written several books that criticize
them, including Rewriting History, a rebuttal to Senator Hillary Clinton's Living History. Morris once joked he will leave the United States if Hillary Clinton were to be elected president in 2008.[2] He currently lives in Redding, Connecticut.
"Freedom of the press belongs to those who own
one." - A. J. Lieberling
Dick Morris –
1996
Allegations that top aide Dick Morris had had extensive extramarital
affairs caught the Clinton presidential campaign off guard in 1996. The
stories began appearing in the Star and National Enquirer
and were then picked up by the mainstream media. Morris allegedly had
revealed White House secrets to a call girl and had fathered a child with
a Texas woman with whom he had had a 15-year affair.
In "Feeding Frenzy: How Attack Journalism Has Transformed American
Politics" (Free Press, 1991 and 1993), political analyst and
University of Virginia government professor Larry J. Sabato provided a
case-by-case account of some notable frenzies in the last half-century
(summaries of frenzies from the 1996 presidential campaign were written
exclusively for washingtonpost.com).
