http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59425-2002Dec15.htmlA Hundred- Candle Story And How To Blow It
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 16, 2002; Page C01
When Trent Lott praised the 1948 segregationist candidacy of Strom Thurmond, most of the mainstream press was, rather embarrassingly, caught napping.
A dozen reporters heard the Senate majority leader say the country would have been better off if Thurmond had won the presidency -- and it was carried on C-SPAN -- but only an ABC producer thought the remarks were newsworthy. Even then the story didn't make it to the network's main newscasts.
Baltimore Sun reporter Julie Hirschfeld Davis says there was so much "tongue-in-cheek" talk at Thurmond's birthday party "that a lot of us probably tuned out remarks that we might have been more careful listening to if it hadn't been such a jubilant atmosphere. Most people were writing this as a featury 100th-birthday bash."
"I wanted to use it but it seemed too parenthetical, given that the story was about Strom," says Washington Post reporter Mark Leibovich. "I feel badly about it in retrospect. I kick myself."
Even after Lott's comments were reported, though, much of the establishment press ignored them for days. It wasn't until Lott apologized last Monday night that such newspapers as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today took note of the matter. In the meantime, Lott was pummeled by a number of online Weblogs -- particularly by conservatives who agree with him on many issues -- in a way that helped force the story into public view.
The contretemps began on Thursday, Dec. 5, when Lott said he was "proud" that his state of Mississippi had voted for Thurmond in 1948 -- a time when the Dixiecrat candidate spoke of keeping "the Negro" out of "our homes, our schools, our churches." Stories by The Post, the Washington Times and the Associated Press made no mention of the remarks. A Knight Ridder report paraphrased Lott in the 14th paragraph but ignored his observation that America would have avoided "all these problems" if Thurmond had won.
ABC producer Ed O'Keefe, who was there, helped break the story for ABCNews.com's political digest, the Note, and the story was used on a 4:30 a.m. broadcast. But "Good Morning America" and "World News Tonight" passed.
The next morning, CNN's Jonathan Karl interviewed Lott but didn't ask him about the Thurmond comments -- which brought subsequent criticism from New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. Karl says he hadn't attended the Thurmond party and didn't know what Lott had said.
"At the time of the Lott interview, no major newspaper, including the New York Times, had reported on the remarks," Karl says. "Even Paul Krugman said nothing about Lott's comments in his column [that] week."
Gwen Ifill played the clip on PBS's "Washington Week in Review" that night. But while former Clinton adviser James Carville took a swipe at Lott on CNN's "Crossfire," the Democrats mostly held their fire, depriving reporters of an easy hook for their story. And there was no liberal equivalent of conservative talk radio to drive the discussion.
After overhearing chatter among his colleagues, Washington Post reporter Thomas Edsall wrote a story for Saturday, Dec. 7, resisting an editor's suggestion that it be treated as an item. "I sent a note saying that it would demean the story to put it in the political column," he says.
The next day, Lott's comments were mentioned on the "CBS Evening News" and debated on CNN's "Late Edition" and NBC's "Meet the Press." While Time's Joe Klein and The Post's David Broder criticized Lott on "Meet the Press," columnist Robert Novak said: "This is the kind of thing that makes people infuriated with the media, is they pick up something that's said at a birthday party and turn it into a case of whether he should be impeached."
By Monday, with the mainstream press still largely snoozing, Web writers were leading the charge. Andrew Sullivan: "Either they get rid of Lott as majority leader or they should come out formally as a party that regrets desegregation and civil rights for African-Americans." Joshua Micah Marshall: "The real question is why this incident is still being treated as no more than a minor embarrassment or a simple gaffe." National Review Online's David Frum: "What came out of his mouth was the most emphatic repudiation of desegregation to be heard from a national political figure since George Wallace's first presidential campaign."
Says Glenn Reynolds, the Tennessee law professor who jumped on the story in his InstaPundit column: "The guy's majority leader. Reporters, as opposed to bloggers, depend on him for access. The hinterlands are full of bloggers who don't care whether Trent Lott is nice to them or not. That makes them different from the Washington press."
Doyle McManus, Washington bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, says his paper initially used an AP report because it had already done a Thurmond birthday story.
"The media were a step slow," he concedes. But at least there were pictures: "Imagine what might have happened without C-SPAN. C-SPAN is really the great, unfiltered, 24-hour medium that meant this didn't get missed."
Now the press is digging into Lott's history of opposing civil rights measures -- a public record that was barely mentioned when he became majority leader six years ago. Time's Karen Tumulty wrote that Lott told her in the early 1980s that he had helped prevent blacks from integrating his Ole Miss fraternity. Tumulty says she didn't report it at the time because Lott was an obscure Mississippi congressman -- who was trying to needle her Los Angeles Times boss (and future CNN chairman) Tom Johnson for also opposing integration at his own fraternity chapter....
