Consider it a sign of how good right-wing Republicans have become at influencing media coverage that David Bossie was a disappointed man on Monday.
The previous evening his conservative advocacy group, Citizens United, placed an advertisement attacking Bill Clinton on seven CBS affiliates around the country, timed to run during an hour-long 60 Minutes interview about the former president's just-published autobiography.
Bossie, a partisan whose methods were heavy-handed enough to get him fired by Rep. Dan Burton and rebuked by Rep. Newt Gingrich, was true to form in his latest effort.
The 30-second spot implicitly accuses Clinton of leaving the United States “vulnerable” to the September 11 terrorist attacks and features a picture of his book with the title, My Life, slowly being replaced by blood-red letters flowing across the cover to spell “My Fault.”
By the next day, Bossie had been interviewed on MSNBC and Fox News; his group's ad had been mentioned prominently in several national newspapers, including an above-the-fold story on the front page of The New York Times; and dozens of regional and local papers were poised to pick up wire stories for publication on Tuesday.
“Whether you are left of center or right of center you call it ‘earned media,'” Bossie said in an interview Monday. “You are trying, obviously, to reach as many people as possible with your message. In my opinion this was not a very successful commercial from that vantage point.”
Given that Bossie says he spent “less than $100,000” for the ads that generated all that coverage, it might seem surprising that he was unhappy with the result. But for Bossie, an inveterate Clinton-hater known as one of the driving forces behind the Whitewater real-estate “scandal” that dogged Clinton throughout his time in office, there are at least two factors underlying his professed dissatisfaction.
First is the simple fact that in previous campaigns, Bossie has been able to generate even more coverage than his anti-Clinton ad received. Second, indicating satisfaction with media coverage would endanger one of the central tropes of the conservative movement: the claim that the press is biased toward the left.
“We didn't get very much television time at all,” he groused Monday, noting that past efforts by Citizens United have resulted in Tim Russert replaying an advertisement for free on Meet the Press, as well as strings of interviews with conservative pundits like Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly.
“You get a substantial amount of print stories, with people running and picking up those wire stories, but there are a lot more people watching TV and listening to the radio than there are reading newspapers,” said Bossie.
Bossie, who is currently promoting a pair of books published by the ultra–right-wing World Net Daily Press -- one pushing the claim that Clinton was responsible for 9-11, the other attacking John Kerry -- said that the extent to which the mainstream press picks up his ads and turns them into stories is one of the measures by which he determines the success or failure of his organization's work.
“Getting on TV helps us maximize the whole thing,” he said.
The group's most recent effort started with a misleading press release that went out to political and media reporters last week. Describing the advertisement as an effort to set the record straight on Bill Clinton's failures in combating terrorism, the press release described the Citizens United ad and noted that it would “debut during the interview” broadcast on 60 Minutes Sunday night.
But the release did not mention that the ad would air in only seven markets, causing some reporters to wonder whether CBS had violated its own longstanding policy of refusing to air highly political advocacy ads, such as an anti-Bush spot that MoveOn.org had wanted to run during the Super Bowl in January.
A frustrated CBS spokesman told me on Monday that the ad buys were undertaken at the affiliate level, and that the network itself had never been contacted about them.
“This group put out a press release and said CBS was going to run this during 60 Minutes,” he said. “CBS did not get a submission, and had we got a submission we would not have run it.”
In the end, the ad actually ran in Washington, D.C.; Cleveland and Cincinnati, Ohio; Des Moines, Iowa; St. Louis and Springfield, Missouri; and Wheeling, West Virginia. Bossie said that the ad had been rejected by stations in New York and Pittsburgh.
The press release had the effect, though, of spurring interest in the advertisement among the national media; although the story of CBS caving to a right-wing advertiser quickly fizzled, Bossie's group still found its way into stories about the Clinton book that ran in The New York Times, USA Today, Newsday, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and The Washington Post. Associated Press wire stories mentioning the Citizens United ad appeared Tuesday morning in smaller papers nationwide.
A lesser strategist might have gloated, but Bossie and his ideological fellows had learned an important lesson in the Clinton wars of the mid-1990s, when a cocky Republican Congress got smacked in midterm elections. They are now ever careful not to allow themselves to become victims of their own success.
So even as papers across the country were going to press with stories about Citizens United and its attack on Clinton, the group's press secretary, Summer Stitz, argued that she doesn't believe that conservative advocacy groups like hers really play the media successfully.
“The Dems have got most of the mainstream media,” she complained, without a hint of irony. “They are extremely biased.”
With enemies like that, though, who needs friends?
Rob Garver is a freelance journalist living in Springfield, Va., and is currently studying at Georgetown Public Policy Institute.
