Editor's Notebook

Maybe it's just the passage of time that brings sanguinity in the face of such scathing attacks. After all, Bush in 1992 took out after us pressies too when his campaign was crashing. And he was just the latest in a long line of media-bashers among our political leaders. Or maybe it's that the politicians themselves are running campaigns (and legislative activities) so petty or trivial or that it's not so bad to be on the receiving end of their barbs. Rather be here in the belly, telling the truth, than out there on the stump, pandering.

Maybe it's that the substance of the attacks on us ink- and makeup-stained wretches (the latter in their $2,000 suits) seem so grotesquely hyperbolic and off key. I mean, who can resist a smirk at Bob Dole in full battle cry: "When do the American people rise up and say, 'Forget the media in America! We're going to make up our minds! You're not going to make up our minds!' This is about saving our country. . . .We are not going to let the media steal this election. We're going to win this election. The country belongs to the people, not The New York Times." It must have come as a surprise to Dole's audience in Dallas, most of whom are more likely to be owned (like Dole) by Big Oil or Big Ag and have never given a thought to the gray lady of 43rd Street.

The tired attacks on the "liberal" media aren't worth the hot air they're carried on. As Frank Rich points out in an Oct. 30 New York Times column, the media went after Clinton, not Dole, on such problems as Indogate and Filegate and Dick Morris' flings and the Democratic National Committee's attempts to suppress election spending data, not to mention Hillary's "conversation" with Eleanor Roosevelt. Since Watergate, the establishment (read liberal in Dole's definition) media have been preoccupied with exposing politicians' peccadilloes regardless of party.

If the mainstream media are liberal in any real sense it's in their pursuit of stories about injustices in our society. Poverty in America, wholesale abrogation of people's civil rights, the exploitation of migrant farm workers and children in sweatshops-these are the kinds of stories the media has gone after, and with good reason and good effect in swaying public opinion and public policy. The anti-government crowd may not want to hear that hundreds of thousands of people are miserably housed in New York City, or that recent federal legislation will throw huge numbers of legal immigrants into the streets as they lose federal benefits. These stories, carefully exposed in The New York Times this fall, might suggest the need for more, not less, government. No, Bob, The New York Times doesn't own America, but it performs a valuable service to its community, as do many others in the belly of the media beast.