Nader's Flip-Flop Media Plan

9.19.00 | LOS ANGELES -- The press conference had just ended, local TV news cameramen were packing down. Ralph Nader walked two feet from the podium to chat with the five reporters assembled.

"So now the big question. The big question of the day!" Nader said in the amplified stage voice the Green Party presidential candidate employs when delivering a campaign punchline. Then he motioned to one of the cameras. "Did you turn it off?" he asked. "Good."

"The big question of the day! Did you get your soundbites?!!"

The reporters laughed, and said they had.

"Did you really? I'm serious, I'm not kidding," he said. "I'm telling you, if you don't do soundbites, you can have the best press conference in the country and it doesn't work."

Then he turned to CNN reporter Anne McDermott -- a self-confident type who had monopolized much of the conference with questions like "so why are you running?" -- and said, deferentially: "I'm asking an authority."

"Yes, yes," she assured him.

"Thank you all very much for coming out on such short notice," he said.

Twenty-four hours later, at Long Beach State University, Nader blasted CNN and other "oligarchic media conglomerates" for being afraid of covering his campaign.

"For example, yesterday I had a press conference on corporate crime, great detail, a very important issue that I can elaborate on, and there's virtually no press. I wonder why!" he said sarcastically, to 700 sympathetic students and faculty who could not have known that the press conference had been nearly unpublicized. "Because there are six or seven giant media conglomerates who control most of the audiences, and the newspaper and magazine circulation. ... You think they want to report on corporate crime, fraud and abuse?"

Nader, trying to claw his way up out of the single digits and into the presidential debates, is playing good cop-bad cop with the media, praising their investigative reporting in one moment, condemning their corporate servility and editorial judgment in the next. In the process, he is fostering a near-conspiratorial view of how the media business works, and is spelling out a series of bold media-policy objectives such as demanding "billions of dollars" of spectrum fees from broadcast companies.

The "corporate crime" press conference, for example, began with Nader holding up a blown-up cover of a recent issue of Business Week on "Corporate Power."

"I just wanted to note that a lot of the points I'm going to make this afternoon have been documented in the mainstream press, for years," he said. The problem, Nader argued, is that investigative reports of corporate abuses are published but "go nowhere. Reporters work two to three months, get the story on Page One and nothing happens."

Why? See Nader's favorite stump-speech soundbite: "Because the two political parties have morphed into one corporate party with two heads wearing different makeup, beholden to the same corporate interests." Or this one: "Because the corporate criminals own the federal cops."

There is a disconnect, Nader argues, between the investigative wing of news organizations and their political reporters.

"I can guarantee you that Al Gore and Geroge W. Bush can campaign around this country for the next 500 years, and they will never be asked by a reporter, or a commentator, what is your position on corporate crime. Even though their own newspapers, their own fellow reporters, their own investigative task forces, have documented it again and again."

A reading of recent Los Angeles Times editions seems to bear Nader's theory out: Monday, on the front page and again on page one of the business section, the Times printed long articles about how motor vehicle safety standards have been virtually unchanged for 30 years -- the exact subject of Nader's Sept. 12 press conference which the Times did not cover, nor even mention in a Sept. 15 article about corporate influence on tire safety regulations. In fact, L.A.'s dominant newspaper did not so much as mention that the Green Party presidential candidate was in southern California for two days last week.