Monster N.Y. Tabs Eat Candidates! Reporters to Restraint: Drop Dead : Campaign: Brown fares better than Clinton in midst of fierce media competition, but it’s not easy to take a sound bite out of the Big Apple.

Turn the pages of this city’s tabloid newspapers and you get a sense of what running for President in the New York Democratic primary is like.

“2 Country Boys Lost in the City,” read a headline in Newsday this week, referring to Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton and former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. “Clinton Tries Jewish Humor and Winds Up in the Soup,” blared another.

The New York Daily News that day was focusing on Brown. Said one head: “Brown: Gay Marriage OK.”

The New York Post was concentrating on Clinton: “The Untruth and Nothing but the Untruth,” was the headline of a column on him by Mike McAlary.

There is a theory that journalism is the business of retelling familiar folk tales in new ways, thereby reinforcing the community’s beliefs. The people in the news are thus transformed into characters and news stories into fables.

Nowhere is this form of folklore journalism practiced more fiercely than in New York City, where four daily newspapers and six television stations vie for attention. And for candidates, the art of running for President here in good measure involves trying to control which familiar metaphor they become, and which morality play they act out.

During the first days of the two-week campaign leading up to Tuesday’s primary, Clinton was turned into actor Jack Lemmon in the film “The Out of Towners,” the boob from Middle America who comes to the big town and loses everything.

Now Clinton and his squadron of campaign advisers are trying desperately to depict themselves as Sylvester Stallone in “Rocky.” He’s a guy who can get off the canvas, change his strategy, and if he loses the fight, he was robbed.

At the core of the effort to burnish his image is a new press strategy, which involves a tacit admission that Clinton sees the press--as much as Brown--as his foe and that he has misplayed it so far.

Rather than trying to fight the press, Clinton has decided to attempt to bypass it by engaging in a series of debates with Brown and live television interviews.

“This way, you get it to the people and don’t have to be filtered through anybody’s prism,” said Clinton’s national campaign chairman, Mickey Kantor.

Brown, meanwhile, arrived in New York to find himself cast as the scrappy underdog with the appealing wise guy style--sort of a Crocodile Dundee charming Manhattan. But he now finds himself the subject of more scrutiny, with much of it focusing on his controversial flat-tax proposal and such issues as gay marriage.

Much of the media’s ferocity in New York is driven simply by its size. Along with the six television stations and four daily papers, there are two all-news radio stations, two weeklies targeted for black readers, a Spanish language paper, the weekly Village Voice, and the weekly New York magazine--and this doesn’t account for suburban news outlets. Even the jostling for space on the sidewalk among the photographers and TV cameramen can get frightening.

When Clinton arrived in town to face all this, he had just been upset by Brown in the March 24 Connecticut primary. And the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post, intensifying their scrutiny of Clinton, had all recently published stories raising questions about his record and actions as Arkansas’ governor.

The Clinton campaign’s initial response was to try to avoid having him answer questions from the local press corps. The image on local television of Clinton’s first day here was of him walking away from reporters. Brown, by comparison, eagerly met the crowds.

That difference gave Brown an immediate advantage, said Jim Willse, editor of the Daily News. “There is a feeling in New York that at the very least you ought to be able to stand on a street corner and go one-on-one with a cabbie. That is not the same as saying that because Jerry Brown has a quick mouth you ought to vote for him, but it can’t hurt him.”

Clinton compounded the problem, aides now admit, by making some mistakes. Last Saturday, for instance, both Clinton and Brown had events disrupted by New Alliance Party presidential candidate Lenora B. Fulani or her supporters.

Clinton reacted by trying to argue with Fulani. Failing, he walked out on his own event in frustration.

Brown, in contrast, ignored the Fulani hecklers, knowing it was his voice being picked up by the press microphones at the podium.

The story on television that night showed Clinton being stymied by hecklers, while Brown was seen dramatically tossing a copy of the U.S. Tax Code into a garbage can, exactly the image he wanted to deliver.

On Sunday, Clinton was trapped by a cleverly phrased question from a local TV reporter into acknowledging that he had smoked marijuana two decades ago while in England. Previously, he had implied he had never tried drugs by saying he had never broken U.S. law.

But, Clinton insisted, he had not inhaled the marijuana, a statement that became the brunt of a joke before a worldwide audience watching the Oscars telecast the next night.

The Clinton campaign responded by blaming the New York media for not being interested in issues.

“This is a media monster that has to be fed,” said Clinton political adviser Jim Carville. “It don’t like carrot sticks, man; it likes cheeseburgers, cheese fries, malted milkshakes. You don’t do an event or give a speech and somebody reports what happens at the event. That is a not a cheeseburger.”

Carville’s analysis, even some campaign colleagues said, overstates the case. But unquestionably, there is an attitude among the New York media that candidates have to prove themselves all over again. If the presidential primary process is a kind of hazing, New York is Hell Week.

“I imagine if you are from Arkansas or even California there is a thought that New York is not the real world,” said Willse of the Daily News. “Well, if you live in New York, we believe this is the real world, and the real world has barracudas in it, so welcome to it.”

Clinton’s people have been particularly angered by the New York Post. “The New York Post is journalism like the ‘Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ was about orthopedic surgery,” Carville said.

For his part, Post columnist McAlary candidly admitted in a recent column that “it is my stated purpose in this primary season to run Bill Clinton right back to a segregated golf course” and out of the race for President.

Whether Clinton’s new strategy of attempting to bypass the local press is successful remains uncertain. But his campaign has been heartened by the response.

When the audience booed TV host Phil Donahue on Wednesday for devoting nearly half his hourlong interview with Clinton to character questions, the New York press picked up on it. The booing audience was shown on local television and in the Thursday papers, Clinton suddenly had some local columnists defending him. The fable on Clinton was undergoing a plot change.