A New Round of Perot vs. the Press : Media: Although outspokenly critical of journalists before he withdrew, the candidate seems even angrier now that he’s back in the presidential race.

A weird gleam entered Ross Perot’s eyes Thursday as he stood on a stage and surveyed a noisy, quivering mass of about 200 shouting reporters, jerking his head from side to side as if he were Capt. James Kirk being confronted by hostile Klingons.

“I don’t think he’s going to have too many press conferences,” Carl Leubsdorf of the Dallas Morning News predicted afterward on CNN.

But, if he does, they won’t be pretty.

That impression lingered from the reborn presidential contender’s warfare with the media last week. Reporters have taken their lumps from both the Bill Clinton and George Bush campaigns, but nothing like the verbal battering given them by Perot in the Dallas hotel where he met the media on several occasions.

If you thought journalists and Richard Nixon fought, imagine the carnage if Perot were in the White House. You’d have to call 911.

Although outspokenly critical of the news media before he withdrew from the presidential race last July, Perot seems even angrier now. So no wonder there was laughter in the hotel meeting room Thursday when he told the crush of journalists, moments after attacking them: “I love you guys.” You immediately pictured a crocodile blowing kisses to a wildebeest.

The Perot vs. the Press spectacle was available to the nation, thanks to the presence of television. So millions saw Perot’s interview on NBC with “Today” co-host Bryant Gumbel last Monday, the day that Republican and Democratic delegations made their unsuccessful pitches to win over Perot supporters.

The Gumbel interview’s tone was set when Perot criticized the lead-in tape package for implying that his campaign organization was not as volunteer-driven as he claimed. Perot advised that “you folks up there in the anchor room spend more time in Walmart, Home Depot.” He added, “Get out there where the rubber meets the road.”

Perot (grinning): “I don’t expect you folks up there, you know, who are tellin’ the country what to think, to ever understand.”

Gumbel (grinning): “We’re not trying to tell anybody what to think.”

Perot grinned again when Gumbel mentioned speculation that Perot would re-enter the race later in the week (as he indeed did). “I’m smiling,” Perot said, “because y’all all get in a room. . . .”

Gumbel interrupted in a high-pitched voice, almost pleading: “You keep on saying ‘you all.’ I haven’t talked to anybody, Mr. Perot. I just got back from vacation.”

Perot persisted. “Y’all decide what’s going to happen, then make it happen.”

The Gumbel interview was foreplay for a series of press conferences and other occasions that Perot used last week to again hit the media:

* He called reporters “you characters.”

* He equated campaign coverage with “tabloid journalism.”

* He spoke of cutting off questioning and returning to the “real world.”

* He told “CBS This Morning” co-host Harry Smith on Wednesday, “I know exactly what’s goin’ on. You guys are the ones swimmin’ around trying to figure it out.”

* He implied to Smith that the press tells “fairy tales.”

* When Smith mentioned the number of Perot supporters who signed petitions to put his name on the ballot in 50 states, Perot reacted defensively: “Really upsets you, doesn’t it?” Smith look puzzled.

Then came Thursday’s tumultuous circus, when Perot became snappish when hit by all those questions simultaneously.

“No one liked what was happening,” Steve Futterman, a Los Angeles-based Mutual/NBC radio reporter, said from Dallas after covering the Thursday press conference and the rest of Perot’s epic week. “Everyone was just trying to be called on, and there was a fear that Perot would answer only two or three questions. It’s not that anyone was out to get him.”

Tell that to Perot. “Everything is the usual hostile, negative screaming,” he shot back at his questioners. And at one point when the room was getting especially raucous, Perot briefly lost control, angrily shouting: “Wait just a minute!”

To one question, he replied: “That’s press myth No. 615.” He slammed the media for creating “these fairy tales.” He accused reporters of being interested only in getting raises and promotions by reporting “gotcha” stories.

Part of Perot’s problem is that there are some reporters who pelt him with idiotic or loaded questions, as they do his opponents. Another part is his inexperience with meeting the media en masse.

He sails through one-on-one chats with such interviewers as CNN’s Larry King and ABC’s Barbara Walters, whose latest Perot encounter ran Friday night on “20/20,” where the candidate blasted the media’s “weird assumptions” about him.

When Walters brought up his widely quoted charge that female TV reporters were seeking to “prove their manhood” by being tough on him, Perot replied that the quote was an “extreme distortion of what I said” and that “it has nothing to do with the campaign.”

Why was it a distortion? Why wasn’t a reported remark that could reflect his attitude about women relevant to the campaign? Walters never inquired, allowing Perot to dance a Texas two-step around the issue.

Confront him with a churning crowd of reporters, however, and it’s a different story.

“I think he feels that everyone in the media is out to get him--or not just him, anyone,” said Futterman. “And there are many in the American public who agree with him.”

Among them may be Bush and Clinton, who probably are thinking what Perot is saying. “I think both Bush and Clinton would like to react the same way Perot does sometimes, but they don’t think it will look presidential,” Futterman said. “Another difference is that Bush and Clinton have trained themselves to be thick-skinned and Perot at times appears to be thin-skinned.”

Although Futterman rejects Perot’s charge of unfair press treatment, he does believe that a President Perot would set a modern precedent for Oval Office bluntness with the media. “At least Perot says what he feels,” Futterman said. “He would not necessarily say things you want to hear. So I think there would be a more honest relationship.”

An honest relationship from the same Perot who now flatly refuses to answer questions that displease him? “On the one hand, he would make our job more difficult,” Futterman said. “But it would be refreshing to have someone who doesn’t keep everything on the inside.”

Refreshing . . . and painful.