Media Set Agenda but Often Misjudge Public’s Interests : Journalism: News outlets shape public opinion. But they seldom know just what will catch nation’s attention.

Sex sells.

That’s one reason the media devoted so much time and space in the last two presidential campaigns to stories on the alleged infidelities of Sen. Gary Hart and Gov. Bill Clinton.

But public opinion surveys show that people think the media went overboard; 70% said Hart’s sex life received too much media coverage in 1988, and in one poll, 69% said the same about Clinton this year. More than 60% also said the press has paid too much attention to another big story in the 1992 campaign--Clinton’s problems with the draft during the Vietnam War.

Does this mean that editors and television news executives do not know what the public’s really interested in--what stories will (or won’t) have genuine impact?

In a sense, that’s exactly what it means.

Newspapers, magazines and television stations periodically conduct readership surveys and focus groups, but journalism is not an exact science; it’s an art--a craft.

“In a given news meeting, there may be 10 different editors sitting around, all very smart, each with a different idea of what the reader wants,” says Bob McGruder, managing editor for news at the Detroit Free Press. “All around the country, declining newspaper circulation suggests that a whole bunch of us may not be right.”

Respondents to public opinion polls may be embarrassed to say they are interested in stories on sex and other gossip, but it is clear that reporters and editors simply have “no real measure of public interest,” says Herbert J. Gans, a sociologist at Columbia University and the author of “Deciding What’s News.”

Perhaps that is why editors are so often surprised when one story has an enormous public impact and another, which they think will have an impact, vanishes without a trace.

Robert Kaiser, managing editor of the Washington Post, expected that the presidential campaign of former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown would be “wiped out” last March by a “fabulous . . . splendidly done” Page 1 story in the Post alleging that he had plagiarized the speech announcing his candidacy. But Brown went on to win the Vermont presidential primary the day after the Post story and he finished a strong second in Minnesota a week later before his campaign ran out of gas--without either the public or other media ever paying much attention to the Post story.

Virtually every other editor in the country can tell a similar tale. But many editors--and many reporters and television news directors--say that does not really bother them. They’re just messengers, they say; they don’t try to create impact--they merely report the news. They do place some stories on Page 1 because they think readers should know--and care--about them, and if the story ultimately has impact, that’s fine; but if it doesn’t, that’s fine, too.

McGruder thinks that’s disingenuous.

“When editors put a story at the top of Page 1, they want it to have impact,” he says. “That’s why they put it there.”

Intentional or not, it’s clear that the media do play a major role in determining what impact a given story will have on the public--and on the political-governmental process.

Given the decline of political parties in the United States in recent years, the media have become “the principal gatekeepers for the dialogues of political debate,” William Greider writes in his book “Who Will Tell the People?”

“What matters to the press matters perforce to politicians,” Greider says. “What the press ignores, the politicians may safely ignore too. What the newspapers tell people, whether it is true or false or cockeyed, is what everyone else must react to.”

Hence, Greider argues, no media coverage means no public reaction, which means no government action.

And when the media do devote attention to an issue?

Just by reporting it, how they report it and how they play it--emphasizing one angle over another, using it at the top of Page 1 or as the lead story on the evening newscast--the media can help shape or crystallize or accelerate public response to a story.

The “dominant interpretation” of the Los Angeles riots by the local media was that the riots were “triggered by economic deprivation, by years of neglect (on) . . . housing, jobs and education,” says Shanto Iyengar, a UCLA professor of political science and the author of “News That Matters: Television and American Opinion.”

The media carried far more references to these issues than to “hoodlums and thugs and vandalism,” Iyengar says, and that helped determine how the public, locally and nationally, interpreted and responded to the riots.

To many in the media and community, that’s exactly how the riots should be interpreted. But from “a conservative point of view,” Iyengar says, it could be argued that “this was distorted by the media.”

Many Republicans felt that media coverage was similarly distorted in the case of President Gerald Ford’s comment during a 1976 presidential debate that “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.”

Focus groups interviewed immediately after the presidential debate in which Ford made the remark thought his comment of so little importance that no one mentioned it. Polls taken at the same time showed that viewers, by a 44% to 33% margin, thought Ford had done a “better job” in the debate than Jimmy Carter.

But as University of Virginia political science professor Larry Sabato writes in his book “Feeding Frenzy,” the news media judged Ford the loser “almost entirely on the strength--or weakness--of the ‘free Poland’ remark.”

“All three networks focused on the costly mistake in their post-debate commentary. . . . Most of the major newspapers reinforced this message the following morning; so did the next evening’s television coverage.

“The drumbeat of negative coverage took a heavy and steady toll on Ford’s standing,” Sabato writes, and within 24 hours, his 44% to 33% “victory” disappeared; suddenly, people said Carter had won the debate--and they said so by the astonishing margin of 62% to 17%.

Ford’s campaign never recovered.

Many critics saw that as a “typical case of the media’s liberal bias.” Indeed, to these critics, a given story has impact (or not) simply because The Media want it to have impact (or not). As Ross Perot said in a recent NBC interview with Bryant Gumbel: “Y’all decide what’s going to happen, then make it happen.”

Critics on the left advance a similar theory. Just as conservatives say the media is biased because most reporters and editors are liberal, so liberals say the media is biased because most media owners have financial interests and social and political ties that give them a vested interest in protecting the Establishment, preserving the status quo.

Thus, Bruce Brugman, editor and publisher of the Bay Guardian, offers this explanation--denied by all concerned--for why the Miami Herald exposed Hart’s evening with Donna Rice in 1988:

Vice President George Bush saw Hart as his most formidable potential foe. The Herald belongs to the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain. Knight-Ridder at that time “needed two . . . billion-dollar favors from the Reagan/Bush administrations”--approval of a money-saving Joint Operating Agreement (JOA) for its paper in Detroit and agreement not to interfere with the planned shutdown of its JOA partner/competitor in Miami, the Miami News. Voila --the Herald staked out Hart’s townhouse and destroyed his campaign; Bush was reelected in a landslide and Knight-Ridder got what it wanted in Miami and Detroit.

Similarly, critics on the left point to many other stories that have had no impact simply because the media ignored them. Many women and ethnic minorities say this is because decisions on media coverage and play are usually made by white male editors. But other stories are also ignored or given minimal attention.

Carl Jensen, a professor of communications at Sonoma State University, runs “Project Censored,” which for the last 16 years has compiled and disseminated a list of “The 10 Best Censored Stories” of each year--meaning stories that were either largely ignored or not covered as widely and intensely by the national media as Jensen’s jury thinks they should have been. Although Jensen insists he has no ideological ax to grind, a significant majority of the stories cited each year do conform to what might be called a “liberal agenda.”

In recent years, Jensen’s “censored” stories have included “corporate America’s anti-environmental campaign,” the Bush family’s financial “conflicts of interest,” the Pentagon’s “secret black budget,” Bush Administration policies in Guatemala, and stories on toxic waste, radioactive waste and how NASA space shuttles “destroy” the ozone layer.

Sometimes questions about the alleged ideological motivation of the media in covering (or not covering) certain stories get a bit murky.

Did the media “go after” Clinton on the womanizing issue only because--at least subconsciously--they wanted to compensate for their embarrassment (guilt?) over having succumbed to their “liberal sympathies” and anointed him the front-runner, with cover stories in Time, the New Republic and New York magazines, before a single primary ballot had been cast?

Did the media “go after” Clinton on the question of his having evaded military service in Vietnam only to balance their having been tough on Dan Quayle four years earlier on the same issue?

Did the media “go after” Quayle in the first place because most journalists are liberal and Quayle is conservative?

Many journalists concede there is probably at least an element of truth in each of these scenarios. But they insist that most media decisions on how and whether to cover a given story are dictated not by such conscious calculation (or even subconscious compensation) but by instinctive journalistic judgments, often made under deadline pressure, with more thought given to what the competition is doing than to what ideology might dictate.

Hart was caught spending a night with a woman other than his wife. Gennifer Flowers publicly accused Clinton of having had an affair with her. Quayle tripped over his own tongue when President Bush selected him as his running mate in 1988 and he has kept tripping on it for four years.

Some of these stories have clearly been overplayed, but there is little doubt that they are legitimate stories. The same is true of the incremental disclosures about Clinton’s draft history--less because of the draft issue than because Clinton responded to each disclosure with an incomplete or inconsistent explanation, which was rendered inoperative or in need of further explanation after each subsequent disclosure.

But what of allegations about Bush’s alleged affair? Those rumors had been around for several years. Why did the media take so long to question the President about them? Even after they questioned him, why did that story have so much less impact than the stories about Clinton and Hart?

Most major news organizations--including the Los Angeles Times--had investigated the rumors about Bush long before reporters first asked him about it publicly. But when they came up with no substantiation, they discussed their findings internally and most (including The Times) decided not to publish anything.

The “threshold for evidence that most journalists will accept for a sitting President is a lot higher than for candidates,” says Jay Rosen, associate professor of journalism at New York University and a frequent writer on the media for various national publications.

Reporters may have been unduly deferential to the President in waiting so long to question him on this issue, but the President--any President--benefits from “a special respect for the office of the presidency,” says Dan Rather, anchor and managing editor of “The CBS Evening News.”

“There’s also the fear factor,” Rather says. Any President can refuse to talk to a reporter again if the reporter asks a question he doesn’t like--as Rather well knows from his confrontations with Bush in 1988.

Some reporters didn’t challenge Bush on rumors of his infidelity precisely because they didn’t want to risk having the prestigious presidential spigot turned off.

It’s especially difficult to challenge a popular President, as Bush was for much of his term. It wasn’t a coincidence that reporters asked Bush about his alleged affair for the first time last summer, when his poll ratings had dropped precipitously.

“The press would sooner go after a falling star than a bright one,” says Todd Gitlin, a professor of sociology at UC Berkeley.

When the New York Post headlined “The Bush Affair” on Page 1 in August and reporters for CNN and NBC followed up by asking Bush about the rumors, most major newspapers felt compelled to report it--in part out of fairness to Clinton. But they did so discreetly, relegating the story to the inside pages of the next day’s paper (Page 12, as it happened, in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post alike).

End of story.

If Clinton hadn’t been vulnerable on the philandering issue, he (or his surrogates) might have pushed harder to embarrass Bush, which might have triggered more stories. But Clinton couldn’t do that without risking damage to his campaign on the same issue, so the Bush story quickly died.

Perhaps surprisingly, a similar problem hampered reporters on a far different and more substantive story--the savings and loan scandal.

On that story, too, the few reporters covering it in its early stages could find no one with sufficient standing who was willing to make serious charges of wrongdoing.

Unlike the House banking scandal--which had partisan protagonists--the savings and loan crisis was a thoroughly bipartisan disaster, with enough blame to embarrass Democrats and Republicans alike at all levels of government.

As the chief lobbyist for the American Bankers Assn. says in Greider’s “Who Will Tell the People?” neither Republicans nor Democrats originally wanted to make a political issue of the S & L crisis because that would have claimed “more bodies on both sides than anyone wants to lose.”

With no partisan protagonist to point the finger of blame--no one to, in effect, do the early dirty work for the media--the S & L story long languished in the political and journalistic backwaters.

“The S & L story was a very complex one, and the press, by and large, missed it,” says Maynard Parker of Newsweek.

As Ellen Hume, executive director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, wrote in the New York Times in May, 1990, the financial trade press and some local and regional newspapers--including the Dallas Morning News, the Miami Herald and the Los Angeles Times--”aggressively covered savings and loan failures in their communities.” The Wall Street Journal also provided some good coverage. But the mainstream national media largely “blew the S & L scandal,” as the headline on Hume’s story put it.

“Not one paper covered it thoroughly from beginning to end,” says Gregory Hill, San Francisco bureau chief for the Journal.

Hill says there are three reasons for this:

* Federal regulators “felt it was their duty to lie to preserve the soundness and safety of the financial system . . . (and) to help the Bush election campaign.”

* “The main operators of the worst S & Ls were also lying, cooking their books, with the help of various accountants and lawyers. . . . We had no access to the examiners’ financial reports of most S & Ls. . . . They were secret.”

* “We as reporters simply dropped the ball. The people covering the financial institutions didn’t do the job” they should have.

Rep. Henry B. Gonzalez (D-Tex.), chairman of the House Banking Committee, tried to ignite media, public and congressional interest in the S & L crisis, but he has long been regarded--unfairly, his many supporters say--as “an eccentric, almost comic figure,” in the words of a 1989 Washington Post profile, and he found little support in Washington for his campaign.

Unlike the House banking scandal, the S & L crisis was neither easy nor sexy. Despite its long-term implications for every American, it had no immediately apparent personal resonance.

“If Bush had gone on television and said: ‘I am adding $100 to each . . . family’s tax bill this year to pay for the S&L; scandal,’ then people would’ve reacted to it a little more,” says Narda Zacchino, associate editor of the Los Angeles Times. But the President made no such announcement.

Nor did the early S & L stories have any villains as instantly identifiable as your local congressman.

Doug Ramsey, senior vice president of the Los Angeles-based Foundation for American Communications, says the tendency of the media to go looking for “good guys and bad guys” often prevents them from looking seriously at “systems and structures,” and the S&L; story is definitely a “systems and structures” story.

It is a complex, convoluted story, with roots in federal monetary policy decisions made a decade earlier and dollar figures that boggled the mind. Most people can grasp the concept of one person “bouncing” a check for $300; not many can identify with a $1-billion swindle involving an alphabet soup of little-known federal agencies.

That applies to journalists as well as to readers and viewers.

“Lack of intellectual sophistication . . . really understanding complex issues, from Soviet politics to the banking system to global warming . . . is a big problem in the news business,” says Robert Kaiser of the Washington Post. “This is where we let our readers and our country down most often. We fail ourselves to grasp the real meaning, the real significance of something that’s happening around us.”

Kaiser says it took him “an enormously long time to understand that this very conservative, small-bore, local American institution (the savings and loan) had been transformed into something very speculative, a high-flying, risk-taking business.”

Kaiser and Leonard Downie, executive editor of the Post, say a few reporters at the Post did understand the S & L crisis, and the paper published some good stories, relatively early. “It’s a myth that the media came late to the S & L crisis,” Downie says.

But he concedes: “People like me came late to it in terms of putting it on the front page,” and neither he nor Kaiser seems convinced that better media coverage would necessarily have led to more vigorous government action or public interest.

“The mythology that Bob (Woodward) and Carl (Bernstein) brought down (President Richard M.) Nixon created a false image about the power of the press that we’re still struggling with, in my opinion,” Kaiser says.

“Bob and Carl, by and large, discovered that which had been discovered already by people with the subpoena power,” he says. Critics who complain that the press “dropped the ball” on the S & L crisis, Iraqgate, Iran-Contra and various other recent scandals because the outcome wasn’t as dramatic as Watergate forget, he says, that “we can only continue to carry the ball in such matters with the help of smart people using the subpoena power.”

Other editors insist that better, earlier coverage of the S & Ls might have triggered both public outrage and government action. But the S & L crisis not only lacked a villain like Nixon, it also lacked the overt political intrigue of Watergate and the tenacious pursuit of a major paper like the Post.

Moreover, many reporters say, in the recessionary climate of the early 1990s--with media profits eroding and competition for the reader’s time intensifying--editors are increasingly reluctant to commit the resources necessary for long-term examinations of complex issues.

“Stories that are hard to grasp, that aren’t black and white from the beginning, require a lot of persistence,” says Jennie Buckner, vice president for news at Knight-Ridder newspapers. Some stories don’t have the impact they should, she says, because the media “don’t stick with it.”

What social psychologists call our “media-dense environment” may also be a significant factor, especially with a story like the savings and loan crisis.

In their 1991 book “Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion,” Eliott Aronson and Anthony Pratkanis point out that each year “the typical American watches 1,550 hours of television, listens to 1,160 hours of radio . . . spends 180 hours reading . . . newspapers and 110 hours reading magazines . . . (sees) 37,822 commercials (and receives) . . . 216 pieces of direct-mail advertising.”

Only certain messages are likely to penetrate our consciousness when we’re buried in such an avalanche. As Aronson and Pratkanis say: “Most people are more deeply influenced by one clear, vivid, personal example than by an abundance of statistics,” and the S & L story, especially as it was first told by the media, was a blizzard of statistics; what clear, vivid, personal examples there were clearly didn’t resonate with the American public.

The S & L crisis was a “numbers” story, not a “people” story, and that made it especially difficult for television.

“I think one of the reasons the savings and loan (story) never achieved the (level of public) outrage that it warranted was the fact that it was not an effective television story,” says Van Gordon Sauter, former president of CBS News and now president of Fox News. “I think it could have been turned into a reasonably effective television story, but that would have required an intensity of focus that is not common” to television.

Although a few publications did a more creditable job than most in covering their L problems, almost none seemed to recognize the full magnitude of the story or to tell it in an engaging fashion until it was too late.

Lengthy, complex stories can be made interesting--compelling--as Donald Barlett and James Steele proved last year with their nine-part series in the Philadelphia Inquirer on the decline of the American economy. The series--titled “America: What Went Wrong?”--was filled with statistics and personal stories. Although some critics found the series oversimplified and biased, others praised its thoroughness and readability, and it clearly struck a chord with readers, triggering more than 20,000 letters and calls. The Inquirer sent out 400,000 reprints of the series, and the series has been expanded into a book--which has another 400,000 copies in print.

“That series proved that if you . . . speak clearly, in human terms, about what some of these complex things mean . . . people are really hungry for it,” says Buckner of Knight-Ridder, which publishes the Inquirer.

Indeed, when Clinton appeared on Phil Donahue’s syndicated television show in April and Donahue grilled him for 25 minutes about infidelity, marijuana use and other, similar matters, a woman in the audience--a Republican--demonstrated this hunger for a substantive discussion of the issues by lashing out at Donahue.

“I think . . . given the pathetic state of most of the United States at this point--Medicare, education, everything else--I can’t believe you spent half an hour of air time attacking this man’s character. I’m not even a Bill Clinton supporter, but I think this is ridiculous.”

Much the same thing happened in the second presidential debate when Bush was forced to abandon plans to attack Clinton’s character and trustworthiness after someone in the audience complained about “the amount of time the candidates have spent on this campaign trashing their opponents’ character. . . . Why can’t your discussions and proposals reflect the genuine complexity and the difficulty of the issues?”

Another questioner in the audience asked: “Can we focus on the issues and not the personalities and the mud?”

But many in the media find it easier to focus on infidelity and inhalation than on Medicare, education or--especially--high (and low) finance. Difficult stories--including most onL crisis--have not often met Buckner’s standards of clarity, comprehension and personal resonance.

“I think our (S & L) reporting was strong early on,” says Richard Smith, editor-in-chief of Newsweek, “but we didn’t succeed, and I don’t think anybody else succeeded, in getting at that story in a way that connected with the readers.”

It was not until the names of Charles H. Keating Jr. and a few other S & L entrepreneurs became well-known that “the press found its handle” on that story, Smith says.

“It represents a failing of the press,” he says, “that we, collectively, had to wait for the personalities to get involved before we could demonstrate to readers and viewers the importance of the scandal.”

To connect with readers, a story generally must be a “story” in the traditional sense--a good narrative, with a beginning, a middle and an end; dramatic examples, vivid images, recognizable characters, heroes and villains and some sense of change or development. This is especially true in the era of television, but these elements are crucial to all successful storytelling, whether on the screen, in print, over a drink or by a campfire.

That’s one reason that political stories of all kinds often have an impact far beyond their substance; they have recognizable characters, plot lines and--like sports events--competition, conflict, a clear resolution, a winner and a loser.

By these standards, reporter Pete Brewton of the Houston Post wrote many of the best early stories about the S & L crisis, dozens of them--some with colleague Gregory Seay--starting in mid-1987. Brewton’s stories certainly had drama, villains and intrigue.

One of Brewton’s major villains was the CIA. He charged that the agency had “used parts of its proceeds from S & L fraud to help pay for covert operations”; that the agency had “intervened in criminal investigations involving agency operatives accused of S & L fraud,” and that there was a “possible link” between the CIA and organized crime in the failure of more than 20 S & Ls. Brewton was also critical of the role Bush’s friends and family, especially son Neil, played in the S & L crisis.

Jonathan Kwitney, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who has written extensively about the CIA and the Mafia, has called Brewton’s work “maybe the best job of reporting I had ever seen,” and he wrote enthusiastically in a recent Village Voice article about Brewton’s about-to-be-published book, “The Mafia, the CIA and George Bush: The Untold Story of America’s Greatest Financial Debacle.”

But some of Brewton’s charges were so sensational and, at times, so tenuous that reporters elsewhere were uneasy about following up on them, and given how dense and difficult Brewton’s prose often was, many other reporters had trouble even understanding them.

“I think . . . it is true and will be proved that the savings and loan (debacle) was part of the ‘black economy’ of Iran-Contra and other foreign policy” ventures, says Christopher Hitchens, a columnist for The Nation and various other publications. “But dying to find this out as I was, I could . . . hardly get through” Brewton’s stories.

Even if Brewton’s most dramatic charges were, as critics contend, the stuff of paranoid conspiracy theories, it’s surprising that more journalists didn’t at least investigate them.

Instead, Brewton and the Post were “very much alone” in their early coverage, Steve Weinberg, former executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review. Like Rep. Gonzalez, Brewton was largely ignored--or dismissed--by the Washington cognoscenti.

That’s not uncommon for reporters and news organizations outside the New York-Washington axis. The national media often have “a kind of dismissive attitude” about stories broken elsewhere, says Smith of Newsweek.

Greg Vistica of the San Diego Union-Tribune knows that all too well.

Vistica broke the story last year on the alleged sexual assaults of 26 women by Naval aviators at the Tailhook convention in Las Vegas. But not until eight months later, when the Washington Post, ABC’s “PrimeTime Live” and the New York Times gave the story prominent attention, was Navy Secretary H. Lawrence Garrett forced to resign.

Sometimes, a respected news organization from Out There can awaken national interest in a given story, but the Houston Post--like the San Diego Union-Tribune--isn’t even a blip on the radar screen of the media that matter in this country.

Beyond thatL story wasn’t really a Washington story--or, more precisely, it was much more than a Washington story. The policies that led to the S & L debacle were made in Washington, but the casualties of those policies--the overwhelming majority of the failed S & Ls and their tens of thousands of depositors--were elsewhere, outside the Beltway, the auto route that encircles Washington and often serves, symbolically, to separate “important” from “unimportant” stories in the eyes of the Washington politicians and journalists who help set the nation’s agenda.

Many factors that explain the failure of the S & L crisis to achieve critical mass in the nation’s consciousness could also be applied to the similarly delayed or diminished impact of stories on the federal budget deficit and on scandals involving President Ronald Reagan’s Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Bank of Credit & Commerce International and the Bush Administration’s dealings with Saddam Hussein before the Gulf War.

All of these are complex stories, involving large sums of money, lacking a clear, comprehensible story line and, for the most part, devoid of recognizable characters.

“Both the S & L story and the Bush/Iraqgate story are full of people you never heard of, a bunch of guys named Abu Dhabi,” says Edward Kosner, editor and publisher of New York magazine.

But Iraqgate is special. It does have at least three recognizable characters--President Bush, Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Saddam Hussein--at least one of whom is a certifiable villain. Iraqgate also had at least one potential hero--Rep. Gonzalez, who vigorously criticized the Administration’s policy, called for a congressional investigation and a special prosecutor, and made public dozens of classified documents that disclosed much of what the Bush Administration had done.

Next: Iraqgate--A Case Study.

What They Said About the S&L; Story

* ROBERT KAISER, managing editor, Washington Post

“Lack of intellectual sophistication . . . really understanding complex issues, from Soviet politics to the banking system to global warming . . . is a big problem in the news business . . . This is where we let our readers and our country down most often. We fail ourselves to grasp the real meaning, the real significance of something that’s happening around us.” It took “an enormously long time to understand that this very conservative, small-bore, local American institution (the savings and loan) had been transformed into something very speculative, a high-flying, risk-taking business.”

* JENNIE BUCKNER, vice president-news, Knight-Ridder

“Stories that are hard to grasp, that aren’t black and white from the beginning, require a lot of persistence.” Some stories don’t have the impact they should. Buckner says, because the media “don’t stick with it.”

* MAYNARD PARKER, editor, Newsweek

“The S&L; story was a very complex one, and the press, by and large, missed it.”

* NARDA ZACCHINO, associate editor, Los Angeles Times

“If Bush had gone on television and said, ‘I am adding $100 to each . . . family’s tax bill this year to pay for the S&L; scandal,’ then people would’ve reacted to it a little more.” But the President made no such announcement.

Peter Johnson of The Times editorial library assisted with the research for this series.