Media Bashing Standard Fare in Bush Drive : Strategy: President’s attack on the press and the pundits is nothing new for a candidate who is trailing. It’s seen as a way to energize the troops.

At every stop now, an energized George Bush holds up a little red bumper sticker.

“Annoy the Media, Reelect Bush,” it says.

“Harry Truman had it right,” Bush said on Tuesday, referring to reporters “who were talking the same thing about gloom and doom. He said they couldn’t know enough to pound sand in a rat hole. That’s true. And we are going to win the election in spite of these mournful polls.”

The crowds go wild. “Tell the truth,” they scream.

At Billings, Mont., they began spitting on the press photographers. In Albuquerque, they poked at the press with American flags. Last week, the Houston Chronicle reporter was hit in the back with a bottle.

It got so bad that a delegation of photographers demanded White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater ask Bush to tone it down, and one NBC photographer even asked the President personally.

By Tuesday, Bush told the crowd in Paducah, Ky.: “Don’t take it out on these guys with the cameras and the boom mikes. They’re all good folks. Take it out on those talking heads in the national press that come on and tell us everything that’s bad about America.”

For some of the members of Bush’s team, attacking the press, the pundits and the polls is a way of trying to energize loyal Republicans not to give up on the race. Democrat Michael S. Dukakis did the same thing the last two weeks of the race four years ago. Walter F. Mondale’s team did the same eight years ago.

For other Republicans, media bashing is also a way of keeping the press honest--working the referees as it were--to get the benefit of the doubt.

Yet for other members of the Republican campaign, the idea that the press has a bias against the Republican Party has been an article of ideological faith since 1964.

At one point or another this year, all three of the candidates have railed against the press as unfair, fixated on “gotcha” journalism, and out of tune with voters.

“The real bias in the press coverage isn’t ideological,” said American Enterprise scholar William Schneider. “It is a bandwagon effect. It comes out of the polls. If tomorrow Bush went into the lead, you would see stories about (White House Chief of Staff James A.) Baker the genius and Bush the magician.”

In an interview on PBS, First Lady Barbara Bush demanded to know if interviewer Judy Woodruff had asked similarly harsh questions of Hillary Clinton. The President became so angry at an interview with ABC he asked for a tape of the network’s interview with Clinton at the Democratic Convention.

Candidates who trail often rail at the media for their problems. Yet for Republicans the resentment appears to be deeper. As early as 1964, many Republicans backing Barry Goldwater believed there was a liberal bias in the press. At the GOP convention that year, former President Dwight D. Eisenhower condemned “sensation seeking columnists” and the delegates stood to face the press seats, roaring their approval.

A lengthy study by the Los Angeles Times in the mid-1980s found that most journalists were liberal in their private beliefs.

But American Enterprise scholar Schneider, who worked on the study, said that it also found that journalists’ private beliefs did not sway coverage “in any definitive way.”

In the last week, like other candidates behind in the polls, Bush made trashing the media a staple of his stump speech.

“I love the equity in the news media,” he told a crowd in Albuquerque on Monday. “They beat up on Dan Quayle for going into the service, and they apologize for Clinton for staying out of the service. (Applause.) Come on! Where’s fair play out there? Where is fair play?”

“Then the polls,” he told a crowd in Denver the same day. “All these deadly talking heads we see on these Sunday television shows, each getting 500 bucks to tell us what we think.”

“I can’t stand those people,” he added on the NBC “Today” show Tuesday, when he got to the subject of TV pundits.

Even the President did not expect the response he got. Fitzwater, at Ft. Campbell, Ky., where the President landed on a campaign stop, said Bush became “upset” when he later discovered the crowd began physically attacking the press traveling with him.

Times staff writer Douglas Jehl contributed to this story from Kentucky.