Mr. Quayle Goes to Phoenix : Publishing: If he retires to the family business, he might reconnect with the reality of American life and values.

Newspapers and journalism are in Dan Quayle’s bloodline. And unless he defies family tradition, he’ll likely return to the calling whence considerable family fortunes flow.

The newspaper chain’s senior executives are past traditional retirement ages, and Quayle is seen by many as the only serious heir apparent.

If indeed he returns to the family business, Quayle ironically would be working with, perhaps responsible for, newsrooms he derisively lumped with the “cultural elite” of “sitcom studios and faculty lounges” as culprits in ridiculing and corrupting “family values.”

It will be a rocky return.

In accusing newsrooms of mocking family values, former newspaperman Quayle committed a journalistic no-no--an undocumented tarbrushing of tens of thousands of journalists whose work he’s never seen.

This from a man whose late grandfather founded the profitable Central Newspapers chain in Arizona and Indiana and co-founded the revered Sigma Delta Chi (now the Society of Professional Journalists), whose step-grandmother and uncle preside over hundreds of millions of dollars of family publishing assets, whose father is a director of the newspapers, whose brother is a publisher and whose mother and cousins are executives in the chain.

The roughly 1,600 U.S. daily newspapers employ 462,000 people, according to the Newspaper Assn. of America, slightly more than 54,000 of them in the newsroom. Surely not all of these newsroom journalists--many with families--are guilty as charged by the vice president.

Quayle’s charge that newsrooms mock family values is equivalent to Lee Iacocca’s taking leave from Chrysler for a stint in Washington, whereupon he denounces dealer showrooms as teeming with con artists and liars, then returns to the automotive world.

If Quayle returns to newspapering’s mainstream and hopes to have any credibility in the clubby publishing world, he must explain what he really meant about newsrooms belittling family values.

It won’t wash if he shrugs and says, shucks, he was just playing politics. But if he sticks to his charge and has influence in the family newspapers, he surely will have to impose editing and reporting policies that meet standards of “family values” espoused by him during the campaign. That should create a fascinating confrontation between First Amendment absolutists and Quayle’s politically inspired “family values” credo.

Except for a few ideological periodicals operated on vanity and shoestrings, publishing today is too expensive and too risky to restrict newspaper readers to a diet of political gruel cooked up by partisan political purists.

Quayle was astonished to learn in the closing weeks of the campaign that one of the family newspapers, the Arizona Republic in Phoenix, had inaugurated a highly profitable classified ad feature in which lesbians and gays advertise for partners. This is an example of where Quayle’s “family values” run headlong into the hard-headed, bottom-line business and marketing decisions of newspapers trying to stay afloat in hard times and serve an audience of jumbled interests and values.

If Quayle becomes a policy-maker in the family chain, would he ban such ads?

My guess is Quayle will find a lofty executive post in the family newspapers more to his liking and with more political visibility than hanging around a musty Republican think-tank in Washington, rendering conservative spiels during the GOP’s exile from the White House.

He could use a newspaper post to conduct a public debate about the media from inside, and might even try to tame what he sees as gratuitous animal and liberal instincts.

At this, he will surely fail.

The world is composed of raunchiness as well as righteousness, probity as well as promiscuity, virtue as well as venality. For every weakness Quayle and his mentors deplore in liberalism, there are that many or more in conservatism.

The media are obliged to cover reality--the world and people as they are, not as we wish they would be.

Quayle’s rub with the media parallels George Bush’s problem with the national mood. Both men have been too long out of touch, perhaps by virtue of the monastic lifestyle in Washington. Once Bush goes fishing, he may again reconnect with the reality of American life, and once Quayle gets the green glow of a video screen in his eyes and takes in the demanding deadlines of newspapers, he might grow to appreciate the wonderfully unpredictable and sometimes offensive freedoms bred and encouraged by the First Amendment.