All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Once is an anecdote. Twice raises an eyebrow. Three times, and you’ve spotted a trend.

Could we be two-thirds of the way there with Fox News Channel and the Giuliani campaign?

Back in August, the cozy relationship between Fox News Channel head Roger Ailes and Rudy Giuliani was discussed in this space. Ailes ran Giuliani’s mayoral campaign in 1989, you see, so it was curious that Fox was giving Rudy a lot more airtime (25 percent) than any of his competitors in the GOP.

And this past week had the story of how the network barred John McCain from using footage of him participating in a Fox News Channel debate, but not being so strict with a certain former mayor of New York City.

Yesterday, Fox News lawyers sent a cease and desist letter to John McCain's campaign, demanding that he halt use of a new ad that uses footage from the Fox-sponsored GOP debate on Oct. 21. Fox is alleging copyright infringement. McCain's campaign is refusing Fox's demand.

What's amusing, though, is that if you head over to Rudy Giuliani's campaign web site, you find that it is absolutely festooned with Fox News footage. It even prominently features footage from the very same debate that Fox is demanding McCain yank down from his site.

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Democratic operatives and contributors writing in the Washington Post’s Outlook section.

An MSNBC study showing journalists’ political donations.

The chummy relationship between news people and newsmakers seems as incestuous as ever, breeding cynicism and distrust.

Add to that mix this morning’s New York Times piece about the friendship-slash-association between Fox News Channel head Roger Ailes and Republican presidential contender Rudy Giuliani.

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Questions about the war in Iraq continue to divide America. What’s going on, exactly? Is there good news that we aren't getting? Why can’t we make even an educated guess about the effectiveness of the “surge?”

The bad news continues to come unabated -- last week’s headlines blared about May being the deadliest month in years – and the fog of war endures, despite our efforts to make sense of what's happening on the ground. At last night’s Republican presidential debate, Rudy Giuliani made this point about the surge:

And I'd just like to ask, I'd just like to ask one question I didn't get to ask before, when you said, if General Petraeus comes back in September and reports that things aren't going well, what are we going to do?

But suppose General Petraeus comes back in September and reports that things are going pretty well. Are we going to report that with the same amount of attention that we would report the negative news?

Giuliani’s media criticism occurred on the same day that the Associated Press held a panel discussion about Iraq in which AP Iraq Bureau Chief Steven R. Hurst said this:

It’s hard to give a very positive report of what’s going on in Baghdad right now for a number of reasons. I think, first and foremost, the United States puts a great deal of hope that the so-called troop surge would start having an effect. Immediately after it was announced, there was a significant drop in violence, in February and March, but that lasted a very short time. Now, we’ve seen a number of people being killed there, which is sadly the Baghdad story right now.

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Rudy Giuliani got some flack for his handling of the abortion issue at the first Republican presidential debate. ("It would be OK" if the Supreme Court upholds Roe V. Wade, he said. Also, "it would be OK to repeal it." Oh, and it "would be OK also if a strict constructionist viewed it as precedent." OK then!)

The rest of the GOP pack was more on message on the issue, using it as an opportunity to throw some red meat to the conservative base: Sam Brownback, for example, said the overturning of the 1973 abortion decision would be a "glorious day of human liberty and freedom."

Giuliani has been trying to keep the issue from hurting him with prospective primary voters, and based on the polls, he has been able to pull it off so far. But the sudden emergence of the news that "in the '90s he contributed money at least six times to Planned Parenthood, one of the country's leading abortion rights groups and its top provider of abortions" is going to complicated matters.

The press corps now has a pretty strong piece of information to cite in efforts to nail down Giuliani's position on the issue, and that makes it a lot harder for him to keep from saying something that will alienate a significant number of voters.

Giuliani, as the Politico points out, has been trying for a somewhat nuanced approach on the issue on the campaign trail. He says he is "against abortion. I hate it. I wish there never was an abortion, and I would counsel a woman to have an adoption instead of an abortion." But he also "understands it is a personal and emotional decision that should ultimately be left up to the woman," according to a spokesperson.

That's a legitimate position, but it sure sounds like a fancy way of saying "pro-choice." And that's not what many Republican primary voters want to hear. Now that reporters have Giuliani's Planned Parenthood contributions to cite, he has less leeway to hedge on the issue.

Consider what Clemson University political science professor Dave Woodard told Jonathan Martin: "This isn't something like where your position is misunderstood. An overt act of giving money shows support for a position. That can't be a mistake or misinterpretation."

"Attack me all you want. There's plenty to attack me about. Please do it. But maybe, you know, show a little decency."

--Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani, asking the media to back off from scrutiny of his wife Judith Nathan Giuliani. Writes WCBS-TV New York's Lou Young: "That's a tough sell for a man who suggested he might invite his wife into cabinet meetings."

As we've discussed before, members of the media – especially in New York – don't much seem to like Rudy Giuliani. And the feeling is, or at least was, mutual. "He didn't like us. I mean, let's just start with that," Newsday’s Ellis Henican told "On The Media" last month. "He didn't like to be criticized. He took it all very personally. He was quick to anger, and he lashed out very quickly."

Anti-Rudy stories have been trickling out with increasing frequency as the campaign has heated up, even as Giuliani has been more successful in maintaining his lead in the polls than many expected. And today we get a flurry of them. Consider this Associated Press piece, headlined "Giuliani faces questions about Sept. 11" – his presumed source of political strength. Writes Larry McShane: "While the former mayor of the nation's largest city was widely lionized for his post-9/11 leadership…city firefighters and their families are renewing their attacks on him for his performance before and after the terrorist attack."

Then there is a pair of pieces in the New York Times, "Testimony by Giuliani Indicates He Was Briefed on Kerik in ’00" and "In His White House, Giuliani Says, His Wife Might Have a Very Visible Role as Adviser." The former shines a light on Giuliani's embarrassing connection to Kerik, his disgraced former police commissioner; the latter stresses the "unusually overt role" Judith Giuliani would have in the White House and notes his "very public breakup with his second" wife in the second paragraph.

It's not that the press corps is making this stuff up – Giuliani has given reporters plenty of fodder for stories documenting incidents and criticisms he'd rather forget. But the evidence does keep mounting that many journalists, justifiably or not, have a bit of a distaste for "America's mayor." And they want the rest of us to see why.

Dan Collins, the CBSNews.com's senior producer for hard news, co-wrote a book about Rudy Giuliani that was published last year. The book, "Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11," which Collins wrote with the Village Voice's Wayne Barrett, is critical of the former mayor.

According to the book's description, "Grand Illusion reveals how Giuliani has revised his own history, casting himself as prescient terror hawk when in fact he ran his administration as if terrorist threats simply did not exist, too distracted by pet projects and turf wars to attend to vital precautions." Booklist writes that "[d]espite his much-vaunted leadership and talk of his prescience to develop a response team after the 1993 attack, Barrett and Collins maintain that Giuliani failed New Yorkers in myriad ways." Publishers Weekly claims that the "Giuliani who emerges from these pages-shrewd, calculating, indomitable-remains an impressive figure, but one that will give voters pause."

I asked Collins if he had any concerns about covering Giuliani in the presidential race in light of his authorship of the book.

"Sure, it's a concern," said Collins. "I've given the staff written instructions to play Giuliani down the middle." Collins says he will continue to edit stories about the candidate. "We're going to go down the middle on all the candidates, Republican or Democratic," he continued. "We've done that since before the book was conceived, while we were writing it, and we'll continue to do that now."

The conventional wisdom about Rudy Giuliani is that he's been so successful as a Republican candidate for president simply because the only sense voters have of him comes from his leadership following the Sept. 11 attacks. Once they find out about more about him, the logic goes – his failed marriages, his social liberalism, the whole dressing in drag thing, this mess – his standing in the polls will fade.

The time has come to find out if that conventional wisdom holds up. The media has begun talking Rudy, and the coverage has focused on the fact that he's not the man many people think he is. In a cover story last week, New York Magazine asked simply, "Him?" And now Newsweek offers its cover story, with its tagline "The Real Rudy."

"Giuliani is a social moderate running in a party dominated by Christian conservatives; he supports gay rights and gun control, and hopes to be his party's first pro-choice presidential nominee since Gerald Ford more than 30 years ago," writes Jonathan Darman. "His tenure at city hall—in which he donned fishnet stockings to dance alongside the Rockettes and sauntered for the press corps as a pink-chiffon-clad Marilyn Monroe—is a case study in why no New York City mayor has gone on to higher office since 1868."

The question of whether Giuliani can overcome his past and ride to the nomination on the strength of his Sept. 11 leadership has, in fact, become the dominant storyline of his campaign. Journalists have been champing at the bit to unveil the Rudy they know to the world – on Sept. 10, he was "just another tired mayor with a bad marriage," according to Newsday’s Ellis Henican, and New York City's reporters have long spoken of Giuliani's anger and short fuse. Now that Newsweek has brought "The Real Rudy" to mailboxes and doctor's office waiting rooms around the country, we'll get to see whether or not this passage from the New York Magazine story says it all:

I ask Max Kaster, a local pastor and party chair for Calhoun County, a half-hour south of Columbia [South Carolina], what people down here would think of America’s Mayor if they knew he had moved in with a gay couple after separating from his second wife. "Really?" Kaster says. He fiddles with a lapel pin that combines an American flag and a cross. "I think that would roll a lot of people’s socks down.”