infobong.com

I watched Bob Roberts last weekend, and I found an interesting user comment related to the previous post. One commenter responds to the suggestion that George Bush resembles Tim Robbins' character with an interesting excavation of popular memory:

I am not a Bill Clinton fan, and I will give her the point that Clinton is a charmer, but her assertion that Bush is hated by the press and Clinton got a free ride is demonstrably out of step with history. Contrast press treatment of Whitewater or the Lewinsky scandal with Bush's assertions about weapons of mass destruction or his National Guard service. Regardless, what is more interesting is how the user presented these claims as fact. I would be reluctant to call this popular memory, if I hadn't heard enough people contend that the press went easier on Clinton. I wonder how this memory is propagated - is this an assertion Rush Limbaugh repeats? Bush's unilaterally antagonistic relationship with the press fosters the idea that the media is out to get him, but how do people remember Monica Lewinsky without remembering the endless press coverage of the affair?

Excavating my own popular memory of the Clinton administration, I couldn't remember Osama Bin Laden's 1998 bombings of American embassies in Africa when they were cited in news coverage after 9/11. I thought back to that summer, and, although I was in college and working nearly full time, I read the news routinely, so I should have remembered the terrorist attacks. But all I remembered was the Lewinsky scandal and, to a lesser extent, the market collapses in Asia. The Lewinsky scandal so utterly dominated the media that terrorist attacks in the global south were merely a footnote in the news.