THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, March 29, 1995 TAG: 9503290437
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY GUY FRIDDELL, LANDMARK SPECIAL WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 68 lines
That oddest of odd couplings among political operatives, Republican Mary Matalin and Democrat James Carville, kept an audience at Tuesday night's Norfolk Forum laughing, cheering, and, now and then, thinking.
As the occupants of the full house were leaving Chrysler Hall, a Chesapeake gentleman farmer remarked, ``I knew what to expect of Mary from watching her on TV, but Carville surprised me.
``He was more homespun, more down to earth, more likable.''
He was that, hilariously so. Noting that a magazine had called him ``a country bumpkin,'' Carville cried, ``Guilty! That's what I am!''
Then he defined the species in half a dozen ways, including:
``You're a country bumpkin when your richest relative buys a new house and you have to help him take off the wheels.
``You're a country bumpkin if the front porch falls down and kills more than three dogs.''
Holding up his tuxedo cuffs, he said, ``You're a country bumpkin for sure if you have cuff links on one hand and a hair pin on the other!''
Matalin led off, lacing into the media, not for any so-called liberal bias, but for their culture. ``The mainstream media,'' she said, ``are much more powerful than any candidate, any issues, and any force.''
And the advent of TV has accelerated the decline of the political parties in disseminating information, she said, citing a poll that fewer than 40 percent of the people trusts the press to tell the truth most of the time.
The print press, Matalin said, can't compete with TV in breaking the news, so it has turned more and more to interpretive journalism and is moving away steadily from the facts - and toward what the reporter deems to be reality.
Subsequent stories are designed to validate the reporter's original interpretation, she said.
She noted two instances in which the truth was skewed and the facts never recovered during the 1992 presidential campaign.
One was the ridiculing of President Bush for not comprehending the scanner at a grocery-store checkout. But that occurred in an exhibition of advanced technology in which a laser beam in a flash totes up contents of a full grocery cart. ``I thought it was pretty gee whiz,'' Matalin said.
The reporter who moved the original distortion had missed the demonstration and picked up a few details from a pool report, she said.
She decried ``Hair Force One'' in which Bill Clinton, getting a haircut aboard Air Force One, was said to have gridlocked the Los Angeles airport. ``No air traffic was held up,'' she said, but the false story ``was repeated ad nauseum.''
She deplored the pack mentality and feeding frenzy of the press and the accentuating of the negative. In a debate on health reform, 10 percent of the exchanges had been partisan conflict while 90 percent had focused on substance, she said. But the stories the next day reversed that ratio so that 90 percent dwelled on the conflict.
In the clash of ideas, Matalin said, the media focus on the clash and not the ideas.
Carville noted that when an individual is victimized through an unfair report, ``it demeans you and demeans the country.''
Both closed on positive notes. Carville lauded the American way of leaving anything you borrowed a little better than how you found it.
``The ultimate thing you use that belongs to someone else is the country,'' he said.
And we should strive to leave it ``a little better off'' for our children.
She poked fun, for fun, at Carville's balding ``serpent head,'' but when he got worked up, he was as impressive as one of the old-time stem-winders. by CNB