OxBlog

# Posted 4:00 PM by Patrick Belton

GIVEN OUR RECURRING INTEREST in covering the way the press covers politics, I was interested to come across this page on the famous Bush v. supermarket scanner story from 1988. What's interesting is that the fairly universal consensus, a decade and a half later, is that the entire incident was invented by the New York Times. Newsweek, screening pool footage of Bush at the famous checkout counter after the New York Times's piece appeared, reported 'Bush acts curious and polite, but hardly amazed.' Michael Duffy of Time concurred: 'completely insignificant as a news event. It was prosaic, polite talk, and Bush is expert at that. If anything, he was bored.' Even more amazingly, it later surfaced that the New York Times's Andrew Rosenthal wasn't even there at the supermarket - he based his story on a distortion of several lines filed by the pool reporter who was present, Gregg McDonald of the Houston Chronicle - who had reported Bush was expressing polite fascination not with then-standard checkout technology, but with a new type of scanner that could detect forged signatures and read mangled or torn bar codes. McDonald himself didn't find the incident noteworthy enough to file back to his own newspaper.

It's hard to think of a much more striking incidence of the press manufacturing an incident to fit its own prior conceptions or narratives - a practice which, more often than not, it generally gets away with. And as a foreign policy hand, I'm less concerned when the victim is a pracitioner of a high-risk, intrinsically unfair profession such as politics, than when it's public understanding of, say, trends in Afghanistan, or development assistance, or politics in Europe and Latin America. Though I've frequently been critical of the first Bush administration, among other things for its failure to give voice to the widespread sense of repugnance in the United States following Tian'anmen Square, to me the fact that the person who here lost his job was Bush and not the New York Times's Rosenthal still seems, frankly, intriguing.

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