Arnie's easy ride with U.S. media

Duncan Campbell, Guardian News Service, Los Angeles

When the Los Angeles Times published a front-page story five days before the California gubernatorial election about six women who claimed that they had been groped by Arnold Schwarzenegger, it caused outrage. However, the outrage was directed not at the governor-to-be for his treatment of women but at the newspaper for daring to print the allegations, even though Schwarzenegger has acknowledged that some of the incidents took place and has apologized for them.

More than 1,000 people have canceled their subscriptions to the state's bestselling daily newspaper and commentators have lined up to berate it for running the story so close to the election. Such has been the level of attacks on the paper that its editor, John Carroll, has gone into print to defend the decision to run the revelations.

For people not familiar with the LA Times, which has always been overshadowed by its eastern rivals, the New York Times and the Washington Post, it is a far from sensationalist paper and its stories are presented in what, by British standards, is a fairly low-key fashion.

In its politics, the paper reflects the state as centrist Democrat -- although its cartoonist, Michael Ramirez, is relentlessly right-wing. Editorially, the paper was strongly opposed to the recall of Governor Gray Davis from the start, arguing that it made a mockery of the electoral process.

There had been rumors for around two weeks that the LA Times was planning a big hit on Schwarzenegger. When it surfaced, with six women alleging that the actor had groped them in incidents starting in the 1970s and continuing to 2000, the effect was immediate.

Initially, Schwarzenegger's team denied the claims and said that their candidate would have no comment. However, the actor decided to deal with them by saying that, while most of the claims were not true, there was "no smoke without fire". He had done things in the past that he had thought were "playful" and that he now realized were wrong, he said, and he wanted to apologize. Over the next few days, more women, 16 in total, came forward with similar claims, many of them agreeing to be named.

I was at three Schwarzenegger rallies in different parts of the state on the day that the story broke. The LA Times was attacked by speaker after speaker from the platform and there was fury that the story had appeared at all. Rumors began: That the LA Times had been fed the story by Davis campaign members, that it had deliberately sat on the story until the last minute, that it had suppressed equally damaging material about Davis and how he treated his office staff. These rumors were soon the currency of talk shows and television news discussions, so the story became whether the LA Times should have run the stories at all.

To British readers, much of this must seem odd. The idea that it is somehow untoward to publish unflattering material -- provided it is true -- about a candidate because it might affect his chances of being elected seems perverse.

John Carroll claims that his paper, not Schwarzenegger, is the victim of smear tactics, and says that the rumors about the paper's sources and motives had been spun on the Internet and by television and radio talk-show hosts. "We are now getting a faceful of rotten journalism -- journalistic pornography, actually -- in which ratings are everything and truth is nothing."

He explained that interviewing the many women who had made allegations, and corroborating their stories, had taken all the time up to publication date and the paper had not sat on the story to place a bomb under Schwarzenegger. Carroll says that the claims made about Davis and his staff had been investigated and did not stand up.

In fact, Scwhwarzenegger was given an easy time by almost all of the media. He announced his bid initially on NBC's Tonight Show to the chat-show host Jay Leno, and it was Leno who introduced the new governor at his victory rally. Schwarzenegger and his wife, Maria Shriver, who also works for NBC, were given an hour of soft questioning by Oprah Winfrey, in which the actor was able to tell the mainly female viewers that he brings his wife her morning coffee in bed. Even though he was the biggest campaign spender, with US$18 million raised for a two-month campaign, he could not have bought that sort of publicity.

The stories that appeared in the British tabloid press about alleged love-children barely surfaced in the U.S. A report suggesting that he had had a meeting with Enron during the state's past energy crisis also received little play in California.

Almost every major daily paper in the state, including the LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Sacramento Bee and Oakland Tribune, urged a vote against the recall. Their advice was ignored by a majority of the electorate, who instead followed the lead of the television and radio talk-show hosts. It has not only been the Democrats who have learned a painful lesson during the election.