Ron Reagan Jr. didn’t shy away from the limelight when his dad was president. In 1986, he appeared on “Saturday Night Live” wearing nothing more than jockey shorts and socks.
So I found it interesting when he weighed in on Jenna and Barbara Bush, the president’s 19-year-old twin daughters, who have again brushed up against the law and reporters for their underage drinking antics in Texas.
The issue, Ron Jr. said, is not “something as mundane as trying to buy beer with a borrowed ID, something that happens 10,000 times a day in every college town in America. The story is the media’s inability to resist the lure of ratings and circulation.”
I disagree with him, but only to a point.
The children of presidents are innocent bystanders in the lives of their fathers. Unlike Ron Jr., who obviously craved attention, they deserve privacy and should be left alone by the media, which has no business prying into their lives.
Unless, that is, they break the law, get busted by the cops and wind up in court. Those are public acts involving public institutions that can’t be ignored, as Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. put it.
That’s what happened to the Bush girls, and the press would have been remiss if it weren’t reported. But in doing so it became our responsibility to treat the story with a restraint due the minor offense, which as a whole we didn’t.
That said, I think editors at Florida Today handled it well. They kept it off the front page, avoiding a sensationalistic splash. In four days from May 31 to June 3, they:
- Ran one story on page 3A and three stories on page 4A, one of those just a four-paragraph brief that quoted Bush’s mother as saying the president was “getting back some of his own” from his admitted hard-partying youth.
- Ran a piece on past presidential children.
- Printed a story at the top of the People section’s front page about how the arrest had renewed talk on underage drinking.
“We played it much more low key than others did,” says Steve Arnold, Florida Today’s news editor who oversaw placement of most of the stories.
“There was never any thought that, ‘God, this is a big story,’ but that it was a story about two kids who, whether they like it or not, are role models and need to be held accountable for that and what they did.
“I think if you go back and look, you’d see that we played Chelsea (Clinton) breaking up with her boyfriend bigger that this.”
As Arnold noted, other news organizations didn’t hold back.
The examples are many, including MSNBC making it a major story, and Newsweek devoting more than a full page to the matter with a large picture of the twins above the headline, “Busted Again in Margaritaville.”
USA Today also ran the girls’ picture on the front page and devoted nearly all of page 3 to the story one day, while cable TV coverage included discussions with college students about drinking and the media’s handling of the matter.
George Kennedy, a professor of journalism at the University of Missouri, says two things besides the law-breaking made the story newsworthy.
First, the president has acknowledged a drinking problem earlier in his life and was arrested for drunk driving. Second, Bush has made a point of stating that families must raise their children to have respect for the law.
“When a violation of those principles hit as close to home as they have here” it becomes news, he says.
There also is another point Kennedy didn’t raise — as governor of Texas, Bush signed into law a bill that calls for underage drinkers to receive jail time after three offenses.
However, Kennedy is deeply distressed with the overboard coverage and how the media once again wouldn’t let go.
“Unfortunately, segments of the press have — as we always seem to do — taken a reasonable news story and blown it out of any semblance of reality,” he says. “There was a lack of judgment and bad judgment that gets us into trouble again and again” with the public.
Kennedy says the media’s credibility woes make people wonder if we really have the good intentions we say we do, and excessive coverage like that of the Bush daughters “feeds directly into that perception, and I think properly so.”
I’m with the professor. It seems like we never learn.
Glisch is Florida Today’s public editor. His weekly column on media ethics and credibility appears Wednesday. Phone: (321) 242-3968. E-mail: jglisch@flatoday.net
