WHEN IT COMES TO TRASHING, SOME KNOW HOW TO PILE ON

By Mike Royko
Web-posted Tuesday, January 14, 1997; 6:02 a.m. CST

Although he's portrayed as a sexual creep, President Clinton isn't the only one who should be embarrassed by the Paula Jones case.

The Washington media elite ought to be cringing. So should many of those former liberals who now call themselves politically progressive. They're being accused of being White House puppets in efforts to muddy up Ms. Jones as mere "trailer trash."

In one of the most remarkable journalistic confessions I've ever read, a Newsweek writer recently described how he and other members of the "mainstream" press brigade were willing, even eager, participants in the kick-Paula campaign.

As the Newsweek article said:

"In media accounts, she tends to be portrayed as a trailer park floozy digging for money and celebrity."

One of those who spoke for the White House was James Carville, the Clinton adviser who portrays himself as a real grass-roots kind of guy.

But of Jones, Carville said: "Drag a hundred dollars through a trailer park and there's no telling what you'll find."

Well, I know what Carville and other members of the Clinton team usually expect to find in "a trailer park." Democratic votes, that's what. Those who live in trailer parks are on the lower rungs of the economic and influence ladder.

But lacking a comfortable net worth doesn't make them trash.

Those in trailer parks are also the kind of voters Clinton and Carville claim to love and comfort and defend. But forget that--in the heat of a legal and image battle, "trailer trash" was a handy label to slap on Ms. Jones.

The Newsweek confession went on:

"Arguably, the main reason more people don't take her story seriously is that the mainstream media have been skillfully spun by the White House and Clinton's lawyers. By playing on the class and partisan prejudices of reporters, as well as their squeamishness and ambivalence about printing stories about the sex lives of politicians, Clinton's operatives have done a brilliant job of discrediting Paula Jones and her case."

Then the Newsweek article made this stunning admission: "Newsweek's Evan Thomas, the author of this piece, said on a Washington talk show that Jones was just `some sleazy woman with big hair coming out of the trailer parks.' This elitist attitude was widely shared by the establishment press."

The repentant Evans, having purged himself of his trailer park-slur guilt, went on to write:

"The mainstream press is beginning to give more credence to Jones' story, in large part because of an influential article by Stuart Taylor in the November edition of The American Lawyer.

"Taylor accused the press of underreporting the Jones story because of a cultural double standard that let off liberal figures like Clinton more easily than conservatives like Clarence Thomas.

" . . . Meanwhile, the press is waking up. The catalyst was the article that appeared in The American Lawyer by Taylor, a former legal correspondent for The New York Times.

". . . Taylor accused the press of hypocrisy and class bias--of believing (Anita) Hill, a Yale Law grad and a feminist, and not Jones with her big hair. Taylor's article was widely read in newsrooms and editors' offices, including those at Newsweek."

Of course, that, too, is revealing. Note that Taylor, the author of the influential article, is a former New York Times legal correspondent. That's as media elite as you can get.

I wonder if those East Coast journalists would have overcome their class and partisan prejudices and been as impressed if the same soul-cleansing article had been done by someone in Salt Lake City or Des Moines.

I doubt it. But the popularity of the slur "trailer trash," isn't limited to the Eastern media elite or White House spin specialists.

Out of curiosity, I ran a computer search to see how often the phrase "trailer trash" has been used in recent months in news publications all over the country.

It's impossible to make an accurate count, the phrase turns up so often. Thousands of times.

Those who live in trailer parks have become a media punching bag. Why? Obviously there is no National Association for the Advancement of Trailer Park Inhabitants to speak up in their defense. And there are few, if any, trailer park offsprings in today's newsrooms.

So those who live in trailer parks are not on any semi-official politically correct endangered species list.

Those who live in trailer parks get to defend themselves only if some reporter drops by to study them as some sort of sociological oddity.

In one such story in a Long Island paper, a trailer owner had this to say:

" `Trailer trash,' that's what they call us. We only live on our Social Security, and that's why we can't move out of here. I don't care what people think. I know what kind of people we are, to heck with anybody who looks down on us."

Get that Mr. Clinton, Mr. Carville and all you journalism school products in Washington?

One final thought: I really like Paula Jones' hair.

© 1996 Chicago Tribune