Ollie and the media

"Don't believe the liberal media" has become a standard conservative refrain. Some politicians on the right, meanwhile, have taken to baiting the press in public while wooing it in private. Oliver North is a case in point.

On the campaign trail in Virginia last year, Senate candidate North rarely lost an opportunity to berate "The Washington Compost," and "The New York Crimes." His fundraising used the press as the bogeyman, decrying what he called "one of the most ruthless and downright vicious smear campaigns in American political history." North mined an anti-press sentiment that ran almost as deep as anti-incumbent fever.

But as the reporters on the campaign trail know, his day-to-day relationship with the press was far more nuanced than his rhetoric.

Soon the public will get a chance to peer behind the curtain and see how North and the press really interacted during the nasty Virginia campaign. Two independent filmmakers, David Van Taylor and R.J. Cutler, tailed North from his announcement in January 1994 to the November election, shooting a verite-style documentary, Semper Fi. The filmmakers plan to raise additional funds for postproduction in the spring, then release the film next fall or winter, on the cusp of the 1996 presidential primary season.

Culter previously produced The War Room, the behind-the-scenes documentary on the Clinton presidential campaign that focused on political strategist James Carville. And although Semper Fi's featured player is North himself, and opponents Charles Robb and L. Douglas Wilder will have time on screen, it's a reporter, The Washington Post's Donald P. Baker, who shares the limelight with North.

Why Baker? "He is in some ways the personification of the liberal media, which North is constantly bashing and yet on whom he totally relies," says Van Taylor. Baker, a sixty-one-year-old reporter who has been at the Post for twenty-four years, is "a bit of central casting," says Cutler. "He's brilliant, amusing, an engaging character, and he fulfills the need of a filmmaker for a character who's passionate about what they do and are doing it extremely well in high-stakes circumstances."

Baker's newspaper was certainly a favorite target of North. "One of the stories he likes to tell," Baker says, "is that every morning when he gets up, he reads the Bible and The Washington Post -- so that he can get both sides." But the reporter says that North's bark seemed worse than his bite. His rhetoric "doesn't translate into a different relationship between the candidate, the staff, and the media," he says. "They're professionals. We get along fine. It's pretty much part of his schtick. It's an act."

That might surprise North's supporters. So might the amount of joking, schmoozing, and bargaining that goes on between North and his presumed media foes in Semper Fi. So might any number of scenes, like the one with the missing press van, which brought North's caravan to a grinding halt while five staff members stood on the highway with cellular phones and walkie-talkies, frantically trying to locate them -- the liberal media. Or North and Baker at dinner, casually arguing about press behavior.

"I was out having drinks with some of North's people last night, and we were talking about this relationship, " says Baker. "We have a lot more in common than we have in opposition to each other, because we all have this great interest in government and public policy."

Journalists, Baker fears, are "going in the direction of lawyers, politicians, and used car salesmen in how the public views us. Then along comes somebody like North or Pat Robertson who takes advantage of that and baits them. These people really do get fired up. And we're being used."

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