Press Aide Attacks Media Critical of Speaker Wright

WASHINGTON —  House Speaker Jim Wright (D-Tex.), whose first year in that office was marked by controversies over his personal finances and high-risk leadership style, responded in typical Washington style last month: He hired a new press spokesman.

But, in his first few weeks on Wright’s staff, chief press officer George Mair may have been more successful in alienating some of the nation’s largest news organizations than in burnishing Wright’s public image.

Since mid-December, Mair--formerly editor and publisher of a suburban Virginia daily newspaper--has fired off strongly worded letters to newspaper and magazine executives complaining in colorful and bitter terms about their reporters’ treatment of Wright.

Times Story Criticized

In response to a lengthy assessment of Wright’s first year that ran Jan. 4 in the Los Angeles Times, for example, Mair accused two of the newspaper’s reporters of writing their article without first interviewing the Speaker--they actually had had a long interview--and charged that the story was “badly researched, poorly written and, possibly plagiarized.”

In his letter to Times Editor William F. Thomas, Mair said that the story “was so beneath the standards of the Los Angeles Times that I was forced to double-check the masthead to make sure of what newspaper I was reading.

“It is a dreadful cut-and-paste job, using worn-out, inaccurate and long-repudiated gossip,” Mair’s letter continued. “In fact, some of the material sounds so verbatimly familiar that I suspect it has been plagiarized.”

Although Mair subsequently retracted his accusation that reporters Karen Tumulty and Sara Fritz had not interviewed Wright for the article, he has yet to document the charge of plagiarism, according to Dennis A. Britton, a Times deputy managing editor.

Charges Called ‘Outrageous’

“I have been associated with Washington and national news for 20 years, and I have never received a letter of this sort before,” Britton said in a telephone interview from Los Angeles. Britton said he wrote to Mair to complain that the charges were “outrageous and simply unacceptable” but said that he has not received a response.

“People in public life have to realize that, when they raise a charge as serious as plagiarism, they had best have something to back it up,” Britton said.

Mair, in a brief telephone interview from Los Angeles, where he and Wright met with The Times’ editorial board Monday, refused to answer questions unless he was told how the Washington Post had obtained copies of the letters. The Post refused to comply.

But, in a statement released by Marshall L. Lynam, his chief of staff, Wright said Monday that he regrets “any intemperate or unjustified” remarks contained in the letters written by Mair.

“Regrettably, I did not see George’s letters before they were mailed,” Wright said in the statement. “If I had, I’m sure I would, in at least some cases, have tempered their tone and content . . . . I believe most people in the media will know from such personal contacts they have had with me that it is my personal instinct and inclination to be polite and to give others the benefit of any reasonable doubt.”

Objects to Quotes

In his letter to The Times, Mair objected to the use of quotes from “political enemies of the Speaker without identifying their right-wing coloration.” Included in that category by Mair was Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, a well-known observer of Congress. Mair said that Ornstein “runs a right-wing quote machine” and is someone Wright has never spoken to or met.

Ornstein guffawed at the characterization of his political orientation and said that the charge that he has never met or spoken to Wright is “false.”

Mair sent similar letters to senior editors or executives of at least four other publications--the Wall Street Journal, Knight-Ridder, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report.

Mair criticized the Journal’s Dec. 4 evaluation of Wright’s year as Speaker as “sly-wink innuendo” and “irrational writing” with “broad and scurrilous allegations.”

“I know that you have been suffering budget cuts with bureaus being closed,” Mair wrote to Journal Editor Robert L. Bartley, “but are things so desperate that the Wall Street Journal cannot do its own research?”

Article Defended

Al Hunt, the Journal’s Washington bureau chief, responded to Mair’s letter and defended the article in a telephone interview as “very fair” and one that “gave Jim Wright some credit.”

In addition, Mair objected strongly to a Nov. 30 Newsweek article on Wright that, like many other recent stories, examined the Speaker’s legislative stewardship of the House and his financial dealings in Texas. A number of news organizations have run stories in the last year on Wright’s activities on behalf of troubled Texas savings and loan associations and his business ties to a Fort Worth developer who had planned to invest in a project for which Wright had obtained federal funds.

The article described how Wright had rebounded from near bankruptcy in the 1970s and his desire that his grandchildren not find themselves “in the financial situation I’ve been in.” The article noted that the Speaker has tried to encourage his grandchildren to be thrifty by giving them $50 a month as long as they donate some to charity and save some.

Anecdote Assailed

In responding to that anecdote and other issues in a 2 1/2-page letter to Richard M. Smith, Newsweek’s editor-in-chief, Mair wrote:

“One of the cheapest shots made in the article by your people is to drag Jim Wright’s grandchildren in and use them to ridicule him for trying to instill in them a sense of charity and thrift. I know Newsweek is in a circulation and advertising fight for its survival and that you’re having to hype your sagging publication with stories on bra museums, angels of death and semi-nude female movie stars. Still, I personally feel you cross the line of taste when you stoop to using children against their parents or grandparents.”

Evan Thomas, chief of Newsweek’s Washington bureau, said: “We stand by the story. It was entirely accurate.”