Supermarket scanner moment

A supermarket scanner moment is a

In February 1992, during

Other major news outlets did not agree with The New York Times's interpretation, as Time and Newsweek described the scene as unexceptional news and Bush as unamazed.^[1][4] The individual who performed the demonstration said that Bush was familiar with conventional scanner technology.^[1] As Time later put it, all eyewitness accounts refuted The New York Times story.^[5] CBS Radio correspondent Charles Osgood corrected his prior broadcast.^[2] The New York Times did not issue a correction,^[6] defending the report and citing video footage in which Bush interacted with conventional and new scanners and was both "unfamiliar with" and "clearly impressed" by conventional scanners.^[1]

For its part, the White House belatedly decried the mischaracterization a week later.^[2] Bush himself angrily wrote to The New York Times chairman Arthur Ochs Sulzberger decrying inaccuracies in the report. In a reply, Sulzberger conceded that the article had been mildly "naughty" and that the paper did not expect it to attract the attention it had.^[6]

Legacy and comparisons

The "supermarket scanner moment", that Bush had been too out-of-touch with common people to understand a quotidian supermarket scanner, became an enduring American political myth, still alive after many years despite widespread refutation.^[5][7] One version of the myth places Bush in a supermarket rather than at a convention.^[5] The Washington Post credits the myth's persistence to human psychological propensity to remember stories that feel plausible and to not forget debunked stories.^[7] Retrospectively analyzed, the myth had exacerbated negative impressions of Bush while he was already blamed for the country's handling of the early 1990s recession and defending against an election primary opponent.^[2][1] As the public already suspected that he did not do his own shopping, wrote Snopes, the situation was a ready recipe for portraying Bush as unfamiliar with both managing the economy and how people bought groceries.^[1] Conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg described the incident as "politically devastating" for the president,^[8] whose popularity declined in public polls in the lead-up to the general election he would lose that year.^[9][1] Bush's press secretary Marlin Fitzwater dedicated four pages of his memoir to lambasting the media coverage of the event.^[2]

During the 2012 presidential election, MSNBC reported on a speech the Republican candidate Mitt Romney had given during a Pennsylvania campaign stop as being another supermarket scanner moment. In the excerpt, Romney marveled at how a touchscreen at a local convenience store worked. Time and Politico wrote that the larger context, that he was making a point about government regulation of business, ruined the connotation that Romney was unfamiliar with common consumer technology.^[5][10] Under pressure that the excerpt was out of context, MSNBC played the longer clip the next day without further comment.^[11]

In the