CyberAlert -- 01/08/2001 -- Chavez as "Extreme" as Ashcroft
Chavez as "Extreme" as Ashcroft; Bush Didn't Win; Stop the "Huge" Tax Cut; Time for Campaign Finance Reform; Gumbel Admitted Cursing 2) Time's trio trounced Linda Chavez. Michael Duffy: "Her positions are just as extreme in some cases as Ashcroft's." Margaret Carlson: "She's totally against...working people." Jack White: She's "taken shrill right wing positions on everything." 1 Sunday's NBC Nightly News only gave the development, first reported on ABC's This Week, a few seconds. But CBS made it the top story of the day as John Roberts opened the January 7 CBS Evening News: "In less than two weeks George W. Bush takes the oath of office to become President of these United States. But there are new questions tonight about who may be joining Bush's inner circle. Democrats are beginning to line up against the President-elect's choice for Attorney General. And, in a scene reminiscent of Bill Clinton's first choice for Attorney General, echoes of Nanny-gate rumbled through the Bush transition today over another nominee." Reporter Phil Jones began the subsequent piece: "Two of President-elect Bush's cabinet nominees, John Ashcroft for Attorney General and Linda Chavez to be Labor Secretary, both darlings of the Republican right wing, today became targets of the most senior and influential Democrats in the Senate." Viewers soon heard from Democratic Senators Joe Biden and Tom Daschle. Neither, apparently, are liberals. Naturally, ABC led World News Tonight with the story the network first reported. Anchor Carole Simpson intoned: "Tonight we begin with a growing controversy over Secretary of Labor nominee Linda Chavez. ABC News has learned that the FBI is questioning Ms. Chavez about an illegal immigrant who lived and may have worked in her home. Chavez was already facing a tough road in the confirmation process, but this latest development is likely to make it even tougher." John Yang ominously noted how FBI agents were
questioning Chavez and the woman, Marta Mercado. Yang recounted how Chavez
maintains Mercado only did odd jobs and so was not an employee who
required Social Security payments. Yang countered: Well before the new anti-Chavez story broke Sunday morning, Washington reporters were already discrediting and denouncing her as too conservative, just as they had done with Ashcroft. At least three Time magazine stars were trouncing
her. Appearing on CBS's Face the Nation, Time Washington Bureau Chief
Michael Duffy tainted Chavez with Ashcroft's supposed extremism: The night before on CNN's Capital Gang, Time colleague Margaret Carlson spewed from the left: "She in fact is so against the minimum wage increase that she calls it a Marxist plot redistribution of income. She falls back on the fact that her father was a house painter and her mother was a waitress, but she's totally against, you know, working people. She's on the record for it again and again and I think labor will fight her tooth and nail. And should." Also over the weekend, Time national correspondent Jack White took on Chavez on Inside Washington: "What Bush has done here is he's appointed a cabinet that looks like America but sounds like a board meeting of the Heritage Foundation. She's right there at the top of the list of people whom the labor unions feel betrayed by. She's a former union activist whose since taken shrill right wing positions on everything, including affirmative action which she's supposed to enforce as Labor Secretary." Last week on the January 3 MSNBC/CNBC Hardball, MRC
analyst Geoffrey Dickens noticed, Chris Matthews raised with Bill Bennett
the issue of the media's bias against any conservative nominee: Some reporters are still having trouble accepting the reality that Bush won the election. On Inside Washington over the weekend, Time's Jack White shouted "no they didn't" to the idea that the Republican Party won as NPR's Nina Totenberg declared Bush "didn't win. Nobody won." Newsweek's Evan Thomas insisted that conservatives have no mandate since if the GOP had "run as a conservative party they would have lost." Picking up on a point made by Thomas, Totenberg treated conservatives as some kind of alien force: "The interesting thing I think that Evan raised is the question here really is: Did Bush balance this cabinet between pragmatists and sops to the right wing, as Evan suggests because he doesn't care about those positions and the domestic policies they represent? Or, is he going to run those policies essentially out of the White House and reign in those departments?" That prompted columnist Charles Krauthammer to point out:
"We had an election between the conservative party and the liberal
party and the conservatives won." Totenberg soon bemoaned: "He has picked a cabinet as
if he had run as a conservative and won a broad mandate." A reason must be found to dump Bush's "huge" tax cut. Gloria Borger suggested the Fed rate cut has made it unnecessary, George Stephanopoulos worried about its "cost," while Margaret Carlson argued a minimum wage hike is the "one way to counteract the effect of this huge tax cut he's pushing which goes to the wealthy." As with the last CyberAlert, the word HUGE is in uppercase below so it stands out. -- Gloria Borger to Tom Daschle on the January 7 Face the Nation: "Last week the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by a half a point. Does that trump the need for a HUGE tax cut?" -- George Stephanopoulos on ABC's This Week: "But this argument somehow that because we're going into some kind of a dip, even if it's not a recession, that you need to have a HUGE tax cut now is completely specious, especially because, as you pointed out in your questioning, the tax cut is not going to take effect right away and the real effect, when it really costs a lot of money, is many years down the road, five or ten years down the road. It was interesting when Mr. [Lawrence] Lindsay said we might then speed up the tax cuts. That means it's going to cost even more, far more than the $1.3 trillion they're talking about." -- Time's Margaret Carlson, on CNN's Capital Gang, announcing her recommendation for Bush's first action as President: "He should signal that he wants to raise the minimum wage. It's one way to counteract the effect of this HUGE tax cut he's pushing which goes to the wealthy, should do something for the working class." The media trinity: Prevent any conservatives from getting confirmed, stop the "huge" tax cut and promote "campaign finance reform." Here's how anchor John Siegenthaler teased what NBC considered the biggest news of the day at the top of Sunday's NBC Nightly News: "The huge sums spent on the campaign trail and the rising calls for campaign finance reform. Has its time finally come?" The news hook? Just that John McCain appeared on some Sunday talk shows and claimed to have 60 votes for cloture to move ahead with his bill. The wrong guy won, so let's dump the constitutional system. Wrapping up a Saturday story on the electoral college vote tallying presided over by Al Gore during a joint session of Congress, NBC News reporter Joe Johns concluded by promoting the views of one professor who declared: "The electoral college is an antique that distorts our democracy." Following a soundbite of Al Gore urging "God
bless our new President and God bless the United States," Johns
concluded his January 6 NBC Nightly News story: "However, for the
American electoral college one constitutional scholar today had few kind
words." Yes, the Constitution is an antique. Bryant Gumbel, whom the camera last summer caught mouthing the insult "what a fucking idiot" about a conservative guest, revealed last week that his New Year's resolution is "to watch my language" since, he conceded, "I've got a bad mouth." The admission came in a portion of CBS's The Early Show usually seen only by a few people in very small markets: One of the :25 and :55 past the hour filler-segments which virtually every affiliate but the smallest bumps to use the time for a local news/weather update. However, on the January 1 holiday, the news department at Washington DC's Gannett-owned CBS affiliate took the morning off, allowing MRC analyst Brian Boyd to catch this exchange at 8:25am between Gumbel and news reader/fill-in co-host Julie Chen: Gumbel: "We've made it eight hours and twenty
five minutes into the new year without mentioning the word but we can't
escape any longer." Gumbel laughed, but he wasn't laughing last June when he denied he had used a vulgarity in insulting Robert Knight from the Family Research Council. For that outburst, he won the "Damn Those Conservatives Award" in the MRC's Best Notable Quotables of 2000: The Thirteenth Annual Awards for the Year's Worst Reporting. The quote and the attribution: "What a f--king idiot." -- Bryant Gumbel caught on camera after he threw the show to a weather segment seconds after wrapping up a hostile interview with Robert Knight of the Family Research Council, June 29 The Early Show. To view a lengthier RealPlayer clip of the comment
and what preceded it, go to the Best of NQ awards presentation page and
click on or scroll down to the Damn Those Conservatives Award: I bet a camera rolling during all the ad breaks would pick up a quite a bit of cursing from Gumbel aimed a conservative guests. -- Brent Baker >>>
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