CyberAlert -- 01/09/2002 -- New Moyers PBS Show
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New Moyers PBS Show; Media-Generated Bush "Pakis" Hype; More Engberg Bias; Al Michaels Hit on Begala; ABC: President's Ranch in Scotland 7) Letterman's "Top Ten Signs Your Neighbor Is Hiding Mullah Omar." Correction: The January 8 CyberAlert cited an October 5, 1992 story by Eric Engberg about Bush campaign ties to the Willie Horton ad. The story actually ran nine days later, on October 14, 1992.
But one network continues to ignore conservatives as it offers programming only a liberal could like: PBS, which will soon launch a new weekly Friday night prime time news show hosted by far-left polemicist Bill Moyers. At the press tour in Pasadena for TV reporters, PBS also announced another Moyers-hosted special set for April on PCBs in the Hudson River. Moyers betrayed his personal agenda in damning former GE Chairman Jack Welch with faint praise, calling him a "dynamic apologist for" GE. The new hour-long Moyers show, titled NOW, in all caps, will debut on Friday, January 18 on PBS at 9pm EST/PST following Wall Street Week. "We believe this will be the best night of public affairs television," PBS President and CEO Pat Mitchell gushed to USA Today's Bill Keveney. Keveney's January 8 story described the show: "NOW will make use of the resources of NPR News, reflecting the public TV system's effort to increase collaboration with public radio. The hour-long program will generally consist of a 12- to 15-minute documentary report, a one-on-one interview, NPR contributions and news analysis." Keveney relayed: "Moyers, however, said the analysis would steer clear of the usual-suspect punditry favored by talk shows that have 'made rhetoric more important than argument.' He said he will seek out analysts not often seen on TV, as he did with a program on Sept. 11 that featured a minister and a professor who has studied the notion of evil." Previewing an upcoming special, Keveney noted:
"In April, the award-winning documentarian will take a literal look
downstream in America's First River: Bill Moyers on the Hudson, a
two-night look at the historical, cultural and environmental effects and
influence of the river. For Keveney's story in full, go to:
An excerpt from Taranto's January 8 column: Yesterday at the White House, President Bush discussed the Indian-Pakistani conflict: "I don't believe the situation is defused yet," he said, "but I do believe there is a way to do so, and we are working hard to convince both the Indians and the Pakis there's a way to deal with their problems without going to war." The New York Times reports that "Mr. Bush raised some eyebrows by using the term 'Pakis.' It is considered an ethnic slur in Britain, which has a large Pakistani immigrant population." Well, whose eyebrows exactly did Bush raise? The Times doesn't say. A clue, however, can be found in this Reuters dispatch: "Asad Hayauddin, spokesman at the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, said he did not consider what Bush said to be an insult. 'I would give him the benefit of the doubt and say it was said in passing. In all fairness, I would say it's not a racial slur,' he said. "He did, however, receive a number of phone calls from reporters seeking the embassy's reaction." The whole "controversy," in other words, seems to have been an invention of the White House press corps. END of Excerpt To read the New York Times story by Todd Purdum, also known as "Mr. Dee Dee Myers," go to: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/08/international/asia/08INDI.html For Taranto's daily "Best of the Web" columns: http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/
Virtually all of this will be fresh material to CyberAlert readers since the Media Reality Check cites historical examples of Engberg's bias, all but one of which did not appear in the January 7 or 8 CyberAlerts. To access the Adobe Acrobat PDF version, go
to: Below is the text of the Media Reality Check, enhanced with links to previous CyberAlerts and MediaWatch articles which provide lengthier quotations of Engberg's reporting. The January 8 CyberAlert: CBS News has been championing its retiring "Reality Check" correspondent Eric Engberg as the very model of fair reporting. "We will miss his professionalism, his humor, his style, his friendship and his great journalism," mourned anchor Dan Rather on Friday's Evening News. "Engberg's reporting and his approach to journalism reflect many of the virtues of broadcast journalism at its best," gushed CBSNews.com editor Dick Meyer, Engberg's former producer, in an online tribute. [For excerpts from Myer's CBSNews.com
article: As Engberg would scream in his regular Evening News hit jobs on conservatives, "Time out!" The idea that such a thoroughly biased reporter symbolized "journalistic virtues" is a cruel joke on objective scribes everywhere. It was one of Engberg's outrageously slanted stories -- a mid-campaign slam on conservative Steve Forbes's flat tax plan in '96 -- that so disgusted his CBS colleague Bernard Goldberg that he cited it in a Wall Street Journal op-ed as proof that the argument about "liberal bias is so blatantly true that it's hardly worth discussing anymore." [For a transcript and RealPlayer video of
Engberg's flat tax story: [For a summary of Goldberg's 1996 Wall
Street Journal op-ed on the Engberg piece, go to: But it's more than just one skewed story which makes Engberg the poster boy for liberal bias. Engberg used his CBS pulpit to rant against perceived conservative misbehavior while condemning critics of unethical liberals: -- Before Bill Clinton, there was nothing worse than a President who lied. On the May 4, 1989 CBS Evening News, at the end of the criminal trials stemming from the Iran-contra scandal, Engberg lectured that "secrecy leads to deception...Deception leads to lies. Lies tear apart the rule of law...Could it happen again? Scholars say yes, until Presidents accept the need to compromise with Congress." -- Covering Clinton's scandals, there was nothing more frightening than a subpoena. "It is now the one invitation in Washington no one wants, a call to testify before Ken Starr's grand jury. It left some near emotional collapse, others raging about police state tactics," he darkly declared on the March 2, 1998 Evening News. "Nearly all of the witnesses, it is safe to say, felt the ominous chill that comes with the arrival of a grand jury subpoena." [For more on this 1998 story, go to: -- According to his friend Dick Meyer, Engberg was "obsessed" with a 1988 TV ad about Michael Dukakis's weekend furlough for murderer Willie Horton, who then went on a crime spree. Four years later -- and less than a month before the next election -- on the Oct. 14, 1992 Evening News, Engberg resurrected his grudge against the ad he claimed "raised questions about racism and dirty politics that still haunt the electoral process like a ghost," adding that, "federal laws may have been violated" if the GOP had coordinated with the ad's independent producer. [For more on this 1992 diatribe, go to: -- When it came to Clinton's dirty campaign dealings -- including proof the President personally reviewed scripts for supposedly "independent" ads -- Engberg chose to beat up on the investigators. He scolded the Senate's oversight committee, declaring on the October 9, 1997 Evening News that "when it comes to sniffing out the breakdown of a system created to police money in politics, this committee...could easily start by setting up a great big mirror." [For more on this 1997 report, go to: -- After the bipartisan Cox commission determined in 1999 that the Chinese had been stealing nuclear secrets right out from under Clinton's nose, Engberg seemed to suggest on the May 27 Evening News that a few H-bombs were nothing to get excited about. "There is a bottom line," he snorted. "Unlike many of the things in the Cox report, there's no argument here. Number of strategic nuclear weapons? U.S., 6,000; China, less than two dozen." [For more on this 1999 story, refer to: Now that Engberg's finally gone, CBS viewers will be spared such tendentious factoids. The airwaves feel less biased already. END Reprint of Media Reality Check
This is the third pro-conservative or anti-liberal political comment from Michaels which the MRC has caught in the last two NFL seasons. In November of 2000 Michaels let slip that he considered Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris to be an "American heroine." The week before, Miller had recommended Peggy Noonan for President, leading Michaels to concede her writing gives him "goose bumps." For details about his Harris comment, plus a
RealPlayer video clip of it, go to: For more about the Noonan exchange, go to: This past Monday, January 7, the MRC's Tim
Jones, who inexplicably decided to watch Monday Night Football instead of
a 43rd showing of MSNBC Investigates, noticed the hit on Begala. MRC
analyst Jessica Anderson tracked down the exchange which took place just
after the beginning of the second quarter of the Minnesota Vikings vs.
Baltimore Ravens game in Baltimore. Over matching video clips of pass
fakes from the season, this exchange occurred:
About 18 minutes into the special ABC 2002
broadcast on December 31, at about 6:48pm EST when ABC was providing a
mini World News Tonight-like summary of the day's news, Jennings
announced: ABC then played video of George W. Bush shaking hands in a restaurant in Crawford, Texas with patrons in a line waiting to place or pick up an order. Viewers heard Bush saying such things as, "happy new year to you all" and "welcome to Crawford." Jennings, apparently correcting for how ABC failed to show the correct clip of Bush commenting on Afghanistan, but without correcting his own goof, soon broke in: "He basically said what he's said many times before, is that they're not sure exactly where Osama bin Laden is but they're going to get him and they don't know exactly where Mohammad Omar is, but they're going to try to get him as well. The President still at his ranch. He'll return to Washington, of course, after the new year." After he makes the trans-Atlantic flight from Clinton's ranch in Scotland? [Web Update: On January 14 Jennings ended
ABC's World News Tonight by acknowledging his goof:
Under the headline, "News media
mainstream: clueless?", McGuigan began his January 5 column: To read the rest of the column, go to: For reprints of other columns and editorials
about the awards quotes, including pieces in Investor's Business Daily,
the Denver Rocky Mountain News, Columbus Dispatch and Chattanooga Times
Free Press, go to a new page set up by the MRC's Mez Djouadi:
10. In his garage are a 1997 Mazda Protege and a camel > One more, nearly last, plug for the
MRC's "Dishonor Awards" dinner in Washington, DC on Thursday,
January 17. For tickets, at $150 per seat, call Sue Engle at (703)
683-9733 ext. 163. Online: >>>
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In
reaction to FNC giving a prime time hour to liberal CNN veteran Greta van
Susteren, MSNBC has hired the conservative Alan Keyes to go up against her
at 10pm EST. (He'll start January 21, she in early February.) FNC has
been quite successful with programming which appeals to conservatives and
CNN's chief, Walter Isaacson, last year tried to reach out to learn why
conservatives distrust CNN.
The New
York Times claimed on Tuesday that President Bush "raised some
eyebrows by using the term 'Pakis.' It is considered an ethnic slur in
Britain, which has a large Pakistani immigrant population." But as
James Taranto noted in his "Best of the Web" column, a Reuters
dispatch inadvertently divulged it was a controversy self-generated by the
Washington press corps.
A
special Web-links enhanced version of a Media Reality Check by the MRC's
Rich Noyes, which was distributed by fax on Tuesday afternoon. The title,
"Good Riddance to Two-Faced Reality Checks: Hailed As 'Great
Journalist' by Dan Rather, Eric Engberg Was Poster Boy for CBS's Worst
Liberal Bias."
Another
hint of conservatism from Al Michaels of ABC Sports. During the last
Monday Night Football game of the season, Micheals awarded "a
lifetime achievement award" to Clintonista Paul Begala for, as
Michael's colleague in the booth, Dennis Miller, suggested, "the
biggest fake of the year, Paul Begala's last smile."
President
Clinton's ranch in Scotland? Catching up on an item from last week, the
MRC's Brad Wilmouth located an incident several CyberAlert readers have
e-mailed me about: Peter Jennings setting up a clip of President George W.
Bush in Crawford as if it were a clip of President Clinton in Scotland.
Another
column about the MRC's "Best Notable Quotables of 2001: The
Fourteenth Annual Awards for the Year's Worst Reporting." Saturday's
Daily Oklahoman carried a second column on the quotes by Patrick B.
McGuigan, editorial page editor for the Oklahoma City newspaper and one of
the 41 judges for the MRC awards issue.
From the
January 8 Late Show with David Letterman, the "Top
Ten Signs Your Neighbor Is Hiding Mullah Omar." Copyright 2002 by
Worldwide Pants, Inc.
