getting all the evidence
out, and NBC's Tim Russert's uncharacteristically
imbalanced questioning on Meet the Press.
a) When Paula Jones came
forward in 1994 with her charge against the President,
reporters were not much interested in her case or her evidence. ABC's
World News Tonight gave her 16 seconds while the other
networks passed. But with President Clinton now in the hot seat
and his credibility threatened, one major reporter is demanding
full disclosure, demanding the Jones team provide the evidence
for their question's about Clinton's behavior.
Mark Honig, head of the
MRC's Parents Television Council, alerted me to this exchange
on Fox News Sunday between NPR's Mara Liasson and guest Wes
Holmes, a member of the Paula Jones legal team:
Mara Liasson: "You
know, a lot of people have charged that President Clinton has
committed adultery, and in some senses the President has almost
admitted that himself. But you are the only people who have charged
that he's committed sexual harassment in the legal sense. Now do you
have evidence of other episodes of the President committing
sexual harassment?"
Wes Holmes: "I'm
sorry. I'm probably going to be pretty boring in this interview
because of the confidentiality order. But I certainly can't
reveal anything that's come up through discovery, and I wouldn't
reveal anything that's come up through our
investigation."
Liasson: "Well, that
raises another question. I mean, you must think that what
happened yesterday is pretty significant, right?"advocate to both sides, but
on Sunday he pressed the guests representing Paula Jones
with more than three times as many challenging questions as he
put to Clinton's defender. The guests on the January 19 Meet the
Press: James Carville, Jones lawyer David Pyke and Jones
adviser Susan Carpenter McMillan.
MRC news analyst Geoffrey
Dickens counted up the questions and determined that Russert
made Pyke and McMillan reply to seven negative questions about
sinister motives and funding, but asked Carville just two negative
questions. Russert asked Carville about a Newsweek story on Kathryn
Willey and whether the deposition spectacle embarrassed the
administration. Here are four of Russert's seven inquires
posed to Pyke and McMillan:
-- "Some of the
concerns expressed, where there is also the Paula Jones legal
foundation or legal fund. And some of that money has been used to pay
for car repair bills and telephone bills. Miss
Carpenter-McMillan there has been a lot of discussion about the Paula Jones
makeover. The new look. Who paid for that? Herself or her legal
fund?"
-- "Let me just turn,
keep pressing on this money issue because New Yorker magazine
reported that you went and floated the idea of a book, pitched
a book, the still standing, The Inside Story of Paula
Jones. Is there a book proposal? Is a book being written? Will Paula
Jones benefit from a book contract?"
-- "So Paula Jones
does not wish to make one nickel on this lawsuit for her own use. Or
will she sell her book rights or movie rights?....But now
and in the future will she pledge not to receive any money from this
lawsuit and refuse to write a book or participate in a
movie?"
-- "Mr. Pyke, in terms
of the political agenda. Could someone make a case that Paula
Jones and her husband received $1,000 to appear in The Clinton
Chronicles, a movie which was hocked by Jerry Falwell. That she
came to Washington and appeared at the Conservative Political
Action Committee. And that the Rutherford Institute, whose now
representing her, or paying for her representation, never took
on a sexual harrasment case until this one. How do you speak to
the issue that this is an attempt by 'right wing
conservatives,' quote, unquote, 'to get Bill Clinton?'"
Anita Hill did not appear
on Meet the Press during her book tour last fall, but two
other NBC News shows helped her promote her book and version of
history: Two Dateline segments and a two-part interview on Today.
Neither challenged her as Russert did the Jones team. For details
on how those shows treated Hill's tale, for which she
supplied much less corroboration than did Jones, see the October 2
and October 6, 1997 CyberAlerts.
Over video of a man working
under the hood of a old car, Rather asserted:
"Resourcefulness, in
Cuba, is a 40 year old religion. Virgilio Riveran's
[spelling a guess] '58 Oldsmobile is a case in point. I'll soon have it
running he told us, once I've fixed the fuel line. In fact, that
won't be that simple. The U.S. embargo has made such tubing hard
to find in Cuba."
As if the US is the only
nation in the world exporting tubing. Standing beside a baseball
game Rather insisted that rural Cuba is no different than,
say, Iowa:
"For a moment at least
this could be the United States. In some ways rural Cuba
resembles some of small town America -- a lot of pride here, strong
sense of community. The difference of course is that here they're
so poor and so repressed, but when you travel outside Havana
this is what you find in little towns such as Boratha Nueva [it
sounds like that]. The game, another religion here in Cuba. Milk
producers versus grapefruit pickers this day. [Over video of
players arguing] This is one place in Cuba where open debate is
permitted. By mid-afternoon they were back at work loading the
last of this year's crop. Some of these people will board buses
into Havana next Sunday for the big mass, but most of them care
little about the Pope..."
The Cuban regime has hardly
made it easy to practice any religion, so maybe the real story is
how many do want to see the Pope.
Two
observations about Sunday morning talk show coverage of the Paula Jones case: a
NPR reporter suddenly concerned with 
