CyberAlert -- 03/25/1997 -- Pedophilia Blame Conservatives

Published: 3/25/1997 1:00 AM ET
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By Brent Baker
the Steven P.J. Wood Senior Fellow and Vice President for Research and Publications
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Copy of: MRC Alert: Pedophilia: Blame Conservatives; Cronkite's Dream

1. NBC News fails report a word about how newly released documents show the White House coffees were designed to raise a specific amount.

2. NBC's Gwen Ifill offers some hyperbole about Hillary Clinton's Africa trip: "Just by setting foot here..."

3. Pedophilia in San Diego: ABC blames Proposition 187.

4. Cronkite's Crockery of the Day: "A system of world government is mandatory." 


      
      

        
1) If
          you watched NBC Nightly News and Today aired since Sunday's New York
          Times headlined "White House Kept Close Tab on Cash Raised at
          Coffees," you would not yet have heard a word about it. Sunday's
          Today didn't mention it and as reported in the March 24 CyberAlert,
          neither did the March 23 Nightly News though the show found time for
          video of President Clinton on crutches (instead of in a wheelchair) as
          he left church.
        
Monday's Today
          ran a two and a half minute taped piece from Jim Miklaszewski on how
          Democrats are distancing themselves from Clinton. Miklaszewski
          reported that many Democrats think Clinton went too far in how he used
          the White House to raise money, but the piece, apparently put together
          the week before, didn't mention the New York Times disclosure.
        
NBC Nightly
          News on Monday night (March 24) didn't utter a word about the
          revelation of how Clinton and Gore were notified of how much each
          coffee was expected to raise and had raised so far. The closest NBC
          came to mentioning fundraising came a brief item from Tom Brokaw
          describing Al Gore's trip to China. Brokaw stuck to a bi-partisan
          theme:

          
"...The
          official agenda includes human rights and trade issues but there is no
          doubt the Vice President's trip will be dogged by recent allegations
          about China's attempt to buy political influence in the U.S."
        
ABC's World
          News Tonight also ignored the coffee discovery. Only the CBS Evening
          News provided a full report. CBS reporter Rita Braver noted that a
          memo revealed a plan to have the President make fundraising calls and
          that the coffees "had specific targets for the amount of money
          they were supposed to raise. Sometimes it was hundreds of thousands of
          dollars. And the documents also show that the White House kept very,
          very careful details on how much was brought in at each one of these
          events, Dan."
        
Dan Rather
          asked: "Rita, why is this important?"
        
Braver
          responded: "Well, it's important because it absolutely shatters
          this illusion that the President has been trying to create that this
          was all an informal process, that people were just invited in here --
          if they felt like giving they could. It shows how calculated it was.
          And the White House kept promising to release these documents,
          wouldn't do it. As you said, they finally came from Capitol
          Hill."
        
An illusion
          not yet shattered for NBC viewers.
          

        

        
2) Hillary
          Clinton's trip to Africa has generated very little network coverage,
          but that didn't stop NBC reporter Gwen Ifill from magnifying its
          importance. In the Today show's first full report on the First Lady's
          excursion with Chelsea, Ifill asserted on the March 24 Today:
        
"Hillary
          Clinton's trip to Africa is designed to convince America that this
          vast continent is about more than just war, disease and famine. Just
          by setting foot here she's given Africa a higher profile than it's had
          for decades..."
          

        
3)
        Conservatives not only want the elderly, homeless and children to
        die, ABC suggested another evil result of conservative policy: They've
        helped allow child sexual abuse. In a March 19 Prime Time Live story
        last Wednesday ABC reporter John Quinones looked at how pedophiles in
        San Diego prey on Mexican boys.
        
At one point,
          as picked up by MRC news analyst Gene Eliasen, he blamed the
          anti-quota proposition in California that voters backed last year:
        
"In
          California, the problem has been made only worse by the passage of
          Proposition 187. It specifically says that no public funds can be used
          to provide social services to anyone who's in this country illegally.
          That means that even if social workers for the city or the state
          wanted to help the boys of Balboa Park they couldn't. It would be
          against the law. Proposition 187 is now being challenged in court, but
          it's message is clear."
        
Another
          example of symbolism over substance. If, as Quinones notes, the law is
          being challenged and therefore has not gone into effect, what impact
          can it really have? And if "it's message is clear," does
          that mean there wasn't any problem until election day 1996?
          

        
4)
        The advantage of employing interns is that you can make them do whatever
        dreadful duties everyone else in the office wants to avoid, like reading
        a boring book. So, last week I inflicted on the MRC's news intern, Brian
        Schmisek, the duty of scanning through Walter Cronkite's book, A
        Reporter's Life, to find anything wacky and/or liberal. Brian not only
        survived the experience, but in a matter of hours he found a bunch of
        quotes that must be read to be appreciated. So, starting today I'll be
        including in each CyberAlert a "Cronkite Crockery of the Day."
        
Today's
          offering comes from page 128 where Cronkite writes about the
          importance of the Nuremburg trials in "establishing a judicial
          precedent" necessary for international law because "the
          world is unlikely to survive a third world war, which would almost
          certainly bring universal nuclear devastation." The former CBS
          News anchor then expressed this hope:
        
"If we
          are to avoid that catastrophe, a system of world order -- preferably a
          system of world government -- is mandatory. The proud nations someday
          will see the light and, for the common good and their own survival,
          yield up their precious sovereignty, just as America's thirteen
          colonies did two centuries ago.
        
"When we
          finally come to our senses and establish a world executive and
          parliament of nations, thanks to the Nurenburg precedent we will
          already have in place the fundamentals for the third branch of
          government, the judiciary. This, to my mind, was the meaning of -- and
          the justification for -- Nuremburg."
        
And I always
          thought all those C-SPAN callers worrying about a one-world government
          were paranoid.

      
      
      
 
      --
      Brent Baker
      

      
 
 		

      
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