CyberAlert -- 07/11/2000 -- Bush's "Contrition" for GOP
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Bush's "Contrition" for GOP; Greedy Drug Companies; Mayberrys Move; Jacoby Suspended >>> Now
online for your viewing pleasure or pain: A clip of the June 28 Dateline
NBC piece by Keith Morrison in which he previewed the wonderful
opportunities and benefits for Elian in Cuba. A few excerpts: Correction: The June 30 CyberAlert Extra twice quoted Bryant Gumbel, in an interview about the Supreme Court's partial-birth abortion decision, asking about "DNX and DNE procedures." That should have read D&X and D&E.
Anchor Peter Jennings introduced the July 10 report from Reynolds: "For many years, Republicans conceded that a majority of black Americans identify with Democrats, but Mr. Bush this week is promoting the notion that he's a 'compassionate conservative.' He's done so before." Reynolds began, as
transcribed by MRC analyst Brad Wilmouth: "George W. Bush came to
Baltimore to get black Americans to give his candidacy a chance, to
underline his insistence that he's a different kind of Republican, and
to show middle-of-the-road voters, both white and black, that he is more
moderate than they may have suspected. Among blacks, Bush has his work cut
out for him." Reynolds to Jackie
Cornish, a "community development activist": "Is that a big
strike against him in the black community?" Preceding the piece by
Reynolds ABC looked at the Gore campaign. Terry Moran reported: "With
his campaign stalled in the polls, Al Gore ratcheted up his populist
rhetoric." After some Gore soundbites, Moran led into a clip from Dick Armey by noting how "GOP leaders in Congress mocked Gore's approach as just another example of a desperate candidate grasping for something to boost his campaign." Moran concluded: "Gore's aides claim the new populist approach is helping to define the election around issues that favor Democrats. The risk for Gore, however, is that he will turn off the independents and Republicans he so desperately needs." Back to Bush and the
NAACP, on the CBS Evening News Phil Jones showed how Bush was heckled over
the Graham death penalty case. Jones added, however, that unlike previous
Republican presidential candidates, Bush did come to the NAACP. Jones
characterized the address: "It was a short 20 minute speech, with few
details, as Bush attempted to portray himself as a new kind of
compassionate Republican." When the Jones piece ended, Rather told viewers: "For his part, Democrat Al Gore is road testing one his strategies for the fall campaign, the Vice President said today Bush is tied to, in Gore's words, 'the nothing for the people Republican controlled Congress.' Gore said Republicans are stonewalling legislation he favors to give patients the right to sue HMOs and to expand Medicare to cover prescription drugs for older Americans."
In a July 10 segment on
AIDS in Africa, prompted by a conference on the topic in South Africa,
Ford pounced on Merck's Dr. Jeffrey Sturchio. Here are Ford's first
two attacks in the guise of questions:
On Imus in the Morning, MRC analyst Paul Smith noticed, Greenfield bemoaned how not even Al Gore is fulfilling "the appetite for public works." Greenfield's recommendation for the surplus: More money for railroads since "we don't have a decent rail system." Here's Greenfield's
suggestion in full, as expressed on the July 10 MSNBC simulcast of the
Imus in the Morning radio show: Just what we need, more Amcrash derailments.
None of the broadcast network evening shows touched the subject Friday night, reported MRC analysts Jessica Anderson, Brian Boyd and Ken Shepherd. CNN's Inside Politics and The World Today skipped it, noted the MRC's Brad Wilmouth. And MRC analyst Paul Smith saw nothing on Friday's The News with Brian Williams on MSNBC or on Saturday's NBC Today. Since Republican Party officials and volunteers helped pack up the moving fan, the situation had a partisan taint, but back in early June, well before any politics were involved, the networks similarly ignored the news that a presidential candidate owned a house in which the tenants were unable to get overflowing toilets repaired. Back in early June, while FNC ran full stories, ABC and CBS never mentioned it. CNN's Inside Politics ran a brief item with video and NBC's Today gave it a few seconds without video. On the July 7 Special
Report with Brit Hume, from Carthage, Tennessee, FNC's Bret Baier showed
guys carrying stuff to a moving truck: "They're not professional
movers, they're staffers with the Tennessee Republican Party. She's
not just an unhappy tenant moving out, she's Vice President Al Gore's
unhappy tenant, who says she's fed up." Mayberry told Baier:
"And I said, 'No.' I said, 'That's a bunch of bull. They're
playing head games with us again.'" After a soundbite from Tennessee Republican Party Chairman Chip Saltsman, Baier read a comment from state Democratic Party Chairman Doug Horne: "This is the first time the Republican Party has shown any concern for working families, and it's only to play politics with this situation." Baier hit hard in his conclusion: "The Vice President spent much of the day campaigning in Pennsylvania, a key electoral state, speaking on his Medicare proposals, and in particular, health benefits for women, while a woman claiming her family's health was threatened living in Al Gore's house packs up and moves on." A shorter version of Baier's piece ran an hour later on the Fox Report. +++ See the movers and the condition of the house. Watch this story via RealPlayer. Late Tuesday morning MRC Webmaster Andy Szul will post it on the MRC home page: http://www.mrc.org To view Fox News
Channel's unique June 5 story when this matter first broke, go to: For an entertaining
piece in The Weekly Standard by Matt Labash about the Mayberry family, go
to:
It would be one thing if he were inspired by a column by a particular columnist or historian, but this e-mail was unauthored and therefore unreliable, leading Jacoby to check the tales before writing his piece. The four month suspension of the lone conservative voice at the very liberal paper will silence Jacoby, coincidentally, through election day. In a statement, Globe publisher Richard Gilman claimed: "We cannot look the other way if any of our columnists, reporters, or writers borrow without attribution from the works of others, even in an attempt to improve upon it. The Globe will not equivocate in abiding by the highest journalistic standards and ethics." By this standard, any columnist who repeats commonly circulated information is guilty of improper behavior. "They are way overreacting," asserted even liberal media critic Dan Kennedy of the Boston Phoenix, as quoted by the July 9 Boston Herald. Over the past couple of years, the Globe had punished columnists Patricia Smith and Mike Barnicle, but those suspensions and eventual separations were prompted, respectively, by clear plagiarism and outright making up of anecdotes and events to add color to stories about human tragedies. And what does it say about how clued-in Jacoby's editors are when they didn't realize beforehand that the stories about the signers were circulating around the Internet? The latest: In Tuesday's Washington Post Howard Kurtz disclosed how many inside the Globe think the suspension was too tough a punishment. Below is an excerpt from that article as well as a reprint of Jacoby's reaction and links to other comments on Jacoby's situation as well as to research on the whole signers controversy. One issue I've not seen addressed: What happens to Jacoby's syndication deal? The Globe is owned by the New York Times Company and the New York Times News Service syndicated Jacoby's column to papers around the nation which are paying for it. -- From the July 11 story by Howard Kurtz: The story line seems all too familiar: another Boston Globe columnist punished for borrowing someone else's work. But this time the offender is an unabashed conservative on a famously liberal op-ed page, and the penalty so harsh -- for what many Globe staffers see as a minor infraction -- that some rushed yesterday to defend a man with whom they rarely agree.... "It strikes me as a terrible overreaction," says Globe business columnist Charles Stein. "The guy made a mistake. He wasn't trying to put anything over on anybody. It's very different from the other incidents the Globe has been involved in, where people were making stuff up. Maybe a reprimand and a week's suspension would have been appropriate." Steve Bailey, the Globe's "Downtown" columnist, calls the suspension "way over the top. The guy's opinions were never welcomed in this building from day one. One mistake and he's gone. It's hard to imagine there wasn't some connection [with his conservative views]. The guy has created a lot of enemies over the years. I didn't agree with his point of view all the time, but I admired his work.".... Says John Fund, a Journal editorial board member who first published Jacoby's writing a dozen years ago: "It's an open secret that Jacoby was viewed at best with sneering indifference and at worst with contempt and hostility in the newsroom." He calls Jacoby's mistake a "misdemeanor." Jacoby has been something of a lightning rod. In 1997, when he criticized Harvard activists who tried to block a discussion by a Christian group that believes homosexuality is sinful, two gay copy editors complained, and the Globe's ombudsman -- who had castigated Jacoby for "homophobic" columns -- called the piece "offensive.".... END Excerpt To read the whole Kurtz
story, go to: -- Jacoby's letter to
friends distributed on Sunday, which I feel comfortable reprinting since
it was quoted by Kurtz and is posted in full on at least one conservative
Web site: The letter: As you may know, I am undergoing some difficulty. At 4:15 last Friday, I was suspended without pay for four months from my job at The Boston Globe, and effectively invited to resign. I was put on notice that if I do choose to return in four months, there would have to be a "serious rethink" of the kind of column I write. The Globe is accusing me of "serious journalistic misconduct" in connection with my July 3 column on the signers of the Declaration of Independence. That theme -- the lives of the signers, and what happened to them after July 4, 1776 -- has been explored many times. One bibliography lists works on the subject dating back to 1820. When I sat down to write the column, I had before me a version written by Paul Harvey, another published by Rush Limbaugh, and a third sent to me a year ago by a reader. Using those versions -- which all told much the same story, in much the same words -- as a starting point, I did my best to verify the information. I checked encyclopedias of American history, consulted books I own on the Revolutionary War, and visited web sites that provide biographical material on the founders. I made a special point of checking sites that debunk "urban legends" and other Internet myths, since I knew that at least some of what is said about the signers is not historically accurate. I knew, too, that an anonymous e-mail on the signers of the Declaration had been making the rounds. In fact, when I e-mailed my column to a group of friends, fans, and family members on the evening of July 2, I noted that what I was sending was NOT a rewrite of that e-mail, which I knew to contain errors. Of course, it too told approximately the same story, using approximately the same language, as all the other versions. Since I was relating lore that has been related over and over, and since all of the sources I relied on had relied in turn on even earlier recitations, I assumed that all the material in my column was in the public domain. It never occurred to me to include a line pointing out that I was far from the first to write about the fates of the Declaration's signers. Had I added such a line, Globe officials tell me, none of this would be happening. On Monday, July 3, I asked if I could repair the oversight by adding a correction to my next column. Permission to do so was denied. Instead, an Editor's Note pointing out that "the structure and concept for [my] column were not entirely original" appeared on the op-ed page on Thursday, July 6. The next morning, I was given an opportunity to explain how the column had been written. A few hours later, I was suspended. I joined the Globe as an op-ed columnist in February 1994. (The first line of my first column was: "So what's a nice conservative like me doing in a newspaper like this?") In the six and a half years since, I have produced close to 600 columns. I invite anyone to judge my integrity and my journalistic ethics on the basis of the work that I have done for the Globe. To my knowledge, the paper has never had any reason to question my work, or to doubt that I hold myself to the highest standards when writing for publication. Six years' worth of superlative evaluations of me are on file in the Globe's personnel records. I think it is fair to say that I have been a credit to The Boston Globe and have improved the paper's reputation. What is happening now is a nightmare. In accusing me of "serious journalistic misconduct," the Globe is poisoning the good name I have spent years building up. This suspension is a brutal overreaction to something that even the Globe will not call plagiarism and doesn't characterize as a willful violation. No one deserves to lose his income for a third of a year because a column lacked a sentence that might have underscored how common the column's theme was. I am deeply concerned about my family's future, of course. And I am deeply concerned about my reputation. It is a great privilege to write a column for a prominent daily newspaper. Over the past six years I often expressed my gratitude to The Boston Globe -- both publicly and privately -- for giving me such a wonderful pulpit. And I endeavored, twice each week, to make good on that gratitude by writing a column of which the Globe could be proud. I thought my future at the paper was limitless. It has been shocking and traumatic to discover how wrong I was. END Reprint For the latest on all of this, go to Jim Romenesko's MediaNews: http://www.poynter.org/medianews/ For reaction: http://www.poynter.org/medianews/extra6.htm For Timothy Noah's
exploration of the origins of the stories and their accuracy, go to: Oh, and the Jacoby
column in question is still online at the Globe. It's been de-listed,
but this direct address still worked as of Monday night:
>>>
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"Bush's
speech here today was, in many ways, a political act of contrition,"
ABC's Dean Reynolds declared on Monday's World News Tonight in a piece
on George W. Bush's speech before the NAACP convention in Baltimore.
Like NBC Nightly News in a brief snippet shown by Tom Brokaw, ABC played a
soundbite of Bush conceding, "For my party, there is no escaping the
reality that the party of Lincoln has not always carried the mantle of
Lincoln." Reynolds piled on: "Bush is associated in this
community with his proposed tax cut that many see as benefitting the rich
and with a death penalty that disproportionately punishes black
people." The CBS Evening News also delivered a full story, but
avoided using the soundbite of Bush bashing his own party.
Pharmaceutical
companies are greedy bastards if they dare to make a profit while people
are dying of AIDS. That seemed to be the attitude, observed by MRC analyst
Jessica Anderson, exuded by Good Morning America co-host Jack Ford Monday
morning when he went after a spokesman for Merck.
More
money from Amtrak, that's the ticket. Liberals in the media seem unable
to resist the lure of the wonders of European socialism. The latest media
figure to urge that the U.S. adopt European priorities is a disappointing
one: Jeff Greenfield of CNN. The former long-time ABC News reporter is one
of the straightest shooters in his reporting, but Monday morning his
former life as a speechwriter for Robert Kennedy broke through.
Friday
night only the Fox News Channel bothered to update viewers on how the
Mayberrys, the family renting the run-down house from Al Gore, gave up on
him after he failed to fulfill his promised repairs and moved to Ohio.
Even
his liberal colleagues are defending Jeff Jacoby. As you may have heard
elsewhere, The Boston Globe late on Friday suspended conservative
columnist Jeff Jacoby for four months without pay, effectively a push to
convince him to resign, for writing a column about the same topic
discussed in an anonymous e-mail circulating around the Internet, about
the fate of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, without
stating that many of the same stories had been written about in the
e-mail.
