CyberAlert -- 12/20/1999 -- Jesus Goes Left; ABC's Liberal Showcases & Time Capsule; Naked Geraldo
Jesus Goes Left; ABC's Liberal Showcases & Time Capsule; Naked Geraldo Correction: A sentence in the December 16 CyberAlert asked: "Diane Sawyer once Bill Bradley's boyfriend?" No gender-bending intended. That "boyfriend" should have read "girlfriend."
Earlier in the show,
Roberts interviewed Barbara and Laura Bush. One of Laura Bush's answers
revealed that in a Bush W. Bush White House there won't be any pressure
from her to cut spending, not even from a puny agency conservatives have
long hoped to eliminate. Roberts asked "How do you feel about funding
for the arts." Laura Bush replied with an answer Hillary Clinton
could just as easily have given: If she had taken a conservative position in favor of cutting such spending of taxpayer money Roberts probably would have challenged her, but in this case Roberts moved on to another area.
On the December 18 show the paper's Executive Washington Editor spewed: "The question was what political philosopher or thinker do you identify with. It was repeated to George Bush. Now if Jesus is a political thinker, I assume he's for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty -- 'blessed are the peacemakers' -- I assume he's pro earned income tax credit -- 'blessed are the poor.'"
If ABC does ever show a Republican debate I bet a major focus will be on how the candidates are too far to the right, as was the focus of Tom Brokaw's questioning at the December 13 debate shown on MSNBC. See the December 14 CyberAlert for details. Friday night, however, Ted Koppel never suggested the two Democrats are liberal or are too far to the left for many Americans. Koppel hardly touched them, spending the evening refining questions from the audience and urging each candidate to be more responsive. He really only posed four questions. He opened the show by asking Bradley and Gore what kind of First Lady their wives would make. He later asked each to explain their view of media responsibility for youth violence and at another time, after pointing out how few blacks excel at science, what each would do to improve education for blacks. He ended the program by offering each time to explain what as a person "distinguishes" them to make them a better President. Far from pressing them
from the right, the audience kept asking what they and the government
would do to solve problems. One guy's questions might explain why
Democrats don't care much about illegal fundraising from China as he
painted missile defense as "warlike" aggression toward China: In addition to Thursday's Nightline, Sunday's This Week gave Bradley and McCain more air time to promote their liberal campaign finance "reform" ideas. Cokie Roberts handled the taped interview, but never pressed either with any argument from the right about how the last "reform" caused the current perceived problems, though she did argue that maybe it's philosophical differences and not money which has blocked health care reform. Hitting them from a Common Cause angle, she asked both about riding on corporate jets, but also wondered if they'd consider running together on the Reform Party ticket. She ended by raising Bush's "Jesus" answer and inquiring if there's "too much religion injected into this campaign?" While on the Thursday McCain-Bradley gimmick, on Friday the manager of the senior citizens center where the event took place told the MRC's CNSNews.com that she considered ABC News to be the "sponsor" of the event. Here's an excerpt of the December 17 story by Scott Hogenson: The manager of the senior citizens center where presidential candidates John McCain and Bill Bradley called for campaign finance reform December 16 said the event was sponsored by ABC News and not the candidates. The controversial meeting between McCain and Bradley has come under scrutiny because no other candidates were involved and because ABC News had exclusive broadcast rights to the event, which the network described as a town meeting "moderated" by ABC Nightline program host Ted Koppel. But Sandy Osgood, who manages the Earl Bourdon Senior Center in Claremont, New Hampshire, the site of the meeting, said the network did more than simply moderate the discussion between McCain and Bradley. "ABC sponsored the event," Osgood told CNSNews.com.... ABC News spokeswoman Eileen Murphy denied that the network had sponsored any part of the McCain-Bradley event and said she believes Osgood "is mistaken" in saying ABC did so. "Perhaps this woman doesn't understand what 'sponsored' means," Murphy told CNSNews.com. "No event was sponsored by ABC. It was an ABC program." When asked if ABC had invited any other presidential candidates to participate in the program, Murphy said she was not certain. But officials with the campaigns of two of McCain's rivals for the Republican presidential nomination -- publisher Steve Forbes and Texas Governor George Bush -- said they were not invited to attend. The questions swirling around the McCain-Bradley meeting already have prompted lawyers for the Forbes campaign to explore whether they will seek equal time on ABC.... Broadcasters are not required by the Federal Communications Commission to provide equal time for political candidates in news coverage, but lawyers for Forbes are examining the question of whether ABC's exclusion of other presidential candidates constitutes a de facto political endorsement of McCain and Bradley's candidacy.... END Excerpt To read the whole story,
go to: While ABC News technically may not have "sponsored" the event -- only appended themselves to an already planned event, just asking McCain and Bradley to stick around for another 30 minutes to tape a Nightline show -- the network owes its viewers equal time for the views of those opposed to the McCain-Bradley concept, whether presidential candidates or not.
Hours later on NBC Nightly News reporter Anne Thompson gave only a few seconds to these questions as she asserted Bradley and Gore are "moderate Democrats." Here are Russert's challenging questions posed during the joint appearance on Meet the Press by Al Gore and Bill Bradley: -- To both: "In the District of Columbia where we sit, one out of every three students drop out before they finish high school. A new study done: three-fourths of the nation's school children are unable to compose an organized, coherent essay. All across the country -- New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans -- the Catholic school system, more than half of those students are non-Catholic, most of them black, many of them with a single mom. They have decided the public schools don't work for their kid, and they want to stop the experimentation on their child. And they have chosen to send their kid to a Catholic school, even though they're non-Catholic. And 99 percent of them go on to college. Why don't those poor, minority moms with their kids, who could not possibly deal with the chaos of public school, deserve a break?" -- To Gore: "On
impeachment day, Mr. Vice President, you said that 'Bill Clinton will be
regarded in history books as one of our greatest Presidents.' Who else
do you believe should be considered our greatest President?" -- To Bradley: "In
1991, the Persian Gulf War. This is what Bill Bradley said as he voted no,
not to support the war [reading from January 23, 1991 Bergen Record]:
'The Persian Gulf War is likely to become a 'bloody and long' battle
that could take up to six months and could destabilize the Middle East for
decades to come, Senator Bradley said.' The ground war, as you know,
lasted 100 hours." On Sunday's NBC Nightly News Anne Thompson opened her piece on the Meet the Press session: "The Democratic contenders, Bill Bradley and Al Gore, moderate Democrats whose positions are almost as similar as their wardrobe choices today, clashing on the details." (Both wore blue suits with red ties.) Thompson played soundbites of both squaring off on health care and Social Security, as well as Gore's gimmick about ceasing campaign advertising. Thompson held Russert's challenging questions to this one sentence which ignored the "greatest President" exchange: "Both men had awkward moments: Gore admitting mistakes were made in fundraising tactics for the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign, Bradley defending his vote against the Persian Gulf War."
It hadn't made it onto CNN's The World Today through Thursday night or Inside Politics through Friday night, though Howard Kurtz briefly raised it on Reliable Sources over the weekend. Kurtz conceded Gore's answer was "important," but denied media bias had anything to do with why most of the media ignored the incident. As noted in the December 17 CyberAlert, on Wednesday only FNC played the exchange between a woman and Gore at a live Tuesday night town meeting on WNDS-TV in Derry, New Hampshire. A CyberAlert update Friday afternoon reported how MSNBC's The News with Brian Williams played the four-minute exchange. Below are more details about that, plus more on how Reliable Sources and Fox News Sunday dealt with the event: -- Thursday night,
December 16 on The News with Brian Williams the host of the same name
introduced the tape: Afterward, Williams suggested: "Now the editorial opinion of that moment has run the gamut from artful to disingenuous. Viewers, of course, are free to draw their own conclusions, but a striking moment there." Of course, viewers who
missed this one MSNBC show or who don't see FNC never saw the lengthy
video as the broadcast networks and CNN's key news shows have yet to
show it. If you haven't seen it, you can via RealPlayer on the MRC Web
site. To view the clip shown by FNC, which was almost the identical cut
seen on MSNBC, go to: -- Reviewing media events of the week on CNN's Reliable Sources, which aired at 6:30pm ET Saturday and 11:30am ET Sunday, host Howard Kurtz played a brief 24-second clip of Gore's answer in which he maintained "there have been so many personal allegations...enough is enough, I do not know how to evaluate each one of these individual stories." Kurtz then noted how "most news organizations did not report Gore's answer, but the Republican National Committee faxed around a transcript to the world and it was quickly picked up by Rush Limbaugh, Fox News Channel, Matt Drudge and so forth." Reliable Sources regular
Bernard Kalb said he found the answer "newsworthy" and thought
it should have been included in larger stories about the town meeting.
Kurtz then opined: Why gays in the military and Gore's view of medical marijuana are assumed to be more newsworthy Kurtz did not explain, but it would be nice if Kurtz would tell the producers of CNN's Inside Politics and The World Today that he finds Gore's comments "important."
Just after 7am on
December 17 co-host Diane Sawyer observed: There it is, with no connection to his reality. As the 7am hour neared its end, Charles Gibson highlighted some ideas with which the GMA staff agreed: "At this time yesterday we asked you to send in some suggestions of things that ought to go into our time capsule 2000 and we got some great suggestions from you and we're going to include them. Number one: Kristin from Hiram, Georgia said put in 'a gun so that in 100 years Americans will recall what a gun looks like and remind them of the destruction they cause.'" Gibson stopped reading her e-mail at that point, but on-screen you could see how it continued: "Hopefully, guns will be abolished." The other ideas ABC adopted: Put in "hope," the Diary of Anne Frank and Linus's security blanket from Peanuts. Of these ideas Diane Sawyer enthused: "These are wonderful." Gibson agreed: "These are great suggestions." Seeing guns as a
destructive force matched a taped story that MRC analyst Jessica Anderson
saw aired at another point on Friday's show. Reviewing school violence,
reporter Judy Muller matched anti-gun rhetoric by predicting that either
we'll agree to more gun control or else we'll have to have
"magnetometers in every school." Muller intoned:
Sunday night at 10pm ET and PT the Travel Channel ran the first part of "Sail to the Century with Geraldo Rivera," a one-hour videography of his trip around the world with a crew on a 70-foot sailboat. He plans to cross the dateline in the Pacific as the year changes, hence the name of the show. Part one started with his departure from Marion, Massachusetts in early 1997 and ended in mid-1999 with the boat off the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean. Geraldo has conducted the trip on intermittent weekend and longer breaks from CNBC and NBC as his crew sometimes waited for him and sometimes sailed on to another port to await his joining them for a leg of the trip. His narration included repeated complaints about having to fly back to the U.S. to cover the Lewinsky scandal. Without warning as the boat hit a calm spot on its way across the Atlantic to the Azores, barely, shall we say, five minutes into the show, a long-haired and unshaven Geraldo doffed his clothes for a swim, forcing viewers to see his buttocks and, as he turned sideways to jump off the boat (with front side toward the camera), a bit more than even NYPD Blue has shown. Fortunately, Travel Channel editors put some of those blury blocks over key parts of his body. Other highlights of the program included Geraldo leading on-deck dancing and exercising. Part two will air sometime in January. But now you're warned. If he went naked in the Atlantic he'll probably do it again in the Pacific. -- Brent Baker >>>
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