Media Watch: September 1995
Table of Contents:
NewsBites: Eleanor's Address
Newsweek's Eleanor Clift spends her weekends promoting the Democrats in venues other than The McLaughlin Group. MediaWatch found Clift serving as keynote speaker at a September 9 women's conference held by Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.).
Clift offered kind words for the White House: "They are doing many of the right things. They're just not, they're not giving it the right public relations....One friend of mine said the Clinton administration is rhetorically challenged. They don't know how to make their case. Clinton is a far better President that he gets credit for." Clift also gave advice. "The Democrats should not allow the right-wing Republicans to steal the issue of traditional values," Clift warned, claiming Clinton "is a moral leader for the country."
Clift warned of impending doom if Republicans have their way:"We are about to embark on a great experiment. If the Republican cuts go through you will see if this really does have an impact. You know the liberals have always said if you do this, you're gonna have this many more people homeless, this many more people in poverty. And then that will provoke a great backlash. Well, you might see that's going to happen."
Removing Clinton's Negatives.
A September 5 "news analysis" by
USA Today reporter Richard Benedetto delighted in Clinton's
performance in Hawaii during V-J Day events. Benedetto
suggested Clinton's speeches "hardly seemed the words of a
leader who has little respect for the military, wants to gut its budget
and is unwilling to commit troops to battle, as many Clinton
critics charge."
In an effort to take the draft-dodging issue off the '96 table, he claimed Clinton magically repaired his image with veterans: "Maybe the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II was a time when he came to the realization that his reluctance to answer his country's call to arms may have been a mistake, and those who answered without a second thought forgave him. How else do we explain aging World War II veterans, as giddy as children, jockeying to get their pictures taken with the President, and camouflaged young soldiers with shaven heads shouting out, `Four more years!'?"
Flacking Federal Food.
ABC's Michel McQueen focused the August 3 Nightline on school breakfast programs in two Rhode Island school districts. Central Falls takes advantage of federal funds and feeds a morning meal to all students regardless of need, while the Pawtucket school board refuses to serve breakfasts.
In disbelief that Pawtucket placed the same value on federal tax dollars as they did local tax dollars, McQueen exclaimed: "At Winter's elementary school in Pawtucket more than three quarters of the children come from families poor enough to qualify for subsidized lunches, but the school doesn't offer breakfast, even though the federal government would cover virtually all of the costs."
Pawtucket schools feed children breakfast through teachers' $2 weekly donations to charitable organizations as well as the school nurse's office. But McQueen asked the Central Falls superintendent: "Do you find it odd that a hungry child in Central Falls can come to school in the morning and get breakfast but a hungry child two miles from here cannot?" McQueen's compassionate campaign had Ted Koppel convinced: "But how can they at the same time sort of accept the notion that teachers are going to dig into their pockets and come up with 2 bucks a piece per week so that kids that are clearly hungry, not a question of these kids faking it. They need to eat just so that they can pay attention in class. They can't really believe that having the teachers do that is an adequate alternative."
McQueen missed the larger story right in front of her: the privatization over the past year of Rhode Island's school lunch program. As Stephen Glass pointed out in the Summer Policy Review, the move reduced federal subsidies by 48 percent with no loss in service. Most notably, an on-site inspection in Pawtucket found that the children were now eating better with a Marriott lunch and that "trays were `completely cleared of food.'"
Death by Capitalism.
"Welcome to the cruel world, Ivan Ivanovich," Moscow reporter Tom Fenton cooed to a newborn Russian in an August 22 CBS Evening News piece. "Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, life expectancy for Russian men has plummeted from 64 years old to age 57," implying the collapse of communism may be at fault. He then cautioned: "The traditional Russian vices of alcoholism, cigarette smoking, and poor diet have always cut short lives here, but even the post-communist collapse of the health care system and a booming murder rate do not fully explain such an alarming drop in life expectancy."
He conceded: "Scientists suspect that one answer may be decades of Soviet environmental abuse." But Fenton's premise is based upon unreliable Soviet-era statistics. He didn't consider the possibility that instead of things getting worse since the fall of communism, we may now be realizing just how bad conditions were for 80 years.
Kunstler's Constitution.
Notices of radical attorney William Kunstler's death portrayed him as a civil libertarian. On the September 5 Today, NBC anchor Matt Lauer announced: "Controversial attorney William Kunstler is being remembered today as a champion of the underdog and a defender of the Constitution." Reporter Pete Williams added: "He once explained his choice of unpopular clients by saying he wanted to keep the government from becoming too powerful." On the same day, Peter Jennings noted in his ABC Radio commentary that Kunstler "was respected for his belief in justice and his commitment to the rights of the defendant...Kunstler always represented the underdog, pitting the individual against the government, he said, keeping the state from becoming all-powerful." Jennings noted "what makes his life an important one" is "his belief in justice, because of his commitment to the constitutional right to a defense."
These tributes did not consider Kunstler's contempt for limited government and the legal system. In 1970, the newspaper Human Events noted Kunstler told students: "You must learn to fight in the streets, learn to revolt, learn to shoot guns...You may ultimately have to take that final step. You may ultimately be bathed in blood." In 1971, he declared: "We have to bring an end to the economic system in this country," adding about the legal system that "any criminal trial in this country is an oppression." In 1976, Kunstler said "Although I couldn't pull the trigger myself, I don't disagree with murder sometimes, especially political assassinations." In 1979, Kunstler told the Village Voice Joan Baez should not have criticized the communist government of Vietnam since he "would never join in a public denunciation of a socialist country."
Stained by Anti-Stalinism.
The admission of Stalinist athlete/entertainer Paul Robeson into the College Football Hall of Fame also drew tributes from the national media. On ABC's World News Sunday August 20, sports reporter Dick Schaap claimed: "McCarthyism stained the United States in the early 1950s, when the Hall of Fame was spawned. And Robeson, although never a member of the Communist Party, never hid his admiration for the Soviet Union....He won the Stalin Peace Prize and the bitter enmity of the red-baiting Right."
Associated Press reporter Nancy Armour wrote on August 25 that "Robeson fought for equal rights for blacks beginning in his Rutgers days, and developed a reputation as a left-wing liberal. When he refused to denounce communism or the Soviet Union, he was labeled a communist." Armour also reported a 1949 radiogram from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that read "We have no evidence that Paul Robeson was ever a communist."
The media ignored the 1949 testimony of Manning Johnson, who told Congress "during the time I was a member of the Communist Party, Paul Robeson was a member of the Communist Party." They also ignored what Time's Stefan Kanfer pointed out in 1989, that Robeson's "equal rights" ideology included the view that "Stalin's brutal purges were a proper way to deal with `counter-revolutionary assassins.' The pact between the USSR and Nazi Germany was excused as a `defensive act.'" When asked by Congress if he was a communist, Robeson testified: "Do you mean -- which, a party of communists or belonging to a party of people who have sacrificed for my people and for all Americans and workers, that they can live in dignity? Do you mean that party?"
NBC's Horton Obsession.
Reporters who complain of the eternal campaign never tire of re-running the seven-year-old Willie Horton ad. In Gwen Ifill's July 27 NBC Nightly News look at race in campaigns. She compared the ad about a convicted killer with George Wallace's stance on segregation: "An effective formula for winning elections. Once blatant, now more subtle." She also showed Jesse Helms's 1990 anti-quota campaign ad, and attacked both Republican ads for using "racial triggers." Ifill warned "as the 1996 presidential campaign begins, highly charged racial rhetoric is already defining the debate."
She talked to three liberal professors, including Sonia Jarvis, who warned "pay attention to what words are being used....That's the key to whether or not there's a real attempt to encourage the country to confront some very difficult issues." Ifill finished her thought: "Or a cynical attempt by campaigns and political consultants to exploit racial anger." The "divisive" words? "Quota," "crime," "welfare," and "immigration."
Ifill attempted to "balance" the Horton and Helms examples with one of Democrat race-baiting. But Ifill didn't discuss the ads run by the Democrats in 1994 against the black Republican candidate J.C. Watts, which employed an old photo of Watts sporting an enormous Afro. Ifill instead fired from the left, criticizing President Clinton for his 1992 campaign attack on rap singer Sister Souljah.
No Weaver Fever.
The Randy Weaver case would seem tailor-made for a media generally eager to report abuses by government agencies. Weaver was the focus of a two-week standoff with the U.S. Marshal Service over a weapons charge in August of 1992, resulting in the deaths of Weaver's unarmed wife, his son, and a U.S. marshal. Questions surrounding government conduct followed amid allegations of evidence tampering and "shoot on sight" rules of engagement, leading eventually to Weaver's acquittal, a multi-million dollar settlement from the FBI this August, and Senate hearings in September.
But through it all, the networks reported nothing beyond what the government told them it had done wrong. In the ten months between Weaver's surrender September 5, 1992 to the not-guilty verdict at his murder trial July 8, 1993, the only coverage was a John Gibson story on jury deliberations for the June 26 NBC Nightly News. CNN and NBC didn't even cover the July 8 verdict. An October 1993 Reason magazine article explained many of the federal improprieties that led to the disastrous results, but that failed to prompt any network attention.
In the 19 months from the July verdict to the suspensions handed out by FBI director Louis Freeh on January 6, 1995, the networks aired three evening or prime time news stories on the case: a Weaver interview with Tom Brokaw on Now and reports from NBC's Jim Miklaszewski and ABC's John Martin.
After January 6, another lull occurred, with only one anchor brief on Weaver until July 13, the day the Justice Department announced it would reopen the case after allegations of destruction of evidence. In all, there were only three pieces of enterprise journalism by the networks during the 37-month Weaver saga. So much for comforting the afflicted.
