Media Watch: September 1995
Table of Contents:
Free the Cabbies
Monopoly often happens by government control, rather than market failure, as NBC's Roger O'Neil explained on the August 1 Nightly News. He told the story of three entrepreneurial cabbies trying to overcome restrictions on the number of cab companies in Denver. "The trip to get that first fare took four years, a federal court lawsuit, and some lawmakers willing to break up a state-sanctioned monopoly of the cab business....For Leroy Jones and his partners, all minorities, theirs was a fight, not for affirmative action, but for economic liberty."
O'Neil explained the national implications: "Cabbies, hair dressers, garbage truck drivers, an estimated 10 percent of all jobs, about 12.5 million, require a license from the government. Passed years ago to protect consumers, many of these archaic state and local laws now protect the old established companies from new competition and force customers to pay more in inflated prices."
A Department of Transportation study said nearly 40,000 new jobs would be created if the cab business was deregulated, and riders could be saved $800 million in fares because of the increased competition.
O'Neil added: "It happened in Indianapolis. Six months after deregulation, 32 new companies, three-quarters of them women and minority owned, and for the first time, a price war." He concluded: "Without the red tape, Jones and the others say they feel for the first time freedom to climb the economic ladder, to succeed on their own."
Correcting Jennings
On July 27, ABC aired a Peter Jennings Reporting special, "Hiroshima: Why the Bomb Was Dropped," which earned last month's Janet Cooke Award. He claimed the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs even though Japan's "military hardliners" were talking surrender. Japan, he charged, wanted only to preserve their emperor, Hirohito. Just weeks later, on August 14, World News Tonight devoted most of its newscast to V-J Day, including two segments reversing the Jennings take on the war's end. ABC's John McWethy noted that after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, "for five agonizing days...the world waits...preparations for an invasion of Japan had to continue." Mark Litke found that "Japanese students were still being drafted to prepare for the expected U.S. invasion, boys as young as 12 were being trained to fly Kamikaze suicide missions."
The reporters used experts Jennings did not. Norman Polmar recalled that "no Japanese military unit in World War II, in 44 months of war, had ever surrendered to U.S. forces." Litke explained that "Japan's emperor and civilian leaders had wanted to end the war weeks earlier, but feared a military revolt." He interviewed Kasotoshi Hondo, author of Japan's Longest Day, and explained a film of that book was how "many Japanese learned for the first time how the military attempted a coup d'etat" and stormed the palace in a last-minute attempt to stop the emperor's recorded surrender message.
