MediaWatch: April 1991

Janet Cooke Award: CBS: Faking the Nation

Sunday morning news programs used to be dry, formal proceedings with a panel of reporters questioning a guest. But in the 1980s, CBS simplified its Face the Nation format by scrapping the panel in favor of one host, Lesley Stahl. Instead of just posing questions, Stahl often debates the guest. For battering Health and Human Services Secretary Louis Sullivan with false and misleading statistics, Stahl earned the April Janet Cooke Award.

Stahl introduced the March 31 show by painting a dismal picture of how children fared in the last decade. "Truth: In the '80s in America, the number of children in poverty rose 26 percent," Stahl announced.

Misleading. This is technically true, if you're calculating the number of families with children living in poverty. According to the Census Bureau, that figure rose from 4 million in 1979 to 5.3 million in 1989, roughly a 30 percent increase. But Stahl didn't tell viewers that the number peaked in 1983 at 5.9 million, and has been declining ever since. In fact, the steepest increase in poverty came in 1980, while Jimmy Carter was still in office.

But CBS didn't use the Census Bureau; they used the Children's Defense Fund (CDF), a liberal group which lobbies for increased spending on children's programs and for a national day care system. CDF claimed that the number of poor children went up 25.8 percent from 1980 to 1989. Marianna Spicer-Brooks, Executive Producer of Face the Nation, told MediaWatch: "This is just my own peculiar feeling about the Census Bureau. It has proved itself to be unreliable on a number of various issues, but the Children's Defense Fund has made it their business to check out the statistics. They're specialized."

When presented with the argument that CDF might cook statistics, Spicer-Brooks retorted: "As opposed to the government, which has the capability to cook the statistics in a special way so they can cut what they want. I mean, everybody cooks statistics, right? We all know that, and so we attempt to weed through what's being cooked and what's not being cooked to get to what is reality." CBS stuck with CDF.

Stahl continued her introduction: "And a new study that one out of eight children under the age of 12 is going hungry."

Misleading. Stahl isn't citing government statistics here either, but the questionable numbers of the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), another liberal advocacy group [See page 1]. Stahl was less interested in the accuracy of this figure and more interested in using it for moral posturing: "Dr. Sullivan, one in eight American children is going hungry. What's gone wrong in our country, where we can afford to fight a war in a foreign land, where we can afford more money for space exploration, but we cannot afford to feed our own babies?" Spicer-Brooks said it wasn't rhetoric, but fact: "We can afford to fight a war and we can't afford to feed our babies....The money for the war is off-budget. Why don't we put money for this off-budget?"

What's responsible for this grim vision of children? According to Stahl, "The problem is the budget cuts. One food program, called WIC for Women, Infants, and Children, has only enough money for half of those eligible."

Wrong. Notice Stahl's bait-and-switch: she didn't follow up her claim of budget cuts with any numbers. Perhaps that's because WIC funding has more than doubled since 1980, from $746 million to $1.7 billion, far in excess of inflation. Spicer-Brooks denied Stahl was referring to WIC, and claimed she had a list "three pages long" of programs cut.

Stahl plunged ahead: "Another truth: more than 26,000 cases of measles were reported last year, a disease all but wiped out ten years ago. The Reagan-era budget cuts were part of the reason." A bit later she returned to the subject: "Why are kids getting measles in America? Now I've heard it was the budget cuts."

Wrong. When asked by MediaWatch if immunization programs had been cut, Steve Sepe, National Vaccine Program Director at the Centers for Disease Control, flatly responded: "No." In fact, federal spending on immunization programs has grown from $32 million in 1980 to $186 million in 1990, and the recommendation for fiscal year 1992 is $257 million, eight times the 1980 amount before inflation. But Spicer-Brooks maintained that while the overall budget for immunization may have increased, the federal funding for clinics had been cut. Who claimed that? "Our source is the Children's Defense Fund."

Trying to convince viewers that even conservatives realize more money should be spent, Stahl told Sullivan: "There was a group of corporate leaders who had supported the budget cuts in the early Reagan years. They are no bleeding hearts. They do not want to see increased spending. They went to Congress and they said that the Administration should double the amount of money spent on these programs to feed the children and pre-natal care, double the amount you're proposing."

Wrong. Stahl was referring to March 6 testimony by five CEOs affiliated with the Committee for Economic Development (CED), a moderate-to-liberal group of corporate executives. Nat Semple, the CED's Director of Governmental Affairs, labeled Stahl "dead wrong." Semple assured MediaWatch that CED members opposed Reagan's proposed social program cuts in the early 1980s: "I'm sick of the media portraying us as some caricature of Neanderthal right-wingers." One of the CEOs who testified to Congress, William Woodside, formerly with Primerica, is credited by the left-wing Food Research and Action Center (FRAC) as a vital supporter of their study on child hunger.

Continuing her attack, Stahl charged: "There's the other problem of infant mortality, which is going up in the United States."

Wrong. The infant mortality rate has not increased since at least 1960. In fact, it declined an average of 2.5 percent during the 1980s, and less than a week after Stahl's performance, the government announced the rate fell six percent between 1989 and 1990. When confronted with Stahl's mistake, Spicer-Brooks said: "I'm sorry, but I'm not responsible if she gets something wrong."

Asked why CBS relied so heavily on liberal groups for the statistics used on the air, Spicer-Brooks responded: "There were other statistics that we got from other organizations, that are statistics we put on the air....We talk to a lot of people, not even a majority of which are liberal people....If what comes across is what you feel is liberal bias, it's not a result of the preparation for the show."

Viewers might accept Stahl's aggressive interviewing style, but they should not accept a public policy debate based on false or misleading statistics. Stahl's shameless performance makes us consider renaming the Janet Cooke Award the Lesley Stahl Award.

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