MediaWatch: April 1992

NewsBites: A Book Gone Wrong

A BOOK GONE WRONG. If it sells, who cares if it's accurate? That seems to be the view of Andrews and McMeel, the book publisher which just released America: What Went Wrong, the paperback form of the October 1991 Philadelphia Inquirer series by the same name. As documented in the December and February issues of MediaWatch, reporters Donald Barlett and James Steele used misleading or inaccurate statistics to portray the middle class as decimated by tax cuts and deregulation.

MediaWatch asked Donna Martin, editorial director at Andrews and McMeel, if the firm had checked the book's statistical assertions for accuracy. "No," she responded before noting that she was pleased that the book "reflects the public mood" and is the basis of some April episodes of Bill Moyers' Listening to America PBS series. So much for fact checking.

FUDGING THE BUDGET. Even though the 1990 budget agreement has failed to control spending as its backers promised, it is still being trumpeted as a success by the media. In a March 6 "news analysis," Washington Post reporter Steven Mufson charged: "Today, with another election at hand, Bush seems willing to borrow a little more from young people's futures to protect his own." Mufson suggested: "Many of the President's own supporters were dismayed at his renunciation of the hard won budget compromise. And many economists criticized Bush's apparent renewal of his 1988 'read my lips' campaign pledge." Mufson didn't include any critics of the budget deal.

In the March 16 issue of Time, Washington reporter Michael Duffy complained: "Rather than telling Americans why he wants another four years and what he intends to do with them, Bush is repudiating one of the few domestic accomplishments of his first term -- a successful budget compromise that cut and capped spending, raised taxes and reduced government borrowing by nearly $500 billion."

What country's budget is he referring to? In a February 10 Wall Street Journal op-ed, the Heritage Foundation's Daniel Mitchell reported domestic spending under Bush has risen twice as fast as under Carter.

REGARDING HENRY. It's not too hard to see which side of the NEA controversy Time has taken. In the March 9 issue, art critic William A. Henry III wrote that Bush's NEA has "allowed the right wing to misrepresent culture as a hotbed of the unpatriotic, the irreligious, the sexually permissive, and perverse." He bemoaned the fact that even media figures, such as ABC's Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts, have called for the NEA's abolition.

"Rather than a pluralist tolerance in which one seeks only to ensure that one's side is heard, anti-NEA campaigners seem to seek a monopoly in which no other values can be affirmed by the government," Henry charged. He failed to explain that the values he wants the NEA to affirm are those of the chocolate-covered, half-naked, lesbian performance artist.

Henry instructed readers: "In a heterogenous society there are other, often antagonistic points of view with equal entitlement to respect." So Michelangelo's David and Andres Serrano's Piss Christ are worthy of equal respect?

NO PROBE FROM STROBE. Time Editor-at-Large Strobe Talbott has made no secret of his affection for his former Oxford housemate Bill Clinton. In the April 6 Time, Talbott defended Clinton's draft record: "At issue is what lawyers call state of mind: How real was Clinton's concern that he might be drafted? The surmise that he had nothing to worry about is based on more than 20 years' hindsight...In the autumn of '69, no one who was at the mercy of the draft knew for sure who would be called up when and according to what procedures."

While the April 6 issue was still on the newsstands, the news broke that Clinton admitted receiving a draft induction notice in the spring of 1969, something he'd avoided telling most people, apparently even his friend at Time. Talbott's tale of tragedy turned to farce. He quoted Clinton writing a friend in the fall of 1969: "I am resolved to go to England come hell or high water and take my chances." Asked by Washington Times reporter John Elvin if he would revise his apologia, Talbott said "No."

NOW COVER-UP. Months after other newspapers and magazines broke the story, The New York Times has seen fit to announce that Patricia Ireland, President of the National Organization for Women (NOW), has a female companion in addition to her husband. In December, The Advocate interviewed Ireland, who admitted to the affair. On March 3, reporter Jane Gross penned a New York Times Magazine profile of Ireland, suggesting Ireland's admission wasn't voluntary: "But her hand was forced by The Advocate, a gay-and-lesbian publication that threatened to 'out' her if she did not cooperate with an interview, Ireland says."

Not quite. On January 15, Washington Post columnist Judy Mann reported that when Ireland "was asked [last July] about her family, she disclosed the information. The New York Times did not print it. The story merely said that she was married and the couple had no children."

Instead of coming clean about the Times' self-censorship, Gross celebrated her subject: "Ireland has a winsome smile, a perfectly sculptured pageboy and a sleek wardrobe accumulated in her days as a partner in a Miami law firm....And her voice is sweetly modulated, especially when she is trying to win a point or have her way." Gross didn't even bother to identify NOW as liberal, just "hard-edged." But she did label another woman: "Beverly LaHaye, President of the right-wing anti-abortion group Concerned Women for America."

FEMINIST FORUM. In January, MediaWatch reported on Good Morning America co-host Joan Lunden's tribute to feminism when she interviewed NOW President Patricia Ireland and liberal columnist Ellen Goodman. On March 19, the tribute resumed when she interviewed Gloria Steinem and liberal reporter Susan Faludi, author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women.

Once again, Lunden engaged in a feminist lovefest rather than a debate. Lunden's questions included: "Why this backlash? Because a lot of women are talking about it now and feeling it," and "Isn't it nice to have something to just blame all these things on...From reading Susan's things, I mean, I really feel you feel there is a very strong backlash. Do you agree?" Lunden even criticized the media: "You're talking about these messages, these media messages that are all of a sudden coming out; that if you sit and look at them you can say, wait a minute, you know, this does seem...anti-woman." She ended: "We could go on and on about this, as they do at many, many dinner parties, I'm sure at many tables, but I gotta jump out of here."

POTTER SAVES THE PLANET. As June's U.N. "Earth Summit" nears, some in the media are doing their best to fan the "global warming" hysteria. Take Ned Potter's completely imbalanced March 12 report on ABC's World News Tonight. Potter, noting the Bush Administration's reluctance to give in to the green lobby, fumed: "At stake [at the Earth Summit] is a treaty to control the industrial gases, like carbon dioxide from oil and coal, that trap the sun's heat in the atmosphere and threaten to warm the world." As usual, Potter left out scientists like MIT's Richard Lindzen, who do not believe warming is occurring.

But Potter's real villain was John Sununu. Potter exalted, "Sources say what's allowed this debate to take place is the departure of John Sununu as Chief of Staff. They say he was so anti-environment and so intimidating that nobody dared tangle with him...Staff members complain that John Sununu held them up for two years. Now they only have two months to get a proposal together." Potter's the intimidated one: if Sununu's arguments were so weak, why was Potter so afraid to cite them?

UNGAGGED OPINION. The Bush Administration revised the so-called gag rule to allow doctors to give limited abortion counseling at federally-funded clinics, but network reporters still weren't satisfied. On the March 20 NBC Nightly News, reporter John Cochran told Tom Brokaw: "I think there will be more abortion counseling, because, along with these guidelines, an unwritten signal is being sent that the thought police will not be watching very carefully what's going on in these conversations."

ABC News reporter Al Dale followed on March 30: "But thousands of other clinics more dependent than Planned Parenthood on federal money may have to obey the rules, leaving many women who cannot afford private care with no place to turn for qualified medical advice on abortion." Neither reporter discussed the difference between the legal right to abortion and the demand that taxpayers subsidize the promotion of abortion.

On March 21, ABC correspondent Karen Burnes reported: "According to a recent ABC News poll, most Americans favor a woman's right to choose an abortion under certain circumstances; only 10 percent oppose it." Burnes avoided polls on issues before the Supreme Court., such as a January Gallup survey that showed 70 to 86 percent support for restrictions like parental consent and spousal notification.

ENGBERG ERRS AGAIN. "The way America treats its children from newborns to teens has deteriorated to danger levels according to a new study out today," Eric Engberg breathlessly declared on the March 23 CBS Evening News. Engberg treated the study, by the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Center for the Study of Social Policy, as the gospel truth, a threatening crisis beyond dispute.

But CBS excluded critics like Heritage Foundation analyst Robert Rector, who told The New York Times the report was "pure mental rubbish" that "ignores $150 billion in welfare; so it doesn't look at the children's standard-of-living conditions." Census Bureau statistics don't consider substantial non-cash welfare benefits such as housing assistance and Medicaid. Engberg also reported that child poverty increased 22 percent in the 1980s. But the Children's Defense Fund, a left-wing lobby for increased welfare dependency, calculated that the percentage of children in poverty declined from 22.3 percent in 1983 to 19.6 percent in 1989.

Without citing any statistical source, Engberg insisted "social workers have encountered more homeless children." For emotional impact, he turned to a social service worker who explained how homeless kids "forget how to laugh, they just sit, they cry a lot. We have a lot of kids that cry. They've lost a sense of trust." The poorest thing in Engberg's story was the reporting.

LANE COMPLAINS. Newsweek reporter Charles Lane, who reported from El Salvador from 1987 to 1990, took issue with an item in last month's MediaWatch. In the January 27 Newsweek, Lane wrote on the Salvadoran war: "By 1980, 800 death-squad victims a month were being dumped on the dusty streets." We responded that such a sentence ignores the killings of the communist FMLN at that time and throughout the war. In a letter, Lane called our article "a patently specious attack." MediaWatch replied: "Your formulation, that the war's deaths are somehow appropriately measured only by the presumed killings of one side, is inherently biased."

Wrote Lane: "In my three years in Salvador, some of my leftier colleagues in the press corps used to excoriate me for allegedly harping on FMLN abuses. Now you guys are slamming me for allegedly doing the opposite. In both cases the charges are bogus." In a later phone conversation, Lane also told MediaWatch: "I had the Salvadoran air force threaten me, I had the FMLN threaten me, I had the FMLN ban me from their territory because they were spreading the rumor that I was a CIA agent. And to have you accuse me of bias on the subject of El Salvador, after I have wrestled with that experience, after I have wrestled with those issues for five years, trying to come to some semblance of truth about that place, which is a damned difficult place to understand, is a cheap shot. And it's not worthy of your publication, which on many occasions I think properly skewers the press for its real biases."

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