MediaWatch: August 1990

NewsBites: The Untouchables

THE UNTOUCHABLES. Once again, the myth of runaway, uncontrolled defense spending has hit the airwaves. On the July 13 Good Morning America, newsman Mike Schneider reported at 7:30 that the Senate Armed Services Committee voted to cut "one billion dollars from the previously untouchable Space [sic] Defense Initiative program, also known as Star Wars." At 8:30, he reported that the committee "worked throughout the night to lop...a billion dollars from the previously untouchable Star Wars program."

But this untouchable program has never been fully funded once: the administration's budget has been slashed at least 18 percent by the Congress every year. Since 1985, SDI has received 18.3 billion dollars, only 74 percent of the amount requested. So much for untouchable.

A JUNGLE OUT THERE. When hundreds of Albanian refugees rolled into a small military camp in Brindisi, Italy, they found it a "paradise" compared to life back home in Europe's "poorest, most politically backward country," ABC's World News Tonight reported July 14.

But if these refugees think Albania was bad, wait till they meet the free-enterprise system as portrayed by reporter Mike Lee. First, Lee showed how enthusiastic the refugees were about their new-found freedoms, how they enjoyed uncensored newspapers, fresh pasta, John Wayne movies, and modern medical care at the refugee camp.

Then Lee pointed out the "realities" of a capitalist system. "These refugees have been told little about the realities of life in the West, including the fact that some people sleep on the street," said Lee ominously, to which one young Albanian woman sensibly wondered, "Why? Don't they work?" Undaunted, Lee continued his forecast of doom: "They will soon learn that jobs are hard to find, consumer goods expensive, relatives in Albania will be missed. Many refugees, according to experts, will suffer from depression and in some cases drug abuse."

These Albanians have no idea what they're getting into.

LEAVE OPPONENTS LEFT OUT. When President Bush vetoed a family- leave bill June 29, several reporters didn't quote anyone opposed to the bill as unfair to small businesses or harmful to job growth. On that night's CBS Evening News, Wyatt Andrews simply showed "victims" of the veto, employees laid off for taking extended leave. Andrews mysteriously ended by portraying the veto as a sop to the rich: "The veto will help frame election-year questions of wealth and privilege. Mr. Bush, who vetoed the bill just before taking a long weekend off, defends the veto as an act to protect jobs. Democrats ask what happened to kinder and gentler."

The next day, The Boston Globe's Renee Graham devoted an entire article to proponents of the bill. "President Bush's veto of the family leave bill resulted from his failure to recognize the changing face of the American work force and could cause the nation to regress into a 'third world country' in terms of business acumen, opponents of the veto said yesterday." In 22 column inches, Graham allowed no Bush official or Republican opponent of the bill to respond. USA Today's June 29 piece quoted only Ted Kennedy, Chris Dodd, and Rep. Marge Roukema, a Republican sponsor of the bill.

MORE PHILLIPS FAWNING. Add the name of Robert Raskin, a Washington-based economics reporter for Knight-Ridder Newspapers, to the list of reporters endorsing Kevin Phillips' thesis that Reagan widened the income gap. Reviewing Phillips' book for The Philadelphia Inquirer on July 22, Raskin declared that "countless lesser studies by liberal analysts over the last five years have documented time and again how Reaganomics delivered a feast to the greedheads and starvation to the poor," but "never before has the case been laid out so accessibly...and built into such a sweeping indictment of Reaganomics and all it wrought."

Phillips saw parallels between the 1980s and the Gilded Age of the late 1800s and the Roaring '20s. Raskin concurred: "Both eras were marked by the same kinds of excesses as the 1980s -- gross concentrations of wealth in the hands of a tiny privileged elite, achieved primarily by deliberate Republican policies that left most Americans behind while debt, greed and conspicuous consumption roared out of control." The other two eras ended in crashes that "triggered populist political uprisings." Raskin hoped for a repetition: "All that's needed, [Phillips] suggests, is the fertilizing rain of a new economic crisis."

NED'S NEW TAXES. ABC's Ned Potter continues to push for a better planet through higher taxes. Introducing a July 10 World News Tonight story following the economic summit, Ted Koppel announced "Six of the seven nations already are working to reduce the pollutants they emit in such vast quantities, pollutants that many scientists say are warming the planet...the one nation out of step is the United States."

Potter admitted that "from atmospheric research to tree planting, the White House says it is doing plenty," but insisted that "scientists say that is much less than what Germany and Holland are doing, and they are already twice as energy efficient as America." Potter never mentioned that the European environment requires drastic steps just to catch up to where the U.S. is now.

What are the Europeans doing? "Most dramatically, putting tremendous taxes, as much as ten times American levels, on anything that burns oil or coal. Those taxes sound crippling, but they may have an economic benefit: they have already pushed business to seek alternatives." Without such bludgeoning of the free market, Potter feared, "America may find itself alone with the temperature rising."

MOURNING MITCH. Homelessness has been a favorite media vehicle to denigrate the Reagan-era economic boom. The death by suicide of activist Mitch Snyder in early June brought on another round of calls for massive federal spending.

On July 7, ABC World News Saturday anchor Carole Simpson lamented: "Snyder's death could not have come at a worse time for the nation's homeless. It comes when public attitudes toward the homeless have been changing, and for the worse." In what way? "Declining sympathy for the homeless," which Simpson saw as synonymous with a poll which found fewer people "would pay more taxes to provide shelter for the homeless."

That same night, NBC cited similar polling data that prompted a comment from anchor Garrick Utley: "The antagonism against the homeless is growing, isn't it?" Reporter Jamie Gangel then gave a typical Snyderesque diatribe: "A third are families who have lost their homes either because housing is too expensive or because of federal cuts in housing assistance...families and children are the fastest growing group and they say that the other groups are much smaller...advocates say what's really needed is a federal master plan starting with more housing. The truth is that on the federal level, except for rhetoric, the homeless are way down the list of priorities."

TAX HIKE HEROES. Jodie Allen's comments on the July 29 broadcast of Money Politics will resolve any doubts about how much journalists want new taxes. While most of New Jersey is outraged with Governor Jim Florio for substantial hikes in the state income tax, the editor of the Washington Post "Outlook" section hailed him as a hero: "It takes a tough man to do a dirty job, but there is a dirty job to be done here. We've been living for ten years borrowing and spending."

Allen compared Florio's future place in history to Thomas Jefferson's: "The problem for Florio is that, as history has shown, when you step up and are a leader, people often don't like you. And it can take a long time, even centuries, for history to look back and say that was a good guy. They didn't start liking Thomas Jefferson until this century." In "the history books," Allen predicted, "Florio will go down as the first, I hope not the last, brave man of the '80s and '90s." Maybe if those histories are written by reporters.

OH NO, DOW HITS HIGH. "A record setting day on Wall Street. Today, the Dow Jones average reached an all-time high," announced reporter Mark Phillips on the July 12 CBS Evening News. Even though the market responded positively to Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan's decision to lower interest rates, Phillips turned to dependably dour economist Gary Shilling, who disagreed with the market's reaction to Greenspan: "It's very bad news for the economy, in that the Fed is finally admitting what some of us have thought for some time, and that is that the economy is already in a recession."

Phillips told viewers that "economic signs are not good. Consumer spending has been down for three months in a row, the first time that's happened since the recession of the early '80s." What led to all of this? Phillips concluded: "The excesses of the '80s -- the S&L crisis, bad debts to the Third World, junk bonds, empires built on credit, like Donald Trump's -- these are all coming home to roost. If, as the saying goes, greed was good for the '80s, its cost, Dan, has been a credit squeeze that threatens the prosperity of the '90s."

READER BEWARE. A recent study by Professor Adrienne Lehrer of the University of Arizona should put some holes in consumer confidence in the "news" industry. Lehrer's study, published in Journalism Quarterly and highlighted in the Washington Journalism Review, measured the percentage of quoted remarks in 24 articles that turned out, when checked against tape recordings to be verbatim. The results: in news stories by professional journalists, 10 percent; in interview stories by professional journalists, 3 percent; in articles by student journalists, 18 percent.

OLLIE'S ALLIES. Dan Rather hinted at conspiracy July 20 in explaining why a federal appeals court overrode one conviction against Oliver North, and asked for further review of the other two convictions.

"Believed to be the lead, or guiding judge in this particular case: Laurence Silberman, named to the court by Ronald Reagan. Siding with Silberman for North, David Sentelle. Sentelle also named to the appeals court by Ronald Reagan. Sentelle is a long- time supporter of Jesse Helms, and it reportedly was Helms who got Reagan to appoint Sentelle to the appeals court." The three- judge panel's dissenting voice was appointed by Jimmy Carter, but Rather didn't presume any political motives in her decision.

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