MediaWatch: August 1991
Table of Contents:
Boston Globe Recycles Article From The Nation
TAKING CLARENCE TO THE CLEANERS
In the absence of any other scandal involving Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, The Boston Globe based two stories in mid-July on an article by David Corn in the far-left magazine The Nation. On July 19, Globe reporter Mark Muro completely recycled the charges from The Nation in an attempt to paint Thomas as an extremist for his advisory board position for the Lincoln Review.
Despite Thomas' own contributions to the journal, including an article praising his Catholic school teachers, reporter Mark Muro described the Review as publishing "eyebrow-raising polemics" that are "often well to the right of the conservative mainstream, and sometimes unabashedly extremist." Some of these included espousing self-help for blacks, replacement of the Martin Luther King holiday with a commemorative coin, and free enterprise, not minimum wage laws, as the solution to poverty. In other words, views which only the liberal left sees as extremist.
Muro condescendingly dismissed Review Editor J.A. Parker as "a Washington PR man who holds only a high school diploma." True to the liberal leanings of the Globe, the Lincoln Review was "an ultraconservative black quarterly" espousing "hard-line Reaganism" and M.E. Bradford was "a 'hard-core' conservative" who was Senior Editor of the "right-wing journal Modern Age." But The Nation, quoted three times by Muro, went unlabeled, as if it were some kind of unbiased news source.
