MediaWatch: August 1991
Table of Contents:
Janet Cooke Award: Willie Horton Hysteria
The stinging electoral rejection of liberal politicians like Michael Dukakis and Harvey Gantt is still smoldering in the breasts of liberals and reporters alike. Three years after the Dukakis loss and one year after Gantt's downfall, some reporters are still replaying the campaign commercials and insisting that the Democrats lost, not because their ideas were unpopular, but because the Republicans used negative ads that exploited racial fears.
Boston Globe congressional reporter Michael K. Frisby exemplified the passion behind liberal resentment in his July 14 Boston Globe Magazine cover story. For his one-sided treatment of Republican campaign controversies and his refusal to offer a conservative opinion on them, Frisby earned the August Janet Cooke Award.
From the story's title, "The New Black Politics," readers might have assumed Frisby would deal with the broadening spectrum of black opinion and black officialdom, especially in the wake of Clarence Thomas' nomination to the Supreme Court. But Frisby's story dealt more with how liberal candidates have been cheated out of office by Republican race-baiting.
Frisby began by describing how Gantt, "a tall, eloquent black man, basked in the cheers of black and white students at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte that day, proving that Southerners could indeed look past the color of his skin to support a candidate who espoused their interests." But "Republicans, say analysts, have found the Achilles' heel for black candidates they want to defeat: Deploy race as a weapon. Gantt was a victim last year, when his campaign nose-dived as Helms put an important issue, such as jobs, in black and white terms."
Then Frisby mourned: "The more often that working-class blacks and whites are pitted against each other, the harder it becomes for Democrats to patch the two sides together in a winning coalition. And the tactic takes a heavy toll on the victims. Susan Jetton, a former Gantt aide, watches the Helms ad on her VCR from time to time. It still brings tears to her eyes." When asked by MediaWatch about this maudlin imagery, Frisby laughed: "That's good emotion. I thought that was well put."
In the midst of this crusade against slimy Republican campaigning, Frisby also had the chutzpah to quote Donna Brazile: "First it was Reagan talking about welfare mothers buying drugs with food stamps, then it was Horton, and now we have quotas -- the same thing, just different tactics."
But Frisby didn't tell readers that Brazile was the infamous Dukakis campaign aide who got fired after she suggested reporters follow up on rumors that George Bush had been sleeping around. Asked why he didn't feel the need to tell his readers about Brazile's role in the 1988 campaign, Frisby told MediaWatch: "Donna does bring an interesting point of view to it, which is probably why I used her. In retro, should I have pointed out that she got thrown out? I don't know, maybe. If I'd had the space. I didn't think it was that big a deal." This article went on for nine pages.
Frisby added: "If we were talking about someone who was buried, who was ostracized from the political strategist community for what she had done, it might be one thing. But we're dealing with a situation where I think most people think the Dukakis people were wrong to fire her. I don't think there's any doubt that she's one of the leading black political strategists in this country." Note the lack of outrage over Brazile's campaign tactics. Her firing was a one-day story, but Willie Horton remains.
Introducing the Horton issue, Frisby reported: "The [Republican] party seems intent on driving a wedge between working-class blacks and whites by deploying race-baiting tactics. It turned William Horton, a black man who raped a white woman while he was on prison furlough, into a symbol of the Democratic Party's flaws in the 1988 campaign."
Frisby didn't address the media misperception that the Bush campaign aired ads featuring Willie Horton's name or face, which they did not. But he did allow his sources to charge Reagan and Bush with racism without allowing anyone to respond. Frisby quoted Roger Wilkins of the far-left Institute for Policy Studies (IPS): "Reagan was just an ignorant, old guy with old-time bigotry, and he didn't even know how racist he was. Bush has no excuse....He still comes across as an unprincipled bigot....if he wanted all that Willie Horton stuff to stop, it would have stopped." Frisby agreed with Wilkins about Bush: "I think that's true. I think that the nominee does have enough pull with the independent organizations that if he wants something to happen, it happens, and if he doesn't want something to happen, it doesn't."
Historical analysis wasn't Frisby's strong point, either. After quoting former Black Panther Bobby Rush on the need for black financial power, Frisby found a solution in redistribution: "Many historians agree. The United States, they note, was run by aristocrats until Andrew Jackson, considered to be a representative of the poor, became President in 1829, but Jackson was unable to transfer much wealth to his constituents."
In his entire article, Frisby used three quotes from conservatives: two from Republican National Committee Political Director Norm Cummings, and one from J.C. Watts, the first black Republican to be elected statewide in Oklahoma. On the other hand, Frisby relied on liberals for 20 quotes, including six from IPS Senior Fellow Roger Wilkins. When asked by MediaWatch about his slighting of black conservative opinion, Frisby joked: "We'll do that story next time." Then he explained: "The article itself was about black politics, and I think that the number of blacks who think that way is a very, very minute number. Therefore, that's why it's not expanded upon."
Frisby suggested he was simply practicing journalism by quota: "I think the black conservatives in my story are quoted proportionately to their numbers in the black community." Frisby's lucky the Globe didn't use that kind of reasoning, or they would have scrapped the article, since blacks are less than 12 percent of the American population.
Frisby found it easy to charge Republicans with exploitative politics, but he failed to discuss why issues like the Dukakis furlough program or the recent quota bills resonate with voters. Is it only the manipulation of irrational fears? Frisby's reporting is too much like the political ads he condemns: it's quick, it's nasty, and it doesn't explore the issues. Black conservatives could have provided liberals with tough questions, like how politicians claiming to represent working-class blacks can release violent criminals like Horton that judges allowed no parole. They might have challenged the traditional "civil rights" leadership and suggested they were out of touch with blacks on the issue of racial preferences. But Frisby's method of reporting says: sorry, minorities don't count.
