MediaWatch: August 1994

NewsBites: Health Plan or Else

ABC's World News Tonight devoted a week of American Agenda to the health care debate. For the last one, on July 29, Peter Jennings noted some "say if you don't do it right, do nothing." Which would mean? Failing to consider any downside to big government reform, Beth Nissen endorsed the liberal class warfare angle, concluding: "Without health care reform, there is nothing to stop insurance discrimination. And anyone can get sick. Anyone with a job can lose it -- lose benefits, lose protection....Without reform, only the richest will be protected from a debilitating new kind of disease -- a virulent strain of worry about their health care, their security; worry that is becoming epidemic."

Only Some Opponents Count
On July 15, when conservatives and liberals came to testify against the Supreme Court nomination of Stephen Breyer, only the liberals were worth covering. Michael Farris, last year's GOP nominee to be Lieutenant Governor of Virginia, was completely missing. Instead, The New York Times and The Washington Post ran pictures the next day of Ralph Nader and focused several paragraphs on the testimony of Nader or his associate Sidney Wolfe of the Public Citizen Health Research Group. The Post had one paragraph quoting Paige Cunningham of Americans United for Life.

Good News Is No News
In the past, the media have highlighted the newest AIDS scare statistics purportedly showing the disease spreading through the population. Typically, Dr. Bob Arnot reported on the June 11, 1993 CBS Evening News: "Heterosexual AIDS among Americans is growing faster than any other risk group, up thirty percent in 1992 alone...Heterosexual AIDS in America is exploding." But the latest stats showing a drop in cases has been met with media silence.

Centers for Disease Control data released in late July revealed that in the first six months of 1994, 37,529 new AIDS cases have been reported, a decline from the 59,979 cases reported in the first six months of last year. The CDC broadened its definition of AIDS on January 1, 1993, which officials say mostly caused the increase in that year, but the drop in reported cases also shows its spread has slowed. The number of network stories reporting this? Zero.

Getting Away with Murder
As a crowded tugboat made a mad dash for freedom from Cuba on July 13, four government fireboats intercepted it and used high pressure water hoses to blow many of the refugees off the deck. A July 19 Miami Herald story reported that about 40 people, including many children, drowned in the incident as the tugboat sank after its hold filled with water. Though President Clinton condemned the Cuban action, generating a three sentence USA Today item, no other national news outlet noted it. The Washington Post did not mention it until nine days later. On July 22, the editorial page reprinted four paragraphs of a Miami Herald editorial on the tragedy. As Pedro Reboredo, a county commissioner in Florida, stated in an ad he bought in the Post three days later: "My people do not expect you to invade Cuba. They just want to feel that they are not alone, that the cries of those Cuban children...will not go unanswered or unheard."

Untouchable Ted
Sen. Ted Kennedy faces his toughest reelection bid ever, yet the national media conveniently ignored the tragedy at Chappaquiddick. The 25th anniversary of the incident came and went on July 18 with little media attention shown to the mystery surrounding the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. On July 18, CNN's Inside Politics ran a short story on Chappaquiddick, and it was alluded to during a segment on anniversaries on the July 17 Late Edition. It also received a brief mention on the July 24 CBS Evening News in a story on anniversaries. The New York Times on July 18, and Newsweek's July 25 edition also mentioned the tragedy as part of broader stories; ABC, NBC, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Time and U.S. News & World Report did not.

While no network found time to do an in-depth look at Chappaquiddick, both CNN and CBS found time to celebrate the 104th birthday of Rose Kennedy, with the July 24 CBS Sunday Morning devoting a full segment to the Kennedy matriarch. And in June of 1993, CNN and NBC evening shows ran stories on the 100th birthday of Cracker Jacks, as did CNN in celebration of G.I. Joe's 29th.

Weiner Roast II
In what has become an annual event, New York Times reporter Tim Weiner charged officials with rigging a 1984 test of the Strategic Defense Initiative. In an August 18, 1993 front-page story, Weiner charged that "Officials in the `Star Wars' project rigged a crucial 1984 test and faked other data in a program that misled Congress as well as the intended target, the Soviet Union." Following the story, then-Secretary of Defense Les Aspin concluded on September 9, 1993: "The [June 10, 1984] experiment was not rigged, and deception did not take place."

As voting time for SDI funding approached this year, Weiner repeated his theory in a July 23 article headlined: "Inquiry Finds `Star Wars' Tried Plan to Exaggerate Test Results." How credible is this latest assault? According to the pro-SDI group High Frontier, the General Accounting Office concluded "the Homing Overlay Experiment had not been rigged, and that deception did not take place." In fact, buried in the fourth paragraph of Weiner's story is what should have been the lead: "The [GAO] report directly contradicted accusations, made by four men who worked for the Star Wars program to Congress in August and subsequently reported by The New York Times, that Star Wars officials rigged the fourth test in the series as part of the deception program."

Mao Now
The Washington Post presented a stunning two-part series titled "Uncounted Millions" on mass murder during the reign of China's communist dictator Mao Zedong. On July 17 and 18, reporter Daniel Southerland chronicled tales of murder, famine, and cannibalism and discovered with Chinese and American scholars that "the two people most associated with mass deaths in this bloodiest of human centuries -- Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin -- were likely surpassed by a third, China's Mao Zedong." While Hitler and Stalin killed around 40 million each, "evidence shows" Mao "was in some way responsible for at least 40 million deaths and perhaps 80 million or more."

Southerland explained that "in the early years of Mao, many Western scholars were so enamored of Mao that they refused to believe such widespread atrocities could have been carried out by the Chinese communists." Not to mention Western reporters. On July 22, 1989, for instance, Washington Post reporter Michael Weisskopf euphemistically reported that Mao's "ideological binges...shredded China's intellectual community," but concluded: "While Beijing denies the Tiananmen massacre, Chinese critics merely add it to the list of things Mao never did.

Moscow on the Hudson. Today laid out the second media welcome mat for Stephen Wechsler, the Army deserter turned East German communist. On the heels of June's fawning Washington Post story on Wechsler, Bryant Gumbel introduced Wechsler on July 18: "For most who lived behind the Iron Curtain, the end of the Cold War was a time of joyous liberation, but for one American it was a time of fear." Reporter Jamie Gangel picked up on the fear angle, characterizing the time of his early 1950s defection from the U.S. Army as an era noted for "The start of the Cold War, McCarthyism, and fear of communism."

For most East Germans the Berlin Wall imprisoned them. But Wechsler explained that "I had always been just a little fearful in Berlin, I had heard stories that some ex-soldiers had sort of been brought back to the West...the Wall in a way meant protection for me." Gangel failed to challenge his paranoia, instead reminiscing about how he is "getting reacquainted" with "many things he has never seen or heard before," such as outlet malls. Calling the man who spent 42 years behind the Berlin Wall, where news on the West came in dictator-approved bites, an "expert on America from afar," Gangel allowed him to explain that his return let him confirm the U.S. has "many people without a home." Will Today offer the next Nazi sympathizer to leave Argentina such a warm welcome?

Selective Ethics
Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz wrote July 8 that "ABC News is cracking down on big-bucks speeches by its star correspondents." Why? Kurtz quoted an internal memo from Senior VP Richard Wald: "`It isn't just how big a fee is, it is also who gives it and what it might imply...You may not accept a fee from a trade association or from a for-profit business. Their special interest is obvious and we have to guard against it.'"

How will ABC policy affect speeches before other special interests, like the NAACP? As Susan Gregory Thomas reported in the May 17 Washington Post, ABC correspondent Carole Simpson (and CBS anchor Dan Rather) hosted a $175-a-plate fundraiser for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's 40th anniversary. Would the new policy prevent helping such a liberal advocacy organization? No, Director of News Practices Lisa Heiden told MediaWatch, noting that ABC's policy had always covered "groups with a political purpose" and NAACP doesn't fit that category.

What's a Moderate?
Maybe it's a grand experiment in shifting the political spectrum two clicks to the right through media word association: `Republican,' equals `far right,' while `Democrat,' means `moderate.' See reporter Jackie Calmes' story on an Idaho congresssional race in the July 7 Wall Street Journal.

"Ultraconservative GOP candidates like Helen Chenoweth," and her "far-right supporters," face Democratic incumbent Rep. Larry LaRocco, a "pro-abortion-rights moderate." But Calmes did not inform readers of LaRocco's less than moderate 24 percent rating from the American Conservative Union (ACU).

Eric Pianin achieved a similar distortion in his May 27 Washington Post article on new House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Sam Gibbons: "A moderate on most social issues, Gibbons is more conservative on economic matters." Yet a few paragraphs earlier, Pianin noted that Gibbons (ACU rating: 22), cosponsored legislation "to create a national system of government-paid health coverage...a single-payer plan."

A sidebar box in the June 27 Newsweek lamented the retiring of "moderate" Democratic Majority Leader George Mitchell. In 1992, his consistently liberal voting record earned him a 95 percent approval rating from Americans for Democratic Action. In the same year, however, the "moderate" contradicted the ACU's legislative checklist every time, leaving him a rating of zero.

Violent Baseball.
As developments in the O.J. Simpson story slowed, CBS dusted off an old piece of feminist principle: Link male violence to the lack of females in professional sports. On the June 30 CBS Evening News, Bob McNamara demonstrated the speed with which trendy leftist theory can become a gravely reported news story.

Intoned McNamara: "Some...say that baseball, football, basketball, hockey and boxing will always be linked to violence, on and off the field, as long as they're for men only. Mariah Burton Nelson has become a magnet for women tired of a sports world dominated by men." McNamara ran a clip of Nelson, author of The Stronger Women Get, the More Men Love Football, explaining that "The hardcore statistics we've got are from colleges with football and basketball players and it does show that they rape more than anybody else except frat boys."

McNamara did allow Oakland A's manager Tony LaRussa to say that Burton's conclusions are "stretching it almost to the point of B.S." Undaunted, McNamara concluded, "When an athlete steps over the line, coaches and crowds go along, it may not be that the games have gotten too rough, but that the rest of us can't remember how to play."

Featured Posts

Bozell Slams Hillary’s Shills in Media: ‘They Are Covering for’ Her

Get the Latest News From CNSNews

Get the Latest Media Analysis on NewsBusters