MediaWatch: August 1994
Table of Contents:
- MediaWatch: August 1994
- Reporters Hold Anti-Clinton Ads to Higher Standard of Disclosure, Accuracy
- NewsBites: Health Plan or Else
- Revolving Door: The Times Agenda
- Networks Fail to Investigate Allegations While Dismissing Revelations
- Too Tough-On-Crime Lawman
- The Numbers Game
- So Much for the Truth Squad
- Janet Cooke Award: ABC's Tom Foreman Finds the Majority of Ad "Inaccuracy" and "Scare Tactics" on the Right
Revolving Door: The Times Agenda
The latest to join the already media-veteran heavy National Security Council staff: Bob Boorstin, a New York Times metropolitan reporter from the mid 1980s until jumping to the Dukakis presidential effort in 1988. Boorstin, who will now serve as a foreign affairs speechwriter, remains a Special Assistant to the President for policy coordination, a position he's held since the beginning of the Clinton Administration.
Boorstin has been involved in formulating Clinton's economic and health plans, a role detailed by Bob Woodward in his new book, The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House. In 1992, Woodward reported, Boorstin was assigned to help economic adviser Gene Sperling and "became the campaign's utility writer."
As the economic team worked in June 1992 to finalize Clinton's economic plan, Boorstin came up against health care adviser Ira Magaziner. "Bob Boorstin took a stab at reasoning with Magaziner as they were traveling in a van to the Governor's Mansion. `No one believes you will save $4 billion,' Boorstin told Magaziner. `It doesn't pass the smell test.' He touched his nose and sniffed once, then twice. Smell was vital in politics. `Look, I used to be a New York Times reporter, and this is just not credible.'"
Two pages and a week later in June the economic team convened again, but Boorstin didn't show such concern for the smell test. As tax hike ideas were dropped from the draft plan, "a tax on foreign corporations, which realistically might have brought in $15 billion over four years, was now saddled with the burden of bringing in $45 billion," wrote Woodward. "Boorstin and Sperling knew it was a lie, a vast overestimation, but they had to balance the books and the $45 billion had come from a congressional report, providing at least some outside verification."
Following the inauguration, Boorstin became media adviser to Hillary Clinton's health care efforts. To win the public relations battle, Woodward learned that Hillary Clinton told Boorstin "they had to find a story to tell, with heroes and villains." Boorstin recommended one. He "was undergoing successful drug therapy for manic depression with the controversial drug Prozac. He had seen the price of a Prozac tablet jump from about 60 cents to $1.10 in just three years, and knew firsthand how drug companies were profiting off the ill. Research showed the enormous profits of drug companies, and Hillary was poised to denounce them."
New to the Hill
Capitol Hill will have a second newspaper to supplement Roll Call next month when The Hill, a weekly being launched by former New York Times reporter Marty Tolchin, begins publication. Signing on as Executive Editor is Al Eisele, a former Knight-Ridder Washington correspondent and Press Secretary to Vice President Walter Mondale.
Eisele covered Mondale for Knight-Ridder's St. Paul Dispatch and Pioneer Press in the early 1970s. Explaining why he left journalism on Inauguration day 1977 to join the new Vice President's staff, Eisele told The Washington Post: "Mondale was one of the few guys in politics I respected enough to go work for. I found I could do press work for him -- and for Jimmy Carter, too, for that matter."
