MediaWatch: August 1995
Table of Contents:
NewsBites: Opposed to Infants and Lepers
In attacking efforts to reduce the deficit, ABC's Carole Simpson and George Strait used sensationalistic examples on the July 9 World News Sunday to shame the public into continued funding for lessening problems.
Strait led the charge, claiming that "commitment to reducing infant mortality is threatened by congressional budget cuts, which public health officials say would make a bad problem worse." Minutes later in the same program, Simpson introduced a report on the nation's last leper colony by clucking at efforts to close it down. Simpson, ignoring the fact that the disease is treatable and no longer requires isolated sanitariums, lashed out: "For more than 100 years Louisiana's Guillis W. Long Center, known as Carville, has been both a prison and a safe haven for people with leprosy. It's the last treatment center of its kind and now federal budget cutters want to close it down."
Flat Wrong on Flat Tax.
USA Today reporter William M. Welch's July 7 article on income tax reform included a table comparing Rep. Richard Gephardt's plan and Rep. Dick Armey's flat tax with current law. The problem? Instead of providing figures by advocates of each plan or an independent source, USA Today used the figures of Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) to critique each plan. Welch termed the liberal, union-funded CTJ "a non-partisan citizens group" and "a group advocating tax fairness."
The CTJ table claimed that at a 17 percent rate under Armey's plan, a family of four with an income of $25,000 would pay a total of $3,600 in taxes, with over $1,800 of that coming from income taxes and $1,160 in business sales taxes. The table insisted that the same family would get a $240 refund under Gephardt's plan. But as economist Dan Mitchell pointed out in MediaNomics, "A family of four pays absolutely no tax on the first $33,300 of income ($22,700 personal allowance for a married couple and $5,300 allowance for each child). To somehow claim, as Welch did, that this family will pay $3,600 of taxes clearly involves a gross misrepresentation of the plan." A more independent analysis by the Tax Foundation showed that even at a 20 percent flat rate, Armey's plan would reduce the tax burden for those in the $20,000 to $50,000 range.
The Meat-Poisoning Party.
Instead of explaining the reasoning behind opposition to more burdensome USDA meat inspection rules, CBS focused on how Republicans would unleash E. coli on the unsuspecting public. On the July 9 Evening News, reporter Sharyl Attkisson highlighted a seven-year-old victim of E. coli. "With the promise of safer meat threatened by delay, consumers are frustrated," she said leading into a soundbite of the victim's mother, who insisted: "When it happens to you it makes you realize how important having safe meat inspections and regulations are." Attkisson then concluded: "And those who have learned by near tragedy the dangers of unsafe meat don't want to be forgotten in the debate."
Reporters called those favoring more regulation "consumer advocates," instead of liberals. The next night reporter Bob Schieffer referred to liberal Public Citizen activist Joan Claybrook as a "consumer advocate." Newsweek's Sharon Begley did the same in a July 24 story on victims: "But smack in the middle of the Senate debate came news that five children in Tennessee had gotten E. Coli poisoning...Such outbreaks, say consumer groups, will become ever more common if Dole gets his way."
Contradicting these sensationalistic stories, in a July 13 Washington Times column David Ridenour pointed out that the regulatory agencies failed: "The regulations lobby will always be able to produce their `victims' to press their case for additional regulations because there is no such thing as a risk-free world...the victims they cite were not spared by the 64,914 pages of regulations on the books, backed up by 130,000 federal bureaucrats."
AIDS Tirade.
Senator Jesse Helms sparked a furor among Washington reporters after a July 5 New York Times interview with reporter Katherine Seelye. He argued that AIDS funding under the "Ryan White Care Act" should be reduced since AIDS sufferers brought the disease on themselves. Seelye sought to refute Helms' assertion that AIDS accounted for more federal dollars than diseases that killed more people: "Public Health Service figures show that when all federal money, including Medicaid and Medicare, is taken into account, total annual federal outlays on heart disease and cancer dwarf those on AIDS."
That night, CBS Evening News reporter Bill Plante aired two Helms critics, but no one supporting Helms' view. "Ryan White's mother says it's unfair of Senator Helms to blame the victims." Plante added: "Helms also maintains...[AIDS] receives greater funding than diseases which kill many more people. That's not true, says the administration's director of AIDS policy."
Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby quibbled with the media's take, reporting the Associated Press "calculated that the U.S. government was spending about $79,000 for every American who died of AIDS -- as against only $7,300 for every death from cervical cancer, $6,300 for diabetes, $2,800 for breast cancer, $800 for prostate cancer, and $600 for stroke." Jacoby also pointed out that the U.S. Public Health Service says the federal government "will spend $2 billion a year on AIDS," compared to only $800 million on heart disease. It is estimated that heart disease will be responsible for 33 percent of American deaths this year, while AIDS will make up only 2 percent of American deaths.
Smolowe's Blows.
Time magazine got a little bit label happy in a July 10 story about religious conservatives. In the article, "Outfoxing the Right," Senior Writer Jill Smolowe repeatedly used labels such as "ultraconservative," and "right wing" to describe Christian activist parents. The subtitle of the story, "Moderates recapture a handful of school boards by publicizing the obsessions of ultraconservatives," set the tone for the entire piece.
Smolowe's angle in the one-page story was that the "moderates" were restoring sanity to the school board with their victories. Smolowe wrote, "moderates, many of whom stayed home when the first wave of ultraconservatives marched into office three years ago, are now mobilizing themselves....moderate teachers and parents parried with a simple strategy....in the end moderates regained a majority, trouncing ultraconservatives."
The labeling tally in 13 references to Christians: five "ultraconservative," four "conservative," four "Christian right" or "religious right" and one "right wing." By contrast, Smolowe used only one "liberal" label, for People for the American Way (PAW) -- although the story also tagged PAW and the National Education Association as "moderate."
Et Tu, Harry Wu?
You would think someone brave enough to have repeatedly risked his life exposing child and slave labor, uncovering forced organ donation, and highlighting a corrupt system of political oppression would be a champion to reporters. But human rights activist Harry Wu has come in for some odd criticism as the media rationalized his arrest by communist China. Maybe Wu, a U.S. citizen, should have criticized the injustice of his adopted country instead.
In a July 10 piece, USA Today's Marilyn Greene suggested that China's trumped-up charges may have merit: "The Wu indictments, however, carry just enough validity to give the Clinton Administration pause as it expresses outrage over his detention to Beijing. Wu, 58, has used methods that could be described as shrewd at best, illegal at worst, to roam remote areas of China gathering incriminating evidence against the government."
Greene pronounced Wu guilty of the charges for which he may face the death penalty. "For example, his Chinese name is Wu Hongda. The name on Wu's passport is Peter H. Wu, his U.S. name. Beijing says this is an attempt to fool officials and enter China under a false name. And in a trip back to China last year, Wu gathered information for reports on the sale and export of human organs from executed prisoners."
L.A. Flaw.
The current talk in Los Angeles is not just about actor Hugh Grant's illicit misconduct on a famed Hollywood thoroughfare, but of how Los Angeles County may end up suffering from one of the largest municipal bankruptcies in U.S. history. The media's culprit as usual, was tax limitations, not the lack of spending limitations.
On the June 19 World News Tonight ABC reporter Brian Rooney suggested: "L.A. County's long fall may have begun with the passage of Proposition 13, the law to limit property taxes." In the July 10 issue, U.S. News & World Report Los Angeles reporter Betsy Streisand added: "No longer able to rely on the state to cover budget shortfalls brought on by Proposition 13, which drastically cut California property taxes, L.A. County for three years has made ends meet with lots of borrowed money."
Similar blame rang July 17, as CBS This Morning co-host Paula Zahn ignored the spending side in an interview with liberal County Supervisors Yvonne Braithwaite Burke and Gloria Molina. The supervisors blamed "a structural deficiency from Proposition 13" for the fiscal meltdown. Zahn asked helpful questions like "Who gets hurt the most if these cuts are enforced?" and stressed the need for more tax money: "I know you have a California congressional delegation that will meet with President Clinton, what is their expectation? Can they get $400 million?" Zahn concluded: "What is your greatest fear as you all try to lobby for more money, not only from the feds, but from your own state government?"
All three reports ignored soaring spending, specifically the public employee workforce. As John Barnes pointed out in the July 25 Investors' Business Daily, public employee pay outgrew pay increases in the private sector in the last decade, and L.A. County exemplified the trend: "Between 1980 and 1995, the number of public workers in the county jumped 15 percent to more than 88,000." In addition, employees got a 7.5 percent raise one year so now "no fewer than 2,230 employees -- nearly two percent of the work force -- make more than $100,000 a year in base salary."
Quitters Never Win.
When Wall Street Journal Deputy Washington Bureau Chief Jill Abramson co-authored Strange Justice, a book-length attack on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, she refused to do joint media appearances with opponents, such as David Brock, author of The Real Anita Hill. In an American Spectator review, Brock called the Abramson book "one of the most outrageous journalistic hoaxes in recent memory." Brock documented numerous misquotations, errors, and lapses in judgment, such as quoting Frederick Cooke as seeing Thomas with a triple-X movie though he refused to confirm or deny the allegation.
But when a caller to C-SPAN's Washington Journal on July 10 asked Abramson when she would rebut Brock, Abramson refused to defend her book: "This is a topic I'd like to skip. I do that rarely but I'm just....He's talking about a review in The American Spectator, which is an ideological tabloid publication here that attempted to criticize a book I wrote with [former Journal writer] Jane Mayer about the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings. But it was so long ago that I think there are more current topics of interest to be talking about." An August 8 Washington Times editorial suggested a reason why: former White House lawyer Mark Paoletta demanded the book's publisher apologize for the suggestion that he'd broken an anti-lobbying law. The publisher apologized and will remove the passage from the paperback edition.
