MediaWatch: August 1995
Table of Contents:
ABC Goes Goofy
Even before Capital Cities/ABC was purchased by Walt Disney, the network indulged in its own trip to Fantasyland. World News Tonight's July 12-14 American Agenda series on the environment conjured up a dystopia of dirty air, bad water and poisoned meat, all a result of GOP reform plans.
Peter Jennings foreshadowed the tone in a July 9 promo: "Next week on ABC's World News Tonight, a series of reports about our environment which will tell you precisely what the new Congress has in mind: the most frontal assault on the environment in 25 years." Of the eight stories aired over three nights, only one touched on job and property rights loss. The others consisted of defending the current system from efforts to "roll back," "weaken," or "gut environmental programs."
Jennings explained July 12 that Republicans "are engaged in the most dramatic overhaul or assault, some would say, on environmental legislation in 25 years." While there is "hostility toward excessive regulation in many parts of the country, there is no public outcry...to rewrite environmental regulations."
Jennings set up Republicans as bullies: "The reason why the Republican plan has set off such a furious debate is that by many measures the environmental laws of the past 25 years have worked. During that time, the number of clean lakes has doubled, average smog levels are down a third, lead from auto exhaust has practically been eliminated." But if the reforms pass, he claimed, "the clean up of hundreds of toxic waste sites would become less of a priority" and the Endangered Species Act (ESA) would be changed. ABC assumed the liberal policies have succeeded. But as the Heritage Foundation's John Shanahan noted, the Superfund program has only cleaned up 24 percent of the "worst" sites as the liability rules encourage costly litigation. On the ESA, David Ridenour of the National Center for Public Policy Research noted, it "has been an abysmal failure because it actually encourages the destruction of species habitat." Fearful of having an endangered species identified on their land, property owners destroy their wildlife habitat.
On July 13, Jennings warned before an Erin Hayes report: "There is a strong clue to what [state environmental autonomy] may mean in the state of Washington, long considered progressive." To Hayes it meant dead shrimp. She interviewed Bill Taylor, a fisherman whose livelihood had been saved by rules making paper mills remove pollutants from their discharges. No one from the paper mill was interviewed, or anyone criticizing the regulatory burdens of the Clean Water Act.
Hayes ended: "There is concern that protection of natural resources could suffer if state and local governments, given too much freedom and under pressure to cut budgets, gut environmental programs. And that worries those like Bill Taylor, who know firsthand exactly what could be lost if environmental safeguards are rolled back too far."
On July 14 Catherine Crier focused on the evil of corporate lobbyists, as if left wing environmentalists never influenced laws: "Many Republicans say they're simply using lobbyists the way Democrats did for years. But few can remember lobbyists having such unprecedented power. And the price of that influence, some fear, could be weaker environmental protection." In this series, the only endangered species was journalistic balance.
