MediaWatch: August 1995
Table of Contents:
Rotten to the Corps
It was a busy week on the subsidy beat for NBC reporter Lisa Myers. First she revisited Clinton's pet program, AmeriCorps. Myers first questioned the youth service program's efficiency in a February Nightly News report. Her suspicions were later confirmed by the GAO, as she noted on her July 11 Nightly News follow-up: "It may not be a good deal for taxpayers....Last year AmeriCorps estimated the program would cost taxpayers $6.43 per hour of service to the community. But preliminary GAO findings say overhead and other costs have driven the price tag way up, to $15.65 per hour of service. Also, AmeriCorps had estimated costs at $17-18,000 per participant, most of the bill footed by taxpayers."
Myers noted wryly, "The highest costs occurred when AmeriCorps gave money to projects run by other federal agencies. Take this anti-hunger project in Vermont, run by the Agriculture Department. Cost? Almost $44,000 per job."
After soundbites from Senator Charles Grassley, a program critic, and AmeriCorps President Eli Segal, Myers concluded: "A big selling point for AmeriCorps was that as much as half the money for projects would come from private donations. But so far, GAO says, federal taxpayers are picking up 80 percent of the tab."
Three nights later on Dateline NBC Myers exposed the federal peanut program, which artificially boosts the price consumers pay for peanut products and restricts farmers' freedom to sell them: "In a free country you might think everyone has that right, but believe it or not, your government decides who can sell peanuts and who cannot."
After explaining that the subsidy, a Great Depression holdover, currently goes to many large farmers and high-income people, Myers disputed Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman's assertion that minorities benefit from the program: "Records from Glickman's own agency tell a far different story. While 13 percent of all quota holders are minorities, the government allows those minority farmers to grow just a tiny 4 percent of all peanuts sold in America. In fact, this is a program that almost systematically discriminates against minorities, because the right to grow peanuts was doled out in the 1930s, when white farmers owned most of the land. A lot of white farmers today inherited peanut quota from their grandfathers."
Myers interviewed House Majority Leader Dick Armey, a program critic, who is "among a growing number of Republicans and Democrats troubled by a program that enriched 76,000 farmers at the expense of 200 million consumers." She then queried Glickman: "When the Clinton administration was forced to choose between the interests of middle class families and the peanut farmers, you're essentially choosing the peanut farmers?"
