MediaWatch: December 1994

NewsBites: Rather on Race

Dan Rather needs time to learn how to deal with Republicans. In an interview with new House Majority Leader Dick Armey on the December 1 CBS Evening News, Rather cited unnamed critics who share his unmistakable flair for bizarre conclusions: "There are plenty of people around who say if you take the Congressman's ideas for reducing the federal budget, you're going to inevitably increase racial tensions in this country because many of the people who are going to suffer first will be minorities."

On November 28, Rather asked Newt Gingrich: "I believe in the Congress that's now ending, there are at least 20 committee chairs or subcommittee chairs who are either black or Hispanic. In the incoming Congress, will there be any?" When Gingrich responded with a no (since none of the GOP's five minority members were elected before 1989), Rather reacted incredulously: "But I want to make sure I understand. You think we may have a situation in the new House in which there will not be a single committee or subcommittee chairman who's black or Hispanic?"

Elections Stink
Tom Brokaw also struggled with the results of blacks' failure to run as Republicans on November 23: "The Republican landslide also changed the face of justice in the Houston area in ways that are raising questions about how judges should be chosen." Reporter Jim Cummins explained: "All eight black incumbent judges...were voted out of office because they are Democrats who were swept away by Republicans who voted a straight ticket in a county-wide election." Cummins concluded: "There are growing demands to change the system in Texas, either appoint judges or create smaller judicial districts by the next election, so that the men and women sitting on the bench reflect the people they are passing judgment on." Didn't the elections reflect the people's judgment?

Nervous Nightline
When the media clamor for "change," it's the kind of change exemplified by the Clintons' vision of reform, not the Republicans. While the media heralded Clinton's promise to "end welfare as we know it," ABC's November 23 Nightline asked the question: "Does the Republican plan for welfare go too far?" Host Chris Wallace noted "the number one thing they [voters] want to change is welfare." But he cautioned: "House Republicans have come out with a plan that can only be called radical." He quoted a study by the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which "talks about the human cost. It predicts two and a half million families and at least five million children would stop getting benefits, causing increases in homelessness and hunger."

Wallace then focused on a single provision in the GOP bill, asking Rep. James Talent (R-Mo.), "the plan anticipates...orphanages. Isn't that like something out of Charles Dickens?" Ignoring Talent's assertion that states given block grants will make their own arrangements, Wallace devoted five more questions to orphanages.

More Gruel, Newt?
On the December 5 CBS Evening News, Dan Rather declared: "Only in America. The newest debate about reforming welfare is focused not on Newt Gingrich's actual idea to bring back orphanages for kids of welfare mothers, but on a Hollywood movie." Reporter Anthony Mason examined the controversy over Boys Town, the 1938 movie based on an orphanage, which Newt Gingrich cited after Hillary Clinton blasted GOP welfare reform. Mason noted: "Gingrich says his new orphanages would be voluntary, for unwanted children." Then Mason asserted, "with plans for widespread welfare cuts poor parents may be left little choice." He wondered: "Is a 56 year-old movie image a blueprint for America's future? For decades the American welfare system worked to phase out orphanages on the strength of another lingering image." As Mason spoke viewers saw video from Oliver Twist in which an orphan begs for more gruel.

Guilt By Non-Association
The media and pundit campaign to discredit The Bell Curve co-author Dr. Charles Murray continues. Unwilling to dispute his conclusions, ABC World News Tonight's Bill Blakemore tried to construct a connection between Murray and the Pioneer Fund, a controversial foundation which gives money to researchers investigating links between race and intelligence. In his November 22 "American Agenda" piece, Blakemore stated, "Close to half the footnotes citing authors who support The Bell Curve's most controversial chapter that suggests some races are naturally smarter than others, refer to Pioneer Fund recipients."

When asked about this allegation, Murray told Blakemore off-camera that he knew very little about the Pioneer Fund, "had never taken [Pioneer Fund] money and knew of only two researchers cited in his book who had." But Blakemore wasn't about to let the facts ruin his report: "Nonetheless, controversy around The Bell Curve is focusing attention on this obscure fund."

Herr Kessler's Merit Badge
"Focused, intense, sincere, with the scruples of a Boy Scout. And if federal bureaucrats aren't supposed to change the world, somebody forgot to tell David Kessler." Thus began Steve Kroft's puffy profile of the FDA Commissioner titled "Crusader" on 60 Minutes December 4. Kroft minimized Kessler's negatives by portraying them as complaints from greedy big industry, which can no longer market unsafe products. Kroft marvelled at the scope of FDA's regulatory power: "There are few federal agencies with influence as pervasive as the FDA...its jurisdiction extends into nearly every port into every refrigerator and medicine cabinet in the country." He touted Kessler's "army of inspectors and scientists" who on his orders "analyze, squeeze, and sniff" products to judge their safety.

Never mentioned is that Kessler's FDA has slowed the already glacial speed of the approval of new, potentially life-saving drugs for the American market. It takes 14 years on average from drug development until FDA approval. A Tufts University study found that 80 percent of FDA-approved drugs made it to market in other countries in just eight years. The regulations have driven up the average cost to develop drugs in the U.S. to over $230 million. Nowhere in Kroft's report did he mention that the FDA's slow and costly regulators are killing people who may benefit from new drugs.

Instead, Kroft celebrated Kessler's use of raw power, especially his seizure of perfectly good reconstituted orange juice with the word "fresh" on the label: "He had U.S. Marshals seize 15,000 gallons of Procter and Gamble orange juice. It was a message to big companies and the special interests that the FDA could no longer be ignored."

The Thomas-Hating Media
CBS This Morning never interviewed David Brock, author of The Real Anita Hill. But that didn't stop co-host Paula Zahn from promoting Wall Street Journal reporters Jill Abramson and Jane Mayer, authors of the pro-Anita Hill book Strange Justice, on November 7. Zahn tossed softballs: "You make it pretty clear in the book that it was politics, basically, that changed the way this case was viewed by the American public and you even go so far as to say that the White House skirted laws to launch a campaign against Anita Hill. Do you think they broke any laws in the process?"

The Boston Globe and Newsweek joined The Wall Street Journal in excerpting the Abramson-Mayer book. After its November 14 excerpt, Newsweek hailed the book in an article by new contributing editor on legal issues, Lincoln Caplan. He touted the book: "The real value of the book, aside from its compelling readability is in the psychological portrait it draws of Clarence Thomas." (The authors never interviewed Thomas.)

In case Caplan's aversion to Thomas wasn't clear, his January 1995 Playboy profile compared Thomas unfavorably to Thurgood Marshall, calling him "the anti-Marshall, voting consistently to weaken strong decisions his predecessor invested his life to secure." Caplan concluded: "The story of the self-hating black man is not new in American life, but it has rarely had a protagonist whose anger has been so costly to many other blacks."

Covert Christians
Informed voters are the Democrats' worst enemy, at least to Christopher John Farley of Time. In the November 21 issue, Farley attacked the Christian Coalition for their role in distributing voter information fliers which listed the candidates' positions on term limits or health care. Farley called the fliers part of a "covert operation," even though the Coalition announced its nationwide distribution on the weekend before the vote .

Farley described a conspiracy where "pamphlets were slipped onto car windshields...and distributed so close to the election so [Rep. Dan] Glickman couldn't effectively protest them, [and] gave the Congressman negative ratings." Two weeks earlier, James Carney sounded the alarm, noting that Christian Coalition voter guides helped defeat Rep. Mike Synar (D-Okla.) in a primary election.

Farley complained that the guides "don't endorse office hopefuls but are designed to put candidates the group opposes in a bad light." He cited the Pennsylvania Senate race, where the guide "boiled down the complex subject of the Clinton health-care plan by saying that Democratic incumbent Harris Wofford supported `Federal Government control of health care.'" That's misleading?

Berlin Walsh
One unfortunate side effect of the fall of communism has been a cottage industry of nostalgia. In the October 18 Los Angeles Times, correspondent Mary Williams Walsh remembered East German social services: "Some have come to the arresting conclusion that they are worse off today than they were under communism. Many men have lost their jobs. Women have lost child-care centers that cost 20 cents a day; practically all households are paying many times more for rent and sustenance. And even the eastern Germans who now have `made it'...talk of a certain something that is missing from their lives." Shootings at the Wall, perhaps? On November 1, Walsh, formerly of The Progressive, recalled a laid-off mechanic: "The end of East German communism has spelled for him not opportunity but a chain reaction that started with the loss of his good factory job and ended up with life in a flophouse....is doubly shocking in a society where vagrants and bag ladies were until recently unknown."

The Hate-Filled Competition
Just before the election CBS grew alarmed about "a lot of anger in the air these days," meaning talk radio. Claiming "it's part and parcel of rush hour all over America," reporter Richard Threlkeld's "Eye on America" warned of "a kind of air pollution as close as your car radio." His evidence of this widespread danger? One conservative afternoon host on a New York City station and one incident "a couple of years ago" on a St. Louis FM rock station's morning drive show. "A daily dialogue of hate and anger that's become big business, and a big target of those who want to shut down hate radio for good," Threlkeld ominously intoned, offering as proof: "Bob Grant hosts the most popular afternoon drive time show in New York. He regularly insults gays, liberals, the homeless, not to mention blacks."

However, as Minoo Southgate pointed out in the December 5 National Review, Grant's critics "are curiously quiet about bigotry when it doesn't come from white conservatives." She explained that two black-oriented radio stations in New York City "promote anti-white racism and anti-Jewish conspiracy theories." One host has even threatened the lives of white journalists. But Threlkeld failed to mention any hate from the left on the radio, making it clear that for CBS, only conservatives are capable of dispensing hate.

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