MediaWatch: December 1995

NewsBites: A Wee Bit Off

A brief item on the November 9 NBC Nightly News and a Washington Post story the next day were the only major reports on an audit that could further damage the Clinton administration's credibility. A General Accounting Office audit found the President's Task Force on Health Care Reform spent $13.4 million, instead of initial White House claims putting the cost "below $100,000," later raised to $200,000. After ignoring the math of a White House that spent $134 for every dollar they claimed to spend, one can understand why reporters might not have done the math behind Medicare "cuts."

Chiles Cheats.

A classic case of dirty Democratic politics in Florida went unreported by the same vigilant media that piled on GOP campaign consultant Ed Rollins in 1993. On November 9, Florida's Democratic Governor Lawton Chiles admitted his 1994 campaign placed scare calls to senior citizens in a successful last ditch attempt to defeat his Republican opponent, Jeb Bush.

The November 10 Washington Post reported "The scandal took off after Jim Krog, Chiles's former chief of staff and senior campaign manager, admitted last Friday to reporters in Tallahassee that he had authorized the calls and use of fictitious fronts." The scare calls claimed Bush cheated on his taxes and that his running mate wanted to "abolish" Medicare and Social Security. The New York Times buried a story on page 39 while the network morning and nightly news shows ignored it. Bush lost by less than 65,000 votes and a Chiles spokesman conceded 70,000 senior citizens received the scare calls, many from the non-existent "Citizens for Tax Fairness."

When Republican consultant Ed Rollins claimed (falsely, it later turned out) that he paid black ministers to encourage blacks not to vote in the 1993 New Jersey Governor's race, the four networks aired 38 evening news stories in 20 days on what CBS labeled a "dirty trick." The Los Angeles Times, New York Times, USA Today, and Washington Post combined for a total of another 62 stories in the same time period, 15 on the front page.

Hiding HUD's Blacklist.

On June 14, CBS Evening News reporter Eric Engberg warned that House Republicans were seeking to end federal funding of liberal lobbyists by "drafting a bill to severely restrict lobbying by any activist group that gets federal grant money." He noted that some of the "targets include unions" which are "regarded as opponents of the GOP agenda." But CBS did not unleash Engberg when a November 23 Associated Press story revealed a union targeting Republicans. The other networks also ignored the news of political blacklisting.

AP's Richard Keil began: "The week President Clinton took office, the head of a federal employees union sent Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros a list of agency workers that the group said were anti-union, racist or aligned with Republicans." John Sturdivant, President of the American Federation of Government Employees, admitted that "these workers, most of them career senior managers, could pose a `blocking mechanism' to the new administration's policies." Keil noted that "eleven of those on the list were career workers who by law are supposed to be free from political pressures." Retired HUD worker Walter Sevier was described as a "reported racist," but Keil found internal HUD records that showed Sevier's office in Fort Worth "had the highest percentage of minority workers among regional offices." The networks overlooked Sturdivant's defense of the purge: "It was part of working with the administration that we helped elect."

Southern-Fried Bias.

National reporters tried to insert race into one gubernatorial campaign while ignoring its obvious presence in another. On the November 16 World News Tonight, ABC's Jim Wooten called the vote in Louisiana between white Democrat-turned-Republican Mike Foster and black liberal Cleo Fields an example of how "more and more whites are leaving the [Democratic] party, leaving it to a few die-hard whites, to Cleo Fields and most of the blacks. What is happening here is the steady resegregation of politics." Wooten tarred Foster, noting he "has the endorsement of David Duke, the former Klansman turned Republican." A GMA story made the same point.

The next day National Public Radio's John Burnett got in the act: "Both Fields and Foster have tried to take the high road by downplaying mentions of race, but it's been hard to ignore. David Duke, who ran a divisive, racially tinged campaign four years ago, has endorsed Mike Foster. Foster was asked why he hasn't rejected Duke's endorsement." But later in the story, Burnett allowed a Fields supporter to declare that Fields "epitomizes" Louis Farrakhan's virtues.

Meanwhile, in Mississippi, Secretary of State Dick Molpus ran a radio ad against Republican incumbent Kirk Fordice implying a vote for Fordice was a vote for segregation. In it, a white-sounding voice intoned: "You go to the back of the bus," followed by a black-sounding voice: "Back of the bus, that's where Kirk Fordice wants to put folk like you and me." Only USA Today mentioned it.

Aim for Bambi. In July, an ABC promo promised "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." That theme continued with a November 20 Nightline. ABC inaccurately suggested Republicans were not out to trim excessive regulations that cost billions for little environmental benefit: they were out to clear the books of pollution laws. Reporter Ned Potter described the grand Republican deception: "It's worth remembering that the word environment never appeared in the Contract with America, no mention of air or water....There was a lot in the contract, though, about stripping away any government regulation...Their elimination became nothing less than an ideological crusade....So, almost from the outset, the new Republican majority set out to reverse 25 years of environmental lawmaking." Potter charged: "It became clear that the legislative assault was not just coming from loggers and ranchers. It was, in fact, one of the best-organized corporate lobbying efforts in years." Potter even tossed in a Republican saying this "isn't what we voted for."

Potter concluded: "The Republicans have handed their opponents a weapon for the '96 campaign." Host Chris Wallace's first question to Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska): "Now it seems that the GOP is going after everything but Bambi. How come?"

Partial News on Partial Birth. When the House voted to ban partial birth abortions, most reporters looked for a way not to describe the gruesome procedure or even mention its name. Dan Rather warned on the November 1 CBS Evening News: "On Capitol Hill, abortion is re-emerging as a national election issue. The House voted overwhelmingly today to make a rarely used type of late-term abortion a felony, a federal crime punishable by prison time for doctors who perform it." CBS This Morning aired a whole report by Sharyl Attkisson without describing the procedure. Only ABC's Good Morning America and World News Tonight described the procedure: a doctor partially delivers a baby 4 1/2 months old or older, then takes a pair of scissors and thrusts them through the baby's skull. The baby's brain is sucked out through a catheter.

There was no real effort to investigate how many such abortions occur each year. The numbers ranged from "100 to 400" in a November 13 U.S. News piece by Steven Roberts to "13,000" in an ABC World News Now segment by Dick Schaap. The networks also pretended these abortions are done solely because of genetic defects or the mother's health. On the November 2 NBC News at Sunrise, Ann Curry stated "The bill makes it a felony to perform the procedure, which is mostly used to save the life of the mother, or when the fetus has severe abnormalities." But one of the foremost practitioners of partial birth abortions, Dr. Martin Haskell, told the American Medical News: "In my particular case, probably 20 percent are for genetic reasons, and the other 80 percent are purely elective."

Harry Hits the War Drums. In a cover story on the November 12 CBS Sunday Morning, Harry Smith displayed his disdain for GOP attempts to curb federal spending on social programs, in this case federal aid to American Indians. Decrying how the U.S. government simply stole land from the Indians in the mid-1800s, Smith declared: "Now they and most of the nation's two million Indians are about to lose more. Congress is hacking away at Indian support programs....Cuts that are averaging 20 percent. Some call it betrayal."

Smith looked at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota where "there are no jobs for these hunters" and where "unemployment is 85 percent. Virtually everyone relies on federal aid." Smith concluded by portraying Indians as helpless victims: "What makes it particularly harsh is that many Sioux cannot accept the sacrifices in the here and now being asked of them so that future generations of white folks may be a little better off."

Instead of taking a hard look at why things are bad for Indians on reservations -- lack of education, high rates of alcoholism, drug addiction, gambling, and dependence on the government -- Smith decided to go with the one-sided, liberal viewpoint that more, not less, government support is needed. No one got any time to suggest that total dependence is the core problem, as all five people Smith interviewed for the story favored more spending. One man "worries about the effect of the cuts on the Indian children" as "tribal leaders see the coming cuts as the beginning of a destructive cycle." One woman, an Indian artist, suggested that the government wanted to "cut our throats eventually." Smith insisted that "Indian art work, a successful $500 million a year business, will also suffer. Congress has cut in half the budget for the Institute of Native American Arts." Smith did not explain why a thriving business venture would need government funding.

Post-Soviet Stress Disorder. Last November it was Mary Williams Walsh reporting on the post-communist collapse of child care in East Germany. This year it's a two-part series from Sonni Efron on health care in Russia. The demise of communism keeps driving the Los Angeles Times Column One into lamenting the decline in social services in post-communist countries, as if communist statistics are a reliable standard with which to measure decline, and communism is a preferable alternative.

On November 12, Efron wrote "public health officials have begun to point to alcohol abuse as a key factor in an alarming decline in public health since the demise of the Soviet Union." Efron noted that in the old Soviet Union, "Chronic drunks were locked up in hospitals for treatment; if that failed, they were sentenced to stints in special labor camps for alcoholics." Sounding almost wistful, she noted "there is no totalitarian state to brake antisocial or self-destructive behavior. Labor camps for alcoholics have been closed."

The teaser for Part Two read: "Old diseases pose new threats as Russia's sickly health care system starts to collapse." The November 13 headline was even more stark: "Post-Soviet Russia Slips Into Third World's Sickly Ranks." Efron warned: "As the underfunded health system here slips into critical condition, infectious diseases that had been nearly extinguished by the now-defunct Soviet Union have returned with a vengeance." Efron sounded like an advertisement for communism: "For 70 years, the communist social contract held that Soviet citizens might be poor -- and might have to wait decades for an apartment or a car -- but that if they feel ill, the socialist workers' state would look after them."

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