MediaWatch: December 1996
Table of Contents:
Pouncing on Powers
CNN created the show Reliable Sources to critique the
news media, but time and again, its panelists gang up on
guests who dare draw attention to bias. The latest victim, on December
8: former Washington Post reporter William Powers, fresh from his inaugural media critique for The New Republic. CNN regulars Marty Schram of Scripps Howard, Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post and moderator Bernard Kalb, formerly of CBS, spent an entire segment arguing how preposterous they found his thesis.
In his December 16 cover story, Powers showed how "the mainline media
did not focus intense, sustained attention on the stories that
could have been most threatening to the President's chances of
re-election." After detailing how Clinton staffers convinced
network producers to not air some scandal stories, he explained
why the White House "outreach" worked: "Simply put, because
Clinton and his people are, to most journalists, culturally
sympathetic. What every conservative press critic preaches, and
almost every reporter denies, is largely true: the mainstream
press is liberal. Most Washington reporters share with the
Clinton aides a language, a value system, a set of buttons. Outrage at,
say, 'partial birth infanticide' is not one of the buttons of
this class. Outrage at 'right-wing abortion activists'
is....Liberal bias flows from principles so deeply held they're
mostly unconscious. All of which means that, had a Republican
President been up for re-election this year, facing the same
array of ethical problems Clinton faced, the scandals would
have gotten more ink."
On CNN, Kalb asked Powers: "Would it have required President Clinton's defeat for you to be prepared to admit that there was adequate ethical coverage?" Kurtz claimed the press covered the scandals but the public didn't care. Schram said Powers committed "a sin" because "I think you had a pre-judgement." Schram insisted "the press did a heck of a job in breaking all of the information on to Indogate and all the other stuff. That's why we know about it because of the media pounding away."