MediaWatch: February 1993

NewsBites: Going Nowhere Fast

Going Nowhere Fast. If the President is serious about spending cuts, he'll have trouble with The Washington Post. On January 21, reporter William Claiborne described how a citizen jury produced its own budget: "The jurors voted 18 to 6 for a relatively radical federal budget that would slash $26 billion out of fiscal 1997 expenditures of $1.745 trillion projected by the Congressional Budget Office....The jurors' somewhat draconian budget would leave a $194 billion deficit in 1997."

Radical? Slashing? Draconian? The jury's plan would reduce the still-growing budget (including CBO's projected increases in mandatory spending) by only 1.5 percent.

Scandals Skipped. Few "appearances of impropriety" by the executive branch went unnoticed by the Washington media during the last 12 years. But that changed on January 20. Two examples: President Clinton's Director of Communications, George Stephanopoulos, may have violated the Ethics in Government Act. As National Review reported, "The law prohibits senior congressional staff from dealing with former employers for one year after their departure. Mr. Stephanopoulos was a senior aide to Rep. Gephardt in 1991 and spent 1992 with the Clinton campaign, on at least one occasion acting as a liaison with congressional Democratic leaders." Sam Donaldson asked Stephanopoulos to respond to the charge on the January 24 This Week, but the issue never made an evening or morning TV news show.

Add to that Hillary Clinton's violation of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, or the "sunshine" law. On January 29 The Washington Times reported that the President's task force on health care met in secret, violating the law which the Times said "requires that any presidentially appointed advisory task force that includes nongovernmental employees or outside advisers must keep all events and meetings public." The task force includes non-employees Tipper Gore and Mrs. Clinton. The media reaction? No coverage, not even after Rep. Bill Clinger, the ranking Republican on the House Government Operations Committee, demanded the closed meetings stop.

Hillary Hair Update. Reporters continue to treat the First Lady like a bimbo whose hair is more important than what's inside the head it grows on. From January 11 to 13, The Washington Post ran a long three-part series on "The Education of Hillary Clinton." Post reporter Martha Sherrill devoted only one paragraph to the First Lady's career at the Rose Law Firm and two to her legal writings, but twelve paragraphs to changes in her hair and wardrobe. Sherrill did not touch on Mrs. Clinton's tenure as chairman of the federal Legal Services Corporation from 1978-81.

But Sherrill still attacked Hillary's critics: "At one extreme you had Pat Buchanan, in the Houston Astrodome, spitting out the words 'lawyer spouse'. On the other side, she's provoked a certain amount of weeping. Old girlfriends....[think] the world has so grossly misunderstood their warm, funny, smart, tough, loyal Hillary."

Scotty's Secret. PBS welcomed the new year with James Reston: The Man Millions Read, another forum for cliched liberal attacks on conservative politicians. Reston, the long-time Washington Bureau Chief of The New York Times, sized up Carter and Reagan: "Jimmy was the greatest ex-President we ever had. He not only talked his principles, but what did he do? He didn't, like Reagan, go and make a couple of million bucks for two 20-minute speeches. He went out on the construction sites and built houses for the poor." On Quayle: "I don't think that there's any doubt whatsoever that if somebody has raised the question of putting up Dan Quayle, that the elders of the party would have said, Well, George, that bird won't fly."

The program lionized Reston and his role as a Washington power broker, and featured only Reston and a few of his Times colleagues. Why? Because the show was produced and funded by The New York Times. Dr. Laurence Jarvik of the Center for Study of Popular Culture noted that PBS violated its own underwriting guidelines, which forbid underwriters "having a direct and immediate interest in the content of a program." Jarvik also noted the Times failed to note its conflict of interest when it editorialized in favor of PBS last April, when its Reston show was still in production. Liberal corruption at PBS continues.

Fuel Fraud. On the December 30 CBS Evening News, John Roberts reported from Boston: "As winter sets in, parents must choose between paying for heat and paying for food." Roberts explained: "Across the country, millions of people rely on the federal government for help with their heating bills, through LIHEAP, the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program. But in recent years, that program has been cut 25 percent, while at the same time, the number of people needing assistance has increased." He also interviewed two mothers with hungry children, one of whom complained that she was running out of fuel.

But where is the evidence for the so-called "heat-or-eat syndrome"? Heritage Foundation analyst Carl Horowitz called this a "false choice," citing the 26.3 million Americans who receive food stamps, not to mention Medicaid, AFDC, and housing subsidies. The Department of Health and Human Services, which administers LIHEAP, does not track the number of people needing assistance, and though spending on LIHEAP declined somewhat from 1991 to 1993 (less than the 25 percent Roberts claimed), spending steadily increased for the program from 1988 to 1991. But Roberts only had time for the liberal line: "Those lobbying for maintaining fuel funds say for every cut in the program, there is an added social cost."

Standing by Their Smear. Whatever became of the practice of offering a retraction when a media outlet is wrong? ABC's Nightline has adopted the policy of clamming up and hoping that people will forget about it. On June 20, 1991, Nightline devoted a hour-long special to promoting the "October Surprise" allegations of two dubious Iranian arms dealers, Cyrus and Jamshid Hashemi. Their reporting played a major part in spurring a congressional investigation that kept the story alive through 1992.

On January 13, 1993, the bipartisan House "October Surprise" task force fully exonerated the Reagan-Bush campaign. Would Nightline devote an evening to the task force report? ABC spokesman Laura Wessner told MediaWatch the answer was no: "What would we say? We're not World News Tonight. That is not a broadcast for Nightline. That is a headline. That is not a half hour show."

When asked if Nightline would report on the findings of the task force, or even offer a retraction and an apology, Wessner said: "We stand by our story. We understand that Mrs. Casey asked a number of people to apologize -- Frontline, Nightline -- you know, to apologize. We absolutely sympathize with her and her dedication to her husband's memory and reputation, but we think that the congressional committee report did not contradict what we reported on the subject."

Christopher's October Surprise. For years the media have dug up and reported every scrap of information -- no matter how dubious -- that would link Republicans to a 1980 arms-for-hostages deal with Iran. Now that the evidence points to the Democrats, the story has been spiked. "A bipartisan House task force revealed yesterday that Warren Christopher had proposed a previously unknown `quid pro quo' of guns and money for the release of 52 Americans held hostages in Iran in 1980," reported the January 14 Washington Times. The Washington Post included only a brief mention of Christopher's offer of $150 million in military spare parts and $80 million in cash for he hostages. The New York Times story on the task force failed to mention anything about Christopher's proposal.

Instead, some gave Christopher credit for negotiating the release of American hostages. A USA Today caption stated Christopher "negotiated release of American hostages in Iran." Newsweek's special post-inauguration issue proclaimed: "Ironically, it was Warren Christopher who negotiated the hostages' freedom just as Carter was leaving office -- which cleared the decks for Ronald Reagan's domestic agenda." Didn't Reagan's resolve have something to do with the hostages coming home?

Marshall Memories. The tributes to former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall began the evening of his January 24 death. No one would dispute that his early efforts to end segregation deserved praise, but the media glossed over criticism of his Supreme Court career.

On ABC's World News Sunday, Cokie Roberts recalled: "Thurgood Marshall carried the cause of racial equality, first as a lawyer arguing civil rights cases, then as a Justice deciding them." On the same day's CBS Evening News, Rita Braver remarked that when elevated to the Supreme Court, "Marshall became a strong voice for individual rights, for minorities, for women, for the poor...Marshall never stopped pushing for equality for all Americans."

But Marshall moved away from racial equality with his support of affirmative action programs. As syndicated columnist Paul Greenberg of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette recently wrote: "In the end, Mr. Justice Marshall was unable to imagine any way out of discrimination against the minority except discrimination against the majority...The game of racial advantage remained the dismal same."

Pompous Powers Returns. Boston Globe Magazine writer John Powers' January 17 memo "To: The Republican Party, Re: Rising from your ashes," was the second strategy memo to a political party. Powers, who once told MediaWatch the Globe doesn't employ conservatives because it cannot "find a conservative who can put a complete sentence together," critiqued the Democratic Party in 1991 from the left. This time, he did the same to the Republicans.

Powers wrote, "It took a while, but the electorate finally figured out that the Republicans are stuck back in the '70s, if not the '50s. When you think of women, you think of Martha Stewart, not Murphy Brown. That's the biggest reason you lost the White House. You lost the women...Your policies and your platform rapped them on the head at every turn. No abortions, no child care, no maternity leave, no equal pay for equal work. Then you had the brass to preach to them about Family Values."

Powers advised: "You can start by tossing aside a couple of albatrosses. Forget supply-side, trickle-down, and the rest of the voodoo remedies. All they did was mail a whopping bill to your grandchildren. And shelve the Ozzie Nelson stuff. If Americans want family values, they can go to K Mart, which is about all they can afford these days."

Time's Queer Numbers. The January 11 Time magazine published letters from outraged readers about its December 14 article on the new gay "tolerance" curriculum in schools. "Our readers did not take lightly the report on schools' efforts to instruct children about homosexuality," a noticeably downbeat Time wrote. "Of the 40 letters we received responding to our story, 75 percent rejected the idea of teaching kids about sexual orientation and gay family relationships." But the Time box excerpted only one letter critical of the curriculum, and two that supported it.

Geneva's Conventions. Reporting isn't going to get any less biased if Des Moines Register Editor Geneva Overholser has her way. As reported in the November 28 Editor & Publisher, Overholser told a conference: "All too often, a story free of any taint of personal opinion is a story with all the juice sucked out. A big piece of why so much news copy today is boring as hell is this objectivity god. Keeping opinion out of the story too often means being a fancy stenographer."

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