MediaWatch: February 1993
Table of Contents:
- MediaWatch: February 1993
- Loving the Children's Defense Fund
- NewsBites: Going Nowhere Fast
- Revolving Door: Time's FOB
- Reporters Hound Clinton on Political Missteps, But....
- "Uneducated" Conservatives?
- Cheers to Sam and Diane
- "Censored" Stories
- Janet Cooke Award: Time Calls for Gas Tax Increase at least 24 Times in Four Years
"Uneducated" Conservatives?
The Post Pre-Judges
Inside-the-Beltway journalists were truly puzzled by the avalanche of calls to Congress opposing the admission of openly gay soldiers into the military. While reporters admitted the outrage over Zoe Baird was genuine, most suggested the 100-to-1 uproar against gays in the military was a small, organized effort whipped up by televangelists.
Midway through a February 1 front-page Washington Post story on that theory, reporter Michael Weisskopf explained: "Corporations pay public relations firms millions of dollars to contrive the kind of grass-roots response that Falwell or Pat Robertson can galvanize in a televised sermon. Their followers are largely poor, uneducated and easy to command."
The next day's Post "Corrections" box included the following: "An article yesterday characterized followers of television evangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as `largely poor, uneducated and easy to command.' There is no factual basis for that statement."
In a February 6 Howard Kurtz story on reader protests, Weisskopf dug himself deeper. Weisskopf called it "an honest mistake, not born of any prejudice or malice for the religious right," but then said he should have said that evangelicals were "relatively" poor and uneducated. According to Kurtz, "Weisskopf said he based the description on interviews with several experts, but didn't attribute it to anyone because `I try not to have to attribute every point in the story if it appears to be universally accepted. You don't have to say, it's hot out today, according to the weatherman.'"
In a letter to the editor published the same day in the Post, Timothy Crater of the National Association of Evangelicals argued: "If such generalizations had been made of blacks, Jews, or any other favored minority, one can easily imagine the journalistic hell into which Weisskopf's career would slide."
In the February 7 Post, Ombudsman Joann Byrd wrote: "The most embarrassing mistakes in newspapers are invariably the ones the paper had abundant opportunity to catch. And this was one of those. As the story moved through the editing process, several able editors read it, and still the sentence, sitting out there with no support, did not jump out."
