MediaWatch: February 1994

Janet Cooke Award: PBS Program on Campaign Finance Laws Boasts Nine Opponents, No Supporters

Bill Moyers Confirms "Pattern of Bias"

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, required by law to monitor PBS programming, declared to Congress on January 31 that "no glaring or egregious pattern of bias, social slant, or partisan predisposition has surfaced in CPB's year-long opinion soundings, including its statistically valid opinion survey."

But CPB's "opinion survey" didn't specifically ask about biased documentary series on PBS. CPB should take a look at the January 21 Bill Moyers' Journal before they rush to declare PBS free of bias. For loading an entire program with nine critics of current campaign finance laws, and no supporters, PBS earned the Janet Cooke Award.

At a 1992 press conference, Moyers claimed: "Anybody who looks at the bulk of my work over the last 20 years knows that it's a fallacious attack to find in it a left-wing agenda.... Many of you have seen programs I've done which have been quite critical of Democrats."

Moyers' latest show was critical of Democrats, particularly the Clinton administration's continued high-dollar fundraising and slowness on campaign and lobbying laws. But the critique came from the left, that campaign donations are a dangerous influence on democracy that must be curbed. Moyers began by suggesting that in 1992, "Millions of Americans had grown disgusted with how money buys access in this town; they resented the inside traders who rigged the status quo to benefit themselves, and they were infuriated, to say the least, with how the last word here often goes to big campaign donors instead of voters."

The show wasn't so much a documentary as it was a talk show. Moyers began with a supposedly balanced panel with "Republican" Kevin Phillips, author of The Politics of Rich and Poor, a Democratic favorite, and former Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor William Greider, author of the left-wing book Who Will Tell the People. Moyers asked: "Both of you talk about how Presidents surround themselves with the very interests that they had come to town to try to challenge. And the question is, can you win the war against the Mafia if you put the Godfathers in charge of that war?" Moyers also asked: "What does it mean when, as The Wall Street Journal says, on issue after issue, the Clinton administration, the government, comes down on the side of corporate America?"

Moyers then did a segment with Ellen Miller of the Center for Responsive Politics, a liberal campaign watchdog group. Miller, like all the other guests, dismissed the Democrats' current campaign finance bills as not radical enough: "What I see in the House and Senate versions of reform, in fact, is freezing into place the status quo. And I think it's ultimately a kind of hoax they're trying to pull on the American public."

The last third of the show was devoted to a panel of six activists for campaign finance "reform." Moyers claimed: "Represented here are Democrats and Republicans, conservative Christians and progressive labor people." For synthetic balance, Moyers included Jim Boutelle, a former Reagan-Bush supporter now working for Ross Perot's United We Stand. But the other five were left-wing activists supporting the elimination of private contributions to campaigns, leaving only the taxpayers to foot the bill for elections.

When Moyers suggested that polls show that a majority opposes public financing of elections, Maine activist Betsy Sweet replied: "When you package that with...[the idea that] people are going to take $5,000 to run and that's it -- they're going to get this money and that's it -- and you really do take everything out of it, then the numbers actually go up."

Activist Randall Kehler blamed Big Money on the demise of the nuclear freeze movement, "whose wishes for a halt to the nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union were thwarted because the big money interests, weapons manufacturers and their allies in Washington, had the ear of our representatives in a way that the majority of American people, who supported the freeze, did not." Moyers never asked for proof of Big Money conspiracies like these.

Moyers ended with a lecture: "As a football fan, I admire the referees who keep the game honest. They do their work in public to keep the playing field level. If it were okay for players, coaches, or owners to contribute to referees on the side, I'd stop trusting the game or watching the game. Supposedly, government is the arbiter between the competing claims of citizens. No one, no one should get a leg up from putting money in the umpire's pocket. When political donations lead to the selective enforcement of the rules, we can't trust government any more. Representation becomes determined by a clever form of bribery."

Moyers ended his hour of advocacy journalism with the suggestion: "You can work to challenge the system locally, as these folks have, and you can start by finding out who has bid what for whom. If you want to know where your members of Congress get their campaign funds, call this toll-free number for Project Vote Smart."

While Moyers did mention in passing a few arguments against finance limits -- such as the Supreme Court's decision in Buckley v. Valeo, linking donations to the exercise of free speech -- he did not raise other conservative arguments against campaign finance "reform." For example, Moyers didn't ask Sweet how a challenger would defeat an incumbent Congressman with a $5,000 budget. That entire argument -- that campaign finance limits might help incumbents -- went unmade. (Moyers has yet to devote an hour to term limits.) Most importantly, Moyers neglected to explore the argument that since government has expanded dramatically into more and more areas, those affected Americans have felt the need to band together and lobby for their own interests, acting as a check on government. If the government weren't so intrusive, the need for lobbies could be reduced.

When MediaWatch contacted Moyers' production company, Public Affairs Television, about the program's advocacy, Debbie Rubenstein responded: "I will have the producer speak with you, but I can tell you that we were surprised as well. We had anticipated different responses from our guests than the ones we got." A few days later, Rubenstein said Moyers and his staff would not be available for comment.

All the talk of "the inside traders who rigged the status quo to benefit themselves" apparently did not extend to Moyers' own company, which has made millions of dollars in royalties from his PBS Video cassettes -- without ever having to disclose any financial information to the taxpayers who fund the production of his shows. If Moyers is really on a crusade about insider deals, we might suggest a little public disclosure of his own. Or PBS might consider a Bill Moyers' Journal on Whitewater Development.

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