MediaWatch: February 1995
Table of Contents:
- MediaWatch: February 1995
- The Newt-Centric Media Universe
- NewsBites: Partisans and Pansies
- Revolving Door: NBC Goes Left with Moyers
- ABC News Argues Voters Don't Really Want Contract with America
- The Tyrannical Pope
- Regulation: A Burden?
- CNN's on the Bill Schneider Contract
- Janet Cooke Award: PBS: Clinton Fails the Liberal Litmus Test
Revolving Door: NBC Goes Left with Moyers
Three months after the electorate rejected liberal policies, NBC News decided to hire Bill Moyers, a Democratic political activist and left-wing crusader on PBS since leaving CBS News in 1986, to offer commentary on its third place Nightly News. A Deputy Director of the Peace Corps and Press Secretary to President Lyndon Johnson, Moyers began his new duties on February 14, though he will continue his PBS work. NBC has no plans to provide a conservative counter-weight.
The New York Times relayed February 1 that NBC News President Andy Lack dismissed questions about Moyers' liberal bias at PBS, insisting "that perception is inside the beltway, and perhaps inside about ten blocks of New York and ten blocks of L.A. I don't think the American people give a whit about it." The same day the Baltimore Sun quoted Moyers: "I'm not in politics. I have no agenda. I'm not pushing a platform. I have no ideology." Really? In a 1989 Esquire profile Moyers tagged Newt Gingrich "Joe McCarthy with a southern accent." Some other non-ideological quotes:
From a March 1991 address to the Democratic Issues Conference: "I was raised on mother's milk and Roosevelt speeches, and over the years, I still cherish the party's defining stands." Taking on Democrats from the left, he charged: "By the 1980s, when the Democrats in Congress colluded with Ronald Reagan and the Republicans to revise the tax code on behalf of the rich, it appeared the party had lost its soul."
In comments during the 1992 PBS press tour: "What liberalism is, is a belief that a democracy like ours has to be tolerant. Has to open itself to ideas, that the answer to a bad idea is a better idea. Civility. I mean, I'd like to think that's what liberalism is. I define myself in that sense as a liberal." On conservatives: "I find it very hard to have intelligent conversations with people on the right wing because they want to hit first and ask questions later. And I just simply don't let that criticism set my agenda."
From a September 1991 Washington Post Magazine interview: "The right gets away with blaming liberals for their efforts to help the poor, but what the right is really objecting to is the fact that the poor are primarily black. The man who sits in the White House today [George Bush] opposed the Civil Rights Act. So did Ronald Reagan. This crowd is really fighting a retroactive civil rights war to prevent the people they dislike because of their color from achieving success in American life."
After Mario Cuomo's 1992 Democratic convention speech, he declared on CNN: "It's worth dying prematurely so you can hear someone else do your eulogy if that someone is Mario Cuomo." Following a 1989 PBS re-broadcast of his 1982 CBS Reports: People Like Us, he insisted: "The documentary has held up as both true and sadly prophetic. While Congress restored some of the cuts made in those first Reagan budgets, in the years since, the poor and the working poor have born the brunt of the cost of the Reagan Revolution. The hardest-hit programs have been welfare, housing and other anti-poverty measures. Even programs that were not cut have failed to keep up with inflation. Meanwhile, rich people got big tax breaks. And the middle class kept most of their subsidies intact. As a result, the Reagan years brought on a wider gap between rich and poor."
In his 1992 PBS show Listening to America, he asked candidate Bill Clinton: "What do you think the American people get for their government? We have no universal health care, we have no federal guarantee of higher education...The regulatory agencies in many cases have been gutted...Why not just say `We will have universal health care and we will raise taxes to pay for it?'" Sounds like he'll feel quite comfortable reporting to NBC Nightly News Executive Producer Jeff Gralnick, Press Secretary to then-Senator George McGovern in 1972.
