MediaWatch: February 1995

Janet Cooke Award: PBS: Clinton Fails the Liberal Litmus Test

The PBS series Frontline promotes itself with a quote from the Cleveland Plain Dealer describing it as "the crown jewel and standard-bearer for the mission of public television." But it is often the crown jewel of the argument that PBS uses taxpayer money to promote radical-left political analysis at the expense of conservative views.

A 1993 MediaWatch study of three years of Frontline found that in seven programs on the environment and eight programs on race relations, no conservative view was represented. Add to that history of exclusion the January 31 edition, titled "What Happened to President Clinton?," which in airing only seven liberal analysts, earned the Janet Cooke Award.

Frontline has treated Clinton very differently than Reagan and Bush. In the 1980s, Frontline aired two programs echoing the claims of the now-defunct Christic Institute, which claimed a "secret team" ran U.S. foreign policy which carried out the assassination attempt on Contra leader Eden Pastora and drug running for the Contras. The Christic claims were thrown out of court as a "frivolous lawsuit," but Frontline never apologized, even when Pastora's real assassins were discovered in 1993.

During the Bush years, Frontline ran two shows asserting the Reagan campaign conspired in 1980 to delay release of the Iranian hostages to prevent an "October Surprise." Later, the House and Senate both found the charges were groundless, but Frontline never apologized. Executive Producer David Fanning claimed the show did not aim to investigate Republicans, but the regime in power. In the Clinton era, Frontline's investigative nose for the high and mighty has gone cold. Despite the wealth of investigative scandal stories -- Whitewater, the travel office, the sex scandals, the Foster suicide, the commodity trading, and especially the conspiracy theory of Contra drug running with Clinton's consent in Mena, Arkansas -- Frontline has aired nothing. One program on October 25 investigated the Agriculture Department, but presented disgraced Secretary Mike Espy as a force for reinventing government who "sees himself as a victim of his reforms." Frontline was less than hard-boiled in "Hillary's Class," exploring the lives of the First Lady's Wellesley classmates since the 1960s.

To address the Clinton presidency, Frontline did no investigation, but simply interviewed seven liberals: journalists Elizabeth Drew, William Greider, Gwen Ifill, David Maraniss, and Bob Woodward, as well as political analysts Garry Wills and Kevin Phillips, whose book The Politics of Rich and Poor was a Democratic Party bestseller. PBS focused on how Clinton had failed to be liberal enough in three areas: gays in the military, campaign finance reform, and government "investments" in job training. Coming three months after a dramatic conservative electoral wave, Frontline's lament displayed how out of sync it is with the public.

PBS aired no legitimate conservative analysts, airing only a ranting talk-show host proclaiming of the President: "He was yellow 25 years ago, and he is a bright shade of urine maize tonight." A caller then stated: "Lee Harvey Oswald, where are you? I don't know how else to say it."

Narrator Will Lyman, reading the script of Sherry Jones, a Frontline veteran and former Democratic Party activist, answered the program's title question: "In 1992, the American people elected a man who had campaigned as an outsider. They expected change. What has happened to Bill Clinton is not about draft-dodging or Whitewater, but the political choices he made at the beginning. He had promised to change the money politics of Washington, to reform how the Congress does business. But within days of his election, the Democratic barons would travel from Washington to Little Rock to argue their view of what was possible."

Woodward explained: "You have the old hands in Washington saying `Look, don't worry about a reform agenda'...There is a simple reality that campaign finance reform and any kind of meaningful reform agenda goes over with the odor of a case of dead skunks in the Congress." Frontline didn't consider the conservative position, that "campaign finance reform" means preventing taxpayer-subsidized elections -- less federal involvement, not more. Jones didn't return MediaWatch calls for comment.

Frontline also lamented: "The conflict over gays in the military would prove to be a perfect example of Clinton's method, one which had repeated itself time and again in Arkansas...He has promised gays he was with them, deferred to the Joint Chiefs when they appeared. In the end, he would please no one." Garry Wills argued: "He should have just issued an executive order as Commander-in-Chief because then anybody who fought with him had to say `I'm going to disobey' and in our country, luckily, up to now, that's a fight the President can't lose."

PBS moved on to the "jobs" programs: "Early on, out of public view, he had thrown away a rare window of opportunity to do something real about campaign finance reform and out of public view, he had also thrown away the means to do something real about jobs...Left out of the [first State of the Union] speech were the details of a series of crucial decisions that had begun in the weeks before he was sworn in, compromises that would subvert the promise of his campaign."

William Greider happily contradicted eight years of rising median income in the 1980s, declaring Clinton "was the very first nominee from either party to look directly in the eyes of the American people and say `I know your wages have been declining for the last 15 years.'" Frontline explained: "He had confronted the unhinging of American prosperity and so pledged to steer spending toward investment in job training and education, to create the kind of economic growth ordinary people could feel."

But here, too, the left felt betrayed, as did Frontline: "Surrounded by warring advisers and conflicting advice, he would postpone his campaign pledge to invest in training and jobs and side with the financial markets, who wanted the deficit reduced." Still, Frontline managed some sympathy for Clinton: "`There must be something nightmarish,' Garry Wills has written, `for a man who wants so badly to please to find himself so thoroughly hated.' He had created a national service corps for young people, provided tax credits for the working poor, cut the deficit so it was no longer growing faster than the economy."

What was truly nightmarish was Frontline's lack of investigative focus on the Clintons' "money politics": Whitewater, commodities, or even selling health stocks short in the White House in early 1993. Why is the only product after two years a collection of disappointed liberal talking heads? Unlike Reagan and Bush, Clinton has been given a pass by PBS.

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