MediaWatch: February 1996

NewsBites: Tricky Dick's Tax Break

When Rep. Jennifer Dunn (R-Wash.) filed an ethics complaint against House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt for possibly illegally evading capital gains taxes on a land swap, the story's hypocrisy angle seemed obvious. Insight reported last summer that Gephardt, who dem-agogues against capital gains tax cuts as windfalls for the rich, listed a beachfront property he was purchasing as an investment property, thus avoiding tax on a $79,500 capital gain. To obtain a loan to build on the North Carolina property, he signed a covenant pledging the house would be used as a second home, and not as an investment property.

Reporters had two chances to make Gephardt's hypocrisy a news story, one when Dunn filed the complaint February 2, and another when Gephardt's lawyer denied the allegations a week later. Despite short stories in The Washington Post and The New York Times, in both cases the network evening news programs completely ignored the allegations.

Newt Left Hanging.

Last July, when the National Republican Congressional Committee printed a Wanted poster featuring targeted Democrats, CNN thoroughly covered the ensuing outrage from Democrats. The NRCC Wanted poster merely pictured Democratic incumbents up for re-election in 1996. CNN gave the most coverage overall of the poster, airing stories on the July 10 and July 15 Inside Politics as well as on World News for July 12 and 13. Declared anchor Bobbie Battista: "Some of the Democrats pictured on a Republican Wanted poster are complaining the ad is racist and could even put their lives in danger." The next day anchor Linden Soles reported, "Democrats say the poster is racist, anti-semitic and could even lead to physical attacks against them."

So where was CNN when the Democratic National Committee (DNC) posted a Hangman game on its Web site that depicted Newt Gingrich as hanging from a gallows? According to John Pitney in the January 29 Weekly Standard, "For each correct guess, the site added a new part to a stick figure and displayed a different quotation from Gingrich. At the end of the game, the screen showed the stick figure hanging from a gallows, above the game's magic word: EXTREMIST." Surely, the lynching of the Speaker of the House on an official DNC computer Web page deserved at least a brief spot. But neither CNN's Inside Politics or The World Today aired a report on the Hangman game. A review of the three other major networks showed they also failed to mention the DNC's ghoulish depiction of Gingrich on the gallows.

PBS on Privates.

Are the personal lives of politicians relevant? Apparently, the PBS answer is "only if they're Republicans." On January 16, the tax-funded documentary series Frontline devoted an hour to the rise of Newt Gingrich, which included tales of how friends had to raise money to feed Newt's kids because he wouldn't pay alimony. Frontline also aired a man heckling Gingrich at a book signing: "You profess family values. This is hidden wisdom in the Holy Bible. And I want to know where it says oral sex doesn't count as adultery. I'd like you to sign it because, you know, you've been cheating on your wife. You've been crying family values. I don't know where it says oral sex is moral while you're trying to take away children's rights and children's benefits."

But Frontline has almost completely avoided dealing with Bill Clinton's sex life. The only snippet came on March 3, 1992, in a documentary on racist David Duke, who declared: "I am not a wizard under the sheets. I have to leave that title to Bill Clinton from Arkansas." But that's about it. The October 21, 1992 Frontline titled "The Choice," a two-hour history of Bush and Clinton, leaped at the very end from Clinton's announcement speech in 1991 to the Los Angeles riots. There was no Gennifer Flowers. In 1995, Frontline aired "What Happened to Bill Clinton?" The answer: He hadn't been liberal enough. PBS said nothing about the allegations of state troopers or the sexual harassment lawsuit of Paula Jones.

Another Travelgate Yawn.

While promoting her new book in January, First Lady Hillary Clinton defended her role in the May 1993 firing of the White House Travel Office staff. She said "financial mismanagement" justified the action. But a recent audit by the General Accounting Office shows that whatever the situation in 1993, it has only gotten worse.

According to an Associated Press story that appeared in the January 30 Washington Post and Washington Times, an audit by the General Accounting Office found: "The current travel office rarely follows its own policy of paying vendors, such as airlines and telephone companies, within 45 days of the invoice date....office employees never balanced checkbooks from January through August 1995." The audit also found that the office's accounts receivable had soared to $5.6 million under the new management, while the employees that were fired had only $366,000. The new employees also forgot to enter over $200,000 in deposits into the office's checking accounts.

The audit drew little national media attention. The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and USA Today all failed to report the embarrassing revelations. With the exception of the NewsHour on PBS, no network evening news show ran a story. Neither did Time or Newsweek.

Hillary's Decade of Greed.

Newsweek's Martha Brant and Evan Thomas analyzed the duality of Hillary Clinton in the January 15 issue. Instead of condemning her as a hypocrite for trashing the "greed is good" 1980s in public while cashing in on her influence in private, the Newsweek duo marveled at her "missionary zeal" as a liberal crusader. "The same zeal that is so impressive in her fight for worthy causes," Brant and Thomas suggested, "can also lead her (at best) to be politically insensitive and (at worst) to be ruthless about getting her way."

The article shows why Hillary never resorted to ruthlessness when dealing with the press on Whitewater; reporters like Brant and Thomas are willing to rationalize her behavior: "It has fallen mostly to Hillary to finance the Clinton's public service. (As governor, her husband never earned more than $35,000 a year.) To the outside world, her commodities trading -- a $1,000 investment to make $100,000 -- looks suspiciously cozy. And the family's lost investment in the failed Whitewater land development has the smell of a sweet deal turned sour...Although she would never admit it, she may feel that she was relatively restrained in Little Rock, given the temptations of her position and the culture of the place. For a governor's wife who was also a senior partner in a politically connected law firm, the opportunity for lucrative deals must have been huge."

Zuckerman's Zero Interest. Liberals often claim that media owners push the media to the right. Not so at U.S. News & World Report where owner Mortimer Zuckerman liked investigating George Bush, but is not so happy about probing the Clintons. Zuckerman used a two-page editorial on January 29 to lambaste Republican handling of the Whitewater hearings. He recalled Joseph Welch's famous dictum, "Have you no sense of decency?" from the Army-McCarthy hearings of the 1950s as he regurgitated the Clintons' public relations line that a report prepared for the RTC by former Republican U.S. Attorney Jay Stephens cleared the Clintons. On the issue of the billing records that were discovered nearly two years after being subpoenaed (and which contradict the RTC report), Zuckerman wrote: "What about the time sheets showing the amount of legal work that Hillary Clinton performed for the failed S&L?...Again, no. Her role...was minimal."

The editorial led to a January 26 guest appearance on Michael Jackson's KABC talk show in Los Angeles. Talk Daily reported that "he called the charges against the Clintons `outrageous' (a term he used several times)," claimed that in the First Lady's Madison dealings "all transactions were legitimate," was "disgusted" by the investigation and considered much of the press coverage a "witch hunt."

Zuckerman's U.S. News piece also attacked fellow journalists for investigating a Democrat: "The press has slipped its moorings here...The two questions now -- what did the President's wife know and when did she know it? -- seem a childish irrelevance by comparison [to Watergate]." However in his own June 22, 1992 editorial on Iraqgate, Zuckerman suggested the Bush administration obstructed justice, claiming: "Certainly the attempts to limit inquiries by Congress on the spurious grounds of national security smell of coverup....In short, what did the administration know and when did it know it?"

California Scheming.

Host Jane Pauley's introduction to the January 23 Dateline NBC dripped with sarcasm: "Do you feel that everyone is after your job, and they just might have an unfair advantage? That people can criticize you and it's OK? Are you a white American male? In California, two men have taken up the cause of the beleaguered species. They've written a ballot proposal that, if passed in November, would change affirmative action in California's state hiring and education admissions." Reporter Josh Mankiewicz charged, "They (Glynn Custred and Tom Wood) are portrayed as `genial scholars,' just two `apolitical professors,' an image Wood and Custred have worked hard to maintain."

Then Mankiewicz moved to discredit them: "The two are key figures in a conservative organization...very critical of many aspects of higher education, including black and women's studies, sexual harassment policies, the emphasis on racial diversity, and affirmative action." John Leo of U.S. News & World Report took exception to the Mankiewicz segment in the February 19 issue: "Senator Joe himself couldn't have phrased this better. It artfully left the impression that NAS [the National Association of Scholars, to which Wood and Custred belong] is a sinister, antiwoman, antiblack group." In fact, Leo noted that "a prominent Marxist, Eugene Genovese, sits on the board of advisers."

Mankiewicz criticized the men for not having statistics on how many white men have suffered discrimination, but Leo pointed out "Nobody has good statistics on this. Since a lot of reverse discrimination is legal under Title VII [of the Civil Rights Act], many who are hurt by it never bother to file any complaints and thus don't get counted."

Judge Baer Not Bared.

When Federal Judge Harold Baer threw out the key evidence in a New York drug arrest, $4 million in cocaine and heroin, only one news magazine noted that the Clinton administration had appointed the judge. All four networks ran stories on the case, explaining how the judge tossed the evidence, which officers found in a duffel bag they earlier saw being placed inside a car, under the guise of it being obtained through an illegal search. A story on NBC's February 6 Dateline noted that the woman charged admitted to being a drug runner and that Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) now regretted suggesting Baer be nominated. But none of the networks noted the Clinton link.

U.S. News & World Report was the only news magazine to make the connection between Clinton and Baer. However reporter Ted Gest, writing in the February 12 issue, failed to tie Baer's ruling with any liberal leanings. Analyzing the administration's judicial choices, he wrote, "Clinton's Supreme Court choices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, are moderates, and so are most of his lower court appointees...Assistant Attorney General Eleanor Acheson...stresses diversity without sacrificing quality." Quality that let a $4 million admitted drug trafficker go free.

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