MediaWatch: February 1997
Table of Contents:
NewsBites: Rooting for Rubin
All that's good about the economy can be credited to Clinton's Treasury Secretary, two reporters have gushed. On Sunday Morning February 9 Charles Osgood asked CBS reporter Ray Brady who is responsible for the "almost perfect" economy. Brady replied: "I happen to think we have one of the best Treasury Secretaries we have ever had in Bob Rubin. He got long term interest rates down, short term rates came down, that's speeding up the economy, it's keeping it going on an even keel."
During election night coverage Tom Brokaw asked NBC's Brian Williams: "You've been covering the Clinton White House for some time. Do you think that there is any more heroic figure, however not very visible, than Bob Rubin, who is Treasury Secretary?"
Dancer, Jokester, Hypocrite.
In a January 24 profile that played up Al Gore's sense of humor and dancing skills, NBC Today co-host Katie Couric asked about a subject the show glossed over last year: Gore's 1996 convention speech, in which he cited his sister's death from lung cancer as the motivation for his opposition to the tobacco industry. She asked: "You're aware that you were criticized for the speech because your family was involved in the growing and selling tobacco until the late `80s. Correct?" Gore sidestepped the issue but Couric countered: "I noticed that your mom seemed to be in visible pain as you were talking about this, and, led me to wonder if you felt you were exploiting your sister's death for political gain at all?"
While Couric noted Gore's family roots in tobacco she overlooked Gore's exuberant exultation of the Tennessee cash crop in a 1988 campaign speech. "Throughout most of my life, I raised tobacco. I want you to know that with my own hands, all of my life, I put it in the plant beds and transferred it. I've hoed it. I've dug it. I've sprayed it, I've chopped it, I've shredded it, spiked it, put it in the barn and stripped it and sold it."
Couric's questions were missing in NBC's pre-election coverage. The morning after Gore's speech, Bryant Gumbel opened the August 29 Today: "The hall fell silent as the Vice President recalled his sister's death from lung cancer after more than three decades of smoking. It was an emotional attempt to build support for the administration's anti-smoking efforts." Jim Miklaszewski added: "Gore was most effective in his shot at Dole's record on tobacco. Political but poignant, Gore invoked the memory of his sister, a cigarette smoker who had died of lung cancer."
Confirmation Conversion
In 1990, New York Times reporter Tim Weiner, then with the Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote Blank Check, a book about the Pentagon's "black budget." In a chapter titled "Laws and Lies," he condemned a failed attempt by Oliver North to win the freedom of U.S. hostages in Iran: "No one in the Reagan administration told Congress about the DEA caper, the arms sales to Iran or the weapons shipments to the contras. The failures to notify Congress were flagrant violations of law. The law governing congressional notification of covert action -- the 1980 Intelligence Oversight Act -- explicitly covers every agency in the government. To say, as North and [National Security Adviser John] Poindexter did, that the National Security Council or the Drug Enforcement Agency could run covert operations with the CIA's help but without congressional approval, without appropriated funds, was to sever constitutional and legal control of covert action."
But to judge by his February 3 Times profile of Anthony Lake, Clinton's National Security Adviser and troubled nominee to head the CIA, Weiner has undergone a confirmation conversion. The failure to inform Congress, when applied to Clinton's secret foreign policy encouraging the Iranians to arm the Bosnian Muslims, is apparently no longer objectionable. Weiner wrote of Lake's confirmation hearings: "But things could get ugly. [Sen. Richard] Shelby sent out a fax on Thursday night saying that the hearing would be delayed so that the Justice Department could fully investigate accusations by House Republicans that Mr. Lake was `lying' about the Administration's tacit approval of Iranian arms shipments to Bosnia's Muslims. Mr. Lake did not notify Congress about the decision. He arguably did not have to, but now concedes he should have." Weiner seemed more bothered by Senate Republican attempts to find the truth. That's quite a conversion.
GOP Apocalypse Now
As the new year began overly descriptive doomsayers at the Los Angeles Times predicted Republican reforms would bring devastation to the environment and welfare recipients. In a January 1 front page story on California's welfare reform, reporters Carla Rivera and Hector Tobar fashioned this scary scene: "Like an ominous storm blown in from the East the reality of welfare reform has descended with relentless and unsparing force on thousands of families like that of Parris who begin the new year today with less cash to live on and the prospect of a welter of new rules aimed at restricting their access to government aid." Rivera and Tobar offered this analysis: "Many who are against the cuts argue that the welfare overhaul does little to address the fundamental causes of poverty, but is instead based on long-standing myths and prejudices."
The hyperbolic imagery continued the very next day. James Gerstenzang opened a story on congressional Republicans and environmental issues this way: "When environmentalists looked west across the continent from Capitol Hill two years ago, they saw chain saws on the march. They were haunted by the specter of species of feathered, finned and furry creatures left to fall inexorably toward extinction by an assault on the Endangered Species Act. There too in the distance were dumps left untended. Such were their fears at the start of what became known as the Republican revolution." After quoting Greg Wetstone of the liberal Natural Resources Defense Council stating the current Congress is "more friendly" to the environment, Gerstenzang warned: "But those who would protect the forests -- and the skies, streams and rivers, for that matter -- are not out of the woods yet."
Rodriguez Reborn
The networks ignored The Washington Times when its June 26, 1996 front page declared: "Secret System Computerizes Personal Data. "Insight magazine Editor Paul Rodriguez detailed how the White House Office Data Base (WHODB) tracked personal information on those who visited the Clintons, including DNC donation records. Only CNN's Inside Politics carried a story at the time. Seven months later, when Time magazine and the Los Angeles Times "discovered" the Insight story, the database finally gained network attention. The January 30 Los Angeles Times story reported that a government-owned database could not be used for unofficial purposes, but the White House did as "staff frequently retrieved data on large political contributors and turned it over to the Democratic National Committee to help raise money for the President's re-election."
ABC aired nothing that night, but NBC Nightly News devoted its "Fleecing of America" segment to the database. Reporter Lisa Myers tied the database to the First Lady: "The White House tried to keep the database secret. An early memo to Hillary Clinton, who pushed the project hard, noted that precautions should be taken or the database would be open to public scrutiny and inquiry."
On the CBS Evening News that night, Dan Rather stated: "Republicans have again attacked the White House for using a database containing 350,000 names. The Republicans say that this was a blatant fundraising operation and that taxpayers were stuck with a $1.7 million tab to create it. Correspondent Rita Braver reports why that could be a problem for President Clinton." It might have been more of a problem if it had been reported before the election.
Watts, We Worry
The selection of black conservative Rep. J.C. Watts (R-Okla.) to respond to Clinton's fifth State of the Union address on February 4 would not go unpunished by CBS. On that night's CBS Evening News, reporter Rita Braver noted that Clinton would "recycle a line from his Inaugural, asking Americans to join him in becoming repairers of the breach." Dan Rather then used the metaphor as a handy tool to whack Watts: "One breach that apparently needs repairing already involves the man chosen by Republicans to give their official response to the President's address." Reporter Bob Schieffer explained: "A real sour note was struck in the Republican effort to reach out to black voters today Watts has stirred up a furor when he was quoted in The Washington Post today speaking of his contempt for `race-hustling poverty pimps' like Jesse Jackson and Marion Barry, whose careers depend on keeping black people dependent on government.'"
Watts later denied referring specifically to Jackson and Barry, but the story didn't include that denial. Watts made the evening news, but Jesse Jackson's own outbursts in December 1994 didn't spark a story at CBS. During an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, Jackson slurred the Christian Coalition, claiming it "was a strong force in Germany. It laid down a suitable, scientific, theological rationale for the tragedy in Germany. The Christian Coalition was very much in evidence there." Weeks later, Jackson was at it again in Britain, in remarks broadcast Christmas Day, 1994: "In South Africa the status quo was called racism. We rebelled against it. In Germany it was called fascism. Now in Britain and the U.S., it is called conservatism."
Then there's Rep. Bill Clay (D-Mo.), who wrote a letter on November 20, 1996 to fellow Congressional Black Caucus members in which he referred to a black Republican, outgoing Connecticut Rep. Gary Franks, as a "foot-shuffling, head-scratching `Amos and Andy' brand of `Uncle Tom.'" Clay also said of black conservatives: "The goal of this group of Negro wanderers is to maim and kill other blacks for the gratification and entertainment of...ultraconservative white racists." CBS didn't report that, either.
CBS Discovers Bias -- On Fox
When one of their own network reporters, Bernard Goldberg, accused CBS reporter Eric Engberg of liberal bias in his campaign coverage, he was disdained and ostracized. CBS News President Andrew Heyward declared: "To accuse Eric of liberal bias is absurd." But CBS, unable to locate any bias in its decades of reporting, found what it called conservative bias on the four-month-old Fox News Channel.
On the January 19 60 Minutes, Mike Wallace reported on the long running Ted Turner-Rupert Murdoch feud. The feud stems from Turner's attempts to keep the fledgling Fox News Channel, a CNN competitor, off New York City cable systems. Wallace insisted that "On Murdoch's new cable channel the news also comes with a conservative spin...Ted Turner disdains all this. He believes Murdoch's political bias contaminates his news coverage." Turner insisted: "He looks down his nose at do-good, honest journalism. He thinks that his media should be used by him to further his own goals."
Wallace left out Turner's propaganda. In 1988, Turner produced Portrait of the Soviet Union, with narrator Roy Scheider making bizarre claims such as "Once the Kremlin was the home of Czars. Now it belongs to the people." The Financial Times later reported that Soviet TV aired the series with a disclaimer saying the film gave an "excessively glamorous portrait." In 1991, Turner's TBS aired Portrait of Castro's Cuba, calling the country "defiant, spirited, free." Turner's approach to environmental reporting was summarized by CNN and TBS producer Barbara Pyle: "I feel that I'm here on this planet to work in television, to be the little subversive person in television. I've chosen television as my form of activism. I felt that if I was to infiltrate anything, I'd do best to infiltrate television."
