MediaWatch: January 1990
Table of Contents:
NewsBites: Race Ruckus
RACE RUCKUS. The invasion of Panama proved "the only people the United States are going to be prepared to use its military against are non-white: peoples of the Third World," charged former ABC News reporter Kenneth Walker on the December 24 McLaughlin Group. The number two man at the White House during Reagan's years also saw racism in Bush's actions toward China and Romania: "The only way you can explain the difference in the reaction is race. This man places more importance on white lives than non-white lives."
Walker didn't hesitate to suggest Reagan's policies were responsible for the recent wave of mail bombings in the South. "When President Reagan opens his campaign for President in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the birth place of the Ku Klux Klan where Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney were killed, it seems to me that, along with his refusal to meet any recognized black leadership throughout his eight years in the White House, sent a signal out there that everything is up for grabs."
BRIT SAW BIAS. One reporter is willing to openly admit that the political views held by his colleagues affect news coverage. ABC White House correspondent Brit Hume, in an interview with the University of Virginia's student newspaper, The Virginia Advocate, cautiously conceded that "the impact of bias may be that you have a different perception of where the middle of the road is." Hume explained that "You often see Jesse Helms referred to as an ultra-conservative, but you rarely see anyone referred to as an ultra-liberal. I think that reflects the perception of where the middle of the road is; a perception that may be to the left of what it actually is. It leads to someone like Senator Edward Kennedy seeming like a middling-liberal when in the eyes of some he may be an ultra-liberal." Precisely. Hume's colleagues would do well to take note.
CRIMINAL LAMENT. CBS News dedicated a December 11 Evening News story to a new crime problem: America's rising incarceration rate. Reporter Bob McNamara characterized convicts as "prisoners taken in America's war on crime" who live in "the image of a human warehouse." McNamara reported a "peculiar consensus that get-tough is too tough and no answer to crime."
His sources? Prisoners and prison guards. McNamara claimed that guards "say the system is too harsh," and one inmate told McNamara prison provided "nothing to create the motivation and self-esteem to keep you out of trouble." Ignoring the responsibility of individuals for their actions, McNamara whined: "On the outside, theirs were lives of little opportunity and despair, where drugs and theft offered a way out... And inside or outside [prison], they still see public and political concern as cold as the concrete that keeps them."
GIL'S WILL. Gil Spencer, Editor of the New York Daily News since 1984, resigned last fall after Publisher James Hoge refused to endorse Democrat David Dinkins for Mayor. Editor & Publisher reported Spencer had a similar dispute just after he left the Philadelphia Daily News to sign on with the New York tabloid. Spencer wanted to endorse Walter Mondale, but the Daily News backed Reagan. After a few months off, Spencer's back at work. He's now Editor-in-Chief of the Denver Post.
KINZER KICKS CONTRAS. New York Times Central America correspondent Stephen Kinzer, currently on leave, recently told The Cape Cod Times the U.S. must shoulder a "great moral burden" for supporting the Contras. "The people [the Contras] who are posited as the alternatives to the Sandinistas...represent a narrow segment which was the most retrograde element of the old Somoza regime."
Kinzer, who served as an aide in Michael Dukakis' 1974 gubernatorial race, complained White House reporters are "not encouraged to insert observations," in their stories. Kinzer offered an example of the kind of "observation" he'd suggest: "President Reagan today denounced the Sandinistas for having converted Nicaragua into a 'totalitarian dungeon' -- another one of his wild exaggerations that ignores the abuses of Guatemalan colonels, Salvadoran death squad leaders and Argentine torturers, with whom he is so friendly."
Our thanks to the left-wing watchdog group, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), for exposing Kinzer in its most recent newsletter. To FAIR, Kinzer's candor has somewhat redeemed his credibility as a fair and accurate reporter.
GANG GREEN. Leading scientists continue to question global warming hysteria, but ABC and Time nonetheless plow ahead with their demands to raise taxes to solve the dubious crisis. During the December 27 World News Tonight, reporter Ned Potter wasn't shy about pushing some "expert" environmentalist recommendations: "They say imposing a seven cent gas tax would coax a lot of drivers off the road," Potter declared, "That would reduce carbon emissions and the eight billion dollars raised could make mass transit work a lot better." To stop the use of coal, "the government may have to jack up the price from $50 a ton to $500."
In Time's December 18 issue, Eugene Linden demanded that "first, the federal gasoline tax should be increased substantially -- to at least 60 cents per gallon." But to Time, the issue isn't just money, it's capitalism itself, insisting that "the laissez-faire, free-market rules that allowed the industrial world to prosper must now be suspended."
Cooler heads ruled at U.S. News & World Report. As Betsy Carpenter explained in the December 25 issue, "there is good reason to believe that today's bogyman, global warming, may go the way of nuclear winter: Under scientific scrutiny, it may look much less menacing." Carpenter concluded that "if we want science to inform public policy, we will have to wait for the science."
NEWSWEEK'S FAMILY PLANS. Newsweek's special Fall/Winter issue on "The 21st Century Family" gave space to author Jonathan Kozol for a scathing denunciation of the Reagan era. He lauded all big- government federal programs, then criticized attempts to cut spending: "Rather than expand these programs, President Reagan kept them frozen or else cut them to the bone...federal housing funds were also slashed during these years."
After these cutbacks, Kozol claimed that "far from demonstrating more compassion, administration leaders have resorted to a stylized severity in speaking of poor children" when then- Education Secretary Bill Bennett called for "higher standards" in schools. He even criticized New Jersey high school principle Joe Clark, a tough disciplinarian, as a "pedagogic hero of the Reagan White House...(who) managed to raise reading scores by throwing out his low-achieving pupils." Kozol's recommendation: massive protests by poor people and shocked middle-class students causing "another decade of societal disruption."
Kozol was not alone in left-wing advocacy. A piece by Dr. Benjamin Spock, "America's most trusted family doctor," demanded: "The first thing government should be pressured into doing is taking the billions of dollars being squandered on nuclear and conventional arms and spending them on fulfilling the needs of families. The federal government should subsidize mothers or fathers (particularly single ones) who would prefer to stay home for the first three to five years of their child's lives."
NETWORKS PREFER PRO-CHOICE. Last January, we reported the results of our study on abortion labeling. Network reporters used the preferred "pro-choice" for abortion advocates, but "anti- abortion" for abortion foes instead of the preferred "pro-life." A recent study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA) confirmed MediaWatch's findings.
Between last January 1 and August 31, ABC, CBS, and NBC "television reporters preferred 'pro-choice' over 'abortion rights' labels by a nearly three to one margin. But they rarely used 'pro-life' or 'right to life' to describe the other side -- only six percent of all labels, compared to 94 percent usage of 'anti-abortion'" CMPA reported. The same study found female reporters in both print and TV displayed a strong "pro-choice" bias. "In stories reported by females," CMPA found, "pro-choice outnumbered pro-life views by a two to one margin." The gender gap was greater for women reporting for print outlets, such as The New York Times and Washington Post. "Pro-choice views predominated nearly three to one in articles authored by women, but only 55 percent to 45 percent in those written by men," the study said.
ECONOMY SOARS, COVERAGE DIVES. "As the economy progressively improved," from 1982 to 1987, "the amount of economic coverage on national network television news progressively declined" and "grew more negative in tone," Professor Ted J. Smith III determined in a recent study for the Media Institute titled The Vanishing Economy. The Assistant Professor for Mass Communications at Virginia Commonwealth University reviewed 13,915 ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News stories on the economy aired during three one year periods: July 1 to June 30, 1982-83, 1984-85 and 1986-87.
The ratio of negative to positive stories grew as economic indicators improved, from 4.9 to 1 in 1982-83 to 7.0 to 1 in 1986-87. When an economic indicator grew better, the networks began covering it less so they could focus more on unhealthy economic signs. For instance, as the unemployment rate fell from 10.6 percent to well under 6 percent by 1987, the number of stories on employment plunged by 79 percent while reports on the growing trade deficit soared 65 percent and on the homeless jumped by 167 percent.
Finding a political spin, Smith noted that "unlike economic problems, which were often attributed directly to Reagan Administration policies, economic gains" were seldom credited to Reagan. Instead, "they just happened."
MORTIFIED BY AMERICA. Paris-based Associated Press senior foreign correspondent Mort Rosenblum may have titled his new book describing his travels around the U.S., Back Home, but his views are similar to those of leftist Europeans for whom America is nothing more than Coca-Cola and the KKK. Never at a loss for something to whine about, he started by griping about Liberty Weekend ("The people up there with the Reagans on Governors Island were not descendants of Miles Standish or crippled Medal of Honor veterans...they were the ones who could pay") and ended fighting the cab driver ("a dangerously unbalanced moron") taking him to Dulles Airport.
Concerning Central America, Rosenblum ranted: "For years U.S. officials knew that our Central American policy relied heavily upon senior officers in Panama and Honduras who smuggled cocaine by the ton into the United States....CIA hirelings and the druglords washed each others money." He mused, "Suppose our Contras won. Would that be progress, installing a bickering junta of former Somocistas?" Anyone familiar with the leftist Christic Institute will recognize the rhetoric. After all, Rosenblum declared, "The Christic Institute, an artisanal shop of lawyers and investors...assembled a convincing dossier [on the Contras]."
Rosenblum expressed an even more alarming view of the Soviet Union, considering the fact he once worked as Editor-in-Chief of the International Herald Tribune, a paper jointly produced by The New York Times and Washington Post. "We cannot always stand up to comparison with the Soviet Union," he wrote, "Its system is plagued by long lines...But there are food and housing at the end of the lines. Health care, inferior to ours, is at least accessible to all. In America a man can earn twenty-five million dollars just for getting fired. But we fought hard not to force companies to give workers two months' notice before eliminating their jobs."
