MediaWatch: January 1992
Table of Contents:
ABC's Liberal of the Week
Most Friday evenings ABC's World News Tonight awards "Person of the Week" honors to the individual who, in the network's eyes, has "made a difference" in the world that week. Often ABC chooses an entertainer, sports figure, or youngster who has caught the public's attention. But when the award goes to a politician or a political activist, the producers at ABC reveal their liberal stripes.
MediaWatch analysts reviewed the Person of the Week segments from January 1988 through December 1991. In those four years, out of 181 segments, sixteen American political officials were chosen. Eleven of those could be classified liberal or Democratic, while only five could be labeled as conservative or Republican. When ABC selected political activists, the disparity was even more pronounced. During the same four-year period, 16 liberal political activists were selected Person of the Week. Not a single conservative activist made the cut.
Among the liberal and Democratic officials: Jimmy Carter, Senator Jay Rockefeller, former Senator William Proxmire, Democratic Party Chairman Ron Brown, former U.S. Rep. Morris Udall, former New York Mayor Ed Koch, Senator Sam Nunn, California Education Superintendent Bill Honig, Washington D.C. Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly, Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder and former Colorado Governor Roy Romer. The conservative and Republican office holders chosen were Defense Secretary Richard Cheney, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell, President Bush (twice) and former Education Secretary William Bennett.
ABC took an unusual approach with Bennett, airing three anti-Bennett soundbites and only one pro-Bennett soundbite. This was a sharp contrast to their normal method of lavishing the Person of the Week with only flattering talking heads. For example, the segment on Senator Rockefeller had no opposing talking heads and even implied that conservatives liked him.
In celebrating left-wing activists, ABC didn't even mention the radical agendas of some of its honorees. On October 18, 191, right after the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, ABC chose the feminist law professor Catherine McKinnon. Anchor Peter Jennings insisted she "deserves her reputation as the country's most prominent legal theorist on behalf of women, whose dedication to laws, which serve men and women equally, has made it better, though not yet perfect for women in the work place." But Jennings failed to inform viewers that McKinnon once said, "compare victims' reports of rape with women's reports of sex. They look a lot alike....Feminism stresses the indistinguishability of prostitution, marriage, and sexual harassment."
ABC went green on April 20, 1990, choosing Earth Day organizer Denis Hayes. Jennings fawned: "[Hayes is] the true believer whose reverence for life has always been a calling, never a fashion, who millions of Americans owe a vote of thanks." Again, Jennings didn't mention Hayes' radical agenda. In Hayes' own words about Earth Day 1970: "I suspect that the politicians who are jumping on the environmental band wagon don't have the slightest idea what they're getting into. They are talking about emission control devices on automobiles, while we are talking about bans on automobiles."
On July 15, 1988, the eve of the Democratic National Convention, ABC picked 1960s radical Tom Hayden, who was a DNC delegate. Jennings explained, "we choose him to show how far he and much of his generation have traveled, since they stood outside the convention twenty years ago, shaking their fists at society...[he is] not afraid to admit mistakes, but confident that his generation made a difference."
But just how far has Hayden traveled? Hayden wrote a column for the December 30 Los Angeles Times in which he defended Oliver Stone's new movie JFK. Hayden wrote, "Now comes Oliver Stone as an incarnation of the 1960s who cannot be dismissed. Like an Id from our past, he terrorizes the official subconscious with the fear that a new generation will be infected with a radical virus that was supposed to have been eradicated....[American democracy] was a system threatened by invisible elites, illegal conspiracies and faceless killers, some of them officially connected." Are these the words of a changed man?
Children's Defense Fund President Marian Wright Edelman got the nod on March 29, 1991 because she's "always on Congress' back for coming up with too little money...from her point of view, as you hear, it is a matter of the whole country's future. The children are fortunate to have such an advocate." But Jennings didn't tell viewers Edelman's opinions on defense. "We must curb the fanatical military weasel and keep it in balance with competing national needs," she wrote in her 1987 book, Families in Peril.
Jennings also endorsed the views of feminist leader Betty Friedan, announcing: "And so we choose Betty Friedan, because she had the ability and the sensitivity to articulate the needs of women, which means she did us all a favor." Jennings honored education activist Jonathan Kozol on September 6, 1991: "He has once again done a masterful job of making us think more clearly about some of the inequities in American education." About AIDS activist and journalist Randy Shilts, Jennings opined: "Shilts has opened some eyes in America, warning a lot of us about what was coming, helping to make people rethink some of their basic assumptions."
Labor activist Cesar Chavez also caught Jennings' fancy: "The effects of his struggle have been widely felt, from the bargaining table to the kitchen table...Today the issue is pesticides...He says he's fasting as an act of penance for those who, as he put it, collaborate with an industry that cares little about its workers." And when the notorious Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) forced the FBI to suspend its investigation of potential terrorist threats from the leftist Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, Jennings said of CCR President Margaret Ratner, "there's no doubt in our mind that what she and her colleagues accomplished is good for all Americans."
The people at ABC do fine when they stick to dancers, actors and football coaches for their Person of the Week segments. But by repeatedly picking liberal (often radical) political activists and Democratic politicians, while for the most part ignoring conservatives, they betray their political bias.
