MediaWatch: January 1993

NewsBites: Holiday Homeless Hype

Holiday Homeless Hype. The holiday season generated another round of exaggerated TV reports on homelessness. On the December 26 CBS Evening News, reporter John Roberts found "more than three million homeless in America, and millions more living in poverty." ABC's Walter Rodgers began a story the next night, "By all estimates there are now more homeless in America, three million by some counts, all across the country."

The three million figure remains the unsupported personal estimate of the late homeless activist Mitch Snyder. The networks continue to ignore the 1990 Census partial count, which found only 150,000 in shelters and 70,000 on the streets.

Panetta Pandering. The media have almost universally proclaimed Clinton Budget Director designate Leon Panetta as a "deficit hawk." On December 11, USA Today's Richard Wolf cooed: "His ability to prescribe such politically perilous medicine with a reassuring smile makes him the Marcus Welby of deficit reduction." On December 10, ABC's Sheilah Kast declared: "As chairman of the House Budget Committee, Leon Panetta has been passionate about the need to cut the deficit." CNN's Wolf Blitzer proclaimed the same day: "The President-elect also named California Congressman Leon Panetta, a hard-liner on the need to cut the deficit, to become Budget Director."

Unfortunately, Panetta's fiscal record falls short of the hype. He vocally opposed the Balanced Budget amendment, in addition to crafting the infamous 1990 budget deal, which raised taxes and doubled the deficit. Two years later he voted to abolish the budget "firewalls" established by the 1990 agreement, allowing defense spending to be shifted back to more domestic programs. In 1991, the National Taxpayers Union gave Panetta a pitiful 21 percent score, officially rating him a "Big Spender."

Cold War Casualty? American forces landed in Somalia to alleviate misery there, but some in the media still managed to blame America for the starvation. CNN anchor Patrick Greenlaw demonstrated this on the December 4 World News: "The situation in the African country is an example of the lingering fallout of the Cold War."

For Bob Simon in a December 8 CBS This Morning piece, it was all America's fault: "Successive American administrations turned a deaf ear to human rights abuses, Somalia's position on the Horn of Africa was simply too important. America was Somalia's most important ally in the 1980s. Washington supplied the dictator [Siad Barre] with guns and butter, and got strategic bases in return. But then the Cold War ended, Washington didn't need Somalia anymore, and cut off aid. That's when it all began to unravel."

On Nightline December 8, reporter John Hockenberry, who just joined ABC from National Public Radio, saw U.S. fingerprints on the devastation. "The government of Siad Barre ran on a potent mixture of repression and advanced armaments, tucked away in a Cold War side show called the Horn of Africa. Somalia's leader had no trouble siphoning military aid from the main event, the confrontation between Moscow and Washington...The Soviet-built naval base on the Red Sea was abandoned by the Americans and never once used." Hockenberry called the base "The world's most strategic garbage dump," and mused, "Maybe this is the best monument to the Cold War."

Reaganomics Verdict. Though President Bush abandoned Reagan's economic policies, the Los Angeles Times continues to blame supply-side policies for Bush's defeat. In a "news analysis" five days after the election, business reporter James Risen declared: "Ultimately, Reaganomics was a failure. It produced big political dividends for the Republicans, and it may have contributed to rapid economic growth during the 1980s. But it was, at its core, a governing philosophy based on a deeply flawed economic notion: that tax cuts, especially large tax cts for the rich, would not worsen the government's budget deficit. Ironically, it was the illogic of that theory that helped bring down President George Bush -- even though it seems clear that Bush never fully believed in the theory himself."

Later Risen insisted: "Tax cuts did not generate higher government revenue, and so did not help balance the federal budget....In the end, what will be remembered most about Reaganomics is the debt that it brought America -- towering mountains of it."

Exactly one month later, New York Times reporter David Rosenbaum countered this typical media portrayal of Reaganomics. Deep in a December 8 story on 1980's tax policies, Rosenbaum wrote: "One popular misconception is that the Republican tax cuts caused the crippling federal deficit, now approaching $300 billion a year. The fact is, the large deficit resulted because the government vastly increased what it spent each year, while tax revenues changed little."

Holes in Cole's Story. Almost the entire media ignored the furor over Johnnetta Cole, the Spelman College President who heads Clinton's transition cluster for education, arts, labor, and the humanities. Human Events reported that Cole had worked for the pro-Castro Venceremos Brigade and the pro-communist U.S.-Grenada Friendship Society in the early 1980s. Among the networks, only CNN touched the story. On the December 17 Inside Politics, anchor Frank Sesno asserted that Human Events "accused her of being a left-wing extremist with Marxist sympathies. While Cole has denounced the allegations as `vile,' it appears the publicity has severely undercut her chances of being nominated to any high- level administration post." Sesno gave viewers the incorrect impression that the facts about Cole -- her membership in pro-communist groups -- were in doubt.

That's not the only story about Cole the media didn't report. In May 1991, a white male English professor at Spelman, Joe Reese filed a $1 million discrimination suit when he was denied tenure by Cole. Reese and Spelman settled out of court late last year for an undisclosed sum. The Clinton team's record on "diversity" is more interesting than reporters would like to admit.

The Good Old Soviet Days. "Workers and managers alike say they long for the simpler days when there was a system to count on and things were affordable." Is this quote from a speech by an anti-Yeltsin, hard-line Marxist on the floor of the Congress of People's Deputies? No, it's CNN Moscow correspondent Claire Shipman on the September 10 World News. On December 3, Shipman reported on people in Moscow who were scrounging through a garbage dump for food. As the camera panned from people picking through the garbage to a shed with a picture of Lenin hanging on it, Shipman announced: "Communist ghosts still linger around the waste yard, this one [Lenin] surveying this post-communist scene with what seems to be an `I told you so' gaze." Shipman struck earlier on CNN's November 11 World News. As viewers saw a child holding up a picture of Stalin, Shipman asserted: "As the future looks more frightening for these Russians, the past is bound to look better all the time."

"Some people are now unhappy at the new price of freedom," anchor Susan Rook sighed on World News last September. Maybe she was referring to western journalists reporting from Moscow.

Hungry for News. With Somalia's famine dominating the news, CBS and CNN sought to dramatize hunger in America, using wild and unsupportable statistics. On December 18, CNN's Anne McDermott declared "Yes, even in the U.S., children die from what might best be called the complications of poverty -- the violence, disease, and ignorance that poverty breeds. And, in the U.S., one out of every five children is poor." Her source? The liberal Children's Defense Fund, famous for advocacy of greater social spending and for inaccurate statements, such as claiming two million children go homeless. McDermott did not provide any proof or balancing view, as evidenced by her breathless conclusion: "Children's advocates say they don't really care where the money comes from, all they know is it's absolutely necessary for these children."

CBS News took exaggeration of hunger to new heights, as Cinny Kennard cited unprovable and highly improbable figures on the December 4 Evening News: "Perhaps there is so much anguish, because there is so much hurting at home. The fact is there are about 30 million people who are hungry and undernourished in America."

CBS colleague Scott Pelley, on the December 17 Evening News, added that "you don't often hear about hungry children in the U.S. starving to death, that's because disease kills them first." Pelley maintained that "the hungry grow by one million per year." However, the Centers for Disease Control told MediaWatch there are no official statistics measuring poverty - or malnutrition- caused infant death, because it's so rare, and none on overall hunger, leaving a factual vacuum for the networks to fill.

No Abrams Admirer. The Washington Post's Walter Pincus, who "objectively" covered President Bush's recent pardons of Caspar Weinberger and five other Iran-Contra defendants, believes at least one pardon recipient was undeserving. Pincus wrote a review of Elliott Abrams' new book Undue Process in the December issue of The Washington Monthly. The review revealed a very vindictive Pincus: "This is a very personal memoir, sometimes embarrassingly so. It is riveting because it portrays a man so different from the Elliott Abrams we have come to know through the media. If you disliked him and the harm the Contra policies he espoused caused others (tens of thousands dead in Nicaragua and El Salvador), you'll not be saddened to hear of his mental suffering" from prosecutors.

Pincus attacked the Reagan Administration's support of the Contras, writing, "Nowhere in this book does one get the sense that Abrams ever had second thoughts about the legitimacy of his policies and the terrible loss of life and destruction they brought to the people of Nicaragua. After all, these were men, women and children even more innocent than he." Pincus then took a final whack: "Abrams represents a new breed. He's someone with so little respect for democratic institutions that when he violates them he doesn't realize it...if [Abrams] is a model of the new generation of conservative Republican public servant, we are in for trouble when they occupy the White House again."

Coverage Limits. On the November 4 CBS Evening News, Bob Schieffer briefly mentioned term limit measures, successful on all state ballots where they appeared, noting "Fourteen states passed laws which will limit in some way the number of years their Senators and Congressmembers can serve." If implemented, the measures would limit the terms of Speaker of the House Thomas Foley, House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt, and Senate Banking Chairman Donald Riegle, but the networks ignored the issue. Between September 1 and December 30, the four networks did no full-length stories on term limits.

In contrast, ballot measures in Oregon and Colorado seeking to prevent homosexuals from becoming a specially protected minority group were the focus of six in-depth stories in the same time period. In September, NBC's Scott Simon likened language in the Oregon measure to the days of Nazi Germany, "language which some leaders of Oregon's Jewish community recognize and revile." In light of the disparity in coverage, perhaps the test of newsworthiness is what the networks do not show.

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