MediaWatch: January 1995
Table of Contents:
- MediaWatch: January 1995
- Revolving Door Spins More for Clinton Administration that Bush's
- NewsBites: Scrooged
- Magazine's Unrelenting Attacks
- CBS Star Far Nicer to Bill Clinton's Mother in 1993 Interview
- Double, Triple the Spending
- Martin's Unmatched
- Abramson-Mayer Book Eviscerated--"Impeccable research"?
- Janet Cooke Award: The "Nonpartisan" Take on Reaganomics
Magazine's Unrelenting Attacks
Newt World Order
Reporters often complain about personal attacks in politics, especially when the target is a favorite -- like Bill Clinton. But that sentiment hasn't stopped them from maligning Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Newsweek Senior Editor Joe Klein posited in the December 19 issue that Gingrich "doesn't seem entirely...solid, does he? It isn't just that he has smoked dope, protested, and messed around -- and now seems desperate to `exorcise' that past, as a friend says, by demagoguing on lifestyle issues (like his outrageous assertions about White House staff drug use, later regretted if not retracted). There is a blabby, effervescent, messianic quality to his public persona."
In the January 9 Newsweek, the "Conventional Wisdom Watch" referred to Speaker Gingrich's (returned) book advance: "$4.5 mil -- that was a buck for every kid you chuck off welfare. You're right: looks lousy." Jack E. White declared in the January 16 Time: "Let's face it: to most African Americans Newt Gingrich is one scary white man." In an article titled "Deal with the Devil," White relayed that "[Democratic] Congressman Major Owens predicts that Gingrich's war on the welfare state will actually cause black children to starve." With the Speaker's reference to inner-city schools in his speech to Congress, White granted: "That could mean Gingrich is serious about shedding his party's whites-only image. If so, blacks ought to meet him halfway -- if only to temper the wilder impulses of one very scary white man."
Leading into a discourse on Gingrich's divorce and the death of his father in the January 9 Newsweek, reporter Howard Fineman claimed: "Gingrich's opportunism...can be devastating in private life. Gingrich has a deep feel for human history, but not always for human beings." Isn't that the sort of personal attack the media love to complain about?
Contract on Newt
The criticism spread from Gingrich's persona to an intensified attack on his proposals to reduce the size of government. Under the headline "A Poverty of Compassion" in the January 16 issue, Time Chief Political Correspondent Michael Kramer alleged: "Republicans approved a bill requiring a three-fifths vote to raise income taxes. A great idea -- if you're rich. The change applies only to the most progressive form of taxation, the one that forces the well-off to pay more than others." He thundered: "Upward income redistribution -- leaving the less fortunate less protected -- is part of what Newt's revolution is all about."
Ignoring constant increases in entitlement programs, he equated "cuts" in future spending with program elimination: "Medicaid...is responsible for ending malnutrition-related diseases, which were rampant before LBJ's war began. Is this a program we really want to cut?" Kramer warned of class warfare: "Millions of Americans are only one disaster away from poverty. A divorce, an arrest, a disabling illness can destroy a working family's financial resources....`Poverty,' warned that ancient futurist Aristotle, `is the parent of crime and revolution' -- a wise warning about an upheaval far different from the one Gingrich has in mind." Newsweek's Jonathan Alter wondered in the January 9 issue if "the gain to individuals ($20 a week in many cases) and negligible economic benefits for the nation are worth saddling the next generation with more debt." In the same issue, Washington Bureau Chief Evan Thomas whined: "Republicans are only willing to cut back programs that are unpopular or unknown or mostly benefit the poor or the well-off elites."
Blaming the voters has also been a theme. Newsweek's Thomas referred to voters "who depend on government benefits while whining about too much government," and insisted: "Some voters may be fooled by supply-side rhetoric, but Wall Street isn't." Karen Tumulty reported in the January 9 Time that Gingrich "is becoming a chubby repository of the tangled and contradictory hopes held by middle-income Americans, who want their federal government to stop meddling in their life, and at the same time, to improve it."
