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
CBS Star Far Nicer to Bill Clinton's Mother in 1993 Interview
Connie Cons Newt's Mom
Hoping to boost the ratings for an upcoming Eye to Eye with Connie Chung, CBS News managed to mar Newt Gingrich's first day as Speaker on January 4. The day before, CBS released the text of an exchange taped 14 days earlier between Connie Chung and Newt's mother. Chung coaxed Kathleen Gingrich into telling what Newt thought of Hillary Clinton. Posing the now infamous "Why don't you just whisper it to me, just between you and me," Mrs. Gingrich whispered "She's a bitch."
CBS was engulfed in criticism for using a statement which many thought Chung made clear was "off the record." CBS News President Eric Ober bizarrely complained to The Washington Post: "It's a legitimate, very good interview that has unfortunately been reduced to one five-letter summary." Chung introduced the actual piece on the January 5 Eye to Eye by saying, "You may have heard one small portion of this interview. Now you will see it in context." It seems both forgot it was CBS which promoted the excerpt and showed it on CBS This Morning, CBS Evening News and Up to the Minute.
Even in context, Chung's interview was very different than one she did with Bill Clinton's mom in 1993. She questioned the motives for the Gingrich family interview: "Newt knows you're talking to us, right?... Some people out there would say he just wants the two of you to talk to us, and talk to the American people, because he wants everybody to know that he's just a homespun kind of guy." Chung dished some dirt: "According to a friend at the time, Newt said he was divorcing [then-wife] Jackie because she wasn't young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of a President and besides she has cancer." She also ran down a list for the Gingriches: "These are some of the things said about your son -- a very dangerous man...visionary... bomb-throwing guerrilla warrior...abrasive."
A very different Chung interviewed President Clinton's brother Roger and mother Virginia Kelley for the debut of Eye to Eye on June 17, 1993. She elicited stories from them showing the President in a positive light: how Bill Clinton protected them from his abusive stepfather, how he served as a father figure to his brother.
She never asked about any negative traits of Bill Clinton's. In a previously unaired portion of the interview on January 6, 1994, after Kelley's death, Chung asked: "It seems that both of your boys have this desire to be famous, and to be loved, and to be stars." She never read a list of adjectives, three-fourths negative, to Kelley about Clinton. The closest she came was "You always see the good and not the bad anyway, don't you?"
