MediaWatch: January 1998
Table of Contents:
Newsbites: Gore's Goofs
Gore’s Goofs. When Vice President Dan Quayle made the occasional error, reporters couldn’t wait to assail his intelligence. But when Al Gore made two goofs in December, the networks didn’t find it newsworthy.
In a recent Time article by Karen Tumulty, Gore boasted that he and wife Tipper were the inspiration behind Ryan O’Neal’s and Ali McGraw’s characters in the book and movie Love Story. On the December 15 Today show, NBC’s Stan Bernard cleared the record: "[author Erich] Segal told The New York Times he was befuddled by the Time magazine story. He said only one aspect of the O’Neal role was inspired by Gore. The rich kid with a controlling father. But the ‘tough, macho guy who’s a poet at heart,’ was inspired by [actor Tommy Lee] Jones." While it generated derision on the weekend talk shows, none of the other Big Three network evening or morning news shows mentioned Gore’s false boast.
The December 24 Washington Times noted that while Gore attempted to promote the administration’s homeless policies, he remarked: "And speaking from my own religious tradition in this Christmas season, 2,000 years ago a homeless woman gave birth to a homeless child in a manger because the inn was full." (Joseph and Mary weren’t homeless, just inn-less: they traveled from their home in Nazareth to Bethlehem.) No network reported the blunder. On December 23, ABC’s Good Morning America showed a clip of Gore’s homeless speech without airing the error.
Lying Ira. When government officials are caught in a lie it is always big news, right? Not if you’re in the Clinton administration. On December 18, Judge Royce Lamberth fined the Clinton Administration $286,000 because White House officials lied under oath regarding the large membership of the Clinton health care task force. Network evening and morning show coverage? Zero.
In 1993, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons sued to open secret meetings of Hillary Clinton’s health care working group to the public. According to federal law, advisory panels that include non-government employees must always meet in public. To keep the panels closed, Clinton health care "czar" Ira Magaziner swore in court documents that they were composed of federal employees only.
Lamberth discovered Magaziner must have known he was lying under oath, since the task force included employees of Magaziner’s own private consulting firm. In his opinion, he rebuked the White House, writing "It is clear that the decisions here were made at the highest levels of government and the government itself is — and should be — accountable when its officials run amok." The networks also failed to pick up on House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Rep. Bill Archer‘s (R-Texas) letter demanding that taxpayers not be responsible for the fine. The story got its only network air time ten days after Lamberth’s decision, when Tim Russert asked Clinton aide Rahm Emanuel about it on Meet the Press.
Your Pal Bill. When President Clinton announced his new $22 billion government-funded child care plan on January 7, the media obediently heralded the plan as deliverance for beleaguered parents. On ABC’s World News Tonight Peter Jennings remarked: "From President Clinton, another proposal for Congress to consider when it gets back to work. This one to help more working parents find and pay for child care. The total cost to the government if Congress agrees: $21 billion." Jennings apparently forgot that it is not government but taxpayers — including those working parents with child care needs — who will bear the cost of any government child care program.
CBS and NBC also ignored the taxpayer angle, focusing on Clinton as an advocate for working parents. On the CBS Evening News, Dan Rather reported: "President Clinton today proposed a centerpiece of his policy agenda: federal help for working parents who need safe and affordable child care." On the NBC Nightly News, Tom Brokaw proclaimed: "The dilemma of every working parent is front and center tonight at the White House, President Clinton unveiling a multi-billion dollar plan to provide more and better care for America’s children." CBS reporter Scott Pelley implied the sense of a personal crusade in Clinton’s initiative, saying to Rather: "Dan, the President was raised by a single mother who left him with his grandparents when she went off to school. Today, Mr. Clinton proposed what may be the largest increase in child care funding in the nation’s history." The networks never questioned the necessity of federal child care subsidies or whether federal programs might in the end result in more costs for working parents.
As Darcy Olson, entitlements policy analyst at the Cato Institute discovered, parents are happy. Citing The National Child Care Survey, 1990, Olson wrote, "ninety-six percent of parents are ‘satisfied’ or ‘highly satisfied’ with their child care arrangements — a finding that did not vary with the employment status of the mother, the type of care used, family income, age of the child, or race."
Cool to Differing Opinions. On January 8, government scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) claimed that 1997 was the warmest year on record. The networks all presented the NOAA study as proof that global warming is a reality, while all but CNN ignored evidence that 1997 was actually quite cool.
On World News Tonight Peter Jennings relayed the bad news, "1997 was actually the warmest year since scientists began keeping records...Nine of the warmest years this century have occurred in the last 11 years. And only a little of the warming last year was apparently due to El Nino according to scientists." CBS reporter Eric Engberg declared on the Evening News: "Government weather experts today declared 1997 the warmest the world has experienced in 100 years with temperatures averaging three-fourths of a degree above normal. Part of the cause: pollution."
On NBC Nightly News, reporter Robert Hager insisted that the findings were above politics: "Today the government’s best climatologists, experts with no agenda to influence debate on public warming, had dramatic news. Worldwide, 1997 was the hottest year of this century." PBS’s Jim Lehrer offered the NOAA claims as fact as well: "1997 was the hottest year on record researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said today....The rise was attributed to human activity such as factory and auto emissions, as well as natural causes including warming ocean currents." Although CNN treated the story as proof of global warming, Carl Rochelle’s piece did mention that "some groups say that atmospheric temperatures taken by satellites conflict with NOAA’s data." ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS all ignored that.
In a January 8 press release, the Science and Environmental Policy Project revealed: "Temperature readings taken from U.S. Weather satellites, the most reliable and only global temperature data available, put 1997 among the coolest years since satellite-based measurements began in 1979. With December readings finally in, the year ranked 7 out of 19, with 1 being the coldest."
Center for Budget Bias. In the mainstream media’s continuing effort to promote class warfare, ABC and CNN reported on a liberal Center for Budget and Policy Priorities study which argued that the gap between rich and poor is growing. Both networks ignored conflicting evidence on the wage gap.
On the December 17 World News Tonight Peter Jennings touted "a new study out which highlights the winners and the losers in the current economy. The report, from the Center for Budget Policy and Priorities (sic) makes absolutely clear what people can already feel. The top 20 percent of the country’s wage earners are managing to take full advantage of a booming service economy and they’ve done very well in the stock market, the rich are getting richer. And the bottom 20 percent, on the other hand, in a declining manufacturing sector have seen their salaries stay the same or go down." CNN’s Joie Chen at least alluded to the politics of the CBPP in her story: "A liberal-leaning research group says that over the last 20 years, the gap between the rich and the poor in this country has gotten wider."
Some perspective on "wage stagnation" would have been nice. Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute argued: "Many of the households that show up as ‘poor’ in the Census Bureau statistics are senior citizens who are income ‘poor’ but asset rich...wages, when properly measured, are not falling. They are higher than ever before. The National Center for Policy Analysis has provided invaluable information showing that because of the increasing value of fringe benefits — such as health care coverage, pensions and more leave and vacation time — median hourly worker compensation has doubled since the mid-1950s and is up by 20 percent since 1980."
Top Secret Smaltz. A federal investigator who wins convictions, indictments and millions of dollars in fines on behalf of the people of the United States deserves attention, right? Not if he’s dealing with a former member of the Clinton administration. Independent Counsel Donald Smaltz’s most recent accomplishments have gone unnoticed. On November 26, Smaltz announced he’d won the conviction of Richard Douglas, the Vice President of Sun Diamond Growers, for giving $7,600 in illegal gifts to Espy. On December 2, Smaltz won a conviction of Ronald Blackley, Espy’s top aide at the Agriculture Department, for lying to investigators about receiving $22,000 from companies with business before his department. Neither received any network coverage.
On December 29, Tyson Foods agreed to pay a $6 million fine for its illegal gifts to Espy. CBS Evening News and CNN’s Prime News gave it a brief mention as did ABC’s Good Morning America, but there was nothing on NBC or on ABC’s World News Tonight. The networks were AWOL on yet another conviction in January when two top-level employees of Tyson Foods, Inc. were charged with giving illegal gifts to Espy. AP’s Curt Anderson explained: "The charges against Archibald L. Schaffer III, the Tyson executive, and lobbyist Jack L. Williams involve the same $12,000 in gratuities that Tyson pleaded guilty in December to giving Espy: playoff football tickets, tickets to a Presidential inaugural dinner, travel to an Arkansas party and a scholarship for Espy’s girlfriend." Why is this not shocking? In the two years and 11months between his indictment on 39 counts of accepting illegal gifts, the networks aired two full stories on the Smaltz probe.
Revolutionary Retirees. CNN Impact host Stephen Frazier began a December 28 tribute: "During this year-end holiday, on a weekend when so many families gather to celebrate, we thought it timely to hear next from some people we can thank for the idea of the weekend — people who devoted their lives to improving the lot of workers."
Frazier explained: "They are radicals whose lifelong activism was no holiday, whose work for labor reform and social reform left them blacklisted, red-baited and shunned by neighbors." Frazier visited the Sunset Hall retirement home in Los Angeles, profiling a group of residents who "formed their own community, a refuge where the glory days of the American political left can live on." One resident claimed socialism was more "broad-minded," while another proclaimed "capitalism stinks!"
CNN panned the retirement home’s library: "A portrait of Vladimir Lenin graces the top shelf of the library, where the 36 residents of this Los Angeles retirement home meet. An unlikely hero, perhaps, for most Americans, but these are the foot soldiers of the American political left, radicalized, they say, by the events of their youth." CNN said nothing about the many victims of Leninist regimes who never made it to the retirement home.
