MediaWatch: July 1992

NewsBites: The Wrong Rights

THE WRONG RIGHTS. The networks believe some "rights" are more important than others. On the same day the abortion decision was announced, the court ruled in favor of individual rights in Lucas vs. South Carolina Coastal Council. David Lucas spent $975,000 for two beachfront lots, but the state prevented him from building anything of value on them, even though houses surround the lots.

But to court reporters, property rights aren't important rights. The evening newscasts all reported at least three stories on the abortion decision. But ABC and CBS didn't even mention the Lucas case. NBC gave the story a brief anchor read, and CNN World News anchor Patrick Greenlaw placed this spin on a clear victory for individual liberties: "The Court also handed down a ruling cutting into the government's ability to regulate private property."

MEDIA CHIEFS HONOR DEMS. The 1992 campaign is under way and media bigwigs are lining up for Democrats. The night before the Democratic convention began, the gay magazine The Advocate and the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association hosted a reception honoring California Senate candidate Barbara Boxer, Rep. Barney Frank, and D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton. The co-chairs to this event: Tom Johnson, President of the Cable News Network; Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Publisher of The New York Times; and Shelby Coffey, Editor of the Los Angeles Times. We'll be waiting to see if these three journalists will be fair and balanced and lend their names to any pre-Republican Convention reception honoring California Senate candidate Bruce Herschensohn, Rep. Dick Armey, and Rep. Bob Dornan. Right.

BACK TO HOMELESS MYTHS. Only three months ago Newsweek reporter Jay Mathews debunked the popular liberal myth of a homeless population of three million. Mathews wrote in the April 6 issue: "The figure of 3 million homeless in the United States, used by advocates and the media in the 1980s, has little basis in fact. A 1988 Urban Institute report found there were no more than 600,000 homeless people on any night."

But Newsweek just can't let go. In a June 29 report on rising homelessness in Europe, Newsweek reporter Pascal Privat suggested "the best figures available" were these: "The National Coalition for the Homeless says 3 million Americans have no permanent shelter."

HATE CRIME HYPE. When the Supreme Court overturned a law against flag-burning in 1989, the media went into a frenzy applauding "free expression." But there was no applause from CNN when the court ruled on June 22 that a Minnesota "hate crime" law on cross burnings went too far in limiting First Amendment-protected speech.

On that night's World News, reporter Bonnie Anderson announced that one "hate crime" victim is "angry the Supreme Court ruled the racial hatred that drove her from her Marietta, Georgia home is protected by the U.S. Constitution....The ruling means that she and her children must still live in fear....Civil rights groups are concerned that the wording [of the court's ruling] was too vague, and now it is open season on hate crimes." CNN left the impression that the Supreme Court had overturned all the other laws under which cross burners can be prosecuted: trespassing, destruction of property, disturbing the peace, and so on.

GUNNING FOR GARTNER. NBC News President Michael Gartner, a man who believes the First Amendment is so expansive it gives him the right to identify rape victims on national TV, isn't so hot about other parts of the Bill of Rights. The National Rifle Association has targeted Gartner as a supporter of a total ban on handguns, which would require a rewriting of the Constitution. The NRA launched an ad campaign with actors Charlton Heston, Susan Howard, and Gerald McRaney. The ads quote a January 16 USA Today column in which Gartner called for eliminating the constitutional right to own handguns: "Let's ban them. Let's change the Constitution....There is no reason for anyone in this country, anyone except a police officer or a military person, to buy, to own, to have, to use a handgun."

Cheerleading for a handgun ban is nothing new to the NBC News President. On January 10, 1991, The Wall Street Journal published a Gartner column titled "Tell Me a Good Reason for Handguns." He wrote: "I'm especially against handguns. I'm against them because they are used to threaten, to maim, to kill. I'm against them because today, if it is typical, 10 children will be killed by handguns....I can't think of any reason to be for handguns." If the criteria for a ban is maiming or killing people, why not ban cars?

CHICKEN LITTLE'S SQUAWK. The media's general affection for the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro couldn't be missed, and Newsweek reporter Sharon Begley couldn't find enough praise for the summit's efforts -- or disdain for the U.S. position.

In her June 1 report on the upcoming summit, Begley applauded the accuracy of the notoriously wrong Club of Rome's Limits to Growth report of 1972: "Its warning that population and growth might tip the world's economic or biological life-support systems into collapse within 100 years was greeted with as much ridicule as reflection. Few thought its doomsday scenario possible. Few took it seriously. But then a funny thing happened....exactly the sort of collapses foreseen in Limits came about." She failed to mention the report also warned the world would run out of oil by 1992.

Begley had no use for President Bush. In the June 15 issue, she wrote: "When Bush shows up this week for a 40-hour appearance, even many of America's allies are going to greet him as the Grinch who stole the eco-summit." Begley's measure of success was detailed in the June 22 issue where she wrote, "But the real yardstick of success was neither rhetoric nor treaties...The true measure was cash....America, in contrast, found itself in the role of cranky Uncle Scrooge."

HIT MAN HUGHES In the same issue in which Time devoted two pages to its favorite Time-Warner recording artist, "Cop Killer" rapper Ice-T, (his "poetry....deftly slices life's jugular"), the magazine selected art critic Robert Hughes to attack Dan Quayle for making Time-Warner an issue in the first place.

Hughes defended his favorite involuntary charity, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and dripped contempt for Quayle's family-values crusade: "It may be, as members of the Republican Party seem to believe, that there are few disadvantages to being American. But there is at least one: what other democratic nation would make a bantam like J. Danforth Quayle its Vice President and send him forth to lecture on public morality and cultural health?...Now the Little Communicator is at it again."

Hughes again charged conservatives with divisive and diversionary politics: "A plethora of Washington conservatives hope for distraction issues -- anything that will take voters' minds off the domestic economy -- and see the campaign for moral restrictions on the NEA a rich source of cheap shots against `liberal' culture." As for the NEA's new director, Anne Imelda-Radice, Hughes blustered that she was appointed to "replace John Frohnmayer, who was fired to appease Pat Buchanan's distorted and ranting attacks on the NEA during the early primaries."

ANITA AMNESIA. Reporters are still ignoring evidence that shakes the credibility of Anita Hill, the media's poster girl for sexual harassment and female Senate candidates. While Capitol Games, a new book by Newsday reporter (and Hill leak beneficiary) Timothy Phelps, drew stories or interviews from ABC's Good Morning America, CNN's Larry King Live, NBC's Sunday Today, and U.S. News & World Report, David Brock and his March American Spectator exposé remained unreported and unchallenged by all of these outlets. Reporters also ignored the latest crack in Hill's credibility. The June 11 Daily Oklahoman reported that Hill is taking a year-long sabbatical from the University of Oklahoma to give lucrative speeches and more importantly, write a book -- which she told Senators she wouldn't do.

The almost-total silence on Brock's expose was broken on June 7 by The Boston Globe's Thomas C. Palmer Jr., a writer for the Globe's Sunday "Focus" section. Wrote Palmer: "John Bliss, a Judiciary Committee staff member who questioned many witnesses in preparation for the hearings, says he considers the Spectator article accurate: 'We've had several months go by now to have someone come forward and effectively rebut it, and no one has.'"

MAURO'S MOURNINGS. USA Today court reporter Tony Mauro has taken his complaints about the conservative Supreme Court to where he doesn't have to pretend to be balanced, the July/August issue of the liberal Washington Monthly. "The rightward shift has, of course, been most visible on the Supreme Court....But the decisions at the next tier of the judiciary -- the circuit courts of appeals -- and the tier below that -- the district courts -- are, ideologically, the Supreme Court again and again. Only worse." Declared Mauro: "The losers in this ideological battle are, of course, those who most need the protection of the courts: minorities, criminal defendants, and the downtrodden. Congress, state courts, and legislatures are increasingly called upon to assume the role of protector once played by the federal courts."

Mauro even took a shot at the American people for backing the nomination of Clarence Thomas: "Our nation's attention -- if not its conscience -- was aroused by the feisty public battles waged at the confirmation hearings of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas." Mauro concluded by lobbying: "The composition of the courts should be a major issue in the campaigns for both the presidency and the Senate, where the power to confirm federal judges should, after the Thomas debacle, be taken a little more seriously."

STRONG'S NOVEL IDEA. Peter Jennings gave "Person of the Week" honors June 5 to Maurice Strong, Secretary General of last month's U.N. Earth Summit. Jennings complimented Strong: "He is hopeful about finding ways to make the earth a better place to live...He is the world's most tireless cheerleader for the planet."

But Jennings left out Strong's real feelings for the planet's industrial nations, captured in Strong's own words on his idea for a novel plot, quoted in the Canadian news magazine Alberta Report on May 11: "What if a small group of world leaders were to conclude that the principal risk to the earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? And if the world is to survive, those rich countries would have to sign an agreement reducing their impact on the environment. Would they do it? The group's conclusion is no. The rich countries won't do it. They won't change. So in order to save the planet, the group decides: isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized nations collapse? Isn't our responsibility to bring that about? This group of world leaders form a secret society to bring about an economic collapse."

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