MediaWatch: July 1993

Janet Cooke Award: Discovery Channel Series Starts Out As Slanted As CBS

Cronkite's Industrial-Policy Informercial

Twelve years after leaving the anchor desk at CBS, Walter Cronkite is coming out of retirement -- just a little bit -- with a new quarterly series, The Cronkite Report, on cable's Discovery Channel. Will the series be balanced, or a chip off the old biased CBS block? The first installment on May 28, "Help Unwanted," looked more like the latter. For its imbalance of experts, mangled statistics, and liberal industrial-policy pleadings, Cronkite earned the Janet Cooke Award.

The show focused on American unemployment and how to shrink it. But Cronkite's central thesis -- "what this program was about was the inescapable tragedy of growing unemployment and the inescapable conclusion that there is a permanency to it that we are not addressing" -- isn't borne out by the facts. Unemployment stands at 7 percent, lower than much of the 1980s. As for permanency, Cronkite may want to debate economics columnist Robert Samuelson, who pointed out in the June 23 Washington Post: "In 1992, nearly half of Europe's jobless had been unemployed for more than a year; in the United States, only 6 percent were."  

Cronkite disparaged market solutions to unemployment: "The free market. While the government helped build the trains and roads to help bring the United States into the 20th century, the economic philosophy of this country has been laissez-faire. Germany and Japan, on the other hand, give industry broad government support. The Japanese government invests 58 percent more than the United States in civilian research and development, Germany 42 percent. But American business always has fought a government-guided industrial strategy. They called it socialism. Now, many are calling it 21st century economics."

Samuelson pointed out that despite their industrial policies, Europe has more persistent unemployment -- Cronkite's central thesis -- than the United States. Wrote Samuelson: "Between 1965 and 1991, the European Community generated only 13 million new jobs, less than half the growth of the working population...In the same period, the United States created 46 million new jobs...In 1972, the EC's unemployment rate was 2.9 percent; by 1982, it was 9 percent." In Germany alone, unemployment surged from 0.5 percent in 1970 to 6.3 percent in 1987.

But Cronkite argued that the U.S. needs a European-style industrial policy, a public-private partnership of government-led investment in the economy. Cronkite's experts were all proponents of industrial policy -- Labor Secretary Robert Reich, MIT economist Lester Thurow, investment adviser Felix Rohatyn, Harvard historian Paul Kennedy, CEOs John Sculley of Apple and Akio Morita of Sony, Harley Shaiken of the University of California, and British official Gillian Shepherd. To round out the wonkfest, Cronkite interviewed Al Gore and Bill Clinton. Conservatives were ignored, but Cronkite did find many tearful unemployed workers and union bosses glumly worrying about their future.

In a long interview, Cronkite asked President Clinton if his industrial-policy solutions would pass: "To implement these programs, it's going to take the support of the people, and through them the Congress. And yet, as they're beginning to learn more of the details of the sacrifice necessary in taxes and so forth, some of the support for this is ebbing. Are you getting discouraged at all?"

Cronkite concluded with a speech laying out his liberal vision: "Today, government and industry, with the support of us the people ...must devise a long-term plan, a national strategy. It would require industry to invest more of its profits, to make better products, to improve research and development, to modernize tools and constantly retrain its work force. It would require all of us to invest more of our income -- that's taxes -- into preparing the next generation through education and training to give it a chance to live at least part of, and keep alive, the American dream. And we all would have to share more, to improve the lot of our disadvantaged, to narrow considerably the differences in opportunity that are rapidly and dangerously dividing America."

Cronkite sold his Clintonesque program with dubious figures: "In the last decade, 60 percent of American families saw their incomes decline despite the increase in working women. In 1980, 20 percent of young American men who worked full-time earned below the poverty line for a family of three. In 1990, that figure doubled to 40 percent."

In his interview with President Clinton, Cronkite repeated his charge: "The real income of the American family has been dropping for 20 years almost now...How do we restore the American dream?" Clinton subtly undercut Cronkite, acknowledging family income increased in the 1980s. In fact, Census Bureau data show that average family income grew in every fifth of earners from 1982 to 1989.

As for young men below the poverty line, Chris Frenze, senior Republican economist for the Joint Economic Committee, told MediaWatch: "That's a ridiculous measurement. It's not really meaningful for men aged 18-24 to have incomes to support families of three or four when most of them aren't married or have families to support." Frenze said one Census Bureau report did include numbers close to Cronkite's. But according to that same Census study, of the year-round full-time workers with earnings below the poverty line for a family of four, only 15.8 percent lived under the poverty line for their own family size in 1979. That fell to 12.9 percent in 1990. For husbands in married-couple families, the percentage under the poverty line fell from 35.7 percent in 1979 to 21.4 percent in 1990.

But Cronkite pretended the 1980s did not exist. He asked Al Gore: "Where do we get the large numbers to take care of our millions of unemployed?" He ignored that 18 million jobs were created in the 1980s, dropping the annual jobless rate from 9.5 percent in 1982 to 5.2 percent in 1989.

Despite Cronkite's stumbling with numbers, Jonathan Ward, Cronkite's production firm partner, told the Boston Herald that with the Cronkite cachet, "We have to be extremely careful about our facts, our figures and our approach." Ward failed to return a week of MediaWatch calls, but an assistant, Karen Gilmore, did call to see what we would ask. When told of the program's spurious claims on family income, Gilmore responded: "I think that difference is because of inflation." When told the Census figures were inflation-adjusted, Gilmore replied: "I'm sure there are many different ways of reading the statistics."

But Cronkite found no one who had a different way of reading statistics than he did. Cronkite's show wasn't a debate, but a one-sided lecture, too much like the journalism of the network he long represented.

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