MediaWatch: July 1994

NewsBites: Dumping on D'Amato

Senator Al D'Amato should start whining about how tough the media is on him. He might shame them into giving him Hillary Clinton's kid glove treatment. When the March 18 New York Times disclosed the $100,000 Mrs. Clinton made through commodities trades, the networks ignored it. On ABC, reporter Brit Hume mentioned it in passing one week later. World News Tonight, led by Executive Producer/Clinton golf buddy Rick Kaplan, didn't devote a whole piece to the commodities deal until fully 11 days after it was first reported. When Roll Call, a small-circulation newspaper about Congress, revealed on June 16 that D'Amato made $35,000 on stock in an initial public offering, the very next day World News Tonight devoted an entire story to it, reported by Jackie Judd.

Why Call Limbaugh?
In the June 16 Los Angeles Times, Mike Clary reported that "stagnant sales and a stepped-up national boycott" are "putting the squeeze on the state Citrus Commission to can" Rush Limbaugh's ads for Florida orange juice. Clary described Limbaugh's show as "bashing gays, environmentalists, and Democrats." Unfortunately, Clary managed to squeeze out Rush's side of the story as well. Rush told MediaWatch: "No one here was contacted by Mike Clary."

However, Clary let boycott organizer and NOW President Patricia Ireland excoriate Rush's "hateful, divisive fanatacism," and added a state senator who didn't want "people who will engender hate, disregard for minorities, or represent any political philosophy" to represent Florida citrus. The only dissent was a mild statement from a commission spokeswoman regretting the controversy. Clary reported that calls and faxes to the Florida Citrus Commission were running 4-1 against Rush, but failed to mention that Rush told listeners not to call.

Apparently realizing their error, the paper ran a follow-up article from Clary eight days later quoting Limbaugh on his June 17 radio show: "The temptation is great to give you the number and have you call...the objective is not generating phone calls; we know we can do that...the single best thing you can do is buy orange juice." It's nice the Times still believes in getting both sides of the story. Maybe next time they won't take eight days to do their job.

Putting Feminism First
Reporters rarely admit their political leanings, but on the network morning shows, the female anchors are never shy in identifying themselves as part of the feminist movement. The words "feminist" and "we" are often interchanged as in a June 2 Today interview when Katie Couric asked author of Who Stole Feminism, Christina Hoff Sommers, "what should we be using other than this angry rhetoric" in the feminist movement?

But a much more pernicious form of bias was revealed when the talk turned to statistics. Sommers is very critical of the now thoroughly discredited statistic that domestic violence increases after football games. Sommers thinks the misuse of statistics discredits the cause. But Couric suggested the feminist cause is more important than the truth: "Let's say, if one accepts your thesis, that these statistics are inflated or are used incorrectly. Aren't you worried about throwing the baby out with the bath water? So Super Bowl Sunday isn't the biggest day for men battering women, aren't you afraid that you're going to be dismissing the problem all together if you refute that, or if you constantly criticize that?"

Pooh-Poohing Paula
Paula Jones made the rounds of major media interviews in June, and the liberals' reviews weren't exactly positive. While her Prime Time Live interviewer, Sam Donaldson, told The Washington Times "she tells a plausible story," Good Morning America co-host Charles Gibson didn't think so in a June 16 interview with Donaldson. "Sam -- `not trying to hurt the President?' Did she say that with a straight face?...Why does anyone care what this woman has to say?"

Time and Newsweek failed to use their interviews with Jones. "We're certainly under no obligation to print anything," Time Washington Bureau Chief Dan Goodgame told The Washington Post. Instead, Time's June 27 issue ran a Michael Kramer column on "Why Paula Jones Should Wait," in which he touted Clinton's "impressive" case. Newsweek Washington Bureau Chief Evan Thomas told the Post: "We didn't learn anything we didn't already know." Instead, Newsweek repeated its attack on Jones in the July 11 issue: "Former Clinton aides from Arkansas are depicting Paula Jones as a groupie, who, far from acting like a victim of harassment, hung around Clinton's office `giggling and carrying on' after her alleged hotel encounter."

Reagan's Nightmare
Both Newsweek and The New York Times Magazine published articles identically titled "Reagan's Revenge," blaming the former President for leaving Clinton penniless and unable to implement his social agenda. In the June 19 Times Magazine, liberal historian Alan Brinkley accused Reagan of forcing the Clinton administration to consider "a kind of social cannibalism: raids on such hitherto sacrosanct liberal programs such as food stamps, Medicare, public assistance to legal immigrants and aid for the homeless."

Economic writer Rich Thomas declared in the July 4 Newsweek: "The reason Clinton's programs aren't passing -- at least on the grand scale he once envisioned -- is that there is no money....Bill Clinton's frustration is Ronald Reagan's revenge. The two-term Republican President, aided and abetted by a fiscally careless Congress, left the federal coffers so depleted that it will be years before any President has the funds to win passage of serious new policy initiatives."

"No money"?
OMB estimates show the budget is rising $80-100 billion a year. Thomas blamed "entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid ...(the latter two are rising $32 billion this year)," but if Clinton held the line he could spend that $32 billion on his programs. Instead he proposed a new health care entitlement the GOP 1994 Joint Economic Report calls "the largest entitlement program and tax increase in U.S. history."

Mayors' Myths
The current state of American cities a result of Reagan-Bush budget slashing? Time thinks so. John Dickerson's May 23 article propagated the myth of cities suffering from a funding drought during the '80s. Discussing the new breed of budget-cutting mayors, Dickerson noted grimly, "The mayors see little alternative. Since 1981, two-thirds of federal support for the cities has dried up." Dickerson told MediaWatch he got his statistics from the National League of Cities, a lobbying group for big-city mayors. Included in the NLC's tally are programs rejected by both parties, including revenue sharing and Urban Development Action Grants, which subsidized construction of five-star Hyatt hotels in inner-city Detroit.

The truth is more complicated. In "The Myth of America's Underfunded Cities," Stephen Moore and Dean Stansel of the Cato Institute showed that while direct aid to the cities went down, "Aid to poor people living in cities increased. Federal social welfare spending rose from $255 billion to $285 billion in real dollars from 1980 to 1992." In fact, "In real terms, cities and states received more federal money in 1992 than in any previous year."

Time's One-Party Ballot
Those who picked up the June 6 Time magazine found a postcard enclosed, addressed to Congress, asking the reader to give their preferred solution for the health care system. Billed as "A Chance to Be Heard," the reader's choices consisted only of three Democratic plans.

In a half-page summary of bills before Congress, Time included the Clinton plan; "an alternative...palatable to many conservatives, proposed by House Democrat Jim Cooper of Tennessee, would rely on improved market competition through voluntary purchasing cooperatives"; and finally, the "bill proposed by House Democrat Jim McDermott of Washington. Modeled on the single-payer Canadian system, it puts the government in charge of allocating health care resources."

Why no Republican health proposals? Perhaps Time's favoritism for Democratic reform plans reflects company policy. After all, corporate parent Time-Warner was the largest single donor to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) over the past 21 months, according to Common Cause, adding $508,333 to DNC coffers.

Knocking Sam Brown Down
The same Time magazine that attacked Reagan and Bush nominees has now supported Clinton foreign policy nominees Morton Halperin, Strobe Talbott, and Sam Brown. In a June 6 article on Sam Brown's appointment as U.S. Ambassador to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, Time columnist Margaret Carlson began: "Why are good people reluctant to serve in government? All the civics student needs to know can be found in the saga of the nomination of Sam Brown." Carlson said of Colorado's Republican Senator: "No one understands why Hank Brown has decided to make Sam Brown his personal nemesis..Some think Hank Brown simply wants to zing the President, refight the Vietnam War and triumph over an old rival."

It could be about what the June 9 Washington Times termed "some very vociferous and anti-American comments and actions of Mr. Brown's over the years." In 1970 Brown declared: "Part of me wanted to blow up buildings, and I decided that those who have waged this war really should be treated as war criminals." In 1977, while a Carter Administration official, he proclaimed: "I take second place to no one in my hatred of the intelligence agencies." That same year he participated in a New York rally staged by the communist rulers of Vietnam. Yet Carlson claimed Brown "was at the suit-and-tie end of the antiwar movement and was inside the convention handling Senator Eugene McCarthy's delegates, nowhere near the Yippies."

East German Justice?
Stephen Wechsler is a U.S. Army deserter and unrepentant communist who returned from East Germany after 42 years to attend his Harvard reunion. To reporter Marc Fisher in a June 20 Washington Post "Style" profile, he's "a soft kid who dreamed of justice."

Fisher quoted Wechsler's recent "dream of a world without hunger...racist violence...where every nationality and every human being is equally regarded and equally secured from life's worst hazards," but didn't mention the East German hazard of getting shot while trying to escape. Instead, Fisher portrayed Wechsler as the victim: "Wechsler's decision to lie about his communist activities on his Army enlistment papers grew out of the intolerance of the McCarthy years....He decided to flee rather than fight against the ideological barriers and blacklists." Failing to quote anyone critical of his support for a murderous regime, Fischer found space to note that Wechsler informed a New York store clerk that "he had gone 30 years without seeing beggars, that he had never seen muggers or a joint."

Bryant's Beef
Today co-host Bryant Gumbel took on the Lake County (Fla.) School Board policy stressing the superiority of America's heritage in the curriculum. During the May 27 interview, Gumbel threw softballs to Florida Secretary of Education Doug Jamerson, then became aggressive while questioning State Rep. Tom Feeney, who defended the curriculum. When Feeney said immigrants rush in because they think the U.S. is superior, Gumbel retorted: "Don't they come to this country because it affords them the kind of freedom from the very kind of superior attitudes you're espousing?" Gumbel concluded: "Well, if they are that superior, you shouldn't have to order people to teach it, it seems, either, Mr. Feeney."

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