MediaWatch: July 1994
Table of Contents:
- MediaWatch: July 1994
- Christian Coalition Regularly Places on the Right, NAACP Almost Never on the Left
- NewsBites: Dumping on D'Amato
- Revolving Door: Price to Urban League
- Reporters Portray Religious Right as Extreme, Take Moderates' Side
- CBS Mourns Spies, Traitors
- Peggy on Prayer
- Dared to Call ABC News Liberal
- Janet Cooke Award: Liberal Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Pays for Pro-Clinton Health Care Special
Reporters Portray Religious Right as Extreme, Take Moderates' Side
Wishing Allen Quist Would Quit
When do the media side with Republicans? When they're liberals challenged by conservatives. Take coverage of liberal Minnesota Gov. Arne Carlson's loss to religious conservative Allen Quist in a party convention. On the June 15 Inside Politics, CNN's Deborah Potter focused on the concerns of moderates: "To some moderate Republicans the Quists...and their supporters are extremist zealots who pack the party caucuses and shut out long-time Republican activists from the state convention."
ABC's Aaron Brown introduced a June 23 Nightline report by declaring: "What is called the religious right, the most conservative element in the Republican Party, staged a coup in Minnesota, a state where politics, Democratic and Republican, has almost always been defined by the words moderate and progressive." Brown claimed: "They have embraced politics with an energy and commitment and you will forgive both the word play and language, they are scaring the hell out of the Republican establishment."
Cokie Roberts continued the theme: "This man is sending chills through the Republican Party. Allen Quist, soybean farmer, managed to wrest the state party endorsement from the sitting Republican governor." Echoing the complaints of Carlson and his supporters, Roberts warned of "the possible McGovernization of the Republican Party, doing to the Republicans what the Democrats did to themselves, by being too far left through the primary process. The Republicans could easily end up being too far right."
Richard Lacayo painted Carlson as victimized by ideologues in the June 27 Time. He wrote: "[Gov.] Carlson, a fiscal conservative who eliminated the state's deficit, is a moderate on many social issues. That means he's out of favor with the troops of the religious right who have seized power in the state Republican Party."
Actually, Carlson's economic policies have angered Republicans. In "A Fiscal Policy Report Card on America's Governors: 1994," the Cato Institute's Stephen Moore and Dean Stansel rated Democrat Douglas Wilder of Virginia highest, but gave Carlson a "D." They noted that Carlson "has created several new spending programs, including a universal health care program called HealthRight, which will cost state taxpayers $250 million a year...the income tax and sales tax have been raised by $650 per family in his first year alone."
Did the media blame Bush's 1990 tax hike deal for pushing Republicans too far to the left? No, but Lacayo opined "Christian conservatives did much to set the belligerent tone of the 1992 Republican Convention in Houston -- which, to put it mildly, was no great advantage to George Bush."
