MediaWatch: July 1996
Table of Contents:
NewsBites: Humorless Howard
To read Washington Post media writer Howard Kurtz, one might think Bill Clinton was some poor fat kid getting ridiculed on the playground. In a June 4 story he claimed Clinton "has drawn a phenomenal amount of personal ridicule" from comedians, "Unflattering images -- of a philandering, draft-dodging, pot-smoking, cheeseburger-chomp-ing, self-indulgent finagler -- reverberate through the media." And "Republicans have concluded that barbed humor can be a particularly sharp weapon." Unfortunately, Kurtz did not quantify his feelings by consulting experts. On June 24, the Center for Media and Public Affairs released the results of its study detailing jokes told by David Letterman, Jay Leno, and Conan O'Brien. Since the end of the primaries, "the latenight comics have told twice as many jokes about Dole as they have about Clinton."
Richer Under Clinton.
The June 20 New York Times headline declared: "Income Disparity Between Poorest and Richest Rises." Reporter Steven Holmes relayed a Census Bureau finding that "during the first two years" of Clinton, "the share of national income earned by the top 5 percent of householdsgrew at a faster rate than during the eight years of the Reagan administration, which was often characterized as favoring the rich." Where were the networks? On March 5, 1992, when the Times ran a similar piece, CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather announced: "In America in the 1980s, what former President Reagan and those who support him call the Reagan Revolution put more money in the pockets of the rich. We already knew that. But a new study indicates that those who did best of all by far were the very richest of the rich." This time CBS was silent, as were ABC and CNN. The news made the June 20 NBC Nightly News, but anchor Brian Williams didn't blame Clinton, but corporate America: "Much of the blame for the income gap has been laid on vast changes in the job market, a job market that keeps shrinking. A while back corporate f pumping the story up."
The Invisible McDougals.
Two recent morning show interviewers demonstrated the convictions of the President's Whitewater business partners on multiple felony counts hasn't changed the media's tune. On the June 5 Good Morning America, ABC's Elizabeth Vargas interviewed Michael Chertoff, Republican Counsel to the Whitewater investigation. She inquired: "It would seem very natural that Hillary Clinton's fingerprints would be on her own billing records. Is this at all significant?" Throughout the interview Vargas sounded like a White House flack: "But, Mr. Chertoff, Mrs. Clinton freely admits she examined those documents back in 1992. How do you know these prints aren't several years old?"
CBS This Morning substitute host Erin Moriarty spent three straight days using the White House spin to challenge guests on June 18-20. Questioning Rep. Susan Molinari (R-N.Y.), Democratic activist Lynn Cutler, and David Maraniss of The Washington Post, Moriarty asked nothing but pro-Clinton questions. She asked Molinari: "But let's be honest here. I mean, this is an election year. How much of this, as the White House of course says, is just a matter of the Republicans piling on in a presidential election year?" She asked Maraniss: "We're talking about transactions that occurred a decade ago. I mean, can't some of this just be simply forgetfulness?" The next day, Moriarty tried to dismiss Filegate in a question to Rep. William Clinger (R-Pa.): "Are you concerned that this will mean a number of redundant investigations into the same matter?"
Schneider's Wishful Thinking.On the June 14 Inside Politics, CNN polling analyst Bill Schneider trumpeted, as the death knell of conservative activism, Virginia Sen. John Warner's decisive win over Jim Miller in a GOP primary: "This week the voters struck a resounding blow against political correctness -- not political correctness of the left, political correctness of the right." Schneider reported Warner took "moderate positions on abortion and gun control" and "refused to support radical right nominees of his own party, like Oliver North in 1994 and former Moral Majority official Mike Farris in 1993."
According to Schneider, activists representing term limits, gun owners and Christian conservatives were rejected by even the Republican faithful in Virginia. "Warner didn't just beat Miller, he wiped the floor with him. Warner won everywhere, even in solidly Republican areas...the Republican mainstream turned out to vote against him [Miller]."
Schneider charged conservatives were on a losing streak. "This represents the third defeat in a row for the right wing in Virginia. They couldn't win general elections in 1993 and 1994." He forgot the GOP made big gains in the state legislature in 1995 and elected conservative Gov. George Allen in 1993. Schneider also failed to mention the actual tone of Warner's TV ads. Some attacked Miller from the right, while others pitched Warner as a conservative: "Committed to common sense conservative principles like lower taxes, less regulation, and a balanced budget."
It's Our Land of Hackdom Now.
An article in the June 3 Newsweek by Mark Hosenball and Daniel Klaidman showed the Willie Horton defense is already being deployed in Campaign '96. Titled "Desperately Seeking the Next `Willie Horton,' the piece detailed what Newsweek called "part of a concerted Republican effort to build a `Hall of Shame' for prosecutors and judges deemed soft on crime...A loose network of former Republican prosecutors is searching for liberal jurists and lawyers, the kind who might, say, turn loose another Willie Horton."
Specifically, Newsweek tried to short-circuit Republican criticism of Janet Napolitano, a Clinton-appointed U.S. Attorney who had been one of Anita Hill's lawyers. Napolitano's office refused to grant a search warrant to postal inspectors investigating a child porn ring because she had a "`philosophical disagreement' with the sting operation because it targeted homosexual males." Oddly, while Hosenball and Klaidman decried this injection of politics into criminal justice, they cheered on that the "Justice [Department] is learning how to fight back. Using the lexicon of the campaign, Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick has told aides she wants a `rapid response' to counter charges `in the same news cycle.' Gorelick is even setting up a campaign-like `war room' in her office. In a campaign year, Justice can't afford to be totally blind."
This contrasted with Newsweek's attitude in 1992 that "Clinton, for a change, should pick an Attorney General who is above politics." In that November 23, 1992 article Newsweek's David Kaplan criticized the Justice Department under Ed Meese for being too political: "Meese ran a Justice Department that was the Land of Hackdom -- little more than an agency to service the needs of President Reagan and, occasionally, of the A.G. himself. [Meese's] four-year reign was the archetype of politics over conscience, ideology over law."
Hyping the Hippie.
When Timothy Leary died on May 31, the media lauded him as a barefoot, smiling hippie who spent his life dispensing wisdom and encouraging people to open their minds. CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson related that "the last words of the man who spent a lifetime asking questions [were] `Why not?'
Newsweek's David Gates gave a much more complete portrait of Leary's life. Gates reported June 10 that by the end of the '60s, Leary "found it `inconceivable' that turned-on parents wouldn't share acid with kids as young as 7." In 1970, he broke out of prison with the help of the ultra-violent leftist Weather Underground, fleeing to the Black Panther's "exile" camp in Algeria. Gates reported that Leary suggested it was a "`sacred act' to shoot cops." After being captured in Afghanistan, Leary informed on drug buddies to curry favor for a lighter sentence.
Brokaw's Bias Drained Out.
Why are the media perceived as biased and what are the greatest threats to honest information? NBC's Tom Brokaw offered novel answers during a June 11 National Press Club appearance aired on C-SPAN. On bias, Brokaw explained: "We're out there on the cutting edge of change on a daily basis. That's what news is all about....The people...who are the recipients of that news, kind of like the status quo for the most part. They're comfortable. They've learned to deal with it and they don't want to adapt to the change. Therefore they have to learn to blame someone in some regard and they think therefore since we brought them the news of the change that somehow we are biased of favor of the change." He insisted: "We've worked very hard to drain the bias out of what we do."
He dismissed talk radio, saying "I think that people pretty soon get bored with it...I think that you'll find that a lot of these acts and a lot of these towns around the country will begin to dry up because it's so Johnny One Note and it's not very enlightening." While "they can still stir up an issue from time to time," to Brokaw that's not a good thing, it's instead "the price of free speech."
Talk radio is not the only non-mainstream media source that disturbed the NBC anchor: "If you don't go on the net and look at the political web sites, then you're missing something, because that's an unfiltered access to people out there, and there's some outrageous stuff that is going out on the Internet right now -- claims that are being made by these special interest groups, all the way across the political spectrum, from the far left to the far right." It seems that in Brokaw's world, free speech is a threat if he or his colleagues can't control it.
