MediaWatch: July 1996
Table of Contents:
Revolving Door: Chancellor's Last Spin
On July 12 NBC News veteran John Chancellor, who anchored NBC Nightly News from 1970 to 1982, passed away at age 68. For two years during the Johnson administration, Chancellor served as Director of the Voice of America. His death generated a series of tributes to his fairness and impartiality from his media colleagues.
On the July 13 NBC Nightly News, for instance, anchor Brian Williams observed of the man who delivered commentary until his 1993 retirement: "He was a role model for all who care about truth, justice and fairness. John Chancellor died last night of cancer, two days short of his 69th birthday. He helped define what TV news should be." Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz recalled that Chancellor "called himself a man of the `extreme center.'"
"He dealt in facts," asserted former NBC News President Michael Gartner in a July 16 USA Today column. "For his last ten years at NBC, he delivered 90-second commentaries three nights a week....At dinner one night, I remarked that he got more facts into 90 seconds than we could get into the rest of Nightly News in 21 minutes." Here's a look at some of those "fact"-based commentaries:
April 17, 1990: "The overall tax burden for Americans, federal, state, and local, is actually quite low....The fact is Americans could pay more taxes and the country wouldn't go down the tube. Taxpayers don't believe this because they are being conned by the politicians...The truth is that the United States needs higher taxes and can afford them. Some political leaders are now starting to say that, but until more say it, the country will remain in trouble."
November 20, 1990: "Some say Ronald Reagan won the Cold War by spending so much on defense that the Kremlin went bankrupt trying to keep up. That won't wash. During Reagan's presidency the United States itself became a bankrupt country."
August 21, 1991, on the Soviet Union: "It's short of soap, so there are lice in hospitals. It's short of pantyhose, so women's legs go bare. It's short snowsuits, so babies stay home in winter....The problem isn't communism; nobody even talked about communism this week. The problem is shortages."
April 30, 1992, after the riots in Los Angeles: "It's not a big surprise that the jury in suburban Simi Valley sided with the white policemen. Just as it's no surprise that the blacks in downtown Los Angeles rioted and people died....Politicians have fanned these flames with code words about `welfare queens,' `equal opportunity,' and `quotas.' Language designed to turn whites against blacks. With two-party politics that favored the rich and hurt everyone else."
March 12, 1992, a year after the Gulf War: "Greenpeace, the public interest organization, believes that the Iraqi death toll, civilian and military, before and after the war, may be as high as 198,000. Allied military dead are counted in the low hundreds. The disparity is huge and somewhat embarrassing. And that's commentary for this evening, Tom." Election night, 1992, looking back at the Republican convention: "I think that the convention -- and certainly all the polling data indicates this -- offended a lot of women, offended a lot of people in the country who thought it was too religious and too hard-edged."
