MediaWatch: July 1997
Table of Contents:
- MediaWatch: July 1997
- Gun Rights Forces Outgunned on TV
- NewsBites: Camel Canard
- Revolving Door: Sidney's Clinton-Loving Slant
- Hearings? What Hearings?
- They All Do It
- Nolanda's Non-Story, Religion and Rehabilitation
- Kurault as Liberal Advocate
- Janet Cooke Award: Another Frontal Assault on Objectivity
They All Do It
Imagine if during Watergate a reporter declared: "The system's the problem, this investigation really isn't about Nixon White House wrongdoing." Many reporters are approaching the hearings on the fundraising scandal not as a process to identify lawbreakers, but as a chance to argue for liberal campaign finance reform.
Indeed, previewing the appearance by former RNC Chair Haley Barbour on the PBS series Follow the Money July 18, Time's Viveca Novak hoped: "It will lay out there the fact that both the parties have this problem. Perhaps what we'll end up with is a very good case that both are were scrambling for money, both of them went overseas and the system lends itself to these kinds of abuses and maybe it really does need to be reformed."
Novak's Time colleague Margaret Carlson insisted on the July 12 Capital Gang: "It's never going to end until there's some kind of reform. And just because what Clinton did is, may be illegal, doesn't mean the whole thing doesn't have to be looked at. Because what's legal is corrupt as well."
The day the hearings began, July 8, a Boston Globe headline asserted: "U.S. Political System Itself to Face Scrutiny in Hearings." Washington Bureau Chief David Shribman contended: "At times it will seem as if an individual, or a presidential campaign, or a political party is being investigated. That's only partly true. What's really in the dock beginning today isn't any politician but the system that politicians built. What's important beginning today isn't what one party can show about the other, but what the campaign-finance system shows about our political system."
In other words, just as liberals believe, everybody does it and the answer is to install more regulations.
Shribman continued: "The hearings that begin this morning aren't really about John Huang and Charlie Trie or Abraham Lincoln's bedroom but about the political loophole -- unregulated 'soft-money' contributions to the parties, not to the candidates -- that makes them important."
He argued: "There are likely to be few spectacles like the spin of summer. In their effort to minimize any changes in the system, the two parties will attempt to spin viewers toward the conclusion that their rival, and not the system, is at fault."
