MediaWatch: June 1992
Table of Contents:
NewsBites: Rather Rich
RATHER RICH. The May 25 Forbes listed Dan Rather as one of corporate America's most powerful people, paid $3.6 million a year. Forbes sounded an ironic note: "In his 1977 autobiography, The Camera Never Blinks: Adventures of a TV Journalist, Dan Rather criticized Barbara Walters' million-dollar-a-year salary as co-anchor of the ABC evening news and commented: 'In my own view, no one in this business is [worth a million], no matter what or how many shows they do, unless they find a cure for cancer on the side.'" Since Rather has yet to find a cure for cancer, Forbes rang true in their final assessment: "As a winner in the genetic lottery, Rather seems to have changed his mind about how high the rewards ought to be." Guess who enjoyed the "decade of greed"?
MIKHAIL'S MONEY. Compare NBC's coverage of Mikhail Gorbachev's money-making trip to the United States to their reports on Ronald Reagan's money-making trip to Japan two years earlier.
During his May 16 Nightly News "Final Thoughts" commentary, Garrick Utley heaped praise on Gorbachev. The anchor mused: "Whatever Gorbachev can get he certainly deserves....Here is a man who not only changed history, but he's going to save us a lot of money....The Bush Administration plans to cut defense spending $50 billion dollars over the next five years. Mikhail Gorbachev is the man who made that possible. So how much should a grateful American nation offer him in reward? In show business and sports, an agent's fee is 10 percent. That would mean $5 billion for Gorbachev. A bit high, you say? Okay, let's make it 1 percent, or even 1/10 of 1 percent. That would still be $50 million...Let's not be cynical, or begrudge him the measly couple of million dollars he takes with him. Those who gave it can afford it. It's the least America can do."
Now read what NBC commentator John Chancellor said about Reagan on the March 15, 1990 Nightly News: "Ask most Americans about Ronald Reagan's recent activities and they will tell you about the couple of million dollars he picked up for a quick trip to Japan...The Reagans' career after the White House has been characterized by big bucks...The country's mood has changed. The 1980s were noted for greed and avarice, but now we're in the 1990s and the waiter has arrived with the check."
RAINING ON PARADE. On May 14, CNN's Jonathan Mann reported on Parade magazine's survey on abortion, but only the results favoring abortion were mentioned. "A national magazine says people in the U.S. are overwhelmingly in favor of keeping abortion legal. Almost three-fourths of those polled by Parade magazine say abortion should remain legal. More than three- fourths of the respondents say outlawing abortions will not stop women from getting them."
CNN failed to note that Parade also found overwhelming public support for two "restrictions" in the Pennsylvania law currently before the Supreme Court. Parade reported 76 percent of the respondents said they believe husbands should be informed before their wives have an abortion; and "80 percent said that, when the woman is under 18, one or both parents should be notified before an abortion is performed."
FRYING THE FAT YEARS. Wall Street Journal editorial page editor Robert L. Bartley's new book about the economic prosperity of the 1980s, The Seven Fat Years, gave Time and Newsweek the opportunity to deny the obvious -- the Reagan years were a time of enormous economic growth.
Newsweek economics reporter Marc Levinson began his May 4 review: "The decade of Ronald Reagan's presidency is already receding into history as the second Gilded Age -- a time when, amid prosperity, many Americans became worse off." Levinson later offered this laughable assertion: "On average, the economy grew as fast under Jimmy Carter as under Ronald Reagan." Growth is easy with double-digit inflation, but that doesn't translate into prosperity. The most important things that grew during the Carter malaise years were lines at gas stations and unemployment offices.
In the May 24 issue of Time, Senior Writer John Greenwald complained that the book "glosses over the excesses and inequalities of the Reagan era." Spurning the supply-side recovery, he trotted out a very tired myth: "The rising tide of '80s style growth failed to lift all boats as advertised: the rich got bigger yachts, the middle class foundered, and many of the poor went under." In reality, all income groups saw their average family income grow during the 1980s.
SAVAGE SUPREME COURT. Los Angeles Times Supreme Court reporter David Savage won last November's Janet Cooke Award for his one- sided attack on Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Now, the attack has been lengthened into a book. In Turning Right, he serves up sugary praise for the liberals of the court. Thurgood Marshall "was, in the view of many law experts, the greatest American lawyer of the twentieth century." William Brennan was "one of the truly great justices of the twentieth century." And the author of Roe v. Wade, Harry Blackmun, "lived up to his pledge to be a protector of the little people whose cases came before the Court." Savage failed to note that unborn children miss Blackmun's "little people" category by a trimester.
As he regularly does in the Los Angeles Times, Savage suggested that conservative justices are against individual rights, and liberals fight off government power. While liberal justices have helped the federal government dramatically increase its control over people's property and economic decision-making, Savage warned: "Under the edicts of the Rehnquist Court, the Bill of Rights is shrinking in significance. The new court has seen its first duty as upholding the will of the majority and the rules of government, not the constitutional rights of individuals...How far will the court go in rolling back constitutional rights?"
GERGEN MISLABELED. David Gergen once served as President Reagan's Communications Director. Now, the U.S. News & World Report Editor -at-Large and MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour pundit is considered a "conservative." Think again. In the "America and the World 1991/92" issue of Foreign Affairs, all Gergen managed was tired liberal-media cliches. Gergen lashed out at Bush's energy policies, blaming Bush, not Saddam, for the Gulf War: "If the United States has a serious energy policy in place it would not be so threatened." Gergen wrote that Bush could "have convinced both the public and his own party that the country needed a sizeable increase in gasoline taxes in order to become more independent of foreign energy sources."
Turning to presidential politics, Gergen lumped candidate Pat Buchanan together with ex-Klan Wizard David Duke, warning: "Neither man will defeat the President, but they will give greater legitimacy to fears and prejudices seething below the surface." The only way to save America from a racist, isolationist future is more social spending: "Unless the nation embarks upon a comprehensive program of domestic renewal, the United States within a few years could become so deeply mired in its own troubles that its politics will turn even more embittered, xenophobic, and inward."
GORE'S GREEN GUIDE. Time Senior Writer Lance Morrow's May 14 review of Senator Al Gore's new book, Earth in the Balance, offered another example of how facts don't matter to Time when it comes to the environment. Morrow claimed "the book speaks with a certain passionate authenticity, a ring of the unfakable that is rare enough in the (usually ghostwritten) outpouring of politicians." Furthermore, the public "may be impressed by Gore's sustained intellectual concentration and mastery of his subject, the environment. Gore has studied it a while...Gore has produced a labor of statesmanship, evangelism, and scientific exposition."
Others would argue Gore went 0 for 3, chiefly producing a political tract that was thoroughly denounced by many in the scientific community. In one of several examples cited by Professor Julian Simon in a Washington Times review, Gore claimed that DDT "can be environmentally dangerous in tiny amounts." Simon noted that use of DDT in India resulted in the near elimination of malaria.
Similarly, Simon found that "Gore seems unaware that the solid scientific consensus is that there was no observable damage to humans living near Love Canal." Simon concluded: "The entire book is filled with this sort of environmental gossip, backed by no sources, and contradicted by solid data....He has been told in the past that his utterances on these subjects do not correspond with the facts. But he has chosen to ignore the scientific literature."
WHITE ON BLACKS. Time "Nation" Section Editor Jack White's May 11 report, "The Limits of Black Power," suggested that black leaders aren't truly "black" unless they're radical blacks, devoted to their race above all else. White suggested Justice Clarence Thomas isn't really black after ruling against a black official in Alabama in a voting rights case, Presley vs. Etowah County Commission: "No brother, no matter how right wing, they felt, could acquiesce in such a ruling." [Italics his.] Thomas simply ruled that current "voting rights" laws apply to voting, not the distribution of government powers, however unfair. To White, the race of the plaintiff mattered more than the actual text of the law, or the power of precedent.
White even huffed that liberal Democratic black leaders aren't radical enough. Take White's backhand at Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson: "Although his gospel-tinged oratory about the power of politics to uplift the poor remains as dynamic as ever, some of Jackson's strongest supporters complain that his priorities have changed and that he has become a tool of white business interests."
HORTON FOOLS COME TRUE. Every year the MediaWatch companion newsletter, Notable Quotables, publishes an April Fools issue, an effort to parody reporters by inventing the most outrageous quotes possible. In this year's April 1 edition, we made up the following Meet the Press question from NBC's Andrea Mitchell to Rep. Newt Gingrich: "Republicans say they will use the House Bank scandal as a wedge issue in November, hoping it will cause huge turnovers in Congress. Isn't this just Willie Horton with a checkbook, Congressman?"
A month later our quote came true. On the May 10 Meet the Press, Andrea Mitchell asked Senator Bill Bradley: "Senator, you told Tim that you thought the White House suggestion that the Great Society programs were to blame for what happened in Los Angeles was ludicrous. Was it also a racial code word -- a code word to appeal to racial fears? Is it the Willie Horton of the 1992 campaign?"
ABC'S SALINGER RESPONDS. After Prime Minister John Major's Conservative Party won a decisive majority in Britain's early April election, Notable Quotables ran some of the media's incorrect predictions. Among them, this from ABC Chief Foreign Correspondent Pierre Salinger on World News Tonight April 9, the day of the election:
"Major and the Conservatives seem to have failed to win a majority after 13 years because of the voter's perception that they did little to pull Britain out of the recession. Conservatives were heavily criticized for failing to invest enough funds in the national health service and the educational system. But voters were equally concerned about the large tax increase the Labor Party proposed with a top rate of 59 percent to fund those programs. If current trends hold up and the Conservatives run about 25 to 30 seats short, observers believe Prime Minister Major will resign tomorrow, leaving it up to Labor to form a government."
Responding from London, Salinger wrote: "I want to tell you you were right but you must also understand the conditions under which this broadcast was made. The polls close at 10:00 pm London time and I have to have a piece ready for World News Tonight by 11:00 pm. All the polls published at this period on BBC and ITN indicated what I said. It was not until 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning that the situation turned around and it started to appear that the Conservatives might win. So while I accept the broadcast was a mistake, I don't really have full responsibility."
