MediaWatch: June 1993

National Public Radio Anchor's Liberal Year at Weekend Today

Scott Simon's Simple Sermons

Most Americans spend their weekends relaxing, but NBC's Scott Simon, co-host of the weekend Today shows, has spent his pursuing a special hobby -- indoctrination. Each Saturday, the former National Public Radio anchor has shared his "personal thoughts," the only commentary aired by the show, while also acting as a reporter.

A MediaWatch review shows that since Simon's debut last August, his self-described "pompous, tortuous essays," have reflected the left-liberal line on nearly every issue, from social spending to gay rights, from El Salvador to Columbus. So with his June 6 departure from Today, we have compiled a sampling of his bias -- words to remember him by.

COMMUNISM. Perhaps the most glaring examples of liberal tilt occurred in Simon's all-too-frequent attempts to rewrite the history of the Cold War, finding America as public enemy number one. Take El Salvador, where Simon could find no good in preventing a communist coup. In a December 20, 1992 report Simon declared: "The United States paid the sticker price for continuing most of the war years when we saw El Salvador as another domino in Cuban or Soviet designs, close to a billion dollars. But Salvadorans paid the real, incalculable costs...For twelve years, most of us, U.S. taxpayers, who helped finance the fighting, risked nothing real to keep it going. It was a good policy to pay for a war we were willing to watch but did not want to risk ourselves."

Simon concluded: "As the war ended this week in a world which has gone on to other crises, you might wonder why the treaty Salvadorans celebrated couldn't have been signed twelve years ago, before 75,000 people died; before, as Oscar Romero said, people whose pockets are heavy with gold paid poor people to fight for food and clothes."

Following the release of a controversial United Nations report on El Salvador (which he accepted without question), Simon opined on March 20: "How could American officials not know about the army to which they gave such expensive weapons, weapons which were turned on Salvadoran civilians?... The army we supported tried to win the hearts of its nation with cruelty and steel. But each life taken by torture, by murder, or massacre gave the rebels new life for their cause."

Simon's willingness to condemn U.S. policy while ignoring the Soviets and their allies was also evident in an October 17 report on Vietnam: "For many Americans, including many who served there, the war in Vietnam wasn't to defend the United States, but to prop up a corrupt and brutal South Vietnamese dictatorship."

On May 15, Simon even touted a biography of Walt Disney, refuted by his family, which alleged that Disney "was an informant for the FBI, that he furnished J. Edgar Hoover information on some of his own employees he thought politically suspect during the McCarthy era." Simon relied on the liberal proposition that the Cold War was overblown, a part of the `paranoia' of the time, as fodder for his wit: "Did Mr. Disney believe Donald Duck's peculiar, scratchy speech contained insidious messages only to be decoded in Moscow?...When Bambi's mother disappeared, was it because Uncle Walt turned her over to the House Un-American Activities Committee?"

COLUMBUS. Unable to contain his revisionism to this century, Simon excoriated Christopher Columbus on October 11: "For Native Americans, the people who hardly felt discovered, Columbus' landing commenced a holocaust. There's really no other word for the death delivered by settlers, as they scattered, enslaved, and obliterated Indian nations on their own sacred lands."

GAY RIGHTS. Simon's frequent bashing of conservatives occurred in his reporting too. This was certainly evident after the Republican convention in Houston, when Simon pressed the "intolerance" issue with Pat Buchanan on October 3: "Mr. Buchanan, some surveys have suggested that your speech at the Republican convention, in which you specifically denounced gay rights, and some other speeches there have promoted a lack of tolerance, an incivility, a lack of manners in a sense, among certain Republicans that has not gone over well with American voters, not just gay Americans, but people who feel homosexuals rights is a basic civil rights issue. Have you hurt the Republican ticket with those remarks this year?"

Opening the show from Washington before the April 25 gay and lesbian march, Simon claimed: "The largest demonstration in U.S history is gathering now...They're here to step out of the closet and onto the main stage of American history." Simon did not correct himself when the Park Police estimated attendance at 300,000, far from the largest protest in U.S. history.

ECONOMICS. The free enterprise system, of course, did not emerge unscathed from Simon's commentary. Discussing new economic ties between the U.S. and Russia on April 3, Simon took a gratuitous swipe at the free market: "Some of the same economists whose belief in a undiluted free market seem to run to permitting many Americans to free fall into unemployment came to Moscow to tell President Yeltsin only shock therapy could snap Russia into prosperity."

He saw the opening of fast food restaurants in Moscow, unthinkable just a few years ago, as a metaphor for the "quality of the over-the-counter economic advice we've been giving them. Fast-fix assembly line fast food that still leaves the store shelves empty....the opportunities for Americans in Russia should be something more than just the last vast market for our most precious products or political theories. Helping Russia to be free ought to mean helping the Russians to be free to find another way."

On September 5, Simon trashed the 1980s: "We elected politicians who gave voice to our grievances and reduced what government could regulate and guarantee ...The financial wealth of the United States has doubled, but the number of poor people has stayed the same. Instead of trickling down, apparently that wealth mostly stayed in the tight fists of those who became richer."

REPUBLICANS. Finally, what self-respecting alumnus of National Public Radio could refrain from a few attacks on Reagan and Bush? On January 16, as viewers saw video of Bush's `Willie Horton' commercial, Simon asserted: "And then there was the George Bush who could be churlish, almost a child-like bully when he campaigned. Commercials arousing fear and speeches veering into the absurd." After President Clinton's staff asked an interviewer to apply make-up to the President, Simon stretched to include Reagan in his jibes of May 29: "Reporters were never asked to make up former President Reagan, although, it often seemed, they were willing to shine his shoes."

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