MediaWatch: June 1993

Janet Cooke Award: Hard News Hillary's Pliant Press

How are the media covering the new First Lady? On CNN's Reliable Sources, Time White House reporter Margaret Carlson claimed: "At Time magazine we cover her just the way we cover the President... I think actually we try to cover her as hard news." For the kind of reporting actually offered, one-sided hailing of Hillary and a caricature of conservatives, Carlson, along with Washington Post reporter Martha Sherrill, earned the June Janet Cooke A-ward.

Carlson's May 10 Time cover story was a dizzying parade of compliments: "Every witness has his or her horror story about getting sick, and Hillary listens as if hearing such woe for the first time...Ever the best girl in class, there seems to be no fact she hasn't memorized...When she briefed the committee, the clarity of her pitch opened a few eyes...When the President's economic address to Congress was scraps of paper on the conference table in the Roosevelt Room, she stepped in and pasted it back together again...She goes through paperwork like butter, scribbling in the margins of the mail, trying not to touch the same piece twice...Friends say Hillary fenced off a park of privacy right after the notorious broadcast on 60 Minutes, when almost every frame of tape showing her at her best was left on the cutting-room floor...She has taken to her role like a student, reading 43 White House biographies and numerous histories."

Carlson concluded: "As the icon of American womanhood, she is the medium through which the remaining anxieties over feminism are being played out. She is on a cultural seesaw held to a schizophrenic standard: everything she does that is soft is a calculated coverup of the careerist inside; everything that isn't is a put-down of women who stay home and bake cookies."

But is Hillary Clinton benefitting from a different double standard -- heading a task force doing the hard-news work of redesigning one-seventh of the economy while riding a wave of soft news? The accompanying interview with Mrs. Clinton had 20 questions, three on health care and 17 on her personal life. Carlson asked about the President doing crossword puzzles: "Does he ask you for a six-letter word for a river in Germany?" And: "Do you get a chance to exercise?...Do people stop talking about issues long enough to date?...You give the President lots of support. Who supports you?"

Carlson relegated the hard-news controversy over Hillary's violation of the open-meetings law to one paragraph out of 40: "A group of doctors and industry insiders sued the White House to open the meetings, arguing that Hillary's presence as a non-government employee entitled them to attend as well. A federal judge ruled some of the meetings had to be open. The Administration appealed, contending it was only trying to keep lobbyists at bay."

After declining to discuss most of the article on the record, Carlson was willing to tell MediaWatch about that law: "It's not exactly on point here. The purpose of the [Federal Advisory Committee] Act was to keep out lobbyists and special interests... we looked at that ruling several times in the magazine in different ways. We haven't used it as a vehicle for doing this because it isn't so on point that it works. I think people look around for a way to challenge something and they find a statute that might help them. It's not as clear for journalistic purposes as you might think...By the time you explain what this is, you've used up thirty lines."

As for the interview, Carlson explained that Time wanted to include the questions that no one else had asked: "We have a lot on the record about health care, and three questions out of 20 about something we have her on the record for seemed enough when you can get in stuff that nobody'd ever seen."

Sherrill told MediaWatch she's no Hillary supporter and no Margaret Carlson type (she called Carlson's articles "press releases"), but her May 4 Washington Post "Style" section article on the inner Hillary's political and spiritual influences did not hold back on praise: "In the midst of redesigning America's health care system and replacing Madonna as our leading cult figure, the new First Lady has already begun working on her next project, far more metaphysical and uplifting." Hillary's mission: "redefining who we are as human beings in this postmodern age." Sherrill added: "She has goals, but they appear to be so huge and so far off -- grand and noble things twinkling in the distance -- that it is hard to see what she sees."

Sherrill told MediaWatch "People assumed immediately that [the Madonna reference] was praise. I didn't see it as such. I don't think the White House was thrilled by this piece." Like Carlson, Sherrill believes her editors are sour on Hillary: "In the context of the paper, if you say anything positive about Hillary Clinton, and there are positive things to say -- she's an admirable woman. She believes in a politics, and she's worked hard for them, so why are we shooting her down?"

Sherrill wrote in the Post: "She is both impersonal and poignant -- with much more depth, intellect, and spirituality than we are used to in a politician." She admitted that was praise: "Well. I've interviewed a fair number of politicians, and this is stuff they don't usually talk about."

Both reporters caricatured the conservative criticism of Mrs. Clinton as extreme and unthinking. Wrote Sherrill: "All this children business, children business -- keeps reminding the far right of communist youth camps, early indoctrination, Marxist brainwashing." Despite claiming she voted for Reagan twice, had an aunt in the John Birch Society, and is "the only Republican in the Post building," Sherrill told MediaWatch "This is something I got from a couple of people, and I'm not going to say who they were, conservatives. I think [conservative criticism] comes from a lot of emotion and not very much thinking."

Carlson also caricatured the Right: "In a state where Gloria Steinem was considered by some a communist, Hillary started out being regarded as a stuck-up feminist from Wellesley and Yale who wouldn't change her name and ended up being a popular and admired First Lady." Asked by MediaWatch who considered Steinem a communist, Carlson confessed: "That was overly glib, and I regret it now. But 20 years ago, a woman came from Yale Law School and the House Judiciary Committee and kept her own name. This was a very conservative group of people, and she was deep in a hole. She had to prove herself."

Both Carlson and Sherrill explained that they would have preferred to have done these articles after the health care task force released its plan. That remains the real test: Will Hillary ever become hard news, or remain a feminist icon and cult figure to be celebrated, not investigated?

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