MediaWatch: June 1995
Table of Contents:
- MediaWatch: June 1995
- GOP Candidates: Far Right, Anti-Choice, Draft-Dodging, Abrasive, Ethically Challenged
- NewsBites: Direct Mail Divergence
- In the Media: Want More on Clinton Success
- Reporters Describe GOP Plans to Increase Spending as "Huge Cuts"
- CBS This Morning Hails Hillary
- Truth About Consequences
- Still Missing "Hate Radio" on the Left
- Janet Cooke Award: All Things Ill-Considered
Still Missing "Hate Radio" on the Left
The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour invited six talk show hosts to discuss the Oklahoma City bombing on April 25, including Larry Bensky of Pacifica, the far-left network of five FM stations that receives around $1 million a year from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Bensky explained: "Talk radio is an entertainment medium. It is set up to be commercially successful on AM radio by getting the maximum number of listeners. It plays to the lowest common denominators, in many cases, of fear, of anxiety and anger. It doesn't spread information. It spreads paranoia."
Bensky was not asked to defend Los Angeles station KPFK's "Afrikan Mental Liberation Weekend" of 1993, when Elijah Muhammed declared: "I would not say that the white man is a descendent of Satan, because that would be wrong. We didn't have a Satan before the white man. So the white man is Satan himself."
During Operation Desert Shield in 1990, Berkeley station KPFA invited on Craig Hulet, who explained: "George Bush is a threat...[He] has perpetrated the most heinous race war against [the] black [and] Hispanic community...since slavery...That's who's going to the prison camps...We've got a man in the White House that is more fascist, more racist, more dangerous than any man on the planet." KPFA then offered Hulet's tapes as a premium for donating to the station. But the media that harped on Limbaugh and Liddy have failed to notice.
