MediaWatch: June 1996

Janet Cooke Award: The Nonpolitical Stand Against Newt

Marches on Washington can get a lot of press coverage -- if the march is liberal. In January, the annual "March for Life" drew one story on CNN, 17 seconds each on NBC and CBS, and nothing on ABC. But when the welfare-reform opponents at the Children's Defense Fund held a "Stand for Children" on June 1, the networks aired 12 evening and five morning stories. For filing the most promotional report, NBC veteran Andrea Mitchell won the Janet Cooke Award.

Anchor Brian Williams touted the CDF march on the May 31 Nightly News, beginning with a promo under the words "Children's Story": "NBC News In Depth tonight, those who can't fight for themselves, hoping there's power in numbers." Later, Williams announced: "Washington's getting ready for a major gathering -- a march to focus attention on kids that organizers are calling `The Stand for Children'...Organizers refused to estimate the crowd size, but the figure on their march permit is 200,000, coming from 3,000 sponsor organizations from all over the country. About 1,000 buses are leaving from New York City alone. But there are critics who think this march is all about all the wrong things, like big government and big spending on social programs."

Mitchell proclaimed: "They are America's future, and all too often, America's forgotten people. Too young to vote, too small to be heard, now coming to Washington with a message: America, listen up...From Miami, Ava and Jerra McDonald are heading to the nation's capital, joining thousands of families from around the country, all coming to talk facts, alarming facts. Every 32 seconds, a child is born into poverty; everyday, three children die from abuse or neglect; everyday, six children commit suicide, 13 are murdered; today, 100,000 are homeless." Added Harvard professor Deborah Prothrow-Stith: "Children are suffering because in this country we have had public policy over the last decade and a half which has literally been mean to children."

Mitchell continued: "Elementary school teacher Mark Lewis sees the results. An arrest right outside the yard where second- and third-graders are learning to play baseball.... This class, part of a special program, tutoring in math, reading, geography, for kids who play in a baseball league...The federal government kicks in $50,000, exactly the kind of spending critics think is a waste of tax dollars." Mitchell aired a clip of Newt Gingrich: "But those solutions we think have to start with balancing the budget and not crushing these young people with a generation of having to work to pay off our debt."

Mitchell ended: "You might wonder why marching for children would be controversial. But critics think rally organizers are using the kids to try to prevent cuts in welfare and other big government programs. That's politics. To a lot of the children coming here this weekend this rally is about something far more important: survival."

How could Mitchell maintain that the CDF's rally was beyond controversy, beyond politics? Mitchell told MediaWatch: "As you know, the event involved the Girl Scouts, church groups of all denominations, diverse organizations around the country. We did reflect the fact was politically controversial, but we did not set out to do a political piece. We were trying to focus on the children, on the needs of the children, which is why we went to a school and found inner-city kids who were being taught on a one-on-one basis by a wonderful teacher. We were taking a step back, if you will, from the daily news aspects of it. We added depth and context."

But the story put Gingrich in a liberal political context (opposes wonderful teachers for poor children), it said nothing about the financial self-interest of the march's supporters. As the Heritage Foundation's Ken Weinstein noted, "Over 100 of the endorsing groups received a total of at least $392 million [in federal grants] in Fiscal Years 1993-94 alone." As for CDF, Edelman defined herself as so ultraliberal that she got in a public fight with liberal Reps. George Miller (D-Calif.) and Tom Downey (D-N.Y.) over their failure to be liberal enough on government-funded day care. CDF is best known for opposing any welfare work requirement for parents. Mitchell explained the lack of focus: "We would get to covering the march the next day. We weren't covering the organizers or the politics."

But if Ralph Reed and the Christian Coalition announced a march for children, would the networks simply cover it as a nonpartisan event? Think again: in covering a Denver rally of the men's Christian group the Promise Keepers on June 22, 1995, NBC's Roger O'Neil asserted: "while [founder Bill McCartney] attacks abortion and homosexuality, his organization says it has no political agenda."

If the CDF were really beyond politics, they might have noted in their press materials that Census Bureau statistics show child poverty went down every year from 1983 to 1989. It's gone up in every year since then. If children were only interested in the best program for "survival," would they see the need for another Reagan? Mitchell said no: "I think that a lot of things went right, a lot of things went wrong. Those statistics are taken way out of context. That isn't the issue. In this country we have terrible conditions for lots of kids."

In an analysis for the Joint Economic Committee, economists Lowell Galloway and Richard Vedder argued the trillions spent in the "War on Poverty" haven't led to an automatic reduction in child poverty: "Between 1959 and 1969, the child poverty rate falls precipitously, from 27.3 to 14.0 percent, an average of 1.33 percentage points a year. After 1969, however, the official child poverty rate begins to drift upward, reaching a new peak in 1983, at 22.3 percent. In the 24 years between 1969 and 1993, the child poverty rate rises by 8.7 percentage points, about 0.36 percentage points a year."

In their research on labor-force participation and the attractiveness of welfare benefits relative to wages, Vedder and Galloway come to a very different conclusion: "On average one of every ten [children] will be classified by the federal government as officially living in poverty precisely because government is too large." (Italics theirs).

What was the source of Mitchell's "facts"? Take the claim of 100,000 homeless children. The CDF has promoted that number for years, citing a National Academy of Sciences study from 1988. But the NAS didn't do any original research to determine its number: it used an August 28, 1985 front-page story in The New York Times by reporter Josh Barbanel, which included no figures on the number or percentage of homeless children, making the 100,000 estimate baseless. When asked her source, Mitchell said: "NBC research." When asked where "NBC research" got the number, Mitchell replied: "I asked for research. I'm not sure what the basis was. I think it's fair to ask. I'll check."

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