MediaWatch: March 1988
Table of Contents:
- MediaWatch: March 1988
- Study: It's All Meese and No Wright
- NewsBites
- Today's Cuba
- Revolving Door
- Janet Cooke Award: Peter Jennings: ABC News
Study: It's All Meese and No Wright
Almost since the day he took office back in February, 1985 liberals in Congress have been hurling charges of improper conduct toward Attorney General Ed Meese. With the disclosure of the Iraqi pipeline memo in late January, his opponents received plenty of help from the media in their quest to raise a cloud of suspicion. Over the past year equally serious questions have also been raised about the ethical conduct of the most powerful Democrat in the nation, House Speaker Jim Wright, including influence peddling and campaign money laundering. But, a MediaWatch Study has found that while major media outlets jump on any rumor of misconduct by the Attorney General, they virtually ignore questions about Wright's behavior.
Using the Nexis news data retrieval system, MediaWatch determined The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, Time, and U.S. News & World Report, during just January and February of this year, ran a total of 103 news stories focused on Meese's ethics. Another 73 made passing reference. The CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News and ABC's World News Tonight ran 26 reports. In all of last year and the first two months of 1988, however, the print publications carried a mere six stories focused on Wright's ethical problems while 23 others made passing reference. The print media covered Meese 17 times more often than Wright in one-seventh the time. Incredibly, in the 14 months ending in February the networks never aired a story on Wright's problems.
Nearly 46 percent of the 103 Meese stories in the newspapers and magazines dealt with old controversies, including how he supposedly used his influence to obtain a federal contract for Wedtech, and possible conflict of interest concerning stock he owned in telephone companies. So far, nothing has been proven illegal. On January 28 the Los Angeles Times claimed Meese may have acted improperly by not reporting that a memo from a friend made reference to a plan to "bribe" Israeli officials who opposed the oil pipeline from Iraq to Jordan. While vague, the media pounced on the story, looking for a way to turn the development into a scandal. During the following month, the print media outlets ran 56 stories exclusively on Meese's role with the pipeline, accounting for 54 percent of the Meese articles. Another 33 pipeline stories concentrated on other players, but made a passing reference to the Attorney General.
A few weeks later, ABC's Dennis Troute reported that a key player in the pipeline project said the memo "shows no technical violations of the law by the Attorney General," but Troute still didn't hesitate to pick up the anti-Meese agenda, concluding on February 12: "His critics will point to it as another example of what they call 'a blind spot to ethical concerns' on the part of Mr. Meese." When Meese released the memo on February 22 in order to clear his name, NBC reporter James Polk declared: "This is still likely to loom as the most embarrassing crisis yet for the beleaguered Attorney General."
While some of the allegations of wrong-doing against Wright date back to 1979, several new questions arose in 1987. These included: 1) His profiting from a business relationship with a Ft. Worth developer he helped get federal money. 2) His intervening with federal officials to prevent the closing of a debt-ridden Texas savings and loan owned by a big Democratic contributor. 3) Charges Wright laundered campaign contributions for his personal use through a publisher who reportedly paid Wright $54,000 in book royalties while the company received $68,000 in 1986 campaign funds, a year he ran unopposed and paid just $100 in campaign staff salaries.
These questions prompted U.S. Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Georgia) to call for an investigation. Virtually every media outlet ignored Gingrich's February 19 press conference which generated just a two paragraph story in the Los Angeles Times and a passing reference in an unrelated Post story. But the record of the networks is even more atrocious. Newsweek on June 29 and the Post on September 24, considered the allegations serious enough to merit lengthy stories. But the networks didn't pick up these pieces as they often did when it came to Meese. The only mention occurred during a January 25, 1988 NBC profile. Wright told reporter Bob Kur he never did anything worth investigating.
What might account for this disparity? At least some of the reason is institutional: the national media, especially the TV networks, consider the Executive to be the most significant of the three branches of government. That's why, for instance, ABC viewers see a lot more of White House reporter Sam Donaldson than Capitol Hill correspondent Brit Hume. As Hume explained to MediaWatch, that short shrift naturally "leads the media to become soft on Congress, its leaders especially." But, as one of the few solid conservatives left in the cabinet, it's hard to avoid concluding a more important reason is that reporters don't mind emphasizing anything that makes the Meese look bad.
