MediaWatch: March 1991
Table of Contents:
Time Writers Rant As C-SPAN Cameras Roll
STANLEY VS. THE "SUPERPATRIOTS"
Time magazine editors and reporters sit in meetings trashing conservative politicians and their concerns. Sound like the paranoid dream of overworked MediaWatch editors? No, that's just what C-SPAN documented when the cable channel aired a week-long look "Inside Time."
During the February 8 meeting of Time's Washington staff, Bureau Chief Stanley Cloud dismissed complaints about reporting by CNN's Peter Arnett from Baghdad. "I don't want to focus on...whether he is or is not an honest reporter. I don't think that's the issue." To Cloud, the issue was not Arnett's reporting, which has out-raged millions of Americans (not just conservatives): "It's a story about superpatriots and how they act in time of war." In Time's subsequent February 18 issue, Cloud wrote "In recent weeks, the halls of Congress have been fouled by superpatriotic blasts from a small band of conservative legislators."
Arnett's reports have been "valid and interesting and have shed some light," Cloud asserted during the meeting. He explained away Arnett's censored reporting by summarizing a dinner conversation he had with two U.S. Senators: "They said he's just a conduit for Iraqi information. I said that's all we are too, pal. Nobody out there is getting anything but what the Pentagon wants us to have." Cloud complained that the "demagogues" attacked Arnett using "inflamed rhetoric." In the February 11 Washington Post, Cloud used inflamed rhetoric himself, comparing the Pentagon's press restrictions to a "smoothly functioning dictatorship."
As to the charges that Arnett was sympathetic to the Viet Cong when he reported the Vietnam War for Associated Press, Cloud insisted: "By the way, this is not a war with the Viet Cong. As far as I know, the Viet Cong is supported by the Soviet Union, which supports the U.S. in this war. So it's absurd." That's like arguing that because Germany is currently our ally, the Nazis weren't our enemy.
Speaking of Nazis, Cloud's Washington bureau underlings competed to outdo the boss by comparing Vietnam POW and war hero Senator John McCain (R-AZ) to Hitler's thugs. Congressional correspondent Hays Gorey remarked: "Well, McCain has got this ad hoc group of superpatriots he's organizing." NASA reporter Jerome Cramer retorted: "They wear brown shirts and march around. Small potatoes."
Cloud later admitted to a C-SPAN interviewer: "We may have been a little less outspoken....I think perhaps there were a few others who pulled their punches a little bit, were a little less outspoken than they might have been." One can only imagine what goes on when the cameras are not rolling.
