MediaWatch: March 1994
Table of Contents:
- MediaWatch: March 1994
- Networks Rarely Cover Church News, Ignore Religious Concerns on Social Issues
- NewsBites: Aborting the Mother
- Revolving Door: Tara Helps Tony
- Media Ignore Sexual Harassment Charges -- When Made Against Clinton
- Crying Over Spilt Milk
- Waste Watchdogs
- Reviewers Ignore Gulf War Record
- Janet Cooke Award: ABC's Strait, Compton, Kast, Gregory, and Burns Tout Benefits of Clinton Health Plan
Media Ignore Sexual Harassment Charges -- When Made Against Clinton
Paula Jones: She's No Anita Hill
At a 1991 ABC News Christmas party, former ABC spokeswoman and Democratic Party veteran Kitty Bayh brought pencils that read "I Believe Her," based on the Hill-Thomas hearings. But since William Kennedy Smith was then on trial for rape, she told The Washington Post: "I should have put `I Believe Anita' on them."
In that same spirit, which insists less on the feminist maxim of believing the woman first than on believing the Democrat first, the national media chose to ignore the story of Paula Corbin Jones, who told a Washington press conference on February 11 that President Clinton, as Governor of Arkansas, had sexually harassed her in 1991.
According to Jones, while working for an Arkansas state agency at a conference, troopers delivered her to a hotel room to meet Clinton. There, he asked her to perform fellatio on him, and even exposed himself. Jones has offered two affidavits by corroborating witnesses, and threatened to sue if she does not get an apology from the White House.
A major scandal? Hardly. Three networks ignored it. ABC's World News Tonight gave it 16 seconds and The New York Times a few paragraphs. Three days later in a "Style" piece on the "primal scream" of hatred for Clinton expressed at a conservative conference, The Washington Post's Lloyd Grove discounted it as "another ascension of Mount Bimbo."
Why no stories from the same media which made the uncorroborated Anita Hill a heroine and sexual harassment the gravest political sin? In the March 7 New Republic, former Newsweek reporter Mickey Kaus described the scene at the Jones press conference: "Afterward...reporters conferred with each other to try to figure out whether what they'd just seen was `a story' and...whether anybody was going to report it. The consensus was that if CNN carried it the networks would carry it, which meant The New York Times might carry it, in which case it would be a big story."
Kaus explained why that didn't happen: "Clinton is also the best President we've had in a long time. That is the unspoken reason the sex charges haven't received as much play as you might expect. Reporters are patriots, too; it's their dirty little secret...Few journalists want to see the President crippled now that he is making some progress in cracking large, intractable domestic problems."
Meanwhile, the February 7 Washington Times reported that Hill has made half a million dollars in lecture fees, and recently signed a two-book contract worth more than a million dollars. All this despite denying that she had any intention of gaining financially from her testimony, a flip-flop yet to be addressed by the rest of the media.
