MediaWatch: March 1995
Table of Contents:
NewsBites: Living in a Radio-Free Cave
A small item up front in the February 20 U.S. News & World Report read: "Until word leaked last week that former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo will soon have a weekly radio show, former Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower's show was a lone liberal outpost in the conservative world of syndicated talk radio." Rush Limbaugh, G. Gordon Liddy, and Michael Reagan may attract the most listeners, but Hightower is not the only liberal syndicated talk host. Liberals with daily national shows include Tom Leykis, Alan Colmes and Jerry Brown, to say nothing of moderates, such as Jim Bohannon and Gil Gross.
Racist Richmond?
With Republican presidential candidates promising to end affirmative action, the networks have taken to heart Newsweek Washington Bureau Chief Evan Thomas's post-election lament: "This is a rotten time to be black."
Carole Simpson targeted the Republicans on the February 19 World News Sunday: "Today three leading contenders for the Republican presidential nomination, Bob Dole, Phil Gramm and Lamar Alexander, all said they would eliminate affirmative action as it's now practiced. Affirmative action is under attack, not just in Congress, but in the courts. ABC's Jim Angle looks at how one decision devastated one business community." Angle surveyed the damage in Virginia: "Richmond is more than 50 percent black, and in the early 1980s had set aside a third of city contracts for minorities. But in 1989, the Supreme Court said that figure was arbitrary and, therefore, unconstitutional....Now [Richmond] has a 16 percent goal for minority contracts. But in the four years without guarantees, minority share of city contracts plunged from 35 percent to one percent."
According to Angle, black businessmen just can't make it without government: "Without government setting an example, these businessmen say the private sector will simply ignore them." He continued, "Minority businessmen here say their experience makes it clear that without affirmative action, even those who want to work will be left on the outside looking in." Angle failed to note that in Richmond, blacks are on the inside, not the outside: the city manager is black, and of the nine members of the City Council, three are white and six are black, including the Mayor, who also serves on the Council.
Nightly Parade of Victims
In his March 2 radio commentary, ABC anchor Peter Jennings lectured listeners: "A Balanced Budget Amendment, even if passed and ratified, wouldn't really cut a single penny of spending...That would require difficult choices." World News Tonight isn't helping by running four almost or totally one-sided stories on the "victims" of proposed budget cuts.
On January 25, reporter Bill Blakemore debunked Republican arts cuts: "In Kentucky, money from the National Endowment for the Arts means thousands of kids pay only $4 instead of $20 to see a live symphony....Most of the NEA's $167 million budget goes to such programs that make art accessible to ordinary Americans." As for public broadcasting, he added "cutting federal support would jeopardize many programs about Kentucky life, and 6,000 hours of instructional broadcasts."
Reporter Ken Kashiwahara defended student aid on February 14, summarizing the plight of the James family: "no federal help -- no college." Kashiwahara concluded the family was "praying not only that [daughter] Lindsay will qualify for student loan programs, but that the programs will still exist." Michele Norris reported February 24: "Public housing programs were hardest of those hit when Republicans took the axe to federal spending." She quoted an angry public housing resident and HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros, and listed the benefits cut because "the Republicans carved out nearly $17 billion dollars."
On March 4, World News Saturday anchor Barry Serafin warned: "Budget cutting fever inspired by Speaker Gingrich and the new Republican Congress has infected government at all levels." Reporter Ned Potter focused on New York state, where "many small programs are getting lost in the shuffle, programs that may actually save money in the long run." He interviewed two recipients of state programs, and dismissed charity: "At this church food bank, organizers worry they will be overwhelmed with hungry people if government programs die."
Hailing Clinton's Helper
In eulogizing former Senator J. William Fulbright, reporters embellished some aspects of his record, while failing to report others. In a February 20 Newsweek article titled "A Politician of Principle," Jonathan Alter declared that Fulbright, "whose withering questions during televised hearings helped to change the mind of the nation, will be remembered for his principled opposition to U.S. policy in Vietnam."
What in Alter's mind made him so principled? Alter wrote: "He was right on Joseph McCarthy (denouncing him early), embarrassingly wrong on civil rights (the major blemish on his record) and prescient on world affairs." So prescient that he opposed efforts to fight communism both at home and abroad.
While all the networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN) and the major news magazines (Newsweek, Time, and U.S. News & World Report) mentioned Fulbright's connection to Clinton, none reported what David Maraniss wrote in his biography on Clinton, First in His Class: "Lee Williams, Fulbright's chief aide, a graduate of the University of Arkansas Law School, had several contacts there and worked the telephone from his Capitol Hill office trying to arrange Clinton's enrollment (in the ROTC program)," which Maraniss noted had become a "safe haven for students looking to avoid the draft."
Right-Wing Radical Nuts
Equating the lethargy of past Democrat-controlled Congresses with "governing," Time and Newsweek have denounced the energetic pace of newly-elected House Republicans. Describing attempts by Republican freshman to include a three-fifths vote for tax increases under the Balanced Budget Amendment, the magazines exhausted the thesaurus for negative labels. In the February 6 issue, under the headline "The `Shiites' of the House," Newsweek's Thomas Rosenstiel declared: "The Gingrich Republicans won control of Congress with the hot rhetoric popular on talk radio. Now they can't help but govern the same way."
Rosenstiel summarized the freshmen: "Most....aren't as bombastic as [Rep. Bob] Dornan or as bitter as [Majority Leader Dick] Armey...But they tend to be fiercely ideological and unyielding." Rosenstiel claimed the "real threat" to the Amendment were "dogmatic freshmen," the "radicals" and "renegades" insisting on a three-fifths vote for higher taxes. Rosenstiel called freshmen attempting to repeal the assault weapons ban "gun zealots."
More Right-Wing Radical Nuts
Time's February 6 headline on the freshmen read: "A zealous crop of House freshmen wants to yank the agenda rightward." Senior Writer Richard Lacayo singled out "the shock troops of the revolution, they were hard to the right and unbeholden to the new order. Almost half of them had never held office of any kind before." Lacayo called Republicans who opposed a supermajority to raise taxes "moderates," while tagging those who tried to make it harder to raise taxes "radicals" and "the Jacobins of this revolution." Incumbents weren't immune from labels either. Profiling Budget Committee Chairman John Kasich (R-Ohio) in the February 27 Time, Karen Tumulty wrote that freshmen seeking to cut government spending "learned their radical ideas were not quite as radical as the chairman's." Reporters who find opposition to raising taxes so "radical" could also be labeled -- as liberals.
Women Weren't Oppressed?
The fallen communist governments of Eastern Europe are best remembered for oppressing their citizens, yet some in the media have engaged in historical revisionism to denigrate the area's new regimes. The latest example came from Boston Globe staff reporter Elizabeth Neuffer, whose February 12 article on the progress of women declared: "As people from eastern Germany to Hungary reel under the impact of their move to capitalism, which has produced double-digit inflation and unemployment, it is women who are feeling that transition's sharpest bite."
What made the communist era special? According to Neuffer, "Women were expected to work, so were guaranteed jobs. They were also to produce children, so were given a vast array of social services." About one of those social services no longer available, Neuffer wrote: "Abortion had been freely available in place of contraception. Now, in Poland, a woman has the right to an abortion only if she is raped or her life is in danger. In Germany, the former East and West are still quarreling over the issue."
Neuffer concluded: "Across Eastern Europe, women find that from abortion rights to economic status the world in which they live and work is not what they anticipated five years ago. While few want a return to communism, most are convinced that capitalism is still essentially a man's world."
Best in the Business?
The March American Journalism Review (AJR) included its annual "Best in the Business" awards. Selected by a survey of 1,000 subscribers to the magazine read by reporters, editors and producers, the list of winners reads more like the "Best of the Left." Newly installed NBC News commentator Bill Moyers won "Best White House Press Secretary (Ever)" for his work as Lyndon Johnson's mouthpiece. He beat out Pierre Salinger, the former Kennedy Press Secretary and ABC News reporter. Last year The American Spectator uncovered Troopergate and Paula Jones, and exposed Wall Street Journal reporters Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson's book on Anita Hill as a fraud. But the media readers of AJR chose the left-wing Mother Jones as the "Best Magazine for Investigative Journalism." PBS' Frontline won second prize for "Best TV Newsmagazine." In the past, it provided a platform for the discredited October Surprise and Christic Institute "secret team" theories. The award for the "Best Nationally Syndicated Columnist" was bestowed upon the Texas liberal Molly Ivins, who specializes in ridiculing conservatives.
It's So Great!
Famously perky Today co-host Katie Couric led the cheers for government-subsidized child care in a February 15 segment with liberal Working Mother editor Judsen Culbreth and North Carolina state official Robin Britt. Couric used pessimistic projections on state run child care for 1994: "Day care standards differ from state to state and it seems that most of them are doing a pretty poor job. A major study found only one in every seven children are in a day care environment that is nurturing and prepares that child adequately for school."
Couric hailed Britt for his state's new spending spree: "What motivated North Carolina to really get on the stick, if you will?...This is costing the state of North Carolina big bucks, is it not?" Britt replied: "We're making that investment, Katie, we're spending $41 million a year now, and we're asking the General Assembly for $21 million more for 12 new counties next year. We have 32 counties currently participating in Smart Start." Later, Couric asked "Why aren't more states doing what North Carolina is doing? It's so great to hear this." Culbreth lamented: "I don't think they understand and appreciate the problem. I'm glad there's so much news on child care now, to bring out how poor it is in some places." Couric ended with the one-sided conclusion: "Amen....Hopefully a lot of states will follow North Carolina's lead."
