MediaWatch: March 1995
Table of Contents:
Janet Cooke Award: The Magazine That Cried Wolf
Time Decries "Elimination" of Nutrition Programs as Actual Spending Continues to Soar
The March 2, 1981 issue of Time magazine came with a cover that read "The Ax Falls." In the 14 years since that metaphorical ax fell, symbolizing deep Reagan budget cuts, the annual federal budget has increased by $1 trillion. But the panicked tone of coverage -- that federal programs will be gutted, even eliminated -- remains the same.
The March 6, 1995 Time recycled the tone of the early Reagan era. Under a heart-tugging picture of a tot in a grocery cart, Time's headline asked "To Be Leaner or Meaner? A congressional proposal to eliminate nutrition programs raises an outcry." For obscuring the actual increases in federal nutrition spending under anti-conservative hype, Time earned the Janet Cooke Award.
Senior Writer Elizabeth Gleick began the article with anecdotes of poor children who didn't get breakfast until they arrived at school, followed by a school administrator warning: "If they cut this program, I don't know what [the children] are going to do." Acknowledging free-market economist Milton Friedman's maxim "there's no such thing as a free lunch," Time asserted: "But the costs of the National School Lunch Act, passed in 1946, also yields real benefits. It enables around 14 million children to eat nutritious lunches for free or reduced prices at a total cost to taxpayers of $4.454 billion. But not since the notorious condiment incident of 1981, when the Reagan administration attempted to reclassify catsup and pickles as vegetables, has this aid been in such jeopardy."
Time allowed that "Republicans contend that truly needy children will continue to receive benefits," followed by a quote from Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.): "The American public expects us to cut spending...but I don't think they expect us to make war on kids." For maximum effect, Time highlighted Obey's quote in large letters under a picture of two school girls eating.
Gleick emphasized: "The flaws in the proposal, children's advocates insist, are many and terrifying....In addition to removing the nutrition programs from federal supervision, the proposed changes also sharply slice the total amount of money available by $860 million in fiscal 1996 and $7 billion over five years."
But that doesn't match the actual GOP plan, which The Washington Times reported increases the school lunch program from $4.5 billion to $4.7 billion next year, and adds $200 million each year through 1999. The "cut" is a drop in the rate of growth from 5.2 percent to 4.5 percent for 1996. How can this be compared to the question of "leaner or meaner," the plan to "eliminate nutrition programs," to "make war on kids"?
Time also played a subtle game in labeling their sources: the liberals in the story -- Rep. David Obey, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and Larry Brown -- were "advocacy groups for the poor" and "children's advocates," while the Heritage Foundation's Robert Rector was a "conservative" bent on "retrenchment." The article quoted Susan Steinmetz of the "welfare-reform division at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, an advocacy group for the poor. `One couldn't find a more ill-advised proposal. It's amazing.'" Gleick continued: "Retrenchment, however seems to be precisely the idea. Conservatives contend that free food has done little to solve the problems plaguing the nation."
Heritage analyst Robert Rector told Time: "Go into any housing project and you don't see kids bent over with rickets. You see strong young men who are a danger to themselves and their community."
Rector has written that by selling a false picture of starving children, liberal groups are distracting public attention from the real problems of poor kids: family breakdown, crime, no role models. But Time omitted Rector's more relevant argument: that Agriculture Department studies have found that rich children and poor children have very similar nutritional intakes, and that the top nutrition-related problem with poor children is obesity. Instead, Gleick used liberal activists to paint an entirely different picture: "The idea that these gains may be rolled back has alarmed some children's advocates. Predicted J. Larry Brown, director of the Center on Hunger, Poverty, and Nutrition Policy at Tufts University: 'We're going to see levels of damage that we have not seen in 40 or 50 years.'" Time failed to note that Brown's Tufts center has estimated the number of hungry American children at 12 million, twice as high as previous liberal activist estimates, citing as a source the Census Bureau, which has completed no studies of hunger in America.
"That's pretty outrageous," Rector told MediaWatch about Time's claim of billion-dollar cuts in nutrition programs. "They didn't cut anything. Time is part of that Washington abuse of the language that perpetually confuses the voters. WIC [Women's, Infant's, Children's food subsidies] actually received an increase, too. What they don't tell you is these programs are eligible to people making 185 percent of the poverty line, or $27,000 for a family of four. That family will pay $6,000 in taxes. Why not let them keep that money, instead of taking it and giving it back?"
As for the school lunch program, Rector told MediaWatch: "These programs are lavish subsidies to middle-class schools, even children of millionaires. Twenty or thirty percent of the funds are going to children of those who make more than $30,000 a year. They are extraordinarily inefficient in their targeting. Every time the Republicans propose to fix that, the school lunch managers fight it, because more affluent schools will drop out of the program."
When asked for comment, Gleick referred MediaWatch to Washington bureau reporter Ann Blackman, who failed to return repeated phone calls. Ironically, in 1981, the Reagan administration had proposed a 29 percent reduction in school lunch funds instead of the present plan for increases, but in the October 12, 1981 Time, reporter George Church wrote "the school program has now grown to the point where it benefits students who are in little danger of starving," and cited examples like affluent Grosse Pointe, Michigan, where "the school board knows that more than a few parents lied about family income or exaggerated the number of their dependents in order to qualify for free or reduced-price lunches."
But in 1995, Time's journalistic approach is not about balance, and it's not about exploring the nuances of a program to make it work more efficiently. It's about intimidating Republicans out of reducing federal spending (as if they were doing that in this case) by showing heart-tugging pictures of grade-school victims and quoting "children's advocates" warning of massive "damage." It's the kind of journalism that warns of an ax falling, but the ax never falls.
