MediaWatch: May 1991
Table of Contents:
NewsBites: Maniacal TIME
MANIACAL TIME.
Time magazine's obsession
with maligning Ronald Reagan is growing ridiculous. The
television advertisement offering "The Most Important People of
the 20th Century" video as a subscription premium begins: "Who
would you choose? A President, a Prime Minister, a national hero
or a maniacal villain?" At the word "President" the ad shows
John Kennedy; at "Prime Minister" a picture of Winston
Churchill; and at "national hero" a movie clip of John Wayne.
For "maniacal villain" Adolf Hitler appears, followed by a
smiling Ronald Reagan.
KILLING KAL.
After the Soviets shot down KAL-007 in
1983, the media gave widespread attention to numerous theories
absolving the Soviets of blame. Even five years after the
incident, on the July 4, 1988 CBS Evening News, the late
reporter Robert Schakne asserted: "The Soviets mistook the
Korean Airlines 747 for an American Air Force reconnaissance plane on a
spying mission over secret Siberian bases."
A new interview with the Soviet pilot who fired the fatal shots proves this and other "blame America" theories were wrong. As recounted by author James Oberg in an April 23 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Lt. Colonel Gennadi Osipovich told Izvestia he knew the plane was not a RC-135, and that "he was instructed to lie about the encounter: to claim that he had radioed it on an emergency channel although he had not, that the target plane's lights were off although he had seen them on, and that he had fired tracers although his cannon had not such shells." Osipovich told Seoul's MPC television he knew he was firing at a commercial plane, the Associated Press reported April 28.
How did the rest of the media react to revelations the U.S. government had told the truth all along? The Washington Post, which devoted a lengthy 1986 story to charges the plane was on a spying mission, gave it a few paragraphs in its "Around the World" column. The New York Times, news weeklies and the networks, however, have so far refused to correct the historical record.
CENSUS CENSORS.
The television networks frequently report
there are millions of homeless people. Two recent examples: "All
across the country Americans are becoming increasingly less
tolerant of homeless people, now estimated to number as many as
two million," ABC's Carole Simpson announced on March 30. "In
New York there are an estimated 70,000 homeless people, three
million across America. A problem that got a lot worse during
the boom times of the '80s," reporter Harold Dow claimed on the
March 26 CBS Evening News.
But when the Census Bureau found just 230,000, ABC, CBS and NBC were silent. Only CNN reported the April 12 finding from the 1990 count, conducted by 15,000 census workers. The bureau conceded it might have missed some people, but in order to reach Dow's claim it would have to had missed more than nine of ten.
REAGAN RANT.
Publication of Lou Cannon's new book, President Reagan: Role of a Lifetime,
provided two media heavyweights with an opportunity to do some
more Reagan bashing. NBC News President Michael Gartner reviewed
the book in the April 21 Washington Post: "Cannon starts off
by proclaiming that Reagan is not a dunce, a point that can be
questioned by the very fact that it has to be made, a point we all
want to believe but a point that Cannon tends to undercut every
few pages...Not a dunce, maybe, but not a diplomat, either. Or a
politician. Or a manager. Or a policymaker. Or a learner."
Gartner argued: "Still the nation needed more than inspiration
in the 1980s. It needed leadership -- moral leadership,
intellectual leadership, political leadership. It needed a
manager, not a cheerleader. It needed a statesman, not a star.
It needed answers, not anecdotes. It needed ideas as wells as
ideals. And Ronald Reagan wasn't up to that task."
Laurence Barrett, Time's Deputy Washington Bureau Chief, was no less gracious on April 15: "What the country did not need was the surfeit of feel-good illusions Reagan sold so successfully. Every politician peddles hope in bright ribbons. The saddest and scariest conclusion one takes from this book is that Reagan fully believed his spiels even at their most outlandish. That gut sincerity and his actor's skills let him ring up record sales in the '80s. Paying the bills is America's hellish task in the '90s and perhaps beyond."
THE MEDIA'S PET KITTY.
The media have a responsibility to
confirm allegations about public figures before reporting them.
But that's not what happened when it came to Kitty Kelley's Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography. The April 7 New York Times
carried a long front-page story by Maureen Dowd which did not
challenge one Kelley claim. Dowd defended the book in the May 13
New Republic: "Of course, the book is tawdry. Of course
the book is, in some spots, loosely sourced and over the
top....Of course, there are mistakes in it...The point, however, is that
Kelley's portrait is not essentially untrue." Dowd was only
disappointed that Kelley did not write more on the First Lady's
"tempering" of the President's "more Neanderthal
tendencies."
Newsweek media critic Jonathan Alter, who by his very position should know better, embarrassed himself by defending Kelley's professionalism in the April 22 issue: "In a narrow sense, Kelley is an effective reporter." Later he added: "Despite her wretched excesses, Kelley has the core of the story right," and "however twisted, the bulk of Kelley's stories seem to at least be based on real events." Alter preferred assaulting the Reagans' reputation: "If even a small fraction of the material amassed and borrowed here turns out to be true, Ronald Reagan and his wife had to be the most hypocritical people ever to live in the White House."
The networks weren't much better. NBC interviewed Kelley for three days in a row on Today. CBS reporter Mark Phillips typified the media's smirking abandonment of duty at the end of his April 8 Evening News report: "Is the stuff in the book true or just vindictive tales? Who knows? Who cares?"
TEDDY, OUR HERO.
While reporters were eating up Kitty Kelley's allegations about the Reagans, Time
reacted a bit differently to Senator Ted Kennedy's Palm Beach
troubles. The April 29 issue carried a three-page spread
praising the Democrat. Senior Editor Lance Morrow wrote: "He is a
lightning rod with strange electricities still firing in the air
around him -- passions that are not always his responsibility
but may emanate from psychic disturbances in the country itself.
America does not have a completely healthy relationship with
the Kennedys."
Morrow continued his toast to Kennedy: "Once, long ago, he was the Prince Hal of American politics: high-spirited, youthful, heedless. He never evolved, like Prince Hal, into the ideal king. Instead he did something that was in its way just as impressive. He became one of the great lawmakers of the century, a Senate leader whose liberal mark upon American government has been prominent and permanent...The public that knows Kennedy by his misadventures alone may vastly underrate him."
Morrow spent much of the article countering suggestions that the Democrat is an alcoholic, noting: "Kennedy is a hardworking and successful U.S. Senator with a busy schedule and a heavy load of intellectual labor that he apparently performs well. His mind is nimble and sharp, except when he has been drinking a lot." Sort of a Catch-22.
PBS HELD HOSTAGE.
Frontline is
promoting yet another left-wing conspiracy theory -- this time,
that the 1980 Reagan campaign bought off the Iranians to delay
the release of the hostages. After six months of
taxpayer-subsidized searching and a meandering hour of unsubstantiated
claims about meetings in Paris, the PBS audience learned only
that "conclusive proof is elusive." But this investigation has
gone on longer than six months: the show's main conspiracy
theorist, ex-Newsweek and AP reporter Robert Parry, has spent six years trying to prove the Reagan Administration guilty of some wrongdoing.
Mark Hosenball, a producer for NBC's Expose, attacked Parry's thesis in the April 21 Washington Post (and earlier in The New Republic of June 13, 1988). Hosenball specifically punctured Parry source Richard Brenneke, reporting that congressional investigator Jack Blum deemed him an unreliable witness. Blum recently told the Village Voice that Brenneke should have been jailed for perjury. But in the April 27 Post, Parry responded: "Blum also concluded that much of what Brenneke said was true." Parry did not tell Post readers that in the midst of devoting almost five minutes of Frontline time to Brenneke's testimony, he and co-writer Robert Ross told viewers that his "credibility remains in question."
CHANGELESS CHINA.
The New York Times learned
nothing from the Tiananmen Square massacre. In an April 14
article, reporter Nicholas Kristof praised Chinese communism:
"In recent decades, China has engineered a remarkable
health-care revolution, one that has increased the odds that her
infant will be alive in the latter half of the next century. While
the communists have yet to deliver on promises to provide Chinese
with lives that are prosperous and free, they have achieved the
remarkable feat of offering their people lives that are long and
healthy."
Kristof quoted University of North Carolina professor Gail Henderson: "There's no question that in a time when people are despondent about what's happening in China, the health-care system really is a shining light from the Maoist era that continues to shine to this day. It's a model for the developing world." Notably absent from the story: mention of China's forced abortion policy.
Meanwhile, the Times gave Chinese capitalism a much dimmer view. In an April 21 article, Kristof's wife, reporter Cheryl WuDunn, asserted: "It is an open secret that here in Shenzhen, a special economic zone just across the border from Hong Kong, economic progress has brought with it the seedy side of the free market: prostitution, corruption, smuggling and even drug trafficking. Shenzhen is China's best-known boomtown, and it is renowned throughout the country for its economic growth, high salaries, modern fashions, and adherence to 'bourgeois' morals, if any. To many people in the rest of China, Shenzhen is a lawless place."
MISLEADING MEDICARE MATH.
Some media outlets
continue the misleading policy of reporting budget "cuts" that
are really just reductions in the rate of spending growth. On
April 18, The Boston Globe ran an Associated Press
dispatch by Alan Fram: "The House yesterday approved a
Democratic-written $1.46 trillion 1992 budget that rejects President
Bush's plan to slash Medicare and other benefit programs." On the
same day, Washington Post reporter Tom Kenworthy wrote
that Bush's proposal "included such politically painful aspects
as a five-year, $25 billion cut in the Medicare program. The
Bush budget ...included a total of $46.6 billion in reductions
in Medicare and other entitlement programs over five years."
Neither reporter told readers that the $100 billion-plus Medicare budget is automatically scheduled to increase up to 15 percent per year, and that "slashing" $25 billion over five years would have left a spending increase of more than $50 billion. And what about the other $21 billion in "entitlement" cuts? They're also cuts in increases, but they're not all social programs. Under this budget's definition "entitlement" programs include outdated boondoggles like the Rural Electrification Administration. The same media that preaches about the deficit continues to keep an accurate picture of spending growth out of the news columns.
BIRDS & BEES & BERGANTINO.
It's hard to imagine a
reporter advising the government to hand out bullet-proof vests
to children as the cure to inner city violence. In an April 16
story for World News Tonight, reporter Joe Bergantino
portrayed the distribution of condoms in schools as the way to stop the
spread of pregnancy and sexual disease among teens. Bergantino
bemoaned a national "epidemic" of teen pregnancy. However, the
national teen birthrate has been dropping since 1957, according
to the National Center for Health Statistics.
Bergantino declared that "Two studies, including one conducted by the Center for Population Options (CPO) involving six different schools, have concluded condom availability does not encourage sex." Later, Bergantino cited three other studies to make the case for condoms. ABC spokesman Arnot Walker told MediaWatch two of those studies appeared in Family Planning Perspectives, published by the Planned Parenthood-affiliated Alan Guttmacher Institute. Of course, asking CPO or the Guttmacher Institute about the hazards of condoms is like asking the Tobacco Institute about the hazards of smoking.
GO WITH GRACE.
To celebrate Earth Day during the week of
April 22, the networks repeated last year's imbalance on a much
smaller scale, tilting the guest list toward the left-wing
environmentalists and shutting the free-market environmentalists
out completely. On the NBC Nightly News, reporter Bill
Lagattuta did a story including leftist luminaries Tom Hayden,
Gaylord Nelson, and Gene Karpinski from Ralph Nader's U.S.
Public Interest Research Group. CNN reporter Greg Lefevre
followed the Turner pattern of environmental bias by selecting David
Weir of the Center for Investigative Reporting and Randy Hayes of
the Rainforest Action Network.
The morning shows were even worse. NBC led the way by airing another three-part "Assignment Earth" series on Today by Paul Ehrlich, the discredited Famine 1975! devotee. Good Morning America interviewed anti-technology activist Jeremy Rifkin, and in a bow to science, CBS This Morning selected someone with more scientific credibility than Ehrlich and Rifkin combined: rock star Grace Slic.
