MediaWatch: May 1994

NewsBites: Newsweek Loves the Times

Newsweek  Loves the Times
Newsweek's Larry Reibstein and Nina Archer Biddle sent a late Valentine to the new editors of The New York Times in an April 18 article on personnel changes at the paper. Retiring Executive Editor Max Frankel was "cerebral and decent." New Executive Editor Joseph Lelyveld was called "an uncommonly graceful writer" whose "brilliance is noted as frequently as his shyness." New Managing Editor Eugene Roberts "brilliantly covered the civil rights movement for the Times" and is "loved in his newsroom" for his "Columbo-like, disheveled personality [which] has endeared reporters for decades." Brilliant, cerebral, loved, decent -- Newsweek usually reserves these adjectives for Eleanor Clift's stories on the Clintons.

Gumbel's Dumbbell Questions
The crime bill before Congress, containing provisions to deny weightlifting equipment and expensive college grants to convicts, came under fire from Bryant Gumbel, citing the need for "rehabilitation." On the April 18 Today, Gumbel claimed that for prisoners, weightlifting was "one of the few recreational activities still available to them." He asked Rep. Deborah Pryce (R-Ohio) if she was "just kissing off the idea of rehabilitation?" Gumbel added: "If you're really worried about a convict's muscles when he gets out, why don't you do a better job of rehabilitating him, rather than depriving him of something because of what they might do when you've failed to do that?"

Gumbel also taunted her: "Should we not educate them, because they might become smarter criminals?" Gumbel mocked Pryce's claim that weights could be used as weapons: "Utensils are used more as weapons. Should we make them eat with their hands so they don't have silverware?" On April 21, after Pryce's legislation passed, Gumbel acted as if prison weightrooms were an entitlement, snapping "I guess they just want them [prisons] to be warehouses."

Hating Houston
It's been a long time since the media caricatured the 1992 Republican convention as a "festival of hate and fear." So pardon The New York Times for its recent reminder. On March 27, reporter Richard Berke focused on "How Houston's Angry Din Still Haunts Republicans." Berke claimed: "The aura of negativism, even intolerance, that seemed to encase the Astrodome that week in Houston, still hangs heavy over the Republican psyche." He added, "The gathering is remembered for the vituperative orations in prime time of Patrick J. Buchanan, Pat Robertson and Marilyn Quayle." By whom?

Berke asserted "the fallout from Houston especially recalls that of the Democratic convention in 1984," when Walter Mondale promised to increase taxes. But CBS News exit polls found few 1992 voters based their decision on the conventions. During election coverage CBS correspondent Ed Bradley even stated, "I think in past years the conventions were very important how they played on television....This year they fell at the bottom of the list." Still, Berke concluded, "It may be a long time before that week in Houston is forgotten. Consider the best face that [William] Bennett could put on the event: `It wasn't as bad as people remember it.'"

Racist Redistricting? The Supreme Court recently rejected North Carolina's oddly-shaped congressional districts, designed to elect more minority members to Congress, with Justice O'Connor citing "an uncomfortable resemblance to...apartheid." CNN's Bruce Morton suggested other ways to play racial politics. On the April 3 Late Edition, he charged: "Usually, sadly, whites don't vote for blacks, so if blacks are to sit in Congress, the rules have to change somehow. If drawing funny district lines is out, something else will have to be tried." Morton ignored the victories of Virginia Governor Doug Wilder in a state which is 77 percent white, or Rep. Gary Franks (R-Conn.) who has won two terms in an 88 percent white district. Morton declared "you have to tinker with one-man, one-vote somehow because it just isn't that simple" and mentioned that "Lani Guinier...suggests cumulative voting."

To ABC anchor Peter Jennings, redistricting for minorities "created districts next door which caused all sorts of problems." Jennings outlined the "problem" on the April 18 World News Tonight: "When you draw up a district for blacks, you create ultraconservative white districts right next door to them."

The Same Green Routine
Another Earth Day, another set of stories dominated by the left. In an April 21 "American Agenda" report, ABC's Ned Potter sought an answer to Peter Jennings' introductory question: "The President said today, as he said so many times before, 'We have the responsibility to pass on a better environment to our children.' But is this administration doing its part?" Potter consulted Carl Pope of the Sierra Club, Fred Krupp of the Environmental Defense Fund and Albert Meyerhoff of the National Resources Defense Council before concluding that, "many groups say...the administration has not used enough of its muscle to protect the earth."

Similarly, Washington Post reporter Gary Lee's April 22 story cited only Eric Olsen of the National Resources Defense Council, Steve Kretzman of Greenpeace, and the newsletter Greenwire as critics of the administration. And from the right? Not a single free-market environmentalist.

Pauley Pummels Protesters
On April 26, Dateline NBC profiled teen pro-life protesters, and while anchor Jane Pauley allowed the teens and their parents to explain their positions, she didn't hesitate to step in and refute them. One teen had passed out pro-life literature at a high school, Pauley suggested she place her energies elsewhere: "Why aren't you out there passing out information about contraception, because that guarantees that there won't be a baby aborted?"

Another teen veteran of clinic protests explained that children have more leeway when demonstrating because of lenient juvenile laws. Pauley was amazed: "That, some people are going to say, Josh, that is a cold and cynical political strategy. That you have found a way to maximize the bodies on the front lines by making them children who can cycle in and out of the justice process quickly." The pro-life movement didn't invent this tactic. It's been used by the left in anti-war protests during the Vietnam and Gulf Wars and by ACT-UP demonstrators today. Where are the NBC reports on these protesters' "cold and cynical" political strategies?

Back in July 1992, Dateline reporter Deborah Roberts described laws allowing girls seeking an abortion to secure a judge's permission instead of parental notification "humiliating" and a "grueling ordeal for a teenager." For Dateline, it seems teens are old enough to get an abortion without parental notification, but too young to protest it.

Masculine Medicine?
The last bastion of misogyny appears to be America's hospitals and medical schools. In an April 13 "American Agenda" report, ABC reporter Jackie Judd explained: "To hear women talk it's as if the women's liberation movement made barely a mark on medicine....Slow-to-change attitudes have helped to keep women in the dark. Even today, some women complain that doctors don't take them seriously." How could this happen? To Judd, the answer was simple: "The chaos, perceived and real, is the result of decades of neglect, lingering discrimination and the imprecision of science."

As Judd pointed out, "A few years ago, women agitated and they did get more research dollars devoted to their health, including a $625 million federal study covering everything from osteoporosis to heart disease. But women are still behind the curve." Her report, however, neglected other results-oriented statistics. For example, the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics has found female life expectancy increased at a faster rate than males over the last 20 years. Women are more likely to be covered by medical insurance than men, according to the Census Bureau. The 1994 National Institutes of Health spending estimate includes $262.9 million for breast cancer as opposed to $55 million for prostate cancer, or 3.5 times more funding for each new case of breast cancer as opposed to prostate cancer. Peter Jennings ironically introduced Judd's segment, "The medical establishment in the United States, when it comes to treating men and women, often has a double standard." Maybe so.

More Homework for CNN?
Refuse to increase taxes and the education establishment raises public alarm by threatening to cut popular programs. It's a ploy CNN bought hook, line and sinker. "In some schools the three R's soon may be all that's left as funding dries up. It's a problem across the nation, a problem apparently having few solutions," lamented anchor Linden Soles in introducing the April 8 World News segment. Reporter Lisa Price explained: "Next fall, the voice of the BloomTrail High School choir will be silenced. Spanish and other languages dropped from the curriculum and competitive sports lose to a shrinking budget. A small school district outside of Chicago cuts $5 million in spending after voters fail to raise property taxes." Price later added: "Educators are calling for the federal government to pay more."

CNN didn't speak to Angela Henkels of the Center for Education Reform. Henkels documented that while education spending tripled over the last 30 years, SAT scores have declined. Her conclusion: "Billions of dollars continue to be wasted, absorbed by layers of administration and countless regulations." Ironically, Department of Education statistics show that in 1992-93, Illinois had the highest teacher salaries as a percentage of expenditures in the nation. No wonder they can't afford the choir.

Frazier Presents Poverty
The new show CNN Presents aired "One Paycheck from Poverty -- The Working Poor" on April 10. Reporter Steven Frazier spoon-fed the liberal slant on poverty statistics: "They're barring the door all over the United States. The number of working poor in America went up 50 percent in the past 13 years, a development the Census Bureau called `astounding.' Eighteen percent of full-time workers cannot make enough to lift a family out of poverty. Incomes got worse for every group the Census measures -- men and women, whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, young and old, college graduates and high school dropouts, rural and inner-city. More rural in fact. But hard working people, all of them." 

Frazier did not talk to Chris Frenze of the Joint Economic Committee, who told MediaWatch this 1992 Census report was "scandalous and bizarre." More than 80 percent of the "working poor" counted in this study are not below the Census poverty line when figured for family size. In other words, if a single teenage male makes less than the poverty level for a family of four, this report called him "working poor." Adjusted for family size, the percent of working poor below the poverty line actually fell from 15.8 percent in 1979 to 12.9 percent in 1990. Frazier told MediaWatch: "We weren't looking at the poverty rate, we were looking at the number of people who were working year-round full time, yet were still poor." Census figures show only four percent of people who worked for 50 or more weeks in 1991 lived in poverty. 

What Bank?
The House bank scandal keeps unfolding, but you'd never know it. Last year most media ignored former House Sergeant-at-Arms Jack Russ's embezzlement admission. On April 5, former Rep. Carroll Hubbard (D-Ky.) pled guilty to channeling campaign funds through the House bank to help his wife's political campaign. CNN and The Washington Post ran full stories, and USA Today and U.S. News ran brief mentions. But ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek and The New York Times ignored it.

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