MediaWatch: May 1995
Table of Contents:
- MediaWatch: May 1995
- Network News Dominated by Arguements and Soundbites Against the GOP Contract
- NewsBites: Brownout
- Revolving Door: Burke's Back
- McVeigh: Newt's Protege?
- Hosts Blamed For Bombing
- Welfare Reform Ripoff
- Today Sounds Like Talk Radio?
- Janet Cooke Award: Sticking Up for Regulatory Overkill
Welfare Reform Ripoff
Tom Brokaw put the fraud in one welfare program in perspective on the April 12 Dateline NBC: "Imagine enough real money to pay for five aircraft carriers, or, as some investors did just today, to make a bid to take over the entire Chrysler Corporation. That's the kind of money the government says it lost over the last two decades because of mistakes and cheating on just one program: the Earned Income Tax Credit."
The problem has only grown in the Clinton years, Brokaw revealed: "The EITC has become the cornerstone of President Clinton's welfare policy. Since he took office, refunds have more than doubled to $23 billion a year....The increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit led to a whole new class of tax cheats." Brokaw found fraud stems from not taking into account net worth, allowing well-off people with low yearly incomes to collect, and some file for multiple refunds. Estimated total cost:$25 billion.
On the April 19 Nightly News, Kelly O'Donnell reported on San Luis, Arizona where "thousands of Mexican residents rent post office boxes here and use them as American addresses to collect welfare checks and food stamps and to enroll their kids in U.S. schools." She also found an EITC connection: "The IRS put a hold on 5,500 tax returns this year after detecting widespread abuse of the Earned Income Credit."
Fractured Facts
ABC's John Stossel exposed the shoddy statistics produced by activist groups, and the willing media that promote them, on the March 31 20/20. Stossel talked to Wall Street Journal reporter Cynthia Crossen, author of the book Tainted Truth, and Christina Hoff Sommers, author of Who Stole Feminism? "[Sommers] found some wildly inaccurate claims, like `150,000 women a year die of anorexia.' The real number's closer to 1,000. Then there's `domestic violence causes more birth defeats than all medical causes combined.' The news reports say they come from the March of Dimes." But the March of Dimes issued no such study.
The left-wing Food Research and Action Center (FRAC) issued a 1991 child hunger study claiming one in four U.S. children was hungry or "at risk" of hunger. Stossel found: "Some reporters made the story even more alarming," showing Dan Rather claiming: "A startling number of American children in danger of starving tonight."
Crossen explained: "Their definitions of hunger were what I would call very loose -- `Have you ever had to limit the number of foods that you could chose from to serve a meal,' for example. Well, is that hunger?" Stossel asked FRAC's Robert Hersh: "`Do you ever cut the size of meals? Do you ever eat less than you feel you should?'....Isn't this silly? You were looking to get a result and you got it."
