MediaWatch: May 1997
Table of Contents:
NewsBites: Schieffer Goes Soft
When Oliver North announced he was running for the Senate in Virginia in 1994, CBS Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer assaulted him with 26 questions about lying in 17 minutes: "How can I know when you are telling the truth?...What's the criteria to know that Oliver North is telling the truth? Only under oath or all the time?"
So how would Bill Clinton fare on the same show April 27? Schieffer asked only 18 questions in the whole show, and didn't ask about Clinton scandals until 20 minutes in. Schieffer never once asked Clinton about lying about anything.
Larry, Meet Lanny. If the White House ever needs a new spokesperson, they could always call Larry King. King did nothing but defend the White House when he had James McDougal and Hillary Clinton as guests on his CNN program.
On April 21, McDougal and King spent time discussing McDougal's claim that President Clinton attended a meeting where he urged David Hale to grant an illegal $300,000 Small Business Administration loan to Susan McDougal. King repeatedly spewed out the best White House spin possible, asking McDougal: "But that day, in that office, wasn't he helping your wife when he said give her the help with that loan, wasn't he doing you a favor?...No matter what the reason, wasn't he doing something nice for your wife?...But that gives you no less feeling about turning the tide?" Later, King asked: "Do you think Mr. Clinton might say President Clinton might say you know, Jim, got me started in this whole thing to begin with. He's the one that called me about Whitewater. I don't know from land deals McDougal took me down this stream."
Things were no different six days later with the First Lady. On possible hush money given to Webster Hubbell, King asked: "A couple of things that you may not want to talk about, but we'll ask them. Mr. Hubbell were you just being a friend?" Later King wondered: "The fundraising, did that surprise you how far the DNC went or were you did you was it knowledgeable to you?"
Pity for Plunderers. Susan McDougal is incarcerated on a contempt of court charge. She could be released tomorrow if she agreed to appear before a grand jury to answer specific questions about Clinton's Whitewater role. You'd think the media would portray her as someone blocking Ken Starr's attempts to get at the truth. Instead, the media portray McDougal as a martyr.
On the April 23 CBS Evening News, Dan Rather introduced their interview: "Susan McDougal says special prosecutor Kenneth Starr is trying to pressure her to lie and implicate the Clintons. She's been jailed for refusing to talk to the grand jury and can be kept as long as the grand jury exists." Reporter Phil Jones conducted the interview via cell phone while standing outside Los Angeles' Sybil Brand Prison because the sheriff allegedly would not let the CBS camera crew inside.
While never explaining why McDougal is being held in California (to face embezzlement charges in a non-Whitewater case), Jones dwelled on her living conditions inside the jail: "She claims she's in solitary confinement for up to 22 hours a day...There are 12 cells, housing women on charges including murder. McDougal is in cell five. It has an upper and lower bunk, a closet, a sink, and a toilet." Jones noted, hinting at a conspiracy, that a "local judge has issued orders for McDougal to be moved to better facilities, but it never happens." Jones didn't get to the substance of her imprisonment until story's end, and CBS interviewed no one to counter McDougal's self-serving description of her predicament.
Agitators vs. Philanthropists. The April 21 issue of Timemagazine featured its list of the "25 Most Influential" people of 1997. According to Time, if you're a millionaire and you help conservatives, you're contributing to the breakdown of society. If you're a billionaire who gives solely to liberal causes, you're seen as a savior.
On one page Time profiled Richard Scaife, whom the magazine labeled a "Conservative Agitator." His bio began: "If conservative thinkers like Bill Bennett and Paul Weyrich are the brainpower behind the resurgent American right, the horsepower comes from Richard Mellon Scaife. For close to four decades, the 64-year-old Pennsylvanian has used his millions to back anti-liberal ideas and their proponents." Later, Time added: "He controls the Sarah Scaife Foundation, which helps subsidize rabidly anti-Clinton magazines as well as conservative social-policy projects." If Scaife is considered a "conservative agitator," it would follow that George Soros would be tagged a "liberal agitator," but Time's subhead labeled him a "philanthropist." Soros' bio read: "And he has been stirring controversy by directing his dollars to an array of hot-button political causes tied to his personal ideal of an 'open society' and by writing an iconoclastic critique of free-market capitalism." Among the projects promoted by this "philanthropist," Time noted: "$1 million to help pass initiatives in California and Arizona last year that legalized medicinal use of marijuana," and "$50 million for a fund to help legal immigrants" overcome welfare reform.
Planet-Savers vs. Partisans. On Earth Day, both The Washington Post and New York Times focused on conservative Michael Sanera's criticism of left-leaning environmental "education" in schools. But when it came to labeling, it was the same slanted story: Liberals were apolitical "environmentalists," while those favoring more balance were "conservatives." The Post's Joby Warrick described the Sierra Club as simply "the environmental group," echoed by "the California-based Center for a Commercial-Free Public Education." But Sanera's and Jane Shaw's Facts Not Fear was a book "hailed by conservatives."
New York Times reporter John Cushman also cited Sanera as "a policy analyst at the Claremont Institute, a conservative research organization in California" and was complemented by "a conservative research center in Washington, the George C. Marshall Institute." But Cushman left off the labels for Sanera's critics: "Environmentalists argue that nothing short of the future of the planet is at stake." Liberal Environmental Defense Fund activist Michael Oppenheimer called the Marshall Institute document "a distortion," but was not labeled as liberal. Neither was the Wilderness Society, cited merely as a "leading national environmental organization."
A Smoking Double Standard. When Bob Dole gave House Speaker Newt Gingrich a $300,000 loan to cover the Speaker's ethics penalty, Democrats called it a sweetheart deal and some reporters joined the Democratic chorus. On the April 17 CBS Evening News, Bob Schieffer noted the reaction: "It set off a row on the House floor when Democrats noticed a newspaper story that Dole was joining a law firm that works for tobacco companies." Schieffer then aired a soundbite from Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.): "We now have the chief lobbyist for Big Tobacco financing the payoff of the Speaker's fine for lying to the Congress." Schieffer continued: "Ignoring that allegation, Dole called it a personal gesture."
Substitute anchor Paula Zahn introduced the next report: "The suggestion of some kind of tobacco connection to the Gingrich-Dole loan deal comes as the tobacco industry is reportedly working on a $300 billion deal to settle government and private health lawsuits." The CBS duo failed to note the Washington Post report that the firm Dole joined is "stocked with several heavy-hitting Democrats," including former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, former Texas Governor Ann Richards and former Treasury Secretary and VP candidate Lloyd Bentsen.
Easy on Al Gore. CNN's Claire Shipman, soon to join NBC's White House correspondent team, totally ignored the Democratic Party's tobacco connections when she lobbed softballs at Vice President Al Gore on the April 25 Inside Politics. She even left it out of a question on the government's latest tobacco ruling: "First, on the tobacco ruling. That would seem a significant, at least partial, victory for you. But on the advertising front, the fact that the judge says the federal government can't control the tobacco company's advertising, that seems to be a loss, because of course that would have a major impact on influencing young kids to start smoking. Are you disappointed? What can you do about that at this point?" Shipman made no mention of the hypocrisy of Gore's speech at the 1996 Democratic convention claiming he'd fight tobacco to the death as the DNC was soliciting tobacco funds for his campaign.
Shipman worried that Gore's image had been soiled in the fundraising scandals, as if he's an innocent spectator to what happened: "Are you frustrated at all at the impact this seems to be having both the China stories and the campaign finance stories on your own popularity and approval rating? Do you think that that's going to continue to be a problem for you personally, especially as the hearings come up?"
Lovable Hostage-Takers? After the dramatic rescue of hostages at the Japanese Embassy by Tupac Amaru terrorists in Lima, Peru, The Boston Globe sympathized not with the hostages, but with one of the slain terrorists, a young woman named Luz Dina Villoslada. "From a Sense of Injustice to a Rebel's Death: Peruvian Dreamed of a Career as Nurse, but Died in Raid" read the headline. Reporter Steve Fainaru wrote of an ambitious girl who ran with the wrong crowd: "Luz Dina was the only person in her family to graduate from high school."
For years, "she believed a career in nursing would help her to lift her family out of the poverty and violence that had ravaged their village." But "her plan changed dramatically four years ago" after her sister was raped and no charges were filed. "Luz Dina, then 16, joined the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement."
Fairanu asserted Villoslada's life story "provides, if only from the biased perspective of loved ones, an inside portrait of the Tupac Amaru rebels, many of whom were recruited as teenagers, lured by promises of steady cash and payback for injustices committed by the government." He mentioned "the violence that surrounded her," but only detailed government violence: "Relatives said they were often harassed by Peruvian security forces. Soldiers and local police officers sometimes extorted money and were involved in beatings of local farmers."
A less starry-eyed view of Tupac Amaru comes from Mark Falcoff, an American Enterprise Institute Latin America scholar, who detailed in the February 26, 1996 Weekly Standard how they are "a terrorist group that, in recent years, has been involved in assassinations, bombings, kidnappings, robberies, and attacks against innocent people, many of them poor."
Byrd on Dogs. A major fuss erupted April 15 when a blind aide to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) was denied access to the Senate floor with her guide dog, a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
CBS anchor Dan Rather announced: "An unidentified Senator's complaint, apparently kept this blind congressional aide, Moira Shea, from entering the Senate chamber yesterday because of her guide dog. Well today she and her dog, Beau, were officially invited in for a brief visit." NBC and ABC named the impeding Senator. NBC's Lisa Myers noted: "Robert Byrd, a zealous guardian of Senate rules, objected." ABC's Peter Jennings also put the best spin on Byrd's objection, saying Byrd is "well known as a stickler for Senate privilege and procedure." One fact skipped by the networks Byrd is a Democrat, a fact not likely ignored if a conservative had been as insensitive.
