MediaWatch: May 1997

Janet Cooke Award: Volunteerism: A Scam to Mask "Cuts"

The Philadelphia "summit" urging Americans to focus on volunteerism underlined the shallow approach of network news. Thrusting microphones into politicians' faces, the reporters demanded "Is this going to be more than a photo-op?," but the cameras did not arrive to chronicle what would be said as much as who would be there President Clinton, three ex-Presidents, Colin Powell, not to mention Oprah Winfrey.

ABC, CBS, and NBC may have avoided the substance of Clinton scandal coverage, but they did follow White House publicity wishes by making room for 24 evening stories and 45 morning segments in five days surrounding the volunteer summit. But a more political theme emerged, placing the media well to the left of Bill Clinton: volunteerism could never replace government action, and it wouldn't be so necessary if social programs hadn't been slashed over the last 15 years, with special scorn reserved for last year's welfare reform bill. For turning a summit supposedly about individual effort into another statistically challenged sermon for statism, ABC earned the Janet Cooke Award.

On the April 27 World News Tonight, ABC reporter Karla Davis declared: "The Presidents involved in today's summit are the very same people who are being blamed for the state of crisis that's facing the nation's children. Opponents say that a few days of goodwill will not make up for years of neglect. Critics are calling it 'Clinton's Cutback Summit.' Protesters from all over, Indiana, Georgia, New York, gathered in front of Independence Hall to deliver a message of their own."

Davis aired a snippet of Larry Holmes of the National People's Campaign: "Talking about volunteerism sounds like a substitute for the programs that you are cutting and instead of being a good thing, which volunteering should be, it amounts to an attack on social progress."

While ABC has allowed liberal groups and Democrats to denigrate conservatives as "extremists," they made no attempt to explain the National People's Campaign. Founded to attack the Contract with America in 1995, one of the group's most fervent passions is seeking the freedom of Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted of killing a Philadelphia police officer. (ABC video showed Abu-Jamal's picture all over the protesters' signs). Isn't championing cop killers "an attack on social progress"? ABC had no time for that question.

Davis continued: "Protester Frank Alexander spent the morning as he does every Sunday feeding the homeless. Advocates for the poor report homelessness is increasing, since President Clinton signed a bill last year to cut welfare by $55 billion over six years." Alexander told the ABC audience: "It's just a hypocritical thing to eliminate social programs and cast millions of people into poverty at the same time you're calling for volunteers."

Davis chose to simply pass on the claims of "advocates for the poor," without asking elementary questions, such as: What social programs are being cut, and which have been cut by Bill Clinton? How can increased homelessness be attributed to last year's welfare reform bill which hasn't gone into effect yet?

While Davis aired a brief snippet of conservative summit backer Arianna Huffington, she had no time for a conservative counter-argument to the protesters' claims of "cuts." The Heritage Foundation argued that in 1996, federal and state spending on 70 means-tested welfare programs "reached over $400 billion, a historic high equaling 5.3 percent of Gross Domestic Product. Despite political promises to end welfare as we know it, the Clinton budget proposes to increase federal means-tested welfare spending by five percent per year, twice the rate of inflation."

On the next evening's World News Tonight, Peter Jennings continued to tout the theme of leftist protesters: "Among those who find fault with this summit, there is concern that all this enthusiasm for volunteering not be seen as a substitute for what government should do....We asked ABC's Tom Foreman to go to Wichita, Kansas, to see whether pure volunteerism is enough."

Foreman began: "If you ask many people in Wichita, they will say there are more volunteers that work here than ever before. Dozens of people every weekend, fixing up low-income neighborhoods....A hundred people a day delivering Meals On Wheels to the sick and elderly. But 15 years after the government first began retreating from social programs, some volunteers say they have been strained to their limits, especially when it comes to solving the most time- consuming, difficult societal problems."

Proclaimed Nick Mork of Wichita's Big Brothers and Sisters: "There needs to be some support from our government to help solve these problems. The problems are just too large." Foreman explained that after Mork's federal funding "dried up....The number of young people served was cut in half, and the agency has never fully recovered. Today, although 800 kids are being served, as many or more are on the waiting list."

Foreman then abandoned all pretense of news gathering and launched into an editorial: "Many hard-core social problems, such as inadequate health care for children, require a degree of skill, dedication and time most volunteers do not have or will not give....Volunteering for most people means running a bake sale or coaching a soccer team. And as useful as such things are, it is still clear that volunteers cannot shoulder the burden of society's more pressing concerns."

Like Davis, Foreman ignored the many poverty programs whose budgets have grown dramatically in the last five years. Cato Institute budget analyst Stephen Moore has noted that in constant 1995 dollars, all sorts of programs have grown: food stamps (up 53 percent), Medicaid (110 percent), housing assistance (67 percent), and a Clinton favorite, the Earned Income Tax Credit (up 150 percent). Foreman also ignored any substantive philosophical counter-argument from the right, for example, the notion that welfare dependency, not spending cuts, have worsened the plight of the poor; or that an ever-increasing tax burden (now an estimated $2.465 trillion in federal, state, and local taxes in 1997, according to the Tax Foundation) might cause people to work harder to make ends meet, leaving less time for volunteering. Neither Foreman nor Davis returned MediaWatch phone calls.

As if the leftists weren't advertised enough, Jennings repeated after Foreman's story: "Incidentally, there was another gathering on volunteerism here in Philadelphia today, not unimportant at all. Several hundred people attended a people's summit organized by union, government and religious leaders as a reality check on the President's summit, which they called a 'glorified Hollywood photo op.'" The protesters were right about the summit, but also about the summit coverage: for what is a lot of heart-tugging pictures of "cutbacks" without any statistical context but a "photo opportunity"?

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