MediaWatch: November 1991
Table of Contents:
- MediaWatch: November 1991
- Hard and Soft on Clarence Thomas
- NewsBites: Please Tax Us
- Revolving Door: Adding from Harvard Yard
- Nightline and Frontline Caught in Hoax
- The Court's Future
- Reporter or Campaign Strategist?
- Media Money Leans Left
- Once in Love with Nina
- Print Reporters Too
- Janet Cooke Award: L.A. Times: Savage Attack on Rehnquist
Print Reporters Too
Just like their electronic colleagues, many newspaper and magazine reporters accused Republicans of playing dirty and the Democrats of being too nice:
"Just as they did in the 1988 campaign, the Republicans
battered the other side by going ugly early with nasty, personal
attacks, by successfully linking the Democrats with liberal
advocacy groups and by using volatile images of race."
-- New York Times reporter Maureen Dowd in a page 1 news story, October 15.
"The White House went into those hearings with a clear
strategy: they were going to get Clarence Thomas confirmed. And
the Democrats came in, having been under a lot of heavy
criticism for trying to cover up this whole story or whitewash it, and
they said `we're going to be the seekers of the truth.' And so,
Clarence Thomas has lawyers sitting on that committee who were
working for him, and Anita Hill didn't have any, and in the end,
the strategy worked for the Republicans."
-- U.S. News & World Report Asst. Managing Ed. Gloria Borger, Oct. 18 Washington Week in Review on PBS.
"The lowest point on the first day of the hearing came when
Pennsylvania Republican Arlen Specter implied that Hill had
simply fantasized Thomas' asking for dates and his lurid remarks
about pornography. It is all but inconceivable that a similarly
qualified man, black or white, would be accused not merely of lying but
of imagining things."
-- Time Senior Editor Jack E. White, October 21 issue.
"The days of Simpson Chic are over. Now he is more often
compared to Red-baiter Joe McCarthy. The image of Simpson
flinging open his jacket and declaring he had lots of `stuff'
against Anita Hill -- while revealing nothing -- was the lowest of many
low points in the Clarence Thomas hearings. Any Senator with a
sense of history should have said, as attorney Joseph Welch
eventually did to McCarthy, `Senator, have you no shame?'
....[Simpson] is writing a book about the media -- a little like
Stalin discussing intergovernmental relations."
-- Newsweek Washington reporter Eleanor Clift, October 28 news story.
