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
Revolving Door: Adding from Harvard Yard
Adding from Harvard Yard. Last summer American University professor Lewis Wolfson completed a report titled Through the Revolving Door: Blurring the Line Between the Press and Government. During his research for Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Barone Center for Press, Politics and Public Policy, Wolfson uncovered five names previously unknown to MediaWatch:
Ed Goodpaster, Deputy Washington Bureau Chief for the Baltimore Sun from 1982 to 1987 and National Editor since then, held the title of Associate Director of the Office of Governmental and Public Affairs at the Agriculture Department from 1978-80. Before joining the Carter Administration, Goodpaster was Deputy National Editor at The Washington Post, a position he assumed in 1974 after nine years as Deputy Washington Bureau Chief for Time.
Lawrence O'Rourke has been White House correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch since leaving the Carter Administration in 1981. During Carter's last year in office, O'Rourke served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Education for Policy and Planning. Before jumping to the new agency, O'Rourke reported White House news for The Bulletin, a now defunct Philadelphia daily.
Veteran Time correspondent Jerrold Schecter was the magazine's diplomatic correspondent when tapped for the National Security Council's Press Secretary slot in 1977, a position he held through 1980. In 1989 he and his wife wrote An American Family Returns to Moscow, a book comparing life under Gorbachev to the late 1960s when he served as Time Moscow Bureau Chief. Earlier this year he translated Khrushchev Remembers: The Glasnost Tapes.
Walter Pincus, a defense reporter at The Washington Post, put in two 18-month stints as an investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under Democratic Chairman William Fulbright. Pincus told MediaWatch he first worked for the committee in 1962, returning in 1969 when Fulbright asked him to investigate the role of the military in foreign policy. After three years as Executive Editor of The New Republic, in 1975 he joined the Post. For several years he simultaneously worked for CBS News, serving as a producer/writer for CBS Reports: The Defense of the United States, a five-part 1981 series.
Wolfson's paper also identified a Reagan connection. In 1981 Dean Fischer left his position as Time Deputy Washington Bureau Chief to become Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs under Alexander Haig. Back at Time as its Cairo reporter since 1986, he joined a PR firm when Haig resigned in 1982.
MediaWatch recently came across a Carter alumnus whom Wolfson overlooked: Arch Parsons, a Baltimore Sun Washington bureau reporter since 1987. Parsons held three positions during Carter's first two years: Director of Information for the Appalachian Mountain Commission; Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at HUD; and finally Director of Public Affairs for the Economic Development Administration at the Department of Commerce. Parsons left government in 1978 for an assistant editor slot at Newsday, followed by a stint at The Washington Star until it folded in 1981.
