MediaWatch: November 1995
Table of Contents:
- MediaWatch: November 1995
- Chopping at the Competition
- NewsBites: Festering Foster
- Revolving Door: Gergen: Still a Clintonite
- Media vs. a Balanced Budget
- Gramm Should Die?
- The 800-Word Antidote
- Networks Ignore Foley, Gephardt Nipping at Newt...Again
- Janet Cooke Award: Mainstreaming the Million Man March
Networks Ignore Foley, Gephardt Nipping at Newt...Again
Acting on a story in the October 23 New York Daily News, CBS reported on that night's Evening News that bulk sales of Newt Gingrich's book To Renew America may have violated House ethics rules. That same night, CNN Prime News anchor Linden Soles introduced a Bob Franken story: "This could be a case of what goes around comes around," referring to former Speaker Jim Wright's bulk book sales. Franken also mentioned Wright and noted that on a visit to Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, Gingrich "slipped into a back room and autographed books, 100 books, purchased on the orders of Liberty President Jerry Falwell."
The next day, Washington Post reporter John E. Yang brought up Wright: "Gingrich also sought to refute comparisons with the bulk sales of a book by then-House Speaker Jim Wright."
None of these stories compared the dramatic differences between the two deals. Wright had an unusually high royalty of 55 percent from a publisher who was a former employee (Gingrich earned the standard 15 percent). Wright's book Reflections of a Public Man was never sold in bookstores -- it was offered instead almost exclusively in bulk to lobbyists like the Fertilizer Institute in order to get around House limits on honoraria income. Wright was charged with 69 counts of ethics violations and resigned in disgrace before being indicted. Gingrich's book was a genuine commercial property, a 12-week number-one bestseller with sales approaching the half-million mark. Yet two networks and The Washington Post ran stories on five bulk orders totalling just over 500 books.
The media missed two scandals involving leading Democrats Dick Gephardt and Tom Foley. Paul Rodriguez detailed in the August 28 Insight that a "review of how Gephardt wound up with a luxury beach house worth more than $700,000 suggests that the Democratic leader may have violated various banking and tax laws, as well as financial reporting requirements of the Ethics in Government Act. As a result, the 10-term Congressman could end up under close scrutiny by the House ethics committee."
But he's had no scrutiny from the press. Gephardt, an avid opponent of capital gains tax cuts, effectively avoided the tax by swapping a property he owned for a vacant lot in a beachfront community. He later reported it as rental property, a possible violation of the terms of the swap.
The October 3 Boston Globe reported the SEC fined an investment firm $100,000 for giving friends preferential treatment with new stock offerings, one being former Speaker Tom Foley. Small investors like Foley are generally not privy to initial public offerings (IPOs), which allow large investors to purchase new stock before it reaches the trading floor. Roll Call noted in 1993 that Foley had made money on eleven out of twelve IPOs offered him the previous year. Except for a single story on CNN's Inside Politics on July 26, 1993, the networks ignored the story both then and now. But ABC did devote a full story to IPOs in June 1994 -- when the beneficiary was Republican Sen. Al D'Amato.
