MediaWatch: October 1991
Table of Contents:
NewsBites: Mad Moldavians
MAD MOLDAVIANS. After decades of telling viewers the Russian people were satisfied with communism, reporters were proven wrong. Now, network reporters are saying that people in the republics don't want independence. NBC News reporter Jim Maceda, in a September 23 Nightly News segment, declared: "Grapes -- at this time of year, gold for Moldavian farmers. In the south, the harvest is good, yet people here are worried. Like many others throughout the republics, they fear independence." Why then did Moldavia's 282-member parliament vote unanimously to declare it?
GLASS HOUSES. New York Times reporter Maureen Dowd turned the controversy over the Senate's handling of Anita Hill's allegations against Clarence Thomas into a page one feminist forum about the Senate's sexism. Dowd loaded her October 8 story with outraged feminists -- Ann Lewis, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Pat Schroeder, reporter Susan Milligan, Rep. Barbara Boxer, Judith Lichtman, law professors Katherine Bartlett and Susan Deller Ross. The only Republican quoted was Sen. Arlen Specter -- who Dowd said "many women" were angry with for his support of Thomas. Dowd failed to quote any of the "many women" for Thomas.
But when Kitty Kelley wrote a book asserting that Nancy Reagan had a lesbian affair, performed oral sex acts on various men, and cheated on her husband, Dowd wrote a gossipy page one piece on Kelley's book without any comment from the woman demeaned. Dowd then defended Kelley in the May 13 New Republic: "Of course the book is tawdry. Of course, the book is, in some spots, loosely sourced, and over the top...Of course, there are mistakes in it...The point, however is that Kelley's portrait is not essentially untrue." Dowd's motto: women should be given a forum when their reputations are in question -- unless they're Nancy Reagan.
UNEQUAL TIME. NBC had a funny definition of balance in a September 7 Nightly News report on Clarence Thomas. Reporter Jamie Gangel gave eight seconds to black Republican businessman Joshua Smith, who said: "And I think in so many cases when you look at successful people they are a product of their own vision."
But Gangel then gave Thomas opponents 69 seconds to attack him: 24 seconds for recent college graduate Shaun Haley and a whopping 45 seconds to Roger Wilkins, a Senior Fellow with the far-left Institute for Policy Studies. Wilkins asserted: "I think that not only is black skin not enough, I think that in this instance the black skin is destructive, because white people, conservative white people for years have picked, tried to pick black spokesmen who agree with them, in order to validate their own racism. And Clarence Thomas is exactly in that mode."
UNEQUAL TIME II. NBC played the same game on the September 20 Nightly News. Reporting on the Kennedy-Danforth compromise civil rights bill, Andrea Mitchell allowed President Bush to label it a quota bill, but then she gave air time to four proponents who criticized Bush. The bill's supporters: Senator Ted Kennedy, Republican-basher Kevin Phillips and Senators Arlen Specter and John Danforth, whom she introduced with the usual media cop-out for not offering the conservative view, "Even some Republicans..." NBC's lucky there aren't equal-time rules.
BOOMING BREZHNEV YEARS. Now that their hero Gorbachev has fallen from favor, reporters are reaching back to Brezhnev to prove that communism could work. In the September 23 issue of Time, Associate Editor George Church wrote, "Inefficient as the old communist economy was, it did provide jobs of a sort for everybody and a steady, if meager, supply of basic goods at low, subsidized prices; Soviet citizens for more than 70 years were conditioned to expect that from their government. Says a Moscow worker: 'We had everything during [Leonid] Brezhnev's times. There was sausage in the stores. We could buy vodka. Things were normal.'"
USA Today reporter Kevin Maney went even further: "But for a long time communism worked OK. Soviet people consistently say their economic life was better 20 years ago when communism was in full bloom under Leonid Brezhnev."
UP THE ACADEMY. Panicked forecasts about global warming are still being widely covered, while calmer reports are ignored. Take for example two reports issued by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). In April, an NAS panel asserted that global warming is happening, and recommended immediate action. The report made news in The New York Times, USA Today, AP, UPI, CNN, Gannett News Service, the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, Newsweek, and two issues of Time magazine. The Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post put it on page 1.
But on September 6, another NAS panel declared in a strikingly non-alarmist tone that the economy could adapt and even benefit from a gradual warming. This time, only AP, the Chicago Tribune, and The New York Times (in two stories) covered the findings. The Washington Post didn't run the report as a news story, but did carry an op-ed by Post environmental reporter William Booth on September 22.
The three broadcast networks covered neither report, but ABC's Ned Potter did find frightening fodder for an "American Agenda" segment on World News Tonight September 18: "The EPA, which rarely sounds alarmist, says the ozone problem is twice as bad as anyone expected...12 million Americans may get skin cancer in the next 50 years. Cataracts and immune disorders will increase. There could even be a threat to the food supply if crops and ocean life are killed by ultraviolet rays."
CANONIZING CASTRO. In an otherwise capable job of reporting the obvious in a two-part series on the decline of Castro's Cuba, Washington Post reporter Lee Hockstader reverted a few times to the same old tourist-brochure language: "The government points out quite rightly that Cuba's standard of living is better than in many other countries of Latin America....Government officials frequently trumpet the revolution's achievements of lowering infant mortality or increasing daily calorie consumption."
The next day, Hockstader claimed: "For 32 years -- nearly half of his life -- Castro has not so much governed Cuba as reinvented it in his own larger-than-life image, and for much of that time enjoyed the consent and even the adulation of his people -- at least those who remained in the country. But today...popular discontent with Castro's government has reached enormous, if unmeasurable, proportions." Notice the discontent was unmeasurable, but the adulation was not.
In any case, evidence indicates the Cuban people may not have been as happy with Castro as Hockstader proposed. The human rights group Freedom House says that "With the possible exception of South Africa, Indonesia, and China, Cuba under Castro has had more political prisoners per capita for longer periods than any other country."
JUST THE FACTS, PLEASE. A September 16 Time article, "Why do Blacks Die Young?", was long on demagoguery but short on detail. Staff writer Christine Gorman claimed, "The gap between white and black [life spans] has remained stubbornly wide, and it increased sharply during the Reagan years, when many social programs that helped minorities were slashed."
But Gorman made this damning charge without backing it up with no proof -- no program names, no budget number, nothing. Perhaps because they are nowhere to be found. Federal budget numbers reveal that between 1980 and 1990, major social program budgets grew at or above the rate of inflation. But facts might have detracted from the media's favorite Reagan-era premise.
OMNIPOTENT OSHA? That's what journalists yearned for in the wake of the fatal North Carolina chicken plant fire. Time and U.S. News & World Report stumped for more inspectors to patrol the workplace, although neither specified just how many would be needed to adequately protect America's work force. Time Associate Editor Richard Lacayo tied increasing danger in the workplace to Reagan. "By almost every measure, America's regulatory safeguards have grown threadbare," Lacayo claimed, "OSHA was stretched to the breaking point by Ronald Reagan."
But later, Lacayo stepped on his own premise, admitting, "work- related fatalities have dropped from 12,500 ten years ago to 10,500 last year." In fact, the workplace is now safer and, according to U.S. News, inspections are "more thorough," decreasing the demand for inspectors.
SAME SONG, SECOND VERSE. "Spend more money" has always been the liberal's solution to any of society's problems, and when federal aid to cities came into question, NBC's Bryant Gumbel was caught singing the same old song.
On the September 3 Today, Gumbel blamed the exodus from the cities on a lack of federal aid: "But don't you find that the problems are only going to get worse if people keep running from the cities? I mean, there'll then be no reason for the government to ever invest any monies in the cities, which is part of the problem right now. I mean, the problems are, the problems seem to be getting exacerbated only because there's no money coming in to them and the people who are in a position to help keep running out of the cities." But according to the Cato Institute's Stephen Moore, federal aid to states and cities has risen steadily from $108 billion in 1987 to $159 billion in 1991. Gumbel forgot to mention ever-rising municipal taxes as a reason for leaving.
MORALS EQUALS IGNORANCE? Yes, according to Time reporter Nancy Gibbs' September 2 article about the rise of teen AIDS cases. Gibbs quickly sided with AIDS activists over the "ignorance" of the Catholic Church. "The two sides disagree not only about morality but also about what approach would be most effective. 'We don't say, 'Smoke carefully.' We say 'Don't smoke,' argues Monsignor John Woolsy...'A huge campaign could work to stop kids from having sex. We don't water down principles.'"
But Gibbs claimed with today's oversexed teens, teaching good morals is useless and can be deadly. "AIDS activists and health- care workers have seen firsthand the devastation that ignorance can yield....there is plenty of evidence that teens need no encouragement."
PC PROTESTERS. Last month, MediaWatch reported that when Operation Rescue blocked access to a Wichita abortion clinic, CBS News reporter Scott Pelley tracked down and quoted someone worried about police overtime costs during the protests. CBS News reporter Bruce Morton also bemoaned Operation Rescue's tactics.
But when radical gay activists turned violent after California Governor Pete Wilson vetoed a "gay rights" bill, bashing in windows, setting fires, and throwing oranges at Wilson during a speech, the networks reacted quite differently. Neither CBS' Richard Roth, ABC's Judy Muller nor NBC's George Lewis quoted a single critic of the protesters' tactics in their October 1 segments, nor did they report the costs of the damage. We're still waiting for a Bruce Morton commentary on the protesters' tactics. Apparently damaging property and threatening violence are acceptable forms of civil disobedience if done for the right cause.
MIDWESTERN VALUES? When Pete du Pont ran for President in 1988 he had six years in Congress and eight years as Governor of Delaware under his belt. In a December 1, 1987 CBS Evening News segment, reporter Bob Faw still asserted: "politically, du Pont has to get recognized as something more than a man who is worth $6 million or who once had a date with Jane Fonda." Faw concluded, "He keeps raising his lance to joust with others, even though they're convinced all Pete du Pont is doing is tilting at windmills."
So when Senator Robert Kerrey (D-NE), who has served only one term as Governor of Nebraska and three years in the Senate, announced his candidacy for President, did CBS News suggest he was just another millionaire first-term Senator who once lived with Debra Winger? Not exactly. On September 19 reporter Eric Engberg gushed that Kerrey, "who won the nation's highest military award after losing part of a leg in Vietnam, brings a message tailored to the generation that was shaped by that war and retains a distrust for conventional politicians...he practices the politics of biography to articulate his views, using events from his own life, like nine months in the hospital and the midwestern values handed down by his father."
RATHER RAGS HELMS. "My best friends still call me 'Rags,'" Dan Rather began I Remember, a book of childhood recollections. In a brief digression, Rather revealed he has absolutely no understanding of why he's considered "a symbol" of the "effete eastern media" by Senator Jesse Helms.
Rather arrogantly insisted Helms just doesn't want to learn the truth. "My job is to be accurate and fair, an honest broker of information. Period. It is a job that automatically puts me down in places Senator Helms dislikes. In the early 1960s I was the point man of CBS News on many of the most controversial civil rights stories. During the Watergate scandals, it was my job as White House correspondent to ask President Nixon questions that he didn't want to be asked. These are 'crimes' that many big- money political contributors don't forgive or forget, and Senator Helms likes to remind them of me because he gets money from them."
