MediaWatch: October 1992

NewsBites: Attacks off Limits?

ATTACKS OFF LIMITS? Responding to a question from Larry King on October 7, President Bush called for Bill Clinton to "level with the American people" about his activities during the Vietnam War, including his student trip to Moscow. Reporters went berserk. On The McLaughlin Group, Newsweek reporter Eleanor Clift suggested: "This is in the finest McCarthy tradition, to suggest there was something suspicious with no evidence...I don't see how George Bush sleeps at night after stooping this low." On CBS This Morning October 12, co-host Harry Smith declared: "Clearly, that red-baiting junk didn't work last night." Instead of investigating the substance of the charge, reporters lashed out at Bush for dirty campaign tactics. CBS reporter Susan Spencer said "it all seems very familiar" to the Pledge of Allegiance issue in 1988.

THROWING STONES. Jeff Zucker, Executive Producer of NBC's Today show, recently declared they would not interview Richard Burke, the former aide to Ted Kennedy whose new book charges the Senator with drug use and sex with teenage interns. But when Kitty Kelley wrote a sleazy book about Nancy Reagan, Today gave her three interviews with Bryant Gumbel. Today's double standard -- no tabloid-style attacks unless the target's conservative (or related to one) -- continued on October 6 and 7, when Katie Couric interviewed Anita Hill, whose charges against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas are no more proven than Burke's attacks on Kennedy.

Like the rest of the media, NBC has yet to report anything questioning "the patron saint of sexual harassment," and neither did Couric in her interview: "Twenty years from now, fifty years from now, when people look back at these hearings, how do you want them to think of you?"

GLASS HOUSES. Today left out that when it comes to sexual harassment, host Bryant Gumbel is also facing an accuser. In a September 14 TV Guide excerpt of the new book Inside Today, former NBC talent coordinator Judy Kessler wrote that Gumbel brought a "locker-room mentality" to the set: "There were women unit managers [Gumbel] claimed to have slept with, and he would say things like,'She's not even a good [expletive].' Then he had the habit of walking around the office and going up behind a lot of women and massaging their backs and shoulders. The other thing he would do was run his hand up their back to see if they were wearing a brassiere....He got a kick out of scaring women."

Kessler quoted a male member of the Today staff, who said: "Bryant was generally so aggressively nasty to women. He would give an assessment of everyone's bust size, and say things like,'You know, I could sleep with that one if I wanted to.'"

G.O.P. TIME? On August 9, The Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley reviewed Marching in Place: The Status Quo Presidency of George Bush, by Time White House correspondents Michael Duffy and Dan Goodgame: "These are the judgments not of Democratic partisans but of correspondents for Time, a magazine that over the years has been identified with precisely the same establishmentarian, Ivy League Republicanism with which Bush himself is most comfortable."

Really? Would a Republican magazine attack the Reagan years as a time of "gluttony and callousness," and declare: "Americans had grown weary of the Reagan era, with its trademark mismanagement of government and the environment, its shallow excesses, its legacy of debt....Bush and his Republicans fought like tigers to promote the interests of corporations, wealthy investors, and the upper-middle class....Bush has always done whatever he thought was necessary to win, even if that meant blatant pandering on taxes, thinly veiled race baiting, misrepresenting his opponent's record, and hinting that his rival is unpatriotic."

The book failed to impress ABC News White House reporter Brit Hume. In the October American Spectator, Hume suggested: "There is far too little original reporting and far too much reliance on secondary sources, even when those sources got things wrong. The explanation may be that Duffy and Goodgame haven't been known for spending too much time around the White House. Too busy writing this book, no doubt."

GROWING OPINION. Time isn't the only news magazine that allows opinions to creep into its news reporting. Newsweek increasingly has overheated rhetoric between its covers, as seen in its Republican convention coverage. The August 31 Conventional Wisdom Watch box said of Pat Buchanan: "Wows troops. Scares nation. Good '96 candidate...for South Africa." Senior Editor Joe Klein wrote "The whole week was double-ply, wall-to-wall ugly...The Republican Party reached an unimaginably slouchy, and brazen, and constant, level of mendacity last week."

CNN Reliable Sources host Bernard Kalb noticed the move toward opinion, too. During the September 5 show, he asked Newsweek writer Howard Finean: "Is Newsweek a magazine of objective reporting or an anthology of partisan columns?" Fineman said "no," that Newsweek remained objective but, "I think in retrospect, to be honest about it, we could have used a little more of a steady hand, in terms of weeding out the steady procession of stories...We overdid it a bit, and it would be silly to say otherwise."

Nor is this just found in Newsweek. Even newspapers are beginning to abandon straight news for "analysis." On the September 12 Reliable Sources, Knight-Ridder White House correspondent Ellen Warren conceded, "Increasingly we in the daily newspaper business are moving into kind of a daily newsmagazine approach. Not as opinionated, I don't believe, as the newsmags, but moving into an analytical journalism."

GAY BACKLASH. Newsweek devoted its September 14 cover story to warning America of an assault on the gay lobby: "Gay America's struggle for acceptance has reached a new and uncertain phase. A series of modest gains over the last several years -- in civil rights, national political clout, funding for AIDS research and visibility in popular culture -- has provoked a powerful backlash."

Who's to blame for this backlash? The Republican Party, of course. "For many gays, a symbolic low point came during the Republican National Convention in Houston last month, where repeated attacks on 'the homosexual lifestyle' evoked images of moral decay and unraveling family life. Conservative Doberman Pat Buchanan told delegates that gay rights have no place 'in a nation we still call God's country.'" But Newsweek didn't stop there, including a column from former Good Morning America producer Eric Marcus, who wrote: "The anti-gay campaign has nothing to do with telling the truth. Instead, it's about trying to scare Americans into thinking that if they vote for Bill Clinton, the awful homosexuals -- me included! -- will destroy America's family values."

GAGGING OVER GUAM. The American territory of Guam has made a rare appearance on the media's radar screen by passing a strong pro- life law that upsets pro-abortion activists -- and reporters. On the October 1 CBS Evening News, reporter Bob Faw began: "At every convention, they brag America's day begins here. What they don't trumpet is that something could also be ending on Guam -- the right of American women to get an abortion. Guam's legislature didn't just sing its national anthem. By a whopping unanimous vote, it enacted the most stringent anti-abortion rights bill ever passed in any American jurisdiction."

Faw went on to detail how Guam's Catholic archbishop sat in the Pacific island legislature's gallery during the debate suggesting excommunication for any Catholics who didn't support the bill. Faw suggested: "So talk all you want about separation of church and state back home. Just don't talk about it on this island, which is 96 percent Catholic." Faw asked the archbishop: "You're saying only one viewpoint will be permitted, only one set of beliefs is to be established. That's not the American way."

JENSEN'S OUTSIDER. On the September 29 NBC Nightly News, reporter Mike Jensen examined Bill Clinton's economic proposals: "Most people don't know much about Clinton's economic performance as Governor of Arkansas. But he gets generally good grades from outsiders....What do the experts think about Clinton? Of eight Nobel Prize winning economists interviewed by NBC News, five preferred the Clinton economic plan, three were for Bush."

Jensen proceeded to allow University of Pennsylvania Professor Lawrence Klein to speak in favor of Clinton's plan. He was the report's only talking head, and Jensen identified him only as a "Nobel Prize-winning economist." So why is that noteworthy? An August 10 Clinton campaign press release featured Klein as one of eleven economists endorsing Clinton's economic plan. The release urged the media to contact Gene Sperling, Clinton's chief economic adviser, to book Klein and the others for television appearances. Sperling's office in Little Rock confirmed that Klein serves as an "adviser on economic issues." Some "outsider."

CLINTON'S CONFORMITY COPS. Howell Raines, the departing Washington Bureau Chief of The New York Times, told the Columbia Journalism Review that "he made it a main job to warn against and protect his younger campaign reporters from the `Conformity Cops,' specifically [former Washington Post reporter Sidney] Blumenthal and Joe Klein of New York magazine and since the spring, of Newsweek." Since writing an adoring profile of Clinton in New York last year, Klein was not only added to the Newsweek staff, but to CBS News as a consultant as well. Warned Raines: "When reporters go around campaign planes criticizing reporters who refuse to cheerlead, that's unhealthy. That's part of what we've seen this year."

National Journal writer Jonathan Rauchis another victim of Clinton's conformity cops. In the September 28 New Republic, Rauch told a "prominent political reporter" that the Clinton economic plan has a "rich larding of sham and evasion," and the reporter responded: "You economic people aren't happy unless a candidate puts a gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger." Rauch told MediaWatch he's not sure the reporter is a Clinton supporter, but was surprised he didn't want candidates held to a tough standard on their plans.

STAHL OFF BALANCE? For the second time this year, CBS has taken the time to investigate the growing "wise use" movement and its opposition to liberal environmentalism. But on 60 Minutes September 20, Lesley Stahl focused on an activist in Cincinnati who has received threats for speaking out against pollution in her neighborhood, and "wise use" activists who say "good" when they're told about the threats of violence. While Stahl gives vivid examples of these threats, and actual incidents of violence, she also points out that the activists are threatened by local employees who fear losing their jobs, not property- rights activists.

Stahl also lent more credibility to the liberal activists' side. When the Cincinnati mother told Stahl: "You look out the window and you see these children, and they're playing happily, and half of them are [coughing], and half can't even run because they can't catch their breath if they do," Stahl says she's "caught up in the movement, but she's not that far off. Local hospitals report that children in Lower Price Hill are up to five times as likely to suffer from respiratory diseases than children in other parts of Cincinnati." But when a wise use activist declared, "I think you can trace almost every piece of economic ruin to the environmental movement," Stahl didn't investigate the real costs of environmental regulations. She simply declared: "C'mon, you know that's just hyperbole." Speaking of hyperbole, Stahl defined tactics such as picketing or videotaping outside environmentalist meetings, both staples of liberal activism, as "harassment."

CONSERVATIVE VOICE. For balanced network reporting, we took note of ABC correspondent Bettina Gregory's coverage of the Census Bureau report on the number of poor Americans. For the past several years, network stories on the annual poverty rate have relayed the spin of liberal activist groups and excluded interpretations from conservative experts. On the September 3 World News Tonight, Gregory aired soundbites from both Clifford Johnson of the liberal Children's Defense Fund and Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation. Leading in to Rector, Gregory explained: "Conservatives say all these government figures are misleading because they don't count welfare and other government benefits as income."

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