MediaWatch: October 1993
Table of Contents:
- MediaWatch: October 1993
- On Health, Network Morning Shows Slant Left in Picking Guests, slightly Right in Questions
- NewsBites: Watching the Ad Watch
- Revolving Door: CNBC's New Chief
- Reporters Heap Heaving Helpings of Mush, Ignore Substanse of Testimony
- 'Kiss Ass, Move with the Mass'
- Wallace on U.N. Waste
- What a Difference a Producer Makes
- Janet Cooke Award: NBC's Jim Maceda Attacks Conservative "Myths" About Health Care
Wallace on U.N. Waste
Mike Wallace opened the door of the United Nations on the September 19 60 Minutes and found horrific waste. "Many in a position to know charge that disturbing amounts from that U.N. budget are disappearing due to mismanagement or corruption. So while we look to the U.N. as the world's policeman, its ability to police itself is quite another matter."
Wallace examined one confidential audit on the U.N. peacekeeping operation in Cambodia: "Tens of millions of dollars have been wasted or ripped off due to the incompetence or outright thievery of U.N. officials or contractors." He then catalogued instances of U.N. fraud: phantom payrolls, contracts awarded to a small number of preferred companies even though their bids were higher than others, payment for work that was never done, construction of huge conference centers, and sweetened consulting contracts for former U.N. employees.
Wallace diagnosed the problem as a lack of accountability built into the U.N. system: 184 countries make up the General Assembly which appropriates money to projects, "and while they get to run up the bills, just 13 of the more prosperous nations have to foot 80 percent of the U.N. tab."
O'Neil's Owls
Breaking with the usual environmental orthodoxy of the networks, NBC reporter Roger O'Neil reported on the September 17 Nightly News that the spotted owl, whose welfare spurred timber summits and lost jobs, was vastly undercounted by government biologists. "In the forests of northern California, despite what government scientists and environmentalists said three years ago, there is nothing rare or threatened about the northern spotted owl."
O'Neil noted that new research "is now proving many of the government's earlier assumptions wrong. For example, it was assumed the owl lived only in old growth timber, forest which has never been logged before." In fact, O'Neil added,"thousands of so-called new owls have been found, almost entirely on private timber company land which has been logged before."
Phil Dietrick of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Department told O'Neil "I believe you can design systems to maintain owl populations within the contexts of managed timber." O'Neil also noted that to environmentalists, "the spotted owl is part of a bigger strategy -- stop the cutting of big old trees in national forests," concluding, "some biologists agree now that the politics of environmentalism got in the way of careful science."
