MediaWatch: October 1994

NewsBites: Sticking to the Issues

Sticking to the Issues?
Always eager to enlighten voters on key issues like crime, education, and the economy, NBC discovered a new issue: the "wildlife misdemeanor." Through early October, Today has aired only one story on the Texas Governor's race. Instead of addressing issues that voters find important, Jim Cummins dedicated his time to a dead bird, inadvertently shot by the GOP candidate during a hunting trip.

George W. Bush, son of the former President, is running against Gov. Ann Richards, and in an annual ritual, the two candidates went dove hunting on the first day of the season with the press in tow. Unfortunately, the GOP hopeful mistakenly shot an endangered killdeer. Recognizing he bagged the wrong bird, Bush admitted his mistake to the game warden and announced his desire to pay the fine.

Cummins concluded by warning: "His misdeed with a shotgun is going to cost the Republican candidate for Governor a lot more than that [$130 fine] before election day. One Democrat joked about Bush, `A guide told him to shoot and he did. That's typical of George -- he only does what he is told and he often hits the wrong target.'"

Trying Out for Dee Dee's Job
"In less than two years, Bill Clinton has already achieved more domestically than John F. Kennedy, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George Bush combined. Although Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan often had their way with Congress, Congressional Quarterly says it's Clinton who had the most success of any President since Lyndon Johnson." Is this shameless bit of promotion a White House press release? No, it's Jonathan Alter's article in the October 3 Newsweek.

Alter laid out how Clinton should be judged: "The standard for measuring results domestically should not be the coherence of the process, but how actual lives are touched and changed. By that standard, he's doing well." A handful of liberal programs and tweaks of government operations are cited as Clinton's successes: procurement reform, "reinventing government," parental leave, national service, more government subsidized student loans, and an increased Earned Income Tax Credit. Alter suggested the EITC is "a hell of a lot more relevant to assessing Clinton's real record than, say, gays in the military." It's not suggested that the public may see the same old liberal proposals in new packages: more welfare, more subsidies, and more government spending.

Nobel Weakness Prize
Jimmy Carter's reputation for appeasement at the expense of U.S. interests was reinforced when he visited North Korea in July and called Kim Il Sung, the communist dictator responsible for the Korean War, "a great leader in the last 50 years." Still, after his mission to Haiti, where the former President embraced the military leaders President Clinton decried for human rights violations, the media clamored to award Carter the Nobel Peace Prize. On the September 19 Today, NBC's Lisa Myers summed up the Haiti mission: "It certainly looks good for Jimmy Carter. I think even before this people considered him a model ex-President and I think he enhanced his reputation further." The Wall Street Journal's Al Hunt chimed in: "Let me just add one more thing there. I think Jimmy Carter's become the frontrunner for the Nobel Peace Prize. It would be well-deserved if he got it." On September 20, USA Today reporter Juan Waite ascribed Carter's foreign policy "successes" to "what his admirers say is his stubborn determination and firm Christian belief that there's always an alternative to war -- whether in stopping North Korea's communist rulers from acquiring nuclear weapons or convincing Haitian coup leaders they must give up power."

Waite claimed: "Above all is his commitment to human rights. It didn't always pay off in the presidency but it gives him a rare moral authority as a statesman." Similarly, on Today, NBC's Sara James fawned over his failed presidency: "When asked to sum up his presidency, Mr. Carter once said that he tried hard, attempted to do the right thing but wasn't always successful. And yet 13 years after leaving the White House, Jimmy Carter finds himself in a position many sitting Presidents would envy -- lauded at home and abroad as a diplomat and peacemaker."

Nuking History
For the National Air and Space Museum's proposed exhibit of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, curators questioned the need to drop the bomb, ignored Japanese war crimes, and even painted the U.S. as the aggressor, writing of World War II that "for most Japanese [it] was a war to defend their unique culture against Western imperialism." The media raised an outcry about historical revisionism -- not the academic revisionism of the curators, but by veterans groups who protested the distorted history.

Stone Phillips referred to the veterans on the August 30 NBC Nightly News: "Alex Haley once wrote that history is written by the winners. Tonight, the story of some people who would like to keep it that way." On the September 21 World News Tonight, ABC's John Martin cited a leftist historian as authoritative: "Who is distorting history? Historian and political scientist Gar Alperovitz has been studying original documents for 30 years. He says War Department papers...back up a revised view of whether the bomb was needed." Martin concluded that view was "inspiring and troubling to a public that thought for 50 years it knew very well why America dropped the bomb."

While Martin claimed the museum "tried from the beginning to cooperate with veterans groups to be sympathetic to their views," and CBS's Jim Stewart charged on September 25 that "veterans are nitpicking the whole thing," Washington Post reporter Ken Ringle noted "the museum chose to conceive and shape the initial script in isolation not only from military historians, but from anyone with any real-life experience with either World War II or that era in this country." Ringle quoted project advisor Richard Hallion, who offered suggestions to the script, but found the curators had "great reluctance" in balancing the exhibit by including Japanese aggression and atrocities.

Edie's Education
In exploring why a rising number of women are attending all-female colleges, CBS Evening News endorsed a discredited feminist study about how girls are intimidated by men in the classroom. On September 25, Edie Magnus suggested "some credibility for the popularity in women's colleges goes to Hillary Rodham Clinton, a Wellesley graduate." But Magnus gave more credit to "a revival fostered in part by a 1992 report on gender bias. A study by the American Association of University Women (AAUW) found girls do not get the same quality of education that boys do in coed classrooms." Magnus then let study author David Sadker explain: "Males get more attention, more precise attention, more encouragement. They are more likely to call out, they're more likely to be heard."

As Christina Hoff Sommers, author of Who Stole Feminism?, noted in the October 3 Wall Street Journal: "What the celebrated AAUW study relies on, instead of verifiable science, is bogus inference and shoddy methodology." While Magnus conceded that "single-sex schools are not a panacea for gender bias nor are they for everyone," she concluded that "for young women like Christy Smith, who want an education where they feel they're the priority, a women's college can quickly feel like home." But as Sommers pointed out, Science News found that "the majority of scholars in the field of adolescent development see no significant gender difference in self-esteem." Indeed, Sommers found that an Education Department survey found a higher percentage of girls than boys said the "teachers listened to what I have to say."

A First Second Look
Has the press been unfair to President Clinton? Dateline NBC thought so. The program took a "second look" at the Clinton Air Force One haircut scandal on its September 21 edition. Anchor Stone Phillips introduced the exercise in self-flagellation: "It seems like every day there is another poll out about President Clinton's job performance. Have you ever wondered about how much of the public's perception is based on the reporting about him and how much of that reporting is accurate? We decided to go back and take a look at one of the big stories that President Clinton took a lot of heat over." Reporter Jon Scott reviewed evidence that showed Clinton's plane may have held up one flight for two minutes while stylist Cristophe tended to his coif. Scott concluded: "So in hindsight, the story of the haircut holding up air traffic doesn't hold up."

But Bill Clinton wasn't the first politician to take a hit on a half baked story. In February 1992, in a widely repeated front- page New York Times story, former President Bush was accused of being amazed at the workings of a supermarket scanner. But as ABC News correspondent Brit Hume revealed in the January 1993 American Spectator, that story was "almost wholly untrue." Hume explained: "Bush's wonder was mostly politeness and the scanner, far from being ordinary, was a new and different device of which the company was especially proud." Interestingly, NBC's concern about how reporting may negatively effect presidential poll ratings seems to be a Clinton-era development.

Toeing the Turner Line
When it comes to covering environmental issues, CNN owner Ted Turner is definitely the leader of the pack at his network. During an address at the National Press Club on September 27, Turner exclaimed: "I mean, that the world's too crowded! That's the simple -- it's getting more crowded all the time. We live in a finite world with an infinitely increasing number of people. It's easy to see and one out of five of those people lives in abject poverty....We in the rich world consume, I don't know, 50 times as much as somebody from the poor world."

The September 11 CNN Presents toed the Turner line. Reporter Peggy Knapp claimed: "There's enough to go around but it doesn't go around. That's why the world has more than 202 billionaires, more than 3 million millionaires and more than 100 million homeless. There are some, including people who are very hungry, who feel that some people aren't sharing their toys very well." Knapp concluded: "There are many who believe that industrialized countries have used up the resources of the developing world, that we've mined their ores, cut down their forests to build our cities and industries. They believe we broke their toys, and now we won't share ours. That would get you a time out in any day care center in the world."

Washington Oops in Review
Print advertisements for the PBS show Washington Week in Review tout its strength as "journalism." But a little more journalism might be in order. On the September 9 show, host Ken Bode was skeptical about Democrats losing many seats in the midterm elections: "I remember the last midterm election, 1990, when the public was angry, term limits were on the ballot around the country, the check-bouncing scandal was going on, every incumbent was an endangered species, and 95 percent of them won re-election." Unfortunately for Bode, the House Bank scandal occurred in 1992, as did the 15 state ballot initiatives on term limits. (Only Colorado voted on congressional term limits in 1990.)

Two weeks later, New York Times reporter Thomas Friedman, declared on the program: "Rush Limbaugh's out there every day against GATT." In fact, despite questions about American sovereignty under the proposed World Trade Organization, which he told listeners were answered by Robert Bork, Limbaugh has not used air time to argue against GATT.

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