MediaWatch: October 1994
Table of Contents:
- MediaWatch: October 1994
- Newsweek Removes Noted Clinton Sycophant from the White House Beat
- NewsBites: Sticking to the Issues
- Revolving Door: Matalin's Matchmaker
- Reporters Club Contract with America with False History of the 1980's
- Who lost Socialized Medicine?
- Health Risk Hype
- Relentless Russert
- Janet Cooke Award: ABC Environmental Reporter Loads Cairo Story with White House-Favored Spokesmen
Health Risk Hype
Los Angeles Times reporter David Shaw took on media fear- mongering over environmental risk in a September 11-13 series, "Living Scared: Why Do the Media Make Life Seem So Risky?" He demonstrated how the media overstate health risks in everything from caffeine to nuclear power.
He cited John Graham of the Center for Risk Analysis at Harvard: "Less than 5 percent of human cancer can be traced to causes that are within the jurisdiction of" the EPA. Yet stories cite man- made chemicals more than any other cause of cancer, according to a study. Shaw looked at heterosexual AIDS: "Although the media have played up the threat of AIDS in the heterosexual community, only 6 percent of all AIDS cases have involved heterosexual contact."
Reporters treat suggestions that there are costs to pursuing safety with disdain: "Conservatives have largely co-opted the cost/benefit argument, though, and since they are largely seen as being pro-business, many in both the news media and the political arena tend to dismiss their arguments out of hand, looking only at their ideology, not at their science or their economics."
Shaw explained: "Too often, critics say, the media provide not just essential information and legitimate warnings but un-warranted alarms for an increasingly susceptible audience, one willing to see risk in almost everything." Perhaps the media low point was what Shaw termed "The Great Alar Apple Scare," involving the alleged-cancer causing pesticide. "Ed Bradley of 60 Minutes initiated a nationwide panic in 1989 by airing a report on the dangers of the chemical Alar." But "after Alar, [New York Times writer Keith] Schneider says, he began asking newer, tougher questions about risk issues and proposals for eliminating risks." 60 Minutes has yet to correct its story.
Defrocked Dope Smuggler?
As U.S. troops prepared to give their lives to restore power in Haiti to Jean-Bertrand Aristide ("a man of peace," according to Bryant Gumbel on September 30), ABC's Jim Angle reported un-pleasantries about the media's favorite "democrat." On September 18, he found "the DEA had uncovered allegations that Aristide, while in office, took payoffs from the Pablo Escobar cocaine cartel. And law enforcement sources told ABC News that when agents asked to question Aristide, Washington killed the idea."
An informant said "Franz Biamby, a cousin of the army chief of staff, saw Aristide take a suitcase filled with several hundred thousands dollars in payoffs," said Angle. "The administration was hoping to repeat what the U.S. did to Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega -- build a drug case against Haitian leaders... But the only information implicating them also implicates Aristide."
