MediaWatch: September 1991
Table of Contents:
- MediaWatch: September 1991
- Labeling Left and Right
- NewsBites: Clubbing Clearance
- Revolving Door: Free-Market Teaching from Dukakis?
- Reporters Undergo A "Liberation Conversion"
- More Attacks on Reagan, Bush, Conservatives
- More Pre-Coup Media Misinterpretations
- Janet Cooke Award: Satisfied Soviet People
Revolving Door: Free-Market Teaching from Dukakis?
Free-Market Teaching from Dukakis? Well, almost. Tom Herman, Deputy National Issues Adviser for domestic policy to the 1988 Dukakis presidential campaign, is now advising U.S. firms on how to enter the Central and Eastern European business market. After Dukakis lost, Herman joined CNN as a European field producer where he helped put together coverage of the Berlin Wall's collapse. Herman now offers his advice out of a Boston firm, the Brown Rudnick Freed & Gesmer Consulting Group.
Democrat Helps Bush Aide. During the 1990 campaign season Mary Fifield, Producer of the CBS News program Face the Nation in 1985 and 1986, was Director of Communications for the Democratic State Committee of Massachusetts. This past spring she started handling public relations for the Boston law firm Mintz Levin Cohen Ferris Glovsky & Popeo, a job that put Fifield to work for the other side.
The law firm represents Bush White House political aide Ron Kaufman. So, when the Democratic State Committee dropped its lawsuit against him for allegedly engineering a picketing line outside the Democrat's convention site, the July 18 Boston Globe noted it was Fifield's job to pass out "a press kit containing Kaufman's statements and outlining the GOP operative's case against the Democrats."
Liberal Manager. The Washington Journalism Review has hired a National Public Radio (NPR) and left-wing magazine veteran as its new Managing Editor. Elliott Negin, a foreign and Washington news editor for NPR, served as Editor of Nuclear Times, a bi-monthly "devoted exclusively to reporting on the grass-roots disarmament movement," until it folded in 1989. Earlier in the 1980s he edited Ralph Nader's Public Citizen magazine.
Passed Away. In mid-August, long-time NBC News correspondent Douglas Kiker passed away at his Cape Cod summer home. Before joining the network in 1966, Kiker reported from Washington for the New York Herald Tribune, a position assumed after a political stint. For the first two years of the Kennedy Administration, Kiker served as Director of Information for the Peace Corps.
Stationary Cloud. Last month's Revolving Door column reported that Margaret Carlson had replaced Laurence Barrett as Time magazine's Washington Bureau Chief. MediaWatch dropped a key word. Barrett had been Deputy Bureau Chief, the position Carlson now holds. Stanley Cloud remains firmly ensconced as Bureau Chief.
