MediaWatch: September 1993

NewsBites: Execution Exaggerations

Execution Exaggerations. The media have descended on Texas to cover the upcoming execution of convicted murderer (and current cause celebre of the left) Gary Graham. Vicki Mabrey's August 15 CBS This Morning report included a soundbite from Ashanti Chimurenga of the anti-death penalty group Amnesty International. Chimurenga claimed: "In some cases, Texas executes two to three people, at least two people per week. That rate of execution really precludes attorneys and other individuals from doing all that they should do to provide representation."

Thirty-two weeks have passed and at the rate of three executions per week, 96 people would have had their death sentence carried out in Texas this year. But in reality, Texas has executed only 68 people since the Supreme Court allowed executions to resume in 1976, 17 years ago. No one in the report disputed the ridiculous Amnesty claim, nor did Mabrey correct the obvious exaggeration.

Lunden's Hunger Blunder. ABC has added to the growing list of reports that dramatically overstate the extent of hunger in American children. On Good Morning America August 18, co-host Joan Lunden asserted: "The Census Department's [sic] estimates are just as astonishing. More than eighteen percent of America's children -- that's twelve million youngsters -- go to bed hungry at night." There's just one problem: the Census Bureau has no such hunger studies, and no such number.

Asked where ABC found its Census "Department" estimate, GMA spokesperson Kathy Rehl quoted from a June 10 press release from the Tufts University Center on Hunger, Poverty, and Nutrition Policy. Rehl told MediaWatch that the inaccuracy of Lunden's statement wasn't ABC's problem: "We didn't do the analysis. You should take it up with [Tufts]." At Tufts, researcher John Cook admitted to MediaWatch: "There is no Census hunger data." Cook also said Lunden was wrong to imply 12 million children "go to bed hungry at night," that is, every night. "Our findings only claim that 12 million children were hungry at some time in 1991." Lunden might have gotten this point clarified if her summary had preceded an interview with a conservative like the Heritage Foundation's Robert Rector, but GMA brought on two leftists: Brown and Assistant Agriculture Secretary Ellen Haas, until recently an activist with the group Public Voice for Nutrition and Health.

Warped Abortion Terms. The language of the pro-abortion movement is quickly becoming the standard way anchors and reporters describe the two sides in the abortion battle. For years one side has been termed "pro-choice," the other "anti-abortion." Recently, even stronger pro-abortion euphemisms began appearing in the media.

Newsweek reporter Eleanor Clift claimed on the May 22 McLaughlin Group: "Therapeutic abortions will be in [the Clinton health plan] as a matter of reproductive health...It's part of a woman's reproductive health, it's not a euphemism."

On the August 20 World News, CNN anchor Susan Rook introduced a story on violence outside abortion clinics: "For years, women's clinics that perform abortions have dealt with [what] abortion rights advocates call the tyranny of the anti-choice minority. This year the violence has escalated, one doctor has been shot to death and another shot and wounded." There is also a change in how interviewees are tagged. CBS This Morning co-host Paula Zahn on August 23 interviewed two doctors who perform abortions. When their names flashed on screen, they were each labeled an "Abortion Provider."

Weisberg's White House. In the September issue of Vanity Fair, New Republic writer Jacob Weisberg turned the tables on the White House press corps when he got a chance to look behind the scenes. Weisberg found a few young corps members who believe in Clinton and "form a tight subculture within the White House press corps." Members include: Mark Halperin of ABC, Matthew Cooper of U.S. News & World Report, David Lauter of the Los Angeles Times, Jeffrey Birnbaum of The Wall Street Journal, Ruth Marcus of The Washington Post, and Adam Nagourney of USA Today. "Politically, they're all liberal and, despite the emotional wounds of the campaign, far more sympathetic to Clinton than the press corps as a whole."

Then there is the case of Newsweek's openly gay reporter Mark Miller, who on the campaign trail "epitomized the closeness of journalists to Clinton." According to Weisberg, Miller "helped sensitize Clinton to the issue of gay rights." After Clinton took office, Newsweek editors asked him to toughen up on the administration. Early on, Miller reported that George Stephanopoulos was contemptuous of the press. Miller told Weisberg that Stephanopoulos "was really hurt. It was not pleasant for our friendship. I didn't want to be in the position of having to write something like that." Not long after, Miller "asked (Newsweek) to be taken off the beat and transferred to the magazine's Los Angeles bureau."

Defending the Deceased. Reporters are stepping up to defend late Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster's bad decisions, including his membership in an all-white country club. In a long August 15 article, Washington Post reporter David Von Drehle bemoaned: "But what was obvious politically was personal agony...Foster had to telephone his wife to tell her to cancel a tennis match that afternoon...Furthermore, in Little Rock society, many people were offended, according to one leading citizen, by the suggestion they were racists with whom it was damaging to associate. Though the issue passed in a blink on the public stage, privately it deepened the sense, for some Arkansans in Washington, of cutting ties to a life they loved." A life without blacks on the golf course?

In the August 23 Newsweek, media writer Jonathan Alter attacked The Wall Street Journal's editorials criticizing Foster: "The savagery is actually a throwback to an earlier era. The Journal editorial page resembles nothing so much as the rabidly partisan 19th Century newspapers that routinely -- often brilliantly -- slandered anyone on the other side of the barricades." Speaking of rabidly partisan, Alter wrote: "If Robert Bartley, the Journal's editor, hasn't been sleeping fitfully, he's even less of a human being than his worst enemies imagine." Funny -- we don't remember this sensitivity to criticism when it came to Republican officials like Ed Meese. Or Ollie North. Or Lyn Nofziger. Or....

Affirmative Action's Negatives. The unusually large number of D.C. police officers who have been convicted of crimes prompted Eye to Eye with Connie Chung to examine the causes. CBS correspondent Edie Magnus, who pointed out one of every 61 officers is under indictment or has a case pending before a grand jury, traced the problems back to the late '80s when the city's crime rate soared. "Congress ordered the city to beef up its police force -- fast."

In the August 12 piece, Magnus catalogued the problems this hiring blitz aggravated. "It wasn't only the failure to do background checks that let in the bad apples. Some of them were overlooked because of department policy. Policies that remain in effect today. Recruiters aren't allowed to look at an applicant's juvenile criminal record...Applicants are allowed to admit some previous drug usage...And preferential treatment is given to residents of the District."

But a Winter 1993 Policy Review article by Tucker Carlson shows Magnus skipped over one problem too politically incorrect to mention. Tucker cited the same maladies as Magnus, but concluded affirmative action shared some blame. Gary Hankins, former Fraternal Order of Police President, was distressed at the quality of recruits that were passing the police entrance exam in the '80s. Tucker wrote: "Hankins called Donna Brockman, an employee at the Office of Recruitment and Examining...Brockman told him that all test scores were `converted' on the basis of non-academic factors. She said the `conversion factors are sex, race, residency, and whether you went to D.C. schools.'" Hankins told Tucker that "Social engineering in the police department drove down standards and elevated irrelevant criteria."

Less Than FAIR? When the left-wing radicals at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) put out a study in August asserting conservatives were wrong about a liberal bias on PBS, the Los Angeles Times and The Boston Globe were quick to publicize the story. But when the Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA) issued a study in March 1992 of PBS documentaries that found a liberal bias, neither the Times nor the Globe did a story.

Times reporter Sharon Bernstein compared the FAIR study to "a well-publicized conservative study of public broadcasting" by CMPA, even though the Times never publicized it. But on April 2, 1992, Bernstein did find space to report on another left-wing study by the Center for Media Education and the Center for the Study of Commercialism, two Naderite groups, on how corporate underwriting is destroying the integrity of PBS.

Frontline "Facts" Crumble. In 1984, former Sandinista war hero turned Contra commander Eden Pastora was the target of an assassination attempt at a news conference in La Penca. Three journalists and a number of Contras were killed. The bomb had been planted by a man posing as a Danish photographer using the false name of Per Anker Hansen. For nearly a decade, the leftist Christic Institute, bolstered by journalists Tony Avirgan and Martha Honey, maintained in a $24 million lawsuit that the bomb plot was part of a right-wing, CIA-sponsored attempt to frame the Sandinistas. The PBS series Frontline touted the Christic accusations in two 1988 episodes, one produced by former CBS News producer Leslie Cockburn.

Through the use of fingerprints, Miami Herald foreign editor Juan Tamayo has now identified the bomber as Vital Roberto Gaugine. A member of the ultraleftist faction of Argentina's People's Revolutionary Army, Gaugine worked for Sandinista counter-intelligence and was trained in Managua by a Cuban intelligence operative. In the September 6 issue of The Nation, Tony Avirgan acknowledged the identity of the bomber noting, "It turns out that he was not part of a right-wing cell or group." We await a retraction from Frontline and Cockburn. And an apology to General John Singlaub and Co.

Miami Lice. The media frequently exaggerate the number of homeless children in America, but NBC added the liberal "solution" to this "growing" problem -- higher taxes. NBC reporter David Bloom declared on the August 11 Today: "A report titled `No Way Out' shatters the image of the homeless. Yes, there are drunken men and mentally ill women, but the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty says that `families with children make up one-quarter to one-third of America's homeless.'" Bloom then asserted: "What's the answer? Homeless advocates say you might find it in Miami, where a new one percent tax on restaurant meals is expected to raise close to $8 million a year for homeless programs. Dade County's plan is being hailed as a national model...because it includes money for long-term subsidized housing."

Bloom quoted Dade County Commissioner Alex Penalas: "We are trying to accomplish...a long-term comprehensive solution to a problem that for many years has been piecemealed to death." Actually, housing assistance grew 120 percent from 1989 to 1993. Bloom only aired soundbites of homeless activists, local government officials, and the homeless themselves. A review by the prestigious National Academy of Sciences found that, contrary to Bloom, "studies seeking to provide an estimate of the number of homeless children...are nonexistent."

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