MediaWatch: September 1994
Table of Contents:
NewsBites: The Case of the Missing 500,000
The Case of the Missing 500,000
Reporters seldom show
skepticism towards Hillary Clinton's statements. On August 16,
ABC's John Cochran reported: "The First Lady and other
supporters of universal coverage tried to push a bogged-down
Senate into action. Noting the Senate began debate last Tuesday, Mrs.
Clinton said more than 500,000 Americans have lost their coverage
since then." The same evening, CBS reporter Bob Schieffer
relayed that "Mrs. Clinton and a lobby group reminded Congress
that every minute the debate goes on, someone loses health
insurance." The Today show also cited the figures.
But NBC Nightly News viewers learned the real story. Hillary's claim, gleaned from the liberal group Families USA, only gave part of the story. The next night, NBC's Lisa Myers explained: "The author of the study on which Mrs. Clinton's claim was based estimates that about as many people gained health insurance last week as lost it." ABC, CBS, and Today failed to correct their stories.
Howard's My Hero
Retiring Senator Howard Metzenbaum received a warm send-off in the August 1 Newsweek.
Jolie Solomon's fond farewell described him as a "self-made
millionaire who fights for the union maid and a mince-no-words
man whose sense of humor and integrity has made ideological foes
such as Orrin Hatch and Alan Simpson into friends."
Indeed, Solomon gave readers no reason to doubt the integrity of this "renaissance liberal." But the 1994 Almanac of American Politics by Michael Barone and Grant Ujifusa noted: "Metzenbaum himself in 1983 accepted a $250,000 `finders fee' for making a phone call putting a prospective buyer in touch with the owner of Washington's Hay-Adams hotel, returning the money only after the transaction was revealed." The authors also noted a conflict of interest involving Joel Hyatt, Metzenbaum's son-in-law and heir apparent to his Senate seat: "He lobbied the Senate Finance Chairman on a tax break for companies that pay for employees' legal services while his son-in-law Joel Hyatt heads the nation's largest legal services firm."
Solomon also claimed he "challenges the equation that an anti-business liberal is a big spender. By reading the fine print of every bill to root out hidden tax breaks, colleagues say, he has saved billions for taxpayers." However, the National Taxpayers Union didn't find Metzenbaum's record much of a "challenge." They gave him a grade of "F" for 1993, putting the Ohioan in the "Big Spender" category.
Deficit Dove
USA Today reporter Mark Memmott
has a history of championing Bill Clinton's economic policies
and trashing the `80s. Last November 3, he predicted a growing
economy: "Many of the major economic problems that built up in
the 1980s are finally becoming less daunting." So it was hardly
surprising when Memmott claimed in an August 8 article:
"President Clinton got back at all those who doubted his deficit
program would do the economy any good." His evidence? "A year
ago, it was expected the 1994 federal deficit would total $305 billion.
Now, it easily could come in under $220 billion. It looks to be
headed below $200 billion in '95."
Memmott didn't mention how Clinton's "deficit reduction" was calculated. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the 1994 deficit at $259 billion, not $305 billion as Memmott wrote. An August study by the Joint Economic Committee attributed the $50 to $60 billion in "deficit reduction" to "a swing in deposit insurance outlays related to liquidation of S&L assets, and better than projected economic growth pushing up revenues and restraining some outlay growth."
Let's Call The Whole Thing Off
ABC World News Tonight
reporter Tom Foreman continued his self-appointed role as truth
monitor of health care reform, moving from last month's Janet
Cooke Award- winning attack on conservative TV ads to correcting
talk shows: "In cities and towns across the country, radio talk
shows are waging a rhetorical war on health care reform....what
is missing from these discussions too often is the truth."
First, Foreman's August 16 story "corrected" conservative Gary Bauer's charge that government spending would rise, asserting: "Lewin-VHI, a private consulting firm...says overall health spending will likely rise only about four percent." But Foreman didn't really correct Bauer, since government spending is projected to increase no matter what happens overall. Then Foreman contested that "the cost of universal coverage as imagined by the Democrats will balloon beyond anyone's wildest dreams, like Medicaid and Medicare did." He quoted Rush Limbaugh: "[Medicare's] running 10 times the cost projections that Congress said it would." Foreman responded: "Medicare is actually about seven times over projections." But on September 29, 1993, NBC's Lisa Myers asserted: "When LBJ proposed [Medicare], he claimed it would cost $8 billion in 1990. The actual cost was $98 billion."
Foreman did critique two liberal claims, but concluded oddly that politics doesn't need conflict: "Most often, it is talk of conflict, not compromise. And for both sides in the health care debate, that may be worse than no talk at all."
Worse Than Cuba?
NBC Sports anchors Ahmad Rashad and
Bob Costas dove into the realm of health reform when they hosted
the "Health Care Olympics" for Michael Moore's TV Nation
on August 8. The sports team traced the progress of patients
with injured legs through hospitals in Cuba, Canada, and the
U.S. The three systems were rated on access, delivery, and cost.
After the patients were admitted, Rashad hailed Canada: "Long waits are typically more characteristic of Canada with rationing of services due to limited resources but...the patient... practically sailed through the check-in process." Rashad critiqued the U.S., where the wait was one hour less: "The U.S. really struggled with access to medical care but that's one area Americans always have been in trouble because of the 39 million citizens who are uninsured." The Cuban was admitted directly to surgery.
NBC claimed Cuba cost the patient nothing, in Canada just $15, and in America $450.70, as if such costs were not incurred elsewhere. Canada took the gold for "over twenty years of universal access." Rashad awarded Cuba the silver: "Cuba had some pretty great moments and wins points for such a comprehensive medical system...until they find a way out of economic isolation, it's going to be hard to sustain the quality of the system." And the bronze? "Unfortunately, it may take a while for the United States to make its way through the insurance obstacle course and who knows what could happen with reform...it came in third," announced Rashad. But if free health care in Cuba is so superior, why aren't Americans rafting their way?
Silly Old Anti-Communism
The Cold War might be over,
but some journalists still miss the McCarthy era. How else to
explain Ralph Blumenthal's July 29 New York Times article on the
FBI investigation into composer Leonard Bernstein, describing
the '50s as a time of "blacklisting and redbaiting, when cold
war fears drove political passions." The FBI "obsessively
documented" the composer's ties to groups "listed as subversive
or communist." The word "listed" implies room for doubt, when
several of the groups were in fact communist fronts, including
the American Youth for Democracy, the formal successor to the
Young Communist League.
CBS Sunday Morning host Charles Osgood cited the Times story two days later, conceding Bernstein was "a liberal, and lent his name indiscriminately to any cause that seemed to him to be worthwhile," including the Black Panthers. If Osgood had read past the headline of the story, he might have noted Bernstein's personal representative Margaret Carson, who told the Times: "His closest political self-definition was that he was a socialist."
Osgood maintained a tone of haughty indignation: "It is a milepost, I think, to be reminded how irrationally suspicious and fearful we once were." The "irrationally suspicious" times look less so after the July 17 Washington Post reported how Mao Zedong "was in some way responsible for at least 40 million deaths and perhaps 80 million," and Stalin for "30 million and 40 million." But Osgood mocked the FBI: "What did the FBI think maestro Bernstein was going to do, leak symphonic secrets to the Russians? Perhaps that was not a baton he held in his hand all those years. Perhaps it was a signaling device of some kind."
Victim of His Own Good
In a July 31 New York Times Magazine
article hated by the White House, staff writer Michael Kelly
portrayed Bill Clinton as a man unable to tell the difference
between truth and fiction. Yet rather than condemn Clinton,
Kelly painted him as a victim of his own desire to do good:
"What makes this sad, even tragic, rather than merely sordid, is
that Bill Clinton's predicament owes itself directly to Bill
Clinton's promise. The President's problems did not come about because
he was a cheap political hack. They came about because he was
not. For what has happened to Clinton has happened because he
wanted, more than anything in life, to get where he is today,
and because he wanted this, at least in part, in order to do
good -- and because the great goal of doing good gave him
license to indulge in the everyday acts of minor corruption and
compromise and falsity that the business of politics demands.
Bill Clinton was perceptive enough to master politics -- but not
perceptive enough to see what politics was doing to him."
Kelly rationalized the 1969 letter requesting a military deferment, saying it showed Clinton "at a crossroads...the writer of the letter is obviously and passionately concerned with doing and being good. But the letter also captures, with shattering clarity, a young man learning to rationalize acts of deception and compromise as necessary in the pursuit of that good -- which Clinton now regarded as inseparable from his own political advancement."
Natural Born Killers
CNN did another story worrying
about violence at abortion clinics on the August 18 World News
-- but, as usual, CNN ignored the 1.6 million incidents of
violence going on inside clinics each year. Reporter Pat Neal
described the "danger" pervading abortionist Randall Whitney's
day. In the 20-plus years since abortion became legal, three
people have been shot and killed outside clinics, so a doctor is more
likely to die in a car accident than be shot outside his office.
Neal hailed the doctor's bravery: "Whitney is the only physician performing abortions in Brevard County. A county with fervent protesters, a clinic dedicated to providing choices, and federal marshals to watch it all...As the day ends, Dr. Whitney's concerns for his safety remains, as do his concerns for his clinic's future, and the future of women who believe abortion should be their choice."
Excuses, Excuses
Alicia Shepard found more lame
excuses for delaying Paula Jones' story in the July/August
American Journalism Review. When Jones spoke out in February,
"We didn't run a story that night...because she was making
charges that could not be verified," said CBS News Washington
Bureau Chief Barbara Cochran. "Her making a claim particularly
of such a serious nature when she had not sought the legal
remedies available to her was just not appropriate to make a story out
of it." CBS had no qualms leading the news with Anita Hill five
nights in a row.
Washington Post reporter Lloyd Grove told AJR "There's no way to assess [the charges] on the basis of a dog and pony show...I just walked away with no firm belief one way or the other about its veracity." But if Grove had "no firm belief," why did he write in the Post that Jones' charges were "yet another ascension of Mount Bimbo"?
