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Russert Hit Gore Contradiction; "Abysmal" on NAACP; Only CBS Touched Memo on Real Gas Hike Causes
-- Best Question of the Weekend: Tim Russert to Al Gore on Meet the Press: "You have for the first twenty minutes said we're going to have a robust economy, you're going to keep it going, and in order to have a robust economy the stock market keeps have to growing, and so now you're suggesting, because Governor Bush suggests a plan involving the stock market, 'oh no, that's risky' when you based your entire premise of your economic program on a robust stock market and economy. You can't have it both ways." Despite Gore's repeated anti-Bush mantra that he's "for the people, my opponent is for the powerful," Russert disappointingly failed to ask Gore about his slumlord housing. -- Oddest Question of the Weekend: Cokie Roberts to George W. Bush on This Week: "Your convention's coming up. Scared?" Earlier in the interview Roberts spent a lengthy 5:45 pressing Bush about the death penalty and evidence some guy named Odell Barnes was really innocent. Bush refused to concede that anyone innocent has been put to death, leading an exasperated Roberts to proclaim: "Well, we'll move on. But the question is how can you be sure?"
During the July 16 roundtable segment substitute host Judy Woodruff read an excerpt from a direct mail letter signed by William Powers, Chairman of the New York State Republican Party: "In her ruthless quest for power, she claims to be a 'New Democrat,' but she's a fraud, a phony, and a pretender...She's hard-core, hardline, hard-nosed ultra-liberal who uses people and hates Republicans." [ellipses on screen in what Woodruff read] Steve Roberts, a
Washington media veteran who once toiled for the New York Times, insisted:
"I think a lot of women will read that and see an underlying sexism
to that, to that tone." What's really sexist is to assume that any criticism of a woman running for office is in itself sexist.
Fletcher appeared on Friday's Washington Week in Review to discuss the Bush and Gore appearances before the liberal group. On Bush, Fletcher declared: "Bush, I think, benefitted simply by coming. I mean his party's record's been abysmal. It's an amazing fact, but he's the first Republican presidential candidate to address the NAACP -- the mid-stream, middle class NAACP, we're not talking about the Nation of Islam here -- since 1988 and his father did that." When was the last time a media figure complained about the "abysmal" record of a Democrat in addressing the concerns of the Christian Coalition? By Fletcher's reasoning, they are "mis-stream" and "middle class" as "we're not talking about a militia group here."
Rich Noyes, Director of the MRC's Free Market Project (FMP), outlined in the latest issue of MediaNomics the relevance of what the Washington Times first reported. Here's an excerpt from an article in the July 17 MediaNomics: The last issue of MediaNomics reported that
independent experts believed that the EPA's clean air rules were a major
factor in pushing gas prices to record levels in Chicago and Milwaukee in
June, but that ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC failed to aggressively pursue that
angle and instead repeated the Clinton administration's assertions that
industry "price gouging" was to blame. (See "Networks Let
Government Slide Off the Hook in Gas Price Run-Up," June 30: Now the Washington Times's Patrice Hill has uncovered an Energy Department memo showing that the administration was fully aware that its rules were a problem, despite contrary public assertions by President Clinton, Vice President Gore, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, EPA chief Carol Browner and other top-ranking officials. In a front-page story in the July 14 Washington Times, Hill revealed that the memo from the Energy Department's acting policy director, Melanie Kenderdine, informed officials that the EPA's requirement that some cities use reformulated gasoline to conform with clean air rules, was a "major reason" for the price increases. That memo was sent on June 5, a full week before public statements by EPA officials prompted the broadcast networks to promote the notion that oil industry profiteering was behind the record price hikes. "The White House has now put the oil industry on notice," CBS's Bob Orr stated on the June 12 Evening News. "If any evidence of price gouging surfaces, regulators will come down hard." At the time, most outside experts believed that regulators were at least as responsible as the oil companies. Now, thanks to Hill's reporting, it's apparent that the regulators themselves knew they were at fault, and were deliberately trying to focus the public's anger on oil companies, despite the absence of evidence that oil companies had done anything wrong. "It is clear from the June 5th memo that the DOE, whose primary responsibility is oversight of our nation's energy supply, believed that a lack of gasoline inventories in the Midwest, as well as EPA regulations, were not only 'factors' which led to higher gasoline prices, but in fact the primary causes," Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert wrote in a letter to the EPA's Browner. "Nowhere does this document indicate, or imply, that price gouging was a factor; nor has any other federal study or investigation," Hastert wrote, as reported by Hill. The Speaker also wrote that public statements targeting oil companies appeared part of a "coordinated strategy" by White House officials and others to escape responsibility. From June 12, when EPA officials publicly stated that their regulations could not have been responsible for the steep rise in prices, through June 26, the four network evening newscasts ran 16 stories about the idea that the oil companies were gouging consumers. Now that additional facts have come to light, it remains to be seen whether the networks will start challenging the EPA's version of the facts.... END Excerpt Friday night, July 14, CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather still couldn't resist opening with this jab at the side which was vindicated as he buried the real news of Clinton team duplicity: "Republicans today sided with the oil companies against the Clinton-Gore administration on the question of who and what is to blame for higher gasoline prices. CBS's Bill Plante is at the White House. Bill, what's all this about?" Plante explained:
"Well, Dan, House Speaker Hastert today angrily accused the
administration of misleading Congress and the public on the cause of
higher gas prices, and of scapegoating the oil companies when, in his
view, the real reason is low inventories and federal pollution
regulations. On June 15th, members of Congress from the hardest hit states
--Illinois, Wisconsin and Missouri -- met with Environmental Protection
Agency head Carol Browner. In a letter today, Hastert tells Browner, 'At
that meeting, you said that this situation was not a supply issue.' Al Gore, June 21:
"Why have their profits gone up 500 percent in the first part of this
year? I think it's outrageous, and I think that big oil may have gotten
too big." Instead of covering this evidence Friday night of liberal duplicity, ABC ran a piece on a true organic farmer in Virginia, CNN and NBC featured stories on how drivers are distracted by using their cell phones, and NBC ended with a piece on ten-year-olds who race mini-cars. Other articles in the latest MediaNomics: -- Gore Darts Further to
the Left but Networks Tag Him as "Populist," not
"Liberal" -- How to Spend the
Surplus To read these items in
full, go to:
An excerpt from the July 11 MagazineWatch: U.S. News writer Kit R. Roane highlighted how a "New book says Giuliani has thuggish family ties." She explained: "According to a new book, Rudy! An Investigative Biography of Rudy Giuliani, the mayor's deceased father was a stickup artist who robbed a milkman at gunpoint, then took over as muscle for a relative's loan-sharking business once he was sprung from prison. Other news: Giuliani's cousin, Steve the Blond, was a mobster shot dead by the feds." Roane later quoted the author, Wayne Barrett: "The greatest revelation here is that a man with so much reason to have understanding and empathy has been so intolerant of the weaknesses of others." Roane doesn't tell the reader that Barrett has long knocked Giuliani from his perch at the radical-left weekly the Village Voice, and concluded by quoting (without a label) the radical lawyer Ron Kuby knocking Giuliani. Roane also seemed surprised that Giuliani would be subjected to muckraking books now, which is odd since clearly these anti-Rudy tomes were intended to frustrate his aborted Senate campaign. The New York Post noted that "Barrett readily admits that four individuals and foundations, some with close Democratic Party ties, such as Bill Moyers, provided funding for his researchers. 'They understood who I am, my kind of journalism." Moyers heads the Florence and John Schumann Foundation in between his omnipresent PBS merchandising opportunities. Four years ago, investigative books about Bill Clinton got a much different treatment in the magazine. In the July 15, 1996 issue, columnist Gloria Borger claimed "some of this summer's political potboilers are problematic." Gary Aldrich's Unlimited Access "reads like an FBI file -- full of thirdhand gossip and rumors, the most notable of which depicts the President playing hide-and-seek with the Secret Service." She also ripped Roger Morris's Partners in Power: "The next juicy attack on the Clintons comes from the left. The author, Roger Morris, is an award winner who wrote a much lauded biography of Richard Nixon. More credible, you say? Forget it. Morris serves up some damning, even indictable, charges against the Clintons. But he fails to serve up much evidence to support them.".... END Excerpt Other items in MagazineWatch: -- Newsweek balanced its
earlier Bill Turque coverage of Al Gore's Vietnam-era military service --
including his contacts with Vietnam commander William Westmoreland -- with
a story on the mystery of whether George W. Bush served the Air National
Guard in Alabama in 1972. Plus the magazine found President Clinton is one
of the "great diplomats." To read these items, go
to:
Back in 1992 when she was still a reporter she reviewed R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.'s book, The Conservative Crack-Up. She asserted: "Sometimes his statements are revisionist howlers: 'The Reagan Administration left the American welfare state pretty much untouched.'" Only a liberal would disagree with Tyrrell. To read Bozell's
column, go to:
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From
the July 16 appearances of Al Gore for the entire hour on NBC's Meet the
Press from the Navy Observatory and of George W. Bush for three-fourths of
ABC's This Week from the Governor's Mansion in Austin:
It's
not just out of line, it's sexist. On Sunday's Late Edition on CNN
Steve Roberts of U.S. News & World Report claimed an anti-Hillary
fundraising letter showed "sexism" and proved her opponents
"don't like powerful women."
His
"party's record's been abysmal," Washington Post reporter
Michael Fletcher declared of Republicans and George W. Bush after he
addressed the NAACP, a group Fletcher labeled "mid-steam."
Clinton
administration officials knew all along that EPA reformulated gasoline
rules and supply problems were behind the gas price run-up in the Midwest,
yet they continued to blame oil company price gouging, Washington Times
reporter Patrice Hill disclosed in a July 14 front page story on an Energy
Department analysis. But only the CBS Evening News picked up on it Friday
night. All three broadcast networks skipped it Friday morning and CNN
ignored it too on Friday night as did ABC and NBC on Saturday and Sunday
night.
Bill
Moyers, the former CBS News analyst turned PBS omnipresence until he had
some health problems, helped fund, through a foundation he controls, the
book which dug up dirt on Rudy Giuliani. But, as the MRC's Tim Graham
noted in last week's MagazineWatch about the July 17 editions, U.S. News
failed to link the book to liberal efforts to discredit Giuliani, who they
expected to be her opponent.
Finally,
MRC Chairman L. Brent Bozell's latest syndicated column is about the
Jeff Jacoby situation: "Jeff Jacoby's Patriotic Problem." For
the column the MRC's Tim Graham dug out from the Notable Quotables
archives a classic quote from Renee Loth, the Boston Globe's editorial
page editor who suspended Jacoby for four months without pay.