Maria Shriver: Did the Homework, Failed the Test
Tim Russert: "How long did
you take to prepare for that interview?"
Maria Shriver: "A couple of
weeks, about two or three weeks, and I read everything. I
memorized that book up and down. I memorized everything that was
written about Whitewater, about Travelgate, about Hillary
Clinton, about First Ladies....You want to admire her, and yet
you're a journalist and you have to ask her these tough
questions, you have to be skeptical, and you can't just come on
and do this like `Oh, you're so wonderful' interview."
-
Maria Shriver on her interview with Hillary Clinton, CNBC's Tim
Russert, Feb. 4.
Reality Check:
"What's this week been like
for you personally?"
"...In the book, you write about preparing your daughter Chelsea for the negative things people might say to her about her father, but you don't say in the book about preparing her for the negative things people might say about her mom. What's this past week, two weeks been like for her?"
"...But this is beyond the territory, I mean, this is tough. This is your mom someone's talking about. Is she upset about this? What have you said to her?"
"...Whitewater. I know you've been answering questions on this subject for four years. Thousands of documents have been handed over, but they still want even more. As you look back on this, do you wish you'd never worked for Madison Guaranty?"
"...You also quote a letter
in there that Nelson Mandela wrote to one of his daughters while
he was in prison, and I'm paraphrasing a bit, but he wrote that
there is no personal misfortune that one cannot turn into a
personal triumph if one has the iron will and the necessary
skills. You clearly have an iron will, you clearly are skilled.
How are you going to turn this personal misfortune into a
personal triumph?"
- Some of Shriver's tough questions to
Hillary Clinton, January 16 Today.
Dan Rather's Partisan Offensive
"The Republican Whitewater
offensive is taking an unprecedented turn: First Lady Hillary
Rodham Clinton has been subpoenaed and now must testify before a
Whitewater federal grand jury. That grand jury is led by a
Republican prosecutor, Kenneth Starr."
- Dan Rather on the
CBS Evening News, January 22.
Forbes: Unknown or Well-Known?
"The quest for the man
behind the ads, however, is more difficult than usual because he
has almost no record to scrutinize. The flat tax advocate with
the quirky smile and scholarly glasses emerges from the closed
world of a billion-dollar private company that makes few public
pronouncements."
- Los Angeles Times reporter Eleanor
Randolph, January 19 front page story.
vs.
"But Forbes does have a
record. His columns provide a clear guide to his thinking over
time."
- Los Angeles Times reporter Ronald Brownstein,
January 23 front page. (Contrast first noted by National
Journal.)
Walter Cronkite's Middle Ground Between Freedom and Oppression
"Cronkite, Mr. Middle
American Everyman, even advocates a new sociopolitical system.
`We may have to find some marvelous middle ground between
capitalism and communism,' he says....`While each nation has
distinctive problems, for the United States the first priority
of the new order must be a revision of the educational system
to...guarantee that each of our citizens will have equal
resources to share in the decisions of the democracy, and a fair
share of the economic pie.'"
- Former CBS anchorman
Cronkite quoted in a January 21 Los Angeles Times Magazine
profile by Newsday TV writer Verne Gay.
The Media's New Campaign: Stop the Flat Tax
"The heart of his fiscal
crusade is his flat tax, a plan derided as `deja voodoo' by
economists who blame Reagan's supply-side tax cuts for the
explosion of the national debt. He has captured perfectly the
fury Americans feel for a system they think treats them like
suckers while the rich enjoy a secret tax code written just for
them - not withstanding his flat tax could favor the rich even
more effectively."
- Time Senior Editor Nancy Gibbs,
January 29.
"[Forbes] is changing the
debate in a really sorry way. This was the week that we left an
honest attempt to do something about entitlements and we
traveled into cloud cuckoo land, which is where the flat tax
is."
- Newsweek Washington Bureau Chief Evan Thomas,
January 20 Inside Washington.
"You know when George Bush
called Ronald Reagan's plan voodoo economics, he was right, and
the people who are calling Steve Forbes' plan voodoo economics
are also right."
- U.S. News & World Report Senior
Writer Steven Roberts on CNN's Late Edition, January 21.
"[Forbes] is a modern-day
robber baron. He just wants to legitimize an idea that will
benefit him and his income tax bracket."
- Newsweek's
Eleanor Clift on The McLaughlin Group, January 27.
No One Left But A Couple of Thousand Reporters
"Despite what the
Republicans may say, there's no left in this country, L-E-F-T.
Liberalism has largely been pilloried, and successfully so, by
Newt Gingrich and others who preceded him...Imagine, here we
have the freest nation on Earth and our political dialogue is
impoverished. You can't even acknowledge being a liberal. This
is not to say that liberals have all the answers. This is to
say, rather, that liberals have been excluded from the table
that might allow them to make a contribution."
- Retiring
TV talk show host Phil Donahue on ABC's Nightline, January 26.
"They are still among the
few people in this country who spend a lot of time talking to
other people - and actually trying to understand people - who
are different from themselves. At a time when so many on the
right and what remains of the left actually brag about refusing
to socialize with, publish alongside or even speak to those who
do not already agree with them, the responsible news media
provide the few vehicles by which we encounter and try to
communicate with each other."
- ABC reporter Michel
McQueen in a Newsweek forum on the news media, January 29 issue.
Why Republicans Will Regret Saving PBS
"In working recently on a
documentary about Andrew Carnegie and 19th century
industrialism, I explored a period of greed, of rapidly growing
wealth inequality, of painful structural changes in the economy,
or a frustrated labor movement, and of unethical business
dealings born from an absence of regulation. I found it
surprisingly good preparation for my next project, a documentary
about the Reagan years."
- Josh Clark, associate producer
for documentaries, WGBH-TV in Boston, in the January/February
1996 Mother Jones.
Newsweek's Idea of an Investigative Reporter
"`She's [Sarah McClendon] a
real treasure for journalism in this city,' says investigative
reporter Robert Parry, a former staffer with the Associated
Press and Newsweek, now freelance. `There was a time in
journalism when journalists took pride in being individuals
instead of being members of the pack.' A disgruntled loner,
Parry is a perfect speaker for tonight's meeting. His topic is
the `October Surprise,' a much probed but never proved tangle of
allegations involving top CIA officials and monied Republicans
who supposedly schemed to sabotage an October 1980 release of
the 52 U.S. hostages in Iran, thereby putting the kibosh on
President Carter's re-election. Parry talks spellbindingly for
two hours about a House committee's classified `X-files,' which
he stumbled upon in `a converted ladies' room, with the tampon
dispenser still on the wall': the Hashemi brothers...BCCI
links...a $20 million deposit...David Rockefeller...the Shah's
twin sister...a Marcos bagman. McClendon appears to doze off
during parts of the presentation, then pipes up with such
on-point questions as: `Was there any sort of French
intelligence input in those [classified] papers?'"
-
Washington Post reporter Richard Leiby on gatherings held by
McClendon, Jan. 24.
- L. Brent Bozell III,
Publisher; Brent H. Baker, Tim Graham; Editors
- Geoffrey Dickens, Gene
Eliasen, James Forbes, Steve Kaminski, Clay Waters; Media
Analysts
- Kathleen Ruff, Circulation
Manager; Jessica Anderson, Intern