Time Unleashed Online
"President Clinton
is taking heat over China's human rights violations, but some
people maintain that human rights is a culturally biased idea.
While Americans attack China over freedom of speech and
multi-party democracy, China accuses the U.S. of inhumane
treatment of the homeless. Does the U.S. have the right to
impose its idea of human rights on China?"
- Time Daily
online poll, June 22.
"Not A Lott of
Tolerance: But the power of Majority Leader gives Lott immunity
from offensive comments."
- Time Daily
headline on Trent Lott's comments on homosexuality as a sin,
June 16.
"The Tobacco Bill
is Dead: John McCain's noble effort just got too big and bloated
to live."
- Time Daily
headline, June 18.
"High Court Turns
Rightward: Two pragmatic conservative decisions have a troubling
aspect."
- Time Daily
headline, June 22.
Ken Starr: Illegal or Unethical?
"So despite all
his earlier statements Kenneth Starr is now in the position of
acknowledging he has given information to reporters in private,
although he still maintains he has done nothing illegal. In a
statement today Mr. Starr said nothing his office has done
violates the law or Department of Justice policy. That's his
legal argument. But legal issues aside, Kenneth Starr has really
handed the White House an incredible political gift, one they've
already started to use against him."
- Charles Gibson
anchoring ABC's World News Tonight, June 15.
"Well I think Ken
Starr's candor might actually cost him this time. You can look
at this and say, 'What's the big deal? So he's leaking,
everybody leaks, the White House leaks.' But the law is very
clear. It's okay for the White House to leak, as sleazy as it
might be in P.R. terms. It's not okay under the law for Ken
Starr or his people to leak. The law is very clear. It says they
cannot talk about quote, 'matters before the grand jury,'
unquote. And that covers a lot of territory."
- Newsweek's
Jonathan Alter, June 15 Today.
"What would
determine, Mr. Walsh, whether a law was broken or whether it was
simply an ethical violation?"
- CNN's Judy
Woodruff to Iran-Contra counsel Lawrence Walsh on Inside
Politics, June 15.
Brill's Shills
"Starr's is a
shameful story - as shameful as the conduct of almost all
television news programs and some of the press....Starr's leaks,
whose purpose is to condition the public to believe in the
President's guilt, are of a piece with other practices that reek
of abuse....The real spinning is taking place in the graves of
our Founding Fathers. When they wrote the First Amendment, they
imagined a press corps as a curb on power. They did not
anticipate an independent counsel free from checks and balances.
They had no role for a chief inquisitor. Nor should we."
- U.S. News
& World Report Editor-in-Chief Mort Zuckerman in his
editorial titled, "Starr Has Hit a New Low," June 29
issue.
"An important
break on an important story."
- Dan Rather on
Brill's article, June 18 Philadelphia Inquirer.
CBS Toes the White House Line
John Roberts:
"How much of a case independent counsel Kenneth Starr has
against the President is in question tonight after a report
Monica Lewinsky is ready to admit she had intimate relations
with Mr. Clinton but that he did not tell her to lie about it.
Sharyl Attkisson reports if Lewinsky testifies to that, the
investigation could end up nothing more than he said, she
said."
Sharyl
Attkisson: "...The nation's capital is abuzz over
the report in The Washington Post that Monica Lewinsky is ready
to deal, willing to testify that she did have sex with the
President despite his vehement denial. But if that's all she's
willing to say, a noted Democratic attorney insists independent
counsel Ken Starr doesn't have a case."
- CBS Evening
News, June 21.
"It appears
tonight that carefully orchestrated leaks of secretly recorded
tapes of Monica Lewinsky, that were damaging to the Clinton
camp, may not have told the whole story...."
- Dan Rather on
the initial Tripp-Lewinsky tapes, June 22.
It Ain't Watergate
"People around the
President were terribly concerned that the parallel with Richard
Nixon and Watergate would be drawn, when in fact these are two
very different situations. One about a pervasive abuse of power
by a President in office, the other relating, for the most part
here, to the private sexual conduct of the President."
- CBS News
consultant and famed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein, June 7 Sunday
Morning.
Tobacco: What Went Wrong
"But what went so
wrong? First, the tobacco companies got mad when Congress
started talking about raising the price of cigarettes higher and
higher....The smoking industry unleashed a $40 million ad
campaign charging member of Congress just wanted to get their
hands on tobacco money so they could spend it."
- ABC reporter
Linda Douglass, June 17 World News Tonight.
"Another breaking
story tonight with huge implications for the health of the U.S.
economy and the health of smokers. The months-in-the-making
multi-billion-dollar tobacco settlement bill is dead. Finished.
Senate Republicans under heavy pressure and heavy money from the
tobacco lobby, voted tonight to kill it."
-
Dan Rather, June 17 CBS Evening News.
"I was just going
to say Senator McCain, does this have something to do with
Republican Senators being unable to wean themselves from the big
bucks that come from the tobacco industry into their campaign
coffers?"
- Katie Couric to
Republican Senator and tobacco-tax hike champion John McCain,
June 18 Today.
"In the end it was
a procedural assassination. Republicans drove up the cost of the
bill by attaching unrelated amendments then said it was too
expensive."
- NBC reporter
Gwen Ifill on Today, same day.
The Good Old Days in Russia, When Everyone Was Equal
"There's also this
in the Miami Herald. 'Moscow minorities in fear as racist
attacks increase.' As Moscow adapts to the ways of the western
world they are missing - everyone was equal under communism -
because they are also experiencing a growing problem with
racism. Skinheads are more prevalent in Moscow than ever before.
More and more minorities are being attacked simply for not being
Russian. That story on the front page of the Miami Herald
tomorrow morning."
- Brian Williams
on MSNBC's The News with Brian Williams, June 17.
Icky Christian Conservatism
"And he dismisses
suggestions the GOP is tilting heavily to the Christian
conservative agenda. Are you concerned that your party is too
narrowly cast?"
- Tom Brokaw to
potential GOP presidential candidate George W. Bush, June 17 NBC
Nightly News profile.
Persecuting Fictional Characters?
"In an era when a
fictional Roman Catholic priest like the one on ABC's Nothing
Sacred can be persecuted by conservative groups just for
being open-minded, it's strange to consider that in 1983 [in the
miniseries The Thorn Birds] there was no uproar over the
story of a priest's affair with a married woman."
- New York
Times writer Anita Gates, June 14.
Baptists: KKK, or Wife-Beaters?
Greta Van
Susteren: "If the Southern Baptists want to do
this, they have an absolute right to do it, and especially when
you examine the history and see how many wars are fought in the
name of religion, how many people are critical of other
religions - you'll see how dangerous it is."
Larry King:
"Greta, the Ku Klux Klan said it was religious. Would it
have been rude to criticize them?"
Van Susteren:
"Well, they also violated the law. They started killing
people."
King:
"When they violated the law. But on their edict it was
wrong to criticize them that whites were superior..."
- Exchange on Southern
Baptist statement that a wife should "submit
graciously" to her husband, who is to "love his wife
as Christ loved the Church," CNN's Larry King Live,
June 12.
"But I think
there's a serious problem with this. Which is that I, you know,
those of us who spend a lot of time worrying about domestic
violence see a resolution like this going down a path that says,
if you don't submit to your husband then what happens next? And,
he is saying, you're not being submissive, and is that a reason
to whack you around a little bit. And at what point then do you
get into the courts. And at what point is the law coming in?
"For a very, very long time, we've had a problem with this
in all countries, and finally in this country we're getting to a
point where people are taking it seriously as a legal question.
It's not just the guy slapping his wife around on Saturday
night. That's illegal. He goes to jail. And to get anything
that's away from that, away from the seriousness of that crime,
I think is very dangerous. I think it's very dangerous for
women."
- ABC This Week
co-host Cokie Roberts, June 14.
Hey, We're Over Here!
"Well, my reaction
was really ambivalence. I think that Evan's [Thomas] right. It's
important to have this kind of a publication since there isn't
any other check on us, exactly."
- ABC
News/National Public Radio reporter Nina Totenberg reacting to
Brill's Content on Inside Washington, June 20.
L. Brent
Bozell III, Publisher
Brent H. Baker, Tim Graham; Editors
Jessica Anderson, Eric Darbe, Geoffrey Dickens,
Tom Roop, Clay Waters; Media Analysts
Kristina Sewell, Research Associate
Michelle Baetz, Circulation Manager
Stacey Felzenberg, Carrie Hale, Interns