Failing to Help CBS Democrats
"So why not stay in the
Senate with your party and restore - if it's all broken, have
you no responsibility to even your Democratic constituents from
New Jersey who work right within this building?"
- CBS
This Morning co-host Harry Smith to Senator Bill Bradley who
announced he will not seek re-election, August 17.
Gephardt and Daschle: The Media's Middle
"The Democrats can offer
only a cacophony of views, ranging from the leftist tract of
[Jesse] Jackson to the more centrist perspectives of House
minority leader Richard Gephardt of Missouri and Senate minority
leader Tom Daschle."
- Time Washington reporter Jeffrey H.
Birnbaum, in an August 14 story on what the parties can offer
Perot voters. Gephardt's 1992 American Conservative Union (ACU)
rating: 0. Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) rating in 1992:
85 percent. Daschle's 1992 ACU: 22 percent; 1992 ADA: 95.
A Massive Six Tenths of One Percent Slash from the Federal Budget
"A bitter battle on Capitol
Hill has ended with a deep slash in federal spending. The House
made more than $9 billion in cuts, hitting education and
employment programs especially hard. NBC's Joe Johns has
more."
- NBC Today anchor Matt Lauer, August 4.
More Concerned About Investigators Than Investigated
"The Whitewater scandal
occupied key committees in both the House and Senate last week
- a two-ring circus whose single goal seemed to be causing
maximum embarrassment to Bill and Hillary Clinton and their
friends."
- Opening sentence of August 21 Newsweek story
headlined "An End in Sight (Maybe), Whitewater: Trying to
finish the investigations." Story written by Mark Hosenball
and Michael Isikoff.
"But these won't be the
last ones. The Republicans plan several more rounds, and these
hearings left us with more questions than answers about the
tangled Whitewater mess and Republicans' motives."
- CNN's
Bob Franken concluding an August 11 World News story.
White Men Ruin Everything
"Why don't we adequately
fund urban education at the preschool and elementary level to
eliminate the need for race-based admission standards later
on?....The uncomfortable truth is that the tension about raceand
gender in this country is not about facts; it is about fear. In
the '60s and '70s, we settled all this on paper. We desegregated
the schools. We admitted women to the Ivy League. We granted
women control of their reproductive lives. And in response?
White, middle class families abandoned our cities and schools to
poor minorities. Universities educated the women they had
admitted, then denied them tenure....We thought we had granted
women the right to abortion in 1973. But barely a year goes by
that the U.S. Supreme Court calendar does not include a case
attempting to limit the right to abortion outlined in Roe v.
Wade."
- Boston Globe
reporter Eileen McNamara in an August 16 front page
"commentary."
Internment Camps, Proposition 187: Same Thing
"Is it really a comfort to
know that Canadians were as disdainful of civil liberties and
common sense as the rest of us in our yellow fever?...In
California, where I grew up, they're doing it all over again,
punishing brown-skinned berry-pickers for the collapse of the
aerospace industry and the savings-and-loan scandals."
-
CBS Sunday Morning TV critic John Leonard on a movie about
Japanese relocation camps in Canada during World War II, July
30.
Abandoned to Crazed Uncles and Big Business
"The Republicans say they
are for the poor as well as the rich. So how come they want to
offer no aid and comfort - and care - when the poor are put
upon? How come they want to eliminate federal welfare programs
and leave the poor and the sick and the unlucky at the mercy of
the states - some of which don't have a great record of caring
for people who don't make political contributions. Why do they
want to let states take away aid to provide for abortions in
case of rape and incest? So only the rich won't have to bear
children of violent strangers or crazed uncles? Do the
Republicans perhaps have a double standard - not of men and
women, but of rich and poor?"
- Former NBC News President
Michael Gartner in his USA Today column, August 15.
"The sordid, cynical effort
to pass regulatory `reform' is all about money. The legislation
is designed to enhance the profits of big business by tying the
regulatory process in knots. Government officials will be
virtually neutralized as they are forced to make endless
cost-benefit analyses before determining whether to protect
Americans from unsafe food or drugs, from dangers in the
workplace, from a tainted blood supply, from pollutants in the
environment, and on and on."
- Former NBC News reporter
Bob Herbert, August 7 New York Times column.
"You're probably wondering
how I'm going to make this segue from Gingrich to Galapagos but
the point I was trying to make was that, in the 19th century,
after Darwin, you had a movement called, that you know all
about, called Social Darwinism, where people applied Darwin's
rules of nature to society: survival of the fittest, the strong
prosper, the weak don't. I'm wondering, do you, some people
think we actually are headed back into Social Darwinism now, a
new way of looking at society's responsibilities."
-
Question from Newsweek Senior Editor Jonathan Alter to ABC's
Forrest Sawyer, August 12 CNBC Talk Live.
Never Mind Current Events, Media Can't Get History Straight
"The Russians attacked on
August 9th; on the 11th the U.S. assured the Japanese that they
could keep their Emperor. [Historian Gar] Alperovitz says this
assurance could have produced a surrender without the atomic
bombs. That is now the prevailing view among U.S.
historians."
- NBC reporter Gary Matsumoto, August 6 Today.
vs.
"Japanese students were
still being drafted to prepare for the expected U.S. invasion;
boys as young as 12 were being trained to fly Kamikaze suicide
missions....Japan's Emperor and civilian leaders had wanted to
end the war weeks earlier but feared a military revolt. Then
came the atomic bombings. On August 9th Emperor Hirohito
summoned top government officials to the Imperial Palace where
he told them the end had come; it was time to accept the
unthinkable. Kasotoshi Hondo wrote Japan's definitive history on
the last hours of the war. Through a film based on his book many
Japanese learned...how the military attempted a coup d'etat on
the 14th of August. Several hundred troops stormed the palace
trying to find the recording of the Emperor's surrender
announcement."
- ABC's Mark Litke on World News Tonight,
August 14.
Lionizing Politically Correct Cop Killers
"Sympathizers around the
globe from Dublin to Soweto hail him as a political prisoner
punished for taking journalistic aim at politicians, police and
the prison system (most recently in a book entitled Live from
Death Row). If he is put to death, they argue, he will be the
first American since Ethel and Julius Rosenberg to be executed
for his political beliefs."
- Time Senior Writer Jill
Smolowe in August 7 story on battle to save Mumia Abu-Jamal,
convicted of murdering a Philadelphia police officer.
- Brent Bozell III, Publisher;
Brent H. Baker, Tim Graham; Editors
- Geoffrey Dickens, James Forbes, Steve Kaminski, Gesele Rey,
Clay Waters; Media Analysts
- Kathleen Ruff, Circulation Manager; Gene Eliasen, Melissa
Gordon; Interns