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The 1,235th CyberAlert. Tracking Media Bias Since 1996
Tuesday February 26, 2002 (Vol. Seven; No. 34)
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NBC: Clinton Helped Enron; Clinton Ties Buried By Papers; Thomas Raises Iran-Contra; NYT: "McCarthy Years...Similar to the Present"
"Enron did surprisingly well during the Clinton years," declared NBC News reporter Lisa Myers on the February 25 NBC Nightly News. She explained: "Lay played golf with the President, and Enron received $1.2 billion in government-backed loans for projects around the world. Documents obtained by NBC News show the Clinton administration billed three Enron projects in India and Turkey as success stories, personally pushed by the late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown. About that time, Enron made its first $100,000 contribution to the Democrats." MSNBC's The News with Brian Williams on Monday night, anchored by Lester Holt, did not carry the Myers piece, but dedicated an amazing 19 minutes over two lengthy segments, yes 19 minutes on one show, to discussing the issue of priests molesting kids. NBC's story aired four days after a February 21 front page Washington Times story detailed how "the Clinton administration provided more than $1 billion in subsidized loans to Enron Corp. projects overseas at a time when Enron was contributing nearly $2 million to Democratic causes. Clinton officials refused to finance only one out of 20 projects proposed by the energy company between 1993 and 2000 to build power plants, natural-gas pipelines and other big-ticket energy facilities around the world, according to the Export-Import Bank and the Overseas Private Investment Corp., the agencies that provided the subsidies." For the entire story by Patrice Hill: http://www.washtimes.com/business/20020221-74571848.htm But that story failed to generate any coverage by the networks, not even on the CNN or FNC evening newscast programs which had raised the subject back in January, nor on CNN's Inside Politics. The February 21 American Morning on CNN offered one brief reference to how Ken Lay had offered a job to former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, a revelation noted a few weeks earlier on CNN's Inside Politics and FNC's Special Report with Brit Hume. On February 21 the networks had to scramble to lead with the death of Danny Pearl, yet the next night all three broadcast network evening shows had an opportunity to delve into the Clinton team's role as each ran stories on how the GAO was proceeding with a lawsuit against the White House over Cheney's energy task force. ABC's Jackie Judd explored how "the Bush administration is fighting on many fronts to limit what Congress and the public can know about how government operates." CBS's Dan Rather intoned: "Congressional investigators filed suit against Vice President Richard Cheney, demanding a list of people consulted secretly..." Naturally, the ABC, CBS and NBC morning shows have done zip. MRC analyst Brian Boyd informed me, for instance, that Thursday's CBS Early Show aired a segment on overweight pets and on Friday featured a reunion of actors from the Addams Family TV show. (The Clinton angle got some slight mentions back when the networks still considered Enron to be a political scandal. "Enron's connections to the Bush administration, wide and deep," warned ABC's Peter Jennings on January 10. Only at the very end of a subsequent story did Linda Douglass acknowledge: "Ken Lay did play golf with then-President Clinton, and Enron has contributed to Democrats." The next night, CBS's John Roberts emphasized how the "The lion's share of the campaign cash has gone to Republicans, specifically George Bush. Since 1993, Enron and its employees funneled two and a quarter million into Mr. Bush's political career and party coffers." But, he briefly added, "Enron also played the other side of the political fence. Prior to George Bush's campaign, Enron Chairman Ken Lay contributed heavily to Bill Clinton's election, played golf with the former President, even received White House support for overseas Enron projects." A week later, on the January 18 Special Report with Brit Hume, Wendell Goler basically outlined the same story NBC got to last night: "Even though Enron head Ken Lay has been Mr. Bush's most generous financial supporter, and nearly three dozen administration officials have held Enron stock, the Clinton administration appears to have provided a bigger bang for the much smaller bucks Enron executives have contributed to Democrats. The late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and his successors, Mickey Cantor and William Daley, all reportedly hosted Enron executives on trade junkets that led to projects in half a dozen countries, including the Indian power plant, and several billion dollars in government loans and risk insurance." That same night, the CBS Evening News put its
emphasis on Cheney, but also looked at the Clinton angle, though without
mentioning the over $1 billion in multiple loans. Bill Plante noted on the
January 18 CBS Evening News: "The administration disclosed today that
Vice President Cheney stepped in last June to help Enron and its partners
in a dispute with India. Because a U.S. government agency was on the hook
for $360 million in guarantees on the Dabhol power project, the White
House says Cheney wasn't trying to help Enron, but was looking out for
taxpayers' interests." The lack of fresh network coverage for the February 21 Washington Times piece which did advance the story and was based on documents released by a Senate committee, may lay in how the New York Times played it. See item #2 below for details. Now let's come full circle to where I began, with the February 25 NBC Nightly News story. Tom Brokaw set it up: "Now the latest on the Enron collapse, and yet another tape has surfaced of former Enron Chairman Ken Lay, this time talking at length about his close ties to President Bush and his family. There's also new documentation of some of the help that Enron got from the Clinton administration and some very big deals overseas." Lisa Myers explained, as taken down by MRC
analyst Brad Wilmouth: "Today a new tape of an October 2000 Enron
employee meeting. CEO Ken Lay reads a worker's question challenging the
propriety of Enron's political efforts." My theory on the lack of media interest in what the Clinton administration did to help Enron: The networks all pounced on Enron back on January 10 as a Bush administration scandal, but within a few days realized that Enron had also donated to many top Democrats. So, by January 15 the networks all dropped the political angle and, with the exception of using Enron as a reason for campaign finance reform, ever since have concentrated on it as a business scandal.
The New York Times headline over the story in
the business section: "Enron Received Many Loans From U.S. for
Foreign Projects." The story by Richard Stevenson began: Not until the fourth paragraph did the New York Times mention the name Clinton: "Republicans said the figures showed that Enron had sought and received help from Washington long before President Bush took office and that the Clinton administration had enthusiastically helped Enron as the company undertook an ambitious global expansion in the 1990s." For the entire story, those registered with
the New York Times can go to: Contrast that with the lead of a January 10 story the New York Times showcased on its front page: "The White House disclosed today that Kenneth L. Lay, the chairman of the Enron Corporation and one of President Bush's biggest political contributors, telephoned two cabinet officers last fall, and one of them said Mr. Lay had sought government help with its dire financial condition." As noted last week by Rush Limbaugh, the
February 21 Houston Chronicle story didn't mention until the 16th
paragraph the role of anyone working for President Clinton.
"Government aid to Enron could haunt taxpayers," read the
headline over the story by Washington, DC-based reporter David Ivanovich.
It began: The "Clinton" name made its first appearance in the 16th paragraph: "Enron executives accompanied former Commerce Secretary Bill Daley and the late Ron Brown on seven overseas trips during the Clinton administration and joined the Trade and Development Agency on 11 trade missions." For the Houston Chronicle story in full:
The UPI veteran, who now writes a column for Hearst, demanded of White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer: "Why would this administration choose a man for counter-terrorism who is so associated with the dark side of the Iran-Contra scandal, Admiral Poindexter?" When Fleischer characterized Poindexter as an "outstanding citizen who has done a very good job in what he has done for our country, serving in the military," Thomas shot back: "How can you say that when he told Colonel North to lie?" The exchange in full between Fleischer and Thomas, which led the February 25 White House press briefing: Thomas: "Ari, why would this
administration choose a man for counter-terrorism who is so associated
with the dark side of the Iran-Contra scandal, Admiral Poindexter?" I got this transcript from the whitehouse.gov
site and corrected it against the actual videotape we recorded. The
official version made Thomas sound a bit better by, for instance,
substituting "have" for "got" in her last sentence.
For daily briefing transcripts: In fact, as the AP reported on February 14,
Poindexter does have a slot at the Pentagon: "Retired Adm. John
Poindexter, who was President Reagan's national security adviser during
the Iran-Contra affair, is directing a new Pentagon office that will focus
on new kinds of military threats, including terrorist organizations. Iran-Contra should hardly make Poindexter unqualified. If anything, such personal experience with Muslim regimes and terrorists should make him best suited for the position.
Times reporter Robert Worth lamented: "The first victims of anti-Communist hysteria were immigrants, and hundreds of immigrants have been detained since Sept. 11, many with little apparent cause beyond the fact that they were Middle Eastern men." Worth warned: "The McCarthy years in some ways were eerily similar to the present moment." After quoting Attorney General John Ashcroft as saying, "a calculated, malignant, devastating evil has arisen in our world. Civilization cannot afford to ignore the wrongs that have been done," Worth asserted: "It is not hard to see in Mr. Ashcroft's language traces of what the historian Richard Hofstadter famously described as 'the paranoid style in American politics.'" During the roundtable on Monday's Special Report with Brit Hume, Kondracke opined: "The editors of the Week in Review section ought to be ashamed of themselves. This piece belongs in the Nation or the Progressive or some other, you know, America-hating publication. I mean the idea, just the whole premise of the piece was that communism was okay and that to have an American campaign against communism was somehow bad." Kondracke later added: "He says that world leaders are worried that we're doing again we're doing toward terrorists what we did toward communist. Well good, they should be glad about that." An excerpt from the February 24 piece, headlined "A Nation Defined by Its Enemies," by Robert Worth: ....America's discovery of an enemy who is not merely an enemy, but "evil," has impeccable historical credentials. In a long history of responding to real and perceived threats, it seems clear that this large, heterogenous country defines itself in part through its nemeses. The language Mr. Bush and others have used to describe Al Qaeda terrorists sometimes sounds as though it could have been written by Cotton Mather. Ever since the Puritans arrived in New England, civic and political leaders have often issued the same warning: sinister conspirators are spreading invisibly through the land, a cabal of evil and dangerous men who are bent on subverting this shining city on a hill. As Attorney General John Ashcroft put it recently: "A calculated, malignant, devastating evil has arisen in our world. Civilization cannot afford to ignore the wrongs that have been done." This is by no means to suggest that the terrorists who struck on Sept. 11, or who kidnapped and murdered the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, aren't evil, or that it is not necessary to say so. But when the nation's enemies are used as highly emotional political symbols, it becomes easy to lose touch with the reality of their acts and motives -- and thus fail to better understand how to defeat or influence them. It is not hard to see in Mr. Ashcroft's language traces of what the historian Richard Hofstadter famously described as "the paranoid style in American politics."... While all nations regard their causes as just, and all demonize their enemies, the combination of American might and its longstanding self-image as uniquely virtuous irritates even its allies. Europeans, for example, have largely tended to use more pragmatic language and embrace realpolitik in foreign policy matters.... It is an outlook rooted in two distinctive American traditions, said Eric Foner, a historian at Columbia University. The country's religious roots and its continuing high level of religious faith make Americans more likely to see enemies not just as opponents but as evil. Linked to that is the belief that America is the world's last best hope of liberty, so that those who oppose America become the enemies of freedom. In the 1770's, colonial pamphleteers described King George III of England as a vicious tyrant who was secretly spreading Catholicism in the land, said Edmund S. Morgan, a professor emeritus of history at Yale University. But by the late 1790's, America had turned on the French, their former allies against the British, and were calling them underground papists too, "devil-like creatures and the most abominable wicked people," according to one newspaper account.... And of course, the 1950's brought the renewed Communist menace, "a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man," in the words of Senator Joseph McCarthy. The McCarthy years in some ways were eerily similar to the present moment. For example, Samuel Stouffer, a Harvard sociologist doing research on attitudes toward Communism in the early 1950's, found a generalized anxiety that the country was under attack by unseen enemies bent on global domination.... There are of course crucial differences between Al Qaeda and the Soviets, who represented a much broader military and political threat but did not practice terrorism against American civilians. And the added vigilance of recent months may well have prevented other attacks. But it remains true that like the terrorists today, and the Catholics in the 19th century, Communists were often conceived as moral monsters whose deviousness and unwavering dedication to their faith made them capable of almost anything. Whittaker Chambers, who saw in Communism "the concentrated evil of our time," wrote in his classic cold war memoir, "Witness": "Their power, whose nature baffles the rest of the world, because in large measure the rest of the world has lost that power, is the power to hold convictions and act on them. It is the same power that moves mountains; it is also an unfailing power to move men." In one sense, the discovery of a new source of "concentrated evil" comes as something of a relief, said John Gaddis, a professor of political science at Yale University who has been discussing the cold war parallel with his students since Sept. 11. "All of a sudden there's something worse than American hegemony out there," he said. "That throws a new light on complaints about American unilateralism, and makes it easier for us to act internationally."... END of Excerpt I can't take any more. On that last point, let's hope it allows the U.S. to act alone. If we had followed the advice of the leftists Worth so admires the U.S. hockey team would have played against the USSR team at the Olympics last Friday. There's a lot more anti-U.S. liberal raving in the article and it's worth registering with the New York Times to read it all so you can appreciate the moral relativism in Europe and academia which sees the United States as the threat to civilization and mocks efforts to beat communism or terrorism as just a justification for an "enemy" needed to fuel our hegemony. For the entire piece: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/24/weekinreview/24WORT.html
To read the February 21 Media Reality Check, "Condemning Bush, Not Interested In Evil; MRC Study: Five Times More Coverage of Bush's Rhetoric Than Iran, Iraq or North Korean Policies," go to: http://archive.mrc.org/realitycheck/2002/Fax20020221.asp To access the
Adobe Acrobat PDF version:
JAG airs at 8pm EST/PST, 7pm CST/MST. The CBS
Web page for the show: Not sure how realistic it is for a Navy lawyer to hop into a jet to fly a bombing mission, but I'm sure it makes for good TV. -- Brent Baker
>>>
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Home | News Division
| Bozell Columns | CyberAlerts |
Two
weeks after NBC became the first broadcast network to point out the
political parallels between Enron and Global Crossing, a reality ABC and
CBS have yet to acknowledge, NBC on Monday night became the first
broadcast network since a CBS story on January 18 to offer more than a
passing reference to how the Clinton administration took great efforts to
help the company. NBC's story does stand as the first broadcast one to
highlight how the Clinton administration provided government loans to
Enron.
"Clinton
helped Enron finance projects abroad," announced the headline over a
story on the front page of the February 21 Washington Times. But stories
that day in the New York Times and Houston Chronicle buried the Clinton
administration connection, and instead referred to "loans" from
"government agencies" or to "government aid."
Helen
Thomas reared her ugly liberal head again on Monday at the White House
press briefing, demonstrating once again that she's more of a left-wing
anti-conservative ranter than any kind of reasonable reporter.
On FNC
Morton Kondracke of Roll Call condemned a Sunday New York Times "Week
in Review" piece which began: "As President Bush toured Asia
last week, some world leaders worried publicly that the war on terrorism
was starting to look suspiciously like the last great American campaign --
against Communism." As if that's a bad thing?
A
citation on FNC of the MRC's study issued last week about ABC, CBS and
NBC coverage of Bush's "axis of evil" concept. On Monday's
Special Report with Brit Hume, after noting the New York Times article
detailed in item #4 above, Hume observed during the roundtable:
A
mission in Afghanistan on tonight's JAG: Judge Advocate General, a CBS
drama about the exploits of Navy lawyers. The plot for the February 26
episode, as recited on the show's Web page: