MRC in the News -- June 2003 -- Media Research Center

June 2003

Many media outlets — radio, television and print — regularly feature MRC guests on their programs, quote MRC spokespeople in their articles, and cite MRC research in their stories. Below is a sampling of MRC making news in the news media. Links are provided when available, and were active when posted.

The American Enterprise
"Doubt and Derision Over Baghdad,"
By Karina Rollins with Assistance from the Media Research Center
July/August 2003

There are laws to protect the freedom of the press's speech, but none...to protect the people from the press." --Mark Twain

Our nation is still catching its breath after the 24-hour, seven-day-a-week, commercial-free, embedded, reported, re-reported, questioned, analyzed, parroted media frenzy that was the coverage of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Never in the world's history has the combination of technology and reporters at the front lines brought war so vividly into our living rooms. In retrospect, how was the American public served by the correspondents, anchormen, columnists, pundits, and "embeds" who had the job of describing the fight in Iraq?

Let's start with TV. The Media Research Center (MRC), whose staff studies such matters for a living, concludes that, on the whole, "reports from embedded journalists were refreshingly factual and were mostly devoid of commentary." Yet back in the studios, "television's war coverage was plagued by the same problems detected during previous conflicts: too little skepticism of enemy propaganda, too much mindless negativism about America's military prospects, and a reluctance on the part of most networks to challenge the premises of the anti-war movement."

MRC analysts took in virtually every second of the TV war coverage and issued a report card on the major channels....

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The American Enterprise
"Bird's Eye," by Zarl Zinsmeister
Jayson Blair's World, and Iraq
July/August 2003

The true course of the war--when compared to much of the media analysis that accompanied it--was the story of the dog that didn't bark. "Contrary to the predictions, there were no homeland terrorist attacks, no chemical gassings of the troops, no mass mobilization of Arab killers, no 100-percent-of-the-vote fierce support for Saddam Hussein, no quagmire of unending length, no public-opinion debacle for President Bush, no hopelessly fractured alliances," points out media critic Brent Bozell. "But," he continues, "being a journalist means never having to say you're sorry."

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The Bulletin's Frontrunner
Leading The News
June 30, 2003

Woman Cited As A "Typical Victim" Of Prescription Drug Costs Is An AARP Coordinator.

The Washington Times (6/30, Pierce) reports in its "Inside Politics" column, "Earlier this month, the Media Research Center reported what it called the 'strange coincidence of the same elderly woman being featured as a typical victim of the high cost of prescription drugs by both CBS News and ABC News -- two years apart.' So maybe it should be no surprise that NBC should join the crowd in featuring Pat Roussos of Connecticut, apparently every TV news reporter's favorite victim of high drug costs. Or maybe the problem is so overblown that she is the only such victim U.S. TV networks can find. The center says a story on the prescription-drug bill reported by Norah O'Donnell on last Monday's 'NBC Nightly News' quoted a spokesman for the AARP, which lobbies for the elderly, followed by a 'typical victim.' Miss O'Donnell said the victim was '77-year-old Pat Roussos of Connecticut, who has arthritis, diabetes and high blood pressure. Her out-of-pocket drug costs are as much as $6,500 a year.' The center said, 'But it turns out that NBC News should have labeled Roussos an AARP spokesperson as well since she's the "Connecticut Community Coordinator" for AARP who "oversees the state's 72 chapters," according to an AARP newsletter.'"

National Review Online
"Our Liberal Media; It's more plausible than the alternative theory," by Ramesh Ponnuru
June 30, 2003

One sometimes gets the impression that not a week goes by without some worthy media institution having a panel on the problems of the media. The prevalence of such forums is not surprising once you realize that for the media, self-flagellation is just another form of self-congratulation. We can wring our hands endlessly over whether we are meeting our high standards. We can take a good long look at ourselves, just like Narcissus.

Anyway, I found myself on a panel of the South Asian Journalists Association the other day....Herewith some notes for, and from, the panel....

2) When conservative politicians go on TV, they are asked questions from the left. Reasonable enough. When liberal politicians go on TV, they also get questions from the left. Consider Judy Woodruff's recent interview with Ted Kennedy — as the Media Research Center noted, she was demanding to know why he was letting Republicans off easy on prescription drugs.

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Rush Limbaugh.com
Rush's Total Stack of Stuff...
June 30, 2003

Read the wide array of articles that the EIB staff puts together and that El Rushbo reads for show prep. Note: some websites change or deactivate stories after we link them here. Plus, news outlet name and cover pictures link to homepages.

Media Research Center
("Ferocious" Conservatives Block Equality, Limbaugh in "Extreme")
(ABC, NBC, NY Times & Wash Post All Find Unsatisfied Seniors)
(How Disgraceful Democrats Lose the "D")

Washington Times
"Inside Politics" by Greg Pierce
June 30, 2003

Not-so-typical 'victim'

Earlier this month, the Media Research Center reported what it called the "strange coincidence of the same elderly woman being featured as a typical victim of the high cost of prescription drugs by both CBS News and ABC News — two years apart."

So maybe it should be no surprise that NBC should join the crowd in featuring Pat Roussos of Connecticut, apparently every TV news reporter's favorite victim of high drug costs. Or maybe the problem is so overblown that she is the only such victim U.S. TV networks can find.

The center says a story on the prescription-drug bill reported by Norah O'Donnell on last Monday's "NBC Nightly News" quoted a spokesman for the AARP, which lobbies for the elderly, followed by a "typical victim." Miss O'Donnell said the victim was "77-year-old Pat Roussos of Connecticut, who has arthritis, diabetes and high blood pressure. Her out-of-pocket drug costs are as much as $6,500 a year."
The center said, "But it turns out that NBC News should have labeled Roussos an AARP spokesperson as well since she's the 'Connecticut Community Coordinator' for AARP who 'oversees the state's 72 chapters,' according to an AARP newsletter."

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MSNBC
Scarborough Country
June 26, 2003

...And the Media Research Center is reporting tonight that, after "The New York Times" discovered an EPA report had some global warming passages taking out, the elite media went on the attack, calling global warming research sound science and nonpartisan and, at the same time, labeling the conservative perspective as unscientific, partisan and cynical.

MRC cited CNN's Aaron Brown as the biggest offender for equating global warming skeptics to flat-Earthers, telling the story about how Galileo, portrayed here by British actor Simon Callow, was convicted for religious heresy for saying the Earth was round. Ah, but Aaron didn't check his facts out right. Galileo was actually busted for what we at the University of Alabama commonly refer to as your basic heliocentric theory, the Earth revolving around the sun, instead of the other way around.

And, hey, on a personal note, Aaron, as the former chairman of the Congressional Flat Earth Society, I'm deeply offended.

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Washington Times
"Inside Politics," by Greg Pierce
June 25, 2003

Fair and balanced
When the New York Times found that an Environmental Protection Agency report had gloomy global-warming paragraphs taken out, the networks packaged liberalism "as the essence of nonpartisanship, idealism, sound science, the public interest, and the well-being of small children and bunnies," the Media Research Center's L. Brent Bozell writes at www.mediaresearch.org.

"The conservative perspective was, naturally, the opposite: partisan, unscientific, cynical, bought and paid for by arrogant corporate polluters. It's all in a night's work of fairness and balance," Mr. Bozell said.

ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and CNBC all piled on in their Friday-night news programs. But perhaps the worst malefactor, the center's Brent Baker found, was CNN's Aaron Brown, who, incredibly, compared global-warming skeptics to flat-Earthers. Mr. Brown, to make his point, told the story of how Galileo got into big trouble for proclaiming the Earth was round. Mr. Brown was wrong. Galileo was convicted of religious heresy for saying

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National Review Online
The Corner
June 23, 2003

MORE ON MISSILE DEFENSE [John J. Miller]
I've received several smart emails on my missile-defense article today. One aerospace engineer makes this point: "A successful test does not mean that the item under test worked properly, but rather that the test was able to produce useful information. For example, had the missile intercepted the target, but telemetry not been received and recorded, the missile would have been a success but the test itself would only have been partly successful." Also, a staffer at the Media Research Center has forwarded this link, showing how the press focuses on missile-defense tests that aren't perfect and ignores the ones that go very well. Posted at 01:51 PM

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Rush Limbaugh Show
June 20, 2003
1:48 PM, EDT

The Media Research Center has come up with a gem. What a coincidence this is. Two years apart CBS News and ABC News featured the same elderly woman, in news stories about the need for a new prescription drug program in Medicare and the shortcomings of Republican alternatives. CBS and ABC News two years apart featured the same old woman as the poster victim of high drug costs.

Tim Graham of the Media Research Center noticed, while working on the Media Reality Check excerpted in an item above the list that I have here, noticed the exploitation of the very same woman, Eva Baer-Schenkein, by the two networks. She actually looks like the Ed Grimley from Saturday Night Live, a Martin Short character.

CBS and ABC did not agree on her ailment. CBS's Diana Olick complained in 2001: "President Bush backs a plan that would target only the poorest and that leaves out middle income patients like Eva Baer-Schenkein." Baer-Schenkein asserted: "So now I'm not taking anything at all for my osteoporosis."

Two years later, ABC's Linda Douglass worried about how "71-year old Eva Baer-Schenkein suffers from hypertension and other problems. She cannot afford the cost of her prescription drugs and is tired of waiting for Congress to help her."

Well wait a minute, how did she stay alive for the past two years without any medicine? And in the CBS story she’s got a problem with osteoporosis and in the ABC story her problem’s high blood pressure. The same woman, my friends. And in the first story, of course osteoporosis she couldn’t get her drugs for two years yet she lived long enough to be a poster-child by ABC.

I’ll tell you how the woman survived. She obviously listens to this program and takes Citrical. There’s no question ladies and gentlemen that Eva Baer-Schenkein, if she was able to survive osteoporosis without prescription drugs, had to be taking Citrical, one of our leading sponsors here at the EIB network. Otherwise, if she hadn’t been taking Citrical, she wouldn’t have been around two years later to be interviewed by ABC about her hypertension....

How did this happen? Seriously, folks how did this happen?.... I guarantee you all Linda Douglas did or Diana Olick did is call the DNC. Call the Democratic National Committee: We need a patient suffering out there because the republicans aren’t doing enough on prescription drugs. And so the DNC has a list of two or three patients to call and that’s how this poor woman — it has to be the DNC is the source. That’s how this happened. I don’t think that if ABC got her name on Nexis and found that CBS had just profiled her two years ago, I don’t think even laziness and a deadline would cause that mistake. But if ABC calls the DNC and DNC says well here’s Eva Baer-Schenkein and the DNC doesn’t tell them that CBS just used her two years ago, then how are they going to know? So it has to be the DNC is the clearinghouse for this stuff. You know this whole route, this whole media and the democrats and the liberals, it’s just an incestuous bunch of revolving doors. It has to be the explanation.

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Boston Phoenix
"The great divide; Neither the economy nor foreign policy frames our society’s fault lines. Instead, look to left-dominated pop culture," by David Brudnoy
June 20, 2003

....As lawyers say, we may safely stipulate that an overwhelming majority of journalists acknowledge that they vote Democratic (or sometimes Green); that the bulk of newspapers stand to the center-left on the cultural scales; that some, although not all, skew their stories to buttress their ideological stances — hello, New York Times — as do the morning TV talk hosts (if not all as obviously as the unlamented Bryant Gumbel, who once declared of his prime-time special The Racial Attitudes and Consciousness Exam (RACE) , "This test is not going to tell you whether you’re a racist or a liberal" — as though these were the only alternatives); and that journalism is the province of people who rarely confess to being conservative or libertarian. (Anyone yearning for a weekly dose of the liberal media elite’s broadcast and print opinings ought to log onto www.mediaresearch.org. Either you’ll keel over laughing, or you’ll grind your teeth into nubs.)...

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Salem Radio Network
Mike Gallagher Show
June 18, 2003

MRC Director of Media Analysis Tim Graham on National Public Radio's liberal bias.

Metro News Network (WV)
Hoppy Kercheval Show
June 17, 2003

MRC Director of Media Analysis Tim Graham on the ethics of networks' attempts to secure exclusives with rescued POW Pfc. Jessica Lynch.

St. Petersburg Times (FL)
"An unlikely homesteader in "Scarborough Country'," by Eric Deggans
June 14, 2003

Sitting behind a desk at the center of MSNBC's sprawling newsroom/studio set, Joe Scarborough got right to the point with an actor supporting movie star Sean Penn's contention that he lost a big-money film role because of his antiwar views. "Bottom line," Scarborough asked, "does Sean Penn really have a constitutionally protected right to a $10-million movie deal? It was the kind of pointed, "I'm-right-you're-wrong" question that has become a staple of the 10 p.m. hour on MSNBC, when the pointedly conservative Scarborough Country takes to the air....

Conservative media analyst Tim Graham of the Media Research Center, based in Washington, said right-leaning viewers probably have a simpler question regarding Scarborough: How long can he last? "Everything on MSNBC, they tend to try it for a couple of months and then shuffle things," Graham said. "MSNBC has always been incredibly uncertain of its mission, and I don't think they're a particularly good judge of talent. I could ask, "Why Joe Scarborough?' I'm not saying he's doing a bad job, but why give him a show? He's a host who doesn't have a big history as a TV host or even as a radio host. He doesn't have the "big mo.' ..."

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USA Radio Network
Jim Bohannon Show
June 11, 2003

MRC Director of Media Analysis Tim Graham on Barbara Walters’s soft interview of Hillary Clinton.

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USA Radio Network
Jim Bohannon Show
June 11, 2003

MRC Director of Media Analysis Tim Graham on Barbara Walters’s soft interview of Hillary Clinton.

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WDEV (VT)
June 10, 2003

MRC Director of Media Analysis Tim Graham on Barbara Walters’s soft interview of Hillary Clinton.

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WDEV (VT)
June 10, 2003

MRC Director of Media Analysis Tim Graham on Barbara Walters’s soft interview of Hillary Clinton.

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WROL (MA)
Don Feder Show
June 9, 2003

MRC Director of Media Analysis Tim Graham on Barbara Walters’s soft interview of Hillary Clinton.

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Radio America
Behind the Headlines
June 9, 2003

MRC Director of Media Analysis Tim Graham on Barbara Walters’s soft interview of Hillary Clinton.

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WMUZ (MI)
Bob Duko Show
June 9, 2003

MRC Director of Communications Liz Swasey on the New York Times, ABC’s Hillary Clinton interview, and tax cut coverage.

KSFO (CA)
Brian Wilson Show
June 9, 2003

MRC Director of Media Analysis Tim Graham on Barbara Walters’s soft interview of Hillary Clinton.

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Talk Radio Network
Chuck Harder Show
June 6, 2003

MRC Director of Media Analysis Tim Graham on the New York Times, ABC’s Hillary Clinton interview, and tax cut coverage.

KFRU (MO)
June 6, 2003

MRC Director of Media Analysis Tim Graham on the New York Times.

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USA Radio Networks
June 5, 2003

MRC Director of Media Analysis Tim Graham on the New York Times.

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2003 Archive