TV
Downplays Clinton Donor Who Lied His Way Into Arlington Cemetery
Page One
Addicted to Scandal? Hardly
The charge in Insight magazine that Bill
Clinton may have granted "dozens" of waivers for burials at Arlington
Cemetery to big donors soon imploded, but media disinterest in the whole
matter left it to a conservative columnist to dig up evidence that one
Clinton crony lied in order to be buried there.
Three days after the story broke on talk radio,
Time’s Margaret Carlson complained on the Nov. 22 CNN Capital
Gang: "Republicans succeeded in spreading this despicable lie
because the press is as addicted to scandal as they are."
Not quite. The Big Three networks passed up the story
in those first days, with the exception of an 18-second brief on ABC’s
Good Morning America and a 17-second item on the CBS Evening
News in which Dan Rather relayed the White House denial of "a
deliberate political smear."
But within days, the Los Angeles Times reported
that House investigators were focusing on M. Larry Lawrence, a $10
million Democratic donor who served as Clinton’s Ambassador to
Switzerland. He had been granted a waiver for burial in Arlington after
he died in 1996. Conservative columnist Arianna Huffington tracked down
a former Lawrence aide who recalled that he asked her to research
Merchant Marine ships that served during World War II, suggesting a
quest for details he could recite as a life experience.
On December 4, House Veterans Affairs Committee
Chairman Terry Everett announced a search of records found no evidence
Lawrence ever served on the Merchant Marine ship on which he claimed
he’d been wounded.
So that made it a big story? No. ABC’s World News
Tonight was the only broadcast network evening show to report the
revelation that night. NBC Nightly News followed the next night.
CBS, busy with El Nino features, took three more days to mention
Lawrence, taking 22 seconds to report that his body would be disinterred
but not explaining why. Rather called it "all part of the fallout from
unsubstantiated accusations that the Clinton camp was selling burial
rights."
Nightline devoted two shows
to the matter, but treated it as an embarrassing new low in political
attacks. ABC’s Michel McQueen ended her December 5 piece by asserting
that Lawrence may have been eligible for burial "because he died while
serving as an ambassador, but in the rancorous atmosphere of 1990s
Washington, the facts may be almost beside the point." But as the Los
Angeles Times discovered, "of six ambassadors granted burial at
Arlington ...three died violently in the line of duty while two had
records far more distinguished than that of the sixth — M. Larry
Lawrence."
Still, Koppel’s first query: "Is this a scandal or is
this just Washington at its worst?"
Turner’s Clinton Man
Ted Turner chose a liberal Democrat to run the
foundation he created to oversee distribution of his $1 billion gift to
the United Nations: Tim Wirth, Undersecretary of State, will
assume the position of President of Turner’s freshly-created United
Nations Foundation. Wirth previously served as a Congressman and Senator
from Colorado, earning a very liberal reputation.
At the State Department Wirth had been in charge of
the administration’s environmental efforts. The Washington Times
noted on November 20 that Wirth had pushed the administration from the
left. Reporter Patrice Hill explained: "Wirth became a lightning rod for
conservative opposition to the global warming treaty in Congress because
of his moves calling on the United States and other industrialized
nations to adopt legally binding reductions in carbon dioxide and other
so-called greenhouse gasses while exempting developing
countries....Wirth prompted criticism by privately asking congressional
delegates to the UN-sponsored negotiations not to criticize the
administration’s position in Kyoto."
Heading North, South & East
Two White House speechwriters have departed, one to
take a media slot and the other to become an ambassador, while a
newspaper veteran assumed a diplomatic post.
David Shipley, who joined
the Clinton speechwriting staff in 1995 after stints as a New York
Times editorial writer and Executive Editor of the New Republic,
is traveling north. Shipley, who has been writing recently for the First
Lady, left in mid-December to, as the November 26 Washington Post
reported, "work on a series of special issues for the New York Times
Sunday magazine."
In November the Senate approved the nomination of
Carolyn Curiel as U.S. Ambassador to Belize. An editor at the New
York Times and Washington Post before jumping to TV in 1992
as a Nightline producer, she joined the Clinton team in 1993.
On the foreign mission front, last summer Bob Healy,
a former Executive Editor and in the early ‘80s the Washington Bureau
Chief for The Boston Globe, hopped a plane for Dublin, Ireland.
The Washington Post reported that he’s "working in a senior job
in the embassy on the U.S. Information Agency payroll."
In a December 1990 Globe column Healy
complained: "Bush was saddled with a lot of the supply-side voodooism of
the Reagan era ....Reagan was not the President of morning in America:
he was President of the free lunch. He gave us growth, but the cost was
borrowed money, more than a trillion dollars of debt."
Right Writing
The Christian Coalition tapped David Aikman, a
Time correspondent until a few years ago, as Senior Consulting
Editor of the group’s magazine, the Christian American. At
Time, Aikman reported from Asia, served as bureau chief in West
Berlin and covered foreign affairs out of Washington....
U.S. News & World Report has
brought aboard Michael Gerson as a Senior Editor to cover
non-profits and philanthropy. Gerson, who has been Policy Director for
Senator Dan Coats (R-Ind.), was hired by Assistant Managing Editor Steve
Waldman, National Journal reported. Before jumping to U.S.
News, Waldman had worked as top policy adviser to the chief of
Clinton’s AmeriCorps program.
Page
Three
Democratic Slurs Not News
Gaffe Patrol on Break
Being a Democrat means never having to say you’re
sorry — even if you impugn a branch of the armed forces, implicate the
House Speaker in the death of a fellow Congressman, or equate
Republicans with Nazis.
The Weekly Standard reported
that after Democratic Congressman Walter Capps died October 28 of a
heart attack, Rep. Sam Farr (D-Calif.) sent a sarcastic "Dear Colleague"
letter complaining about Gingrich’s hectic legislative schedule. To make
his point, Farr attached a newspaper article headlined: "Farr: Hectic
pace helped kill lawmaker." No news show, not even CNN’s Inside
Politics, covered Farr’s far-out charge.
The gaffe patrol was also silent when Assistant
Secretary of the Army Sara Lister resigned after referring to the
Marines as "extremists" and "a little dangerous." She can hardly blame
her ouster on the media spotlight — the only network coverage of her
remarks, printed in The Washington Times, came in a brief on the
November 13 World News Tonight. Even when she resigned the next
day, only World News Tonight noted her departure with a Jackie
Judd report that spun the focus from Lister’s insulting comments to a
defeat for women in the military: "As head of Army personnel, Lister was
a strong advocate for women in the military, even allowing them to go
into combat. Her supporters say that is what the firestorm is really
about."
It seems nothing a Democrat says can raise an eyebrow.
During House fundraising hearings on December 10 independent counsel
Donald Smaltz recalled his presidency of the Young Democrats. The
omission of his years in the GOP enraged Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.):
"You remind me of the late and unlamented Secretary- General of the
United Nations, Kurt Waldheim, who also had a lapse in memory. He
conveniently forgot several years when he was a Nazi." Only CNN’s
Inside Politics aired it.
Lantos defended and expanded his comments three days
later in the San Francisco Chronicle: "The more I think about it,
the more I think I was totally proper and correct....If you for 30 years
are a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and someone says, ‘What are your views
about racial issues,’ and you say, ‘When I was 15 I had a black friend
with whom I played basketball’...you are not being truthful." Still, no
media reaction.
Janet Cooke Award
ABC Implies Intentional Lying, Junk Science
Behind Business-Funded Global Warming Ads
Ted Koppel vs. The "Flat Earth Society"
On February 24, 1994, ABC’s Ted Koppel devoted a
Nightline to Al Gore — not to studying Gore, but to Gore’s
opposition research on scientists skeptical of global warming and their
alleged funding sources.
He concluded: "There is some irony in the fact that
Vice President Gore, one of the most scientifically literate men to sit
in the White House in this century, that he is resorting to political
means to achieve what should ultimately be resolved on a purely
scientific basis...The measure of good science is neither the politics
of the scientist nor the people with whom the scientist associates. It
is the immersion of hypotheses into the acid of truth. That’s the hard
way to do it, but it’s the only way that works."
That’s a nice point, but Koppel has continued to base
environmental programs not on science, but on the credibility of global
warming skeptics. On December 9, Koppel devoted Nightline to
another "ad watch" questioning the accuracy of ads run by business
groups. For implying that warming skeptics were deliberate liars and
comparable to the "Flat Earth Society," Nightline earned the
Janet Cooke Award. The show began:
Koppel: "At the Kyoto summit
on global warming, the fate of the Earth is being described in
apocalyptic terms."
Al Gore: "More record floods
and droughts, crop failures and famines."
Ross Gelbspan: "A slight
warming could trigger an explosion of crop-destroying and
disease-spreading insects."
Koppel: "But back in
Washington, a $13 million ad campaign warns of an apocalypse of a
different sort."
Woman in ad: "A proposed
United Nations climate treaty could put me out of business by raising
the cost of gasoline, natural gas, and electricity by 25 to 50 percent."
Carl Pope, Sierra Club:
"Their ads are lies, and they know their ads are lies."
Koppel: "But have they
worked?"
Ben Goddard, ad maker: "I
think the campaign has worked very well."
Koppel: "Tonight, the ad
campaign aimed at movers and shakers but designed to affect your
future."
After leaving the impression that the ad makers
intentionally lied, Koppel then joked that global warming might not be
amusing like the Letterman or Leno shows, but what about the prospect of
gas rationing, the loss of 650,000 jobs, or a treaty that will cost the
American economy $350 billion a year? "I’d love to have your company,
but I’m not sure we can vouch for the accuracy of any of those doomsday
predictions."
He declared the ad campaign seems to charge "the
Clinton administration is on the verge of giving away the farm at the
global warming conference currently under way in Kyoto, Japan. It is not
the conference that has seized our attention tonight, nor for that
matter what may or may not be achieved there. It’s the Chicken Little,
sky-is-falling approach being adopted by both sides in the debate."
Despite Koppel’s feigned balance, ABC reporter Chris
Bury’s set- up piece focused its heat only on warming skeptics: "The
people running the ads call themselves the Global Climate Information
Project, special interests from car manufacturers to oil companies to
coal miners. Their $13 million dollar commercial campaign glosses over
the science of the global warming debate to focus on two things:
fairness and fear." Bury noted the ad’s energy-cost estimates came from
a study by Charles River Associates that was paid for by auto and
utility companies: "Ross Gelbspan, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and
author, says the model is an extreme scenario." But Candace Crandall of
the Science and Environmental Policy Project told MediaWatch:
"The Pulitzer Prize board does not list him as a winner for any year or
at any newspaper. We contacted Ross Gelbspan by phone and asked if he
could fax a copy of his Pulitzer Prize citation. He admitted he has
none."
Bury noted only six percent of Americans remembered
seeing the ads, "but the ads were never really aimed at the American
public." Pope charged industries were threatening politicians with
putting up ads against them in the 1998 elections. Bury noted the Sierra
Club "has tried to fight back with ads like this, but its ad budget is a
measly $100,000." He did not note that the supposedly cash-poor Sierra
Club spent an estimated $7.5 million in the 1996 elections to defeat
Republican candidates.
Koppel’s interview segment gave a larger megaphone to
warming skeptics, matching liberal Environmental Defense Fund activist
Michael Oppenheimer with skeptic Karen Kerrigan of the Small Business
Survival Committee. But while Koppel posed very vague questions to
Oppenheimer, he asked some tough questions of Kerrigan.
For example, he asked whether she believed the ads’
estimates since "it seems all speculative and there is no agreement
yet." He raised a liberal point in suggesting "fairness" would mean the
U.S. should bear much of the burden: "One of the interesting notions
that is raised by critics of U.S. policy as it has been in the past is
that we represent one-twentieth of the world’s population and we’re
using one-quarter of the world’s fossil fuel ...Should there be such a
thing, Ms. Kerrigan, as a certain amount of global fairness?"
Kerrigan told MediaWatch the show was
not what she was led to expect: "We were told we were going to look at
both sides’ ad campaigns. Both would be asked to comment on the other.
So either we would rip at each other’s campaigns or each explain what we
were trying to do." But Kerrigan said once she heard the show’s
introduction, "I knew ‘I’m starting in a major hole.’"
But Koppel displayed his bias most distinctly by
lashing out at Kerrigan’s claim that many scientists were skeptical of
warming: "I was just going to make the observation that there are still
some people who believe in the Flat Earth Society, too, but that doesn’t
mean they’re right." Kerrigan told MediaWatch: "It was a
major insult."
Citizens for a Sound Economy recently commissioned a
poll of state climatologists found that, by a 44 to 17 percent margin,
they believe "recent global warming is a largely natural phenomenon."
Nine out of ten agreed that "scientific evidence indicates variations in
global temperatures are likely to be naturally occurring and cyclical
over very long periods of time." Only 19 percent said "weather events
over the last 25 years have been more severe or frequent than other
periods" in their states’ history, and less than a third of that small
percentage attributed such weather to global warming.
ABC directed MediaWatch to Nightline
spokesperson Sue Lin Chang, who promised she would find out who was that
night’s senior producer. She did not call back. The networks present
themselves as objective referees of public debates. But on this issue,
Koppel’s show suggested that the fate of the planet is too important for
a scientific debate, and skeptics would best serve the public by
shutting up.
NewsBites
Weather Trumps Washington.
On December 11 a grand jury indicted former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros
on 18 counts of lying to the FBI about payments he made to a former
mistress, Linda Jones. Cisneros is the second Clinton cabinet member
indicted this year. But you wouldn’t know much about it from watching
TV.
Of the three broadcast networks, only NBC offered an
evening story, as well as two brief updates the next morning. ABC gave
it 18 seconds on the 11th, CBS nine seconds a night later. Both ignored
it in the morning. More important to Dan Rather, two minutes on "The
huge Pacific weather machine, whipping up the waves, is also giving a
gentle lift to the tender wings of the Monarch butterfly. CBS’s John
Blackstone has the story and pictures that will make you flutter with
delight."
Matt Attacks. On the April
8, 1991 Today, Bryant Gumbel gushed over Kitty Kelley’s salacious
book on Nancy Reagan that charged, among other things, an affair with
Frank Sinatra. Gumbel praised Kelley’s "courage" and "credibility." Fast
forward six years and change the target to liberal icon John F. Kennedy
and we see a different tack from a Today show host. Seymour Hersh,
a hero to liberals in the ‘60s and ‘70s as the New York Times
reporter who broke the My Lai massacre story, ran into a hostile Matt
Lauer on November 10 and 11. Lauer greeted Hersh harshly: "The book,
The Dark Side of Camelot, is out today, but the controversy began
earlier this fall when a collection of Hersh’s source documents on some
of the most titillating topics proved to be fakes. Seymour Hersh, good
morning...You handle the legacy of JFK with about as much tenderness as
a steamroller. What was your goal with the book?"
Lauer praised Hersh’s past work, when he was taking on
conservatives, but raised the questions of Kennedy backers: "I know
you’ve done some wonderful works in the past, but they think that
possibly you’ve been twisting the words of sources. Some of your sources
in this book have now come out and said you twisted their words. As a
matter of fact, one gentleman, Jerry Bruno, a former Kennedy advance
man, says after being interviewed by you and reading the final product
that you should have called this book The Dark Side of Seymour Hersh."
Money-Grubbing Clinton-Haters?
When questions were raised about big insurance companies
footing the bill for President Clinton’s legal defense in the sexual
harassment case brought by Paula Jones, ABC and Time were in the
vast majority of media outlets that ignored it. Recently, a double
standard was exposed when these outlets made a big deal out of who is
paying the bills for Jones.
On the November 12 World News Tonight, Peter
Jennings suggested they were just evening out the publicity: "Paula
Corbin Jones faced a round of questioning from the President’s lawyers
on her claim that she was sexually harassed by Mr. Clinton in 1991. The
President’s defense is being handled by a major Washington attorney, Bob
Bennett, been in the news a lot. ABC’s Jackie Judd reports tonight on
the people providing the most support for Paula Jones."
Judd profiled Jones as she arrived in Little Rock
"flanked by her representatives and backed by organizations associated
with conservative causes." Judd played up the right-wing puppet angle:
"The Rutherford Institute in Virginia has signed on to finance the
lawsuit. It’s known for defending religious rights activists and
abortion protesters. It recently mailed 60,000 fundraising letters
appealing for money, quote, ‘to keep fighting for the truth.’"
Judd went on to Jones’ spokeswoman, "some say her
Svengali, self- described conservative feminist Susan Carpenter
McMillan." Judd asked: "Is this about getting Bill Clinton?" After a
soundbite of McMillan, Judd declared: "The President’s supporters see
some value in Jones being backed by conservative activists. They say it
proves that this is not about sexual harassment but about politics and
damaging President Clinton."
In the November 24 issue, Time White House
reporter Jay Branegan profiled John Whitehead, founder of the Rutherford
Institute: "Clinton’s embarrassment is a spectacle many conservative
groups are relishing." Like ABC, Branegan spun the fundraising angle:
"He [Whitehead] says some of his traditional donors are ‘horrified’ that
he’s involved in such a seamy public episode. All the same, after taking
up the case, he rushed out a fundraising letter."
Connerly the Cat’s Paw. When
60 Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace profiled Ward Connerly, he
was astonished a black man would dare hold conservative beliefs. In the
November 9 piece Wallace allowed Connerly, who led California’s ballot
initiative to do away with quotas in government hiring, contracting, and
college admissions, to fully respond to each charge. But he accused
Connerly of what he thought every self-respecting black man would hate
most: being a tool of Whitey. Wallace asked, "Do you ever feel like
you’re being used by white conservatives to lead this thing, that you’re
the cat’s paw?"
After Connerly asserted that he believed he furthers
the idea of equality by opposing racial preferences, Wallace related
that Connerly’s "critics" believed him to be a race traitor: "One of
your critics says: ‘For someone to stand within the ranks and say, ‘I’m
not black,’ but use it to destroy his own people, that’s the kind we
label a traitor.’ That’s how you’re perceived by many people in the
black community." To bolster his charge, Wallace interviewed Elizabeth
Stansbury, Connerly’s cousin and a quota activist. Stansbury charged
that Connerly, who grew up poor in the care of his grandmother, was
treated like a "little prince" by their family and that Connerly’s
rags-to-riches story was false. Finally, an incredulous Wallace lectured
Connerly: "I get the feeling that you’re looking at things through rose-
colored glasses. I can see black folks across the country looking at him
now and saying ‘What world does this Connerly guy think we’re living
in?’"
Bitter Bryant. CBS’s
Public Eye with Bryant Gumbel may be doing poorly in the TV ratings,
but it’s doing very well in the liberal bias ratings, especially when
Bryant Gumbel discusses racial matters. On the November 19 show Gumbel
asked guest Oprah Winfrey: "You talked about the responsibility of being
an African-American woman, and being the descendants of slaves.
Conservatives are quick to point to you, and people like you...as an
indication that ours is a color-blind society. Where do you come down on
what is now the popular whipping boy in politics, affirmative action?"
After a profile of University of Texas Law School
professor Lino Graglia on the December 3 edition, Gumbel tried to keep
his cool when discussing the anti-quotas professor with correspondent
Bernie Goldberg: "Bernie, let me see if I can address this in a civil
tone and begin by assuming that Professor Graglia is an intelligent man.
When he looks at scores as a barometer of intelligence, how does he just
ignore factors of income, access, opportunity, all of which he surely
knows impact education?"
Goldberg tried to explain how poor white children are
the big losers in the quota game because they don’t have the advantages
rich white children have nor can they rely on a racially-based quota to
admit them to a university like blacks and Hispanics. An exasperated
Gumbel shot back: "Hard to believe that he thinks a white student
doesn’t enjoy more advantages in this society than a student of color.
That’s hard to believe."
Later in the same show, Gumbel used actor Will Smith
to make the point that to him, America is still an unrepentantly racist
place: "Smith’s rap sounds similar to that of other young black men.
Unfortunately, so do some of his all too real run-ins with cops. Do you
think it would surprise people to learn that you still get stopped by
cops for being nothing more than a young black guy driving an expensive
car?"
O’Leary Amnesia. Lost in all
the fuss over Attorney General Janet Reno’s decision not to recommend an
independent counsel to look into the fundraising practices of Bill
Clinton and Al Gore, was her decision to let former Energy Secretary
Hazel O’Leary off the hook. Reno decided not to recommend an independent
counsel over Johnny Chung’s allegation he gained a meeting for five
Chinese officials after an Energy Department official suggested he
donate $25,000 to O’Leary’s favorite charity, Africare.
The story first broke in a Tom Brokaw interview with
Chung on August 19. So did the networks send out their crack
investigative "journalists" to get to the bottom of the story? No.
Excluding brief mentions on the following Sunday’s morning shows, here’s
how the networks covered the story:
The day after the Chung interview, NBC’s Today
uttered not a syllable about their own scoop. Later that night the
Nightly News aired a follow-up report on the Chung allegations. Over
the next week, NBC ran one story on the Nightly News and two on
Today. The story then died on NBC until September 19, when the
Nightly News did one story reporting on Attorney General Janet
Reno’s decision to look into the possibility of asking for the
appointment of an independent counsel. This was the last time NBC would
mention Chung’s allegations.
A month after the Chung interview on NBC, CBS broke
the story that Attorney General Janet Reno was being urged to appoint an
independent counsel by lawyers at the Department of Justice. In their
first story on Chung’s allegations, Dan Rather reminded viewers: "It is
important to note that O’Leary denies any wrongdoing." CBS then forgot
about the story until December 2, when they reported Reno had decided
not to ask for an independent counsel.
At least you can count on the all-news networks to
develop and investigate the story thoroughly, right? Wrong. Between the
August 19 interview and the December 2 decision, CNN’s The World
Today did just two stories on Chung. Inside Politics also only
mentioned the story twice over nearly four months. PBS’s The NewsHour
with Jim Lehrer and ABC have yet to run one story on the
investigation.
Strike Good, Scandal Bad. On
November 17, federal election officer Kenneth Conboy disqualified
Teamsters Union president Ron Carey from running again for re-election
after he diverted more than $700,000 in union funds for his own election
in December 1996. The scandal threatens not only Carey, but top Clinton
fundraiser Terry McAuliffe (who was told of the illegal schemes), the
AFL-CIO (whose Secretary-Treasurer, Richard Trumka, took the Fifth), and
liberal groups who joined the illegal fundraising conspiracy. Big news?
Not if you work at the networks. That night, CBS and NBC provided only
briefs. ABC aired one story in which John Martin relayed the sad note:
"One analyst called the day a disastrous setback for the union and the
nation."
This wasn’t the first time the networks skipped over
the Teamster scandal. This summer, the three broadcast networks aired 71
full stories and 17 anchor briefs on Carey’s Teamsters strike against
the United Parcel Service, but only six full stories and four anchor
briefs on Carey’s post-election decline and fall.
The Big Three morning shows aired 94 full segments on
the UPS strike, but only three through mid-December on the Teamsters
scandal. The strike led the morning shows 20 times. Within that sample,
the morning shows aired 26 interview segments on the strike to just two
on the Carey scandal. ABC’s Good Morning America carried almost
all of that; NBC’s Today aired one anchor brief in three months,
and CBS This Morning aired nothing. Clearly, the UPS strike has
more news appeal to a broader audience than Teamster corruption does.
But the prominence the Teamsters gained through the burst of strike
coverage ought to make their current struggles more prominent than the
near-blackout so far.
Study
Reporters Cast Debate as Environmentalists vs.
Polluters Instead of Liberals vs. Conservatives
The "Nonpartisan" Kyoto Cheerleaders
The "environmentalist" agenda is easily classified as
liberal: regulation reigns at the center of their proposals. At the
recent climate conference in Kyoto, Japan, environmental groups proposed
the U.S. cut its emissions to 20 percent below 1990 levels, a drastic,
government-supervised suppression of American energy output.
But news reports drain the ideology out of the debate,
casting it as "environmentalists" vs. industry instead of liberals vs.
conservatives. In 1990, a MediaWatch study of labeling in
three major newspapers from 1987 to 1989 found that in 2,903 news
stories featuring ten "green" groups, analysts found only 29 ideological
labels, or less than one percent. (Subtract 22 labels in 83 stories for
the radical group Earth First, and the total was seven labels in 2,820
stories).
To update that research, MediaWatch
analysts used the Nexis news data retrieval system to locate every news
story in 1995 and 1996 on ten liberal environmental groups, and compared
that to conservative groups in The New York Times, USA Today, and
The Washington Post. The story remains the same: in 1,089 news
stories, liberal environmental groups were described as liberal in only
five stories (or 0.5 percent).
By contrast, the largest "free-market
environmentalist" think tank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute drew
eight "conservative" labels in 29 stories (28 percent). In most of the
stories in which they weren’t labeled, they were described as
"anti-regulatory," "pro-business," or "promoting private solutions over
government action." Only the radical-left group Earth First, whose
literature may have inspired the Unabomber’s selection of bombing
targets, rivaled to CEI’s labeling percentage, with nine "radical"
labels in 25 stories (36 percent).
Not only do reporters leave out any description of
ideology motivating "green" groups, they fail to describe them as
partisan activists in Washington seeking to overrule and overthrow
Republicans. Reporters used advocacy labels (such as "activist,"
"advocate," and "lobbyist") in only 78 of 1,089 stories (7 percent).
Among the liberal groups getting the "nonpartisan" treatment:
The Environmental Defense Fund,
a very active proponent in the global-warming fight, was never called
"liberal" in 121 news stories, and only carried advocacy labels in six
articles. The New York Times did call them "mainstream" in a June
25, 1996 story on a intra-liberal debate on dolphin safety. A February
19, 1996 Washington Post story noted 37 "environmental, medical,
religious and consumer groups, led by the Environmental Defense Fund
urged oil companies not to use a manganese-based gasoline additive."
The Environmental Working Group is a network TV
favorite, with its regular studies declaring the nation’s drinking water
unsafe. Its Web site touts the group’s Clearinghouse on Environmental
Advocacy and Research (CLEAR) for information on the "anti-
environmental lobby," including a campaign by the "radical right" to "defund
the left." But EWG inspired no liberal labels in 46 stories, and were
only labeled as advocates in seven pieces.
Greenpeace is perhaps the
best-known environmental group, due to its radical tactics, like
interrupting nuclear tests and hanging banners from smokestacks. But in
178 articles, it never once attracted a liberal label — but The New
York Times did include them in the "mainstream" faction on dolphin
safety. Reporters tagged Greenpeace with advocacy labels in only 22
stories. A June 23, 1995 USA Today story did call Greenpeace "one
of many groups fighting the GOP on several fronts."
The nonpartisan approach is most inaccurate with the
League of Conservation Voters, which spent $1.5 million in 1996 on ads,
mass mailings, and door-to-door campaigns against GOP candidates. But
reporters gave it only one liberal label and ten advocacy labels in 62
stories. The January 27, 1996 Washington Post broke the mold in a
story on the LCV helping to elect Sen. Ron Wyden with the headline
"Candidate’s Backers Hope to Make Oregon a Liberal Proving Ground."
The National Audubon Society successfully
buries its liberal agenda beneath its bird-watching activities, drawing
no ideological labels and only three advocacy labels in 64 news stories.
A 1994 fund-raising letter scared donors by claiming they could "project
with some accuracy the eventual end of the natural world as we know it."
The Web site of the National Wildlife Federation
claims "Unless worldwide action is taken, we may be witness to the
fastest warming of the climate since the last ice age." But NWF acquired
no liberal labels and one advocacy label in 31 stories.
The Natural Resources Defense Council ran ads
in 1996 claiming Republicans aimed to "block programs to protect our
drinking water from deadly parasites, arsenic, and radioactivity." In
211 news stories, analysts found one liberal label and 14 advocacy
labels. That one label was indirect: on April 2, 1995, Washington
Post reporter Howard Kurtz noted the Sierra Club and the NRDC aired
ads "assailing the GOP for attempting to weaken environmental laws.
Other liberal groups are joining the fray."
The Sierra Club spent $7.5 million to defeat
GOP candidates in 1996, including ads calling Republicans "eco-thugs."
Nevertheless, in 325 stories, the Sierra Club collected only three
liberal labels (all in the Washington Post) and only 14 advocacy
labels. They were also in the New York Times "mainstream"
coalition in one story. In five New York Times stories and three
Washington Post stories, reporters did underline their affinity
for Democrats with terms like "almost always supports Democrats,"
"sympathetic to Democratic candidates," and "a potent force in
Democratic primaries."
The World Resources Institute’s founder, James
Gustave Speth, is now the most powerful American official of the U.N.
environment program. No labels of any kind were forthcoming in 27 news
stories — unless you count The New York Times describing them in
two articles as an "independent" monitor.
The Worldwatch Institute releases an annual
"State of the World" report that Ted Turner has handed out to his CNN
employees. They attracted no liberal labels in 24 stories, and only one
advocacy reference. On January 14, 1996, the Washington Post
didn’t use a liberal label for a liberal proposal: "Environmental
activist Lester Brown calls for a new tax on polluters in the annual
environmental almanac released yesterday by the Worldwatch Institute,
the think tank he heads."
Balance in environmental journalism requires at least
two obvious remedies: liberal groups should be described as liberal more
often, and their conservative counterparts ought to be consulted in more
than a small fraction of the stories in which liberal groups and their
research are promoted.
On
the Bright Side
One Overlooked Tornado
With all the talk about the destructive forces of El
Nino, it is surprising another weather-related story was overlooked by
all the network evening shows but one — except that it involves evidence
the President may have lied to the Whitewater grand jury. Last spring, a
tornado aided in the discovery of a trove of Whitewater documents in a
damaged Mercury Marquis, including a check made out to Bill Clinton for
$27,600 from James McDougal’s failed Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan.
NBC Nightly News was the
only one of the four network evening shows to report it. On November 10,
Fred Francis reported: "Before junking [the car] mechanic Johnny Lawhorn
pried open the trunk and found a cashier’s check for $27,600 payable to
Bill Clinton. Adding to the mystery, Bill Clinton has testified that he
never borrowed money from his Whitewater partner. But the amount of the
check corresponds exactly to the amount of a Whitewater loan repayment.
So why was it made out to Bill Clinton? That’s what the Whitewater grand
jury wants to know."
ABC, CBS, and PBS’s Newshour with Jim Lehrer
all ignored it. Except for a 17-second Ann Curry news update on the
November 6 Today show and a brief mention by Mark Knoller on
CBS Saturday Morning two days later, the network morning programs
didn’t touch it. CNN’s Bob Franken and Wolf Blitzer covered the story on
Inside Politics, but it never made it onto CNN’s evening
newscast, The World Today.
Three days after the story broke, NBC News Washington
Bureau Chief Tim Russert interviewed the President one on one during the
50th anniversary edition of Meet the Press, and although he asked
Clinton about his golf handicap, he forgot about the check. At least his
network beat the competition on a very uncompetitive story.
Back Page
Institutions Ask Why Credibility Down
Denying the Obvious: Bias
Last summer the American Society of Newspaper Editors
(ASNE) and the Freedom Forum launched $1 million plus projects to
determine why the press is losing credibility. They could save a lot of
money if journalists would concede that liberal bias exists. Instead, as
polls point to bias as a hindrance to credibility, much of the media
remain in denial.
The latest example: A Fox News survey asked "What do
you believe is the media’s worst problem?" The most popular reply,
"bias" at 44 percent. After announcing the result on the Nov. 9 Fox
News Sunday, host Tony Snow turned to Time Managing Editor
Walter Isaacson who conceded previous bias but rejected it now: "I don’t
think that there’s a bias in the media now the way there used to be."
Alerted to the many surveys documenting liberal views of reporters,
Isaacson declared: "I’m not sure I really believe those polls."
Isaacson complained about how "we get blasted from
both sides." A bewildered Brit Hume of Fox News replied: "Walter, do you
really think the newsrooms of America are equally divided between
conservatives and liberals?" Isaacson insisted: "I think that our
newsroom at Time and the people who write there are open minded
and are not Democrats and liberals as the popular perception is."
The October Quill, the magazine of the Society
of Professional Journalists, featured a story by former New York
Times reporter John Wicklein who rejected the relevance of liberal
views held by reporters since journalists "express a strong professional
desire to be fair and honest in their reporting."
Unwittingly demonstrating the prism through which
reporters miss bias, Wicklein insisted: "I’ve yet to find a paper in
which I could discern a deliberate liberal — or conservative — slant to
news stories. Instead, I’ve found reporters and editors working hard to
play it straight." Indeed, Washington Post Executive Editor
Leonard Downie dismissed the public as ignorant, telling Wicklein: "I
think people confuse reporting that exposes problems and seeks solutions
as liberal bias."
But there may be hope. ASNE’s magazine ran a February
cover story titled "The Myth of the Liberal Slant." The September
American Editor, however, featured Richmond Times-Dispatch
editorial page editor Ross Mackenzie’s piece titled "Liberalism’s Role
in Our Collapsing Credibility." Up front, ASNE President Sandy Rowe, of
the Oregonian, noted that reporters "dismiss the critics as
cranky conservatives" but, she suggested, "we cannot improve our
credibility with the majority of our public unless we are willing to
examine bias through their lens, not ours." If only more journalists
would take up her challenge.
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