CNN’s New Chief Admires Hillary; Rather Upset Tax Cuts Hinder More Spending; 401(k) Losses "Could Cast a Cloud Over" Bush’s SS Plan
1) Walter Isaacson, the new head of CNN, has denied
there’s any liberal bias, holding up Time as a model of balance. As
Managing Editor of Time, Isaacson proclaimed how he "was fascinated
and impressed by" Hillary Clinton. He insisted that with Bill
Clinton, "historically, I don't think we'll worry about whether he
was chaste or not when we were saying whether he has character." He
praised Clinton for "conquering runaway deficits while still showing
how government could help average citizens."
2) Dan Rather cited "worries" that President
Bush’s "big tax cuts" are "are re-shaping the political
and fiscal landscape of the country."
3) NBC vs. NBC. The loss in value in 401(k) retirement
accounts "could cast a cloud over" Bush’s plan to allow people
to invest some Social Security funds in the stock market, NBC’s Brian
Williams warned. But Lisa Myers advised viewers that their "best hope
of living well in retirement" is "to put every dollar you’re
allowed into your 401(k), every year, no matter how you did last
year."
1
Walter
Isaacson, named on Monday by AOL Time Warner to run CNN as CEO of the CNN
News Group, recently denied there’s any liberal bias, holding up on Fox
News Sunday in 1997 his own Time magazine as a model of impartiality:
"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."
As Managing Editor of Time magazine, Isaacson
proclaimed that if the 1998 "Person of the Year" had been
awarded to "somebody we wanted to honor, you know there are a lot of
other people from Mark McGwire to Hillary Clinton." He conceded that
"sentimentally, a lot of us wanted to" make her the winner as
"I personally was fascinated and impressed by her."
On MSNBC one night he insisted that with Bill
Clinton, "historically, I don't think we'll worry about whether he
was chaste or not when we were saying whether he has character." And
in the pages of the magazine he praised Clinton’s policies: "One of
President Clinton’s accomplishments has been to restore the strength of
Franklin Roosevelt’s legacy by reforming welfare and conquering runaway
deficits while still showing how government could help average
citizens."
Isaacson also took to the pages of Time to
praise FDR, especially for how "he escorted onto the century’s
stage a remarkable woman, his wife Eleanor" who "became an icon
of feminism and social justice." But Isaacson criticized the views
espoused by Winston Churchill.
Monday’s New York Times broke the news of
the job change for Isaacson, Editorial Director of Time, Inc. From 1996
until last November he had served as Managing Editor of Time magazine, the
top editorial slot at the weekly, a position he had assumed after a long
career with the magazine. In his July 9 story, New York Times reporter Jim
Rutenberg outlined Isaacson’s new duties for the media conglomerate:
"Effective today, Mr. Isaacson will take leave of Time Inc. to become
chairman and chief executive of the CNN News Group, overseeing not only
the CNN domestic network, but also its Web sites, radio outlets and cable
spin-offs: Headline News, CNNfn, CNN/SI, CNN en Espanol and CNN
International, executives said....Mr. Isaacson's appointment to CNN comes
less than two weeks after its longtime chairman and chief executive, Tom
Johnson, resigned suddenly."
Rutenberg claimed "Mr. Isaacson is widely
regarded as a respected journalist who helped Time magazine evolve from a
fading periodical of record to a livelier national chronicle with greater
appeal to a younger group of readers, giving it a heightened focus on
technology, science and pop culture. It is AOL Time Warner's hope that Mr.
Isaacson will be able to do the same for CNN: make a well-known, but
somewhat stodgy, journalism outfit more entertaining while keeping it
informative and authoritative."
Rutenberg relayed: "Mr. Isaacson said in
a statement that he would keep the network focused on its mission of
practicing ‘great journalism.’ He added that by doing so, ‘it also
means conveying the enthusiasm and fun that comes from engaging with
interesting events, ideas and personalities.’
In my absence on Monday, Rich Noyes, the
MRC’s Director of Media Analysis, reviewed the MRC’s archives for
quotes from Isaacson, a man who has maintained a fairly low media profile
as he only occasionally appeared on interview shows and his byline became
more infrequent as he rose through management:
-- Media Bias Eradicated. From the December,
1997 MediaWatch:
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."
END Excerpt from MediaWatch
Obviously, as any observer of Time magazine
knows, that’s preposterous. The counter-examples are too numerous to
cite, but at the time of Isaacson’s claim the MRC’s Notable Quotables
offered this as a "Reality Check," Time reporter Dick Thompson
in a February 27, 1995 story headlined "Congressional Chain-Saw
Massacre: If Speaker Newt Gingrich gets his way, the laws protecting air,
water and wildlife may be endangered":
"The noises coming from [Rep. Sonny] Bono
and many of his fellow Republican signers of House Speaker Newt
Gingrich’s ‘Contract with America’ signal a radical shift in
Congress’ attitude toward environmental issues -- a shift that may bode
ill for the health of snail darters, spotted owls, and even the human
species."
-- We Wanted to Honor Hillary as Our Spurned
Spouse of the Year. Isaacson, as Time’s Managing Editor, explaining on
the December 20, 1998 Meet the Press his magazine’s Men of the Year
choice of Bill Clinton and Ken Starr,
"It's that person or persons who's affected
the news the most, affected our history the most for good or for ill. Had
it been an award, had it been somebody we wanted to honor, you know there
are a lot of other people from Mark McGwire to Hillary Clinton, but in the
end we had a pretty messy year. I think Washington went totally mad and
these two people are symbols of that."
-- Hillary’s "Surreal Dignity" Had
"Impressed" Isaacson. His "To Our Readers" article,
Dec. 28, 1988/January 4, 1999 Time:
"For a while...she was our leading
contender. Her strength and her almost surreal ability to assert her
dignity were remarkable to some and mystifying to others. She also, for
many months, helped determine how the nation framed the scandal debate by
portraying it as a partisan battle and disgusting prosecutorial invasion
of personal privacy. So why didn't we choose her? Sentimentally, a lot of
us wanted to; I personally was fascinated and impressed by her."
-- Forget About Impeachment. Isaacson on
MSNBC's Hockenberry, June 21, 1999:
"I think one thing we've said this evening
is that the correlation between being chaste and having character is
pretty minimal....It [The Lewinsky scandal] will not be the thing we
remember the '90s for, which is a period of unparalleled prosperity, a
really strong economy, and Clinton did fight hard for certain things for
the middle class, and for this economy that he'll be remembered for. So
yeah, we focus a bit on the scandal of the moment when it's happening, but
historically, I don't think we'll worry about whether he was chaste or not
when we were saying whether he has character."
-- Heroic Bill Clinton. Isaacson on Bill
Clinton’s piece in Time about Person of the Century runner-up FDR,
"To Our Readers" article in the December 31, 1999 issue:
"One of President Clinton’s
accomplishments has been to restore the strength of Franklin Roosevelt’s
legacy by reforming welfare and conquering runaway deficits while still
showing how government could help average citizens. He’s written a
fascinating piece about what Roosevelt means today."
-- And heroic Eleanor Roosevelt. Isaacson in a
separate article on those considered but not selected as Person of the
Century, December 31, 1999 edition:
"Roosevelt made another great contribution:
he escorted onto the century’s stage a remarkable woman, his wife
Eleanor. She served as his counterpoint: uncompromisingly moral, earnest
rather than devious, she became an icon of feminism and social justice in
a nation just discovering the need to grant rights to women, blacks,
ordinary workers and the poor. She discovered the depth of racial
discrimination while touring New Deal programs (on a visit to Birmingham
in 1938, she refused to sit in the white section of the auditorium), and
subsequently peppered her husband with questions over dinner and memos at
bedtime. Even after her husband's death, she remained one of the
century’s most powerful advocates for social fairness."
-- But Churchill is a Scourge. Isaacson in the
same issue of Time:
"In his approach to domestic issues,
individual rights and the liberties of colonial subjects, Churchill turned
out to be a romantic refugee from a previous era who ended up on the wrong
side of history. He did not become Prime Minister, he incorrectly
proclaimed in 1942, ‘to preside over the liquidation of the British
Empire,’ which then controlled a quarter of the globe’s land. He
bulldoggedly opposed the women’s-rights movement, other civil-rights
crusades and decolonization, and he called Mohandas Gandhi
‘nauseating’ and a ‘half-naked fakir.’"
-- Time Should Control America's Thinking.
Isaacson, just after being named Time’s Managing Editor, on the January
9, 1996 edition of the PBS talk show Charlie Rose:
"Time magazine, to use that lingo, can be
your intelligent agent. It can also help set the agenda, so that we, in a
time when everything is fractured, 500 channels, you know, hundreds of
thousands of places to go on the World Wide Web, what we do need in this
country, and maybe in this world, is common ground.... What I think Time
magazine should be looking for is the right tone, a set of core beliefs,
and set of core values, and I think that those are based on sort of a
sensible American common ground; an approach where we ask certain basic
values we all share like what's good for the kids? You know, clean up
after ourselves, certain faith in free minds and free markets and a
certain sense that, whatever the proposal is, the most basic question we
should ask is: yes, but does it work?"
-- Rationalizing Soviet Aggression. Isaacson,
then a Time Senior Writer, in the November 6, 1989 edition of the
magazine:
"For the Russians, tempered by centuries of
land invasions, national security has long been defined as the control of
territory and the subjugation of neighbors. Moscow's desire for a
protective buffer, combined with a thousand-year legacy of expansionism
and a 20th century overlay of missionary Marxism, was what prompted Stalin
to leave his army in Eastern Europe after World War II and impose puppet
regimes in the nations he had liberated."
2
Dan
Rather is upset by how Bush’s "big tax cuts" are impinging
upon liberal spending plans. He opened Monday’s CBS Evening News:
"President Bush today mounted a big summer campaign push trying to
revive his agenda in Congress. The context includes new worries that his
big tax cuts, along with a shrinking budget surplus, are re-shaping the
political and fiscal landscape of the country."
3
Bush’s
idea of investing Social Security money in the stock market is dangerous,
but investing in the stock market is the smartest way to ensure a good
retirement.
The loss in value in 401(k) retirement
accounts in 2000 "could cast a cloud over" President Bush’s
proposal to allow people to invest some Social Security funds in the stock
market, NBC’s Brian Williams warned. But, less than two minutes later,
NBC reporter Lisa Myers advised viewers that their "best hope of
living well in retirement" is "to put every dollar you’re
allowed into your 401(k), every year, no matter how you did last
year."
Setting up a July 9 NBC Nightly News piece,
anchor Brian Williams scolded the Bush idea: "A new report that could
cast a cloud over another of the President’s proposals -- to put some
Social Security funds in private investment accounts. The study shows
popular 401(k) retirement savings plans lost money last year, dipping in
value along with the stock market decline, and still showing weakness in
the first six months of this year."
Lisa Myers proceeded to recount how a
"new report from a top management consulting firm," Cerulli
Associates, found an average 10 percent loss from 1999 to 2000 in 401(k)
accounts. Myers listed some "rules" experts advise investors to
follow, such as mixing stock and bond funds and have a diversity of
holdings. But in direct contradiction of the fear expressed by Williams,
she concluded: "Experts say the most important rule of all is to put
every dollar you’re allowed into your 401(k), every year, no matter how
you did last year. That’s your best hope of living well in
retirement."
Maybe Williams should watch the stories before
writing intros to them.