October 8, 2001

"THE AGENCY" ON CBS:

Right Time but Wrong Show

by Jeff Cohen

It's hard to remember a time in U.S. history when public attention was more sharply focused on issues of domestic security, civil liberties and the role of U.S. intelligence agencies. A prime-time dramatic series on the CIA could contribute mightily to public understanding -- if rigorously independent and unencumbered.

Unfortunately, that's not the approach CBS is taking with "The Agency," its new series about the CIA, made with the support of the CIA. CBS is running reverential promos for the show: 'Now, more than ever, America needs the unsung heroes of 'The Agency."'

One wonders if CBS executives remember "The FBI," the Efrem Zimbalist Jr. series that was one of the great feats in propaganda history. Week after week for nine years, it presented an unvaryingly upbeat--and largely distorted-- portrait of a supremely ethical, non-politicized institution.

The unsullied portrait was shaped jointly by ABC and the FBI, which had say over scripts and story lines. The series was part of J. Edgar Hoover's effort to polish the bureau's image in the mass media as a means toward more power and more funding.

After "The FBI" went off the air in 1974, congressional hearings and Freedom of Information lawsuits revealed that, during the nine years of sanitized hero worship on ABC, the bureau was systematically abusing the 1st Amendment rights of countless civil rights and peace advocates, from grass-roots activists to John Lennon and Martin Luther King Jr. "The FBI" offered no episodes about that FBI.

Seemingly unconcerned with this history, CBS' "The Agency" has invited the participation of the CIA, an institution with a history at least as controversial as the FBI's. The CBS project readily won the support of the CIA and its official liaison with Hollywood, Chase Brandon, whose job is CIA image-polishing. "Right now the American public needs a sense of reassurance," Brandon told the Los Angeles Times, referring to the Sept. 11 attacks. "If anything, a show like 'The Agency' couldn't be more timely."

What might be more timely is an independent look at the CIA. In light of Sept. 11, Americans have a right to question how that agency has performed lately and what sort of people it has been associating with, in Afghanistan and in other secret wars. These questions could be posed in a dramatic series but not on a show inclined more toward glorification than elucidation.

After meeting the creator of "The Agency" and reviewing scripts, Brandon granted unprecedented support for the CBS series, which was allowed to shoot scenes at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., using off-duty agency employees as extras. For interior sets in Los Angeles, the CIA has provided agency seals. "Much to the delight of the agency," the New York Times reported, "CBS clearly has become an agency booster."

Series producers say the CIA will have input on scripts but not script "approval." Executive producer Shaun Cassidy discussed the CIA's script involvement with the Richmond Times-Dispatch: "Their support is [on] a strictly case-by-case basis. If they don't like the script, we won't have their support that week, and that may happen."

In a country where separation of media and state is so valued, should network TV producers be showing scripts to a government agency in hopes of getting its support? And if a series is that cozy with its subject, how much integrity can the program have?

In recent years, the CIA has worked hand-in-hand with brutal regimes and armies. It has helped overthrow elected governments. CBS knows it will lose its access and support if "The Agency" focuses on the CIA's less savory activities or blunders. CIA liaison Brandon is unabashed about denying requests for help to any Hollywood project he deems insufficiently friendly.

So as long as CBS and the CIA remain wedded, we can expect more episodes like last Thursday's, in which the CIA director's lying under oath to the Senate is portrayed as the correct and ethical choice. But don't expect hard-hitting episodes on the CIA's past alliance with terrorists such as Osama bin Laden. Or on the agency's role in the bombing of the pharmaceutical factory in Sudan and the Chinese Embassy in Serbia.

A tough-minded show about the real CIA would make for riveting drama. But how much reality can we expect from a series that goes to the agency every week for approval?

June 8, 2001

The Return of Otto Reich:
Will Government Propagandist Join Bush Administration?

by Jeff Cohen

In totalitarian countries, government propaganda officers wield great power. They're authorized to use the media to stir up state-sanctioned passions and fears through the selective dissemination of information -- sometimes factual, sometimes phony.

If you think the United States has never employed propaganda officers, meet Otto Reich. He may soon be our country's chief diplomat in Latin America if the Bush administration has its way.

In March, Bush announced his intention to nominate Reich as assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere. If he's officially nominated, it will be interesting to see how journalists handle Reich -- because from 1983 through 1986, it was Reich's job to handle journalists. That's when he commanded the State Department's Office of Public Diplomacy, whose main mission was to inflame fears about Nicaragua and its left-wing Sandinista government that had come to power by overthrowing a corrupt, U.S.-supported dictator.

By covertly disseminating intelligence leaks to journalists, Reich and the OPD sought to trump up a Nicaraguan "threat," and to sanctify the U.S.-backed Contra guerrillas fighting Nicaragua's government as "freedom fighters." The propaganda was aimed at influencing Congress to continue to fund the Contras.

Take the scary news that Soviet MiG fighter jets were arriving in Nicaragua. With journalists citing unnamed "intelligence sources," the well-timed story surged through U.S. media on the night of Ronald Reagan's reelection. At NBC, Andrea Mitchell broke into election coverage with the story. The furor spurred a Democratic senator to discuss a possible airstrike against Nicaragua. But the story turned out to be a hoax. Several journalists later acknowledged they'd been handed the story by Reich's office.

It isn't the only erroneous story journalists link to the OPD. According to the Miami Herald, for example, Reich's office promoted the fable that Nicaragua had acquired chemical weapons from the Soviets. According to Newsweek, the OPD told reporters that high-level Sandinistas were involved in drug trafficking, but U.S. drug officials said there was no evidence for such a charge.

Reich's office worked alongside the White House National Security Council, collaborating with CIA propaganda experts, Army psychological warfare specialists and a then-obscure Marine lieutenant colonel named Oliver North. Declassified documents detailing OPD activities are on file and online at the National Security Archive, a DC-based nonprofit (http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB40/).

In a March 13, 1985 "Eyes Only" memo to Pat Buchanan, then-White House Communications Director, the OPD bragged about the recent results of its "White Propaganda" operation in support of the Contras. The OPD said it helped write an anti-Sandinista column for the Wall Street Journal that ran two days earlier; assisted in a "positive piece" on the Contras by Fred Francis that aired the night before on NBC; wrote op-eds for the Washington Post and New York Times that would run with the bylines of Contra leaders; arranged an extensive media tour for a Contra leader "through a cut-out" (to hide the OPD's role); and prepared to leak a State Department cable that would embarrass the Sandinistas: "Do not be surprised if this cable somehow hits the evening news."

The memo said that the Wall Street Journal column, "Nicaragua is Armed for Trouble," was written by an OPD "consultant," but cautioned that "officially, this office had no role in its preparation." Weeks later, after the Journal published a news report on Nicaragua that Reich disliked, the OPD chief wrote an angry letter-to-the editor touting the "Armed for Trouble" column and complaining that the news report was "an echo of Sandinista propaganda." It was an audacious charge since Reich himself was "echoing" propaganda his office had covertly boasted to have assisted in.

Besides media manipulation through planted stories and leaks, there was also cajoling and bullying of journalists. Reich visited CBS in April 1984 to complain at length about its Central America coverage. In a memo to President Reagan, Secretary of State George Shultz described the meeting as an example of "what the Office of Public Diplomacy has been doing to help improve the quality of information the American people are receiving. It has been repeated dozens of times over the past few months."

Six months later, Reich met with a dozen National Public Radio reporters and editors about their allegedly biased Nicaragua coverage. According to NPR Foreign Affairs correspondent Bill Buzenberg, "Reich bragged that he had made similar visits to other unnamed newspapers and major television networks...Reich said he had gotten others to change some of their reporters in the field." Buzenberg told me in a 1987 interview that he viewed the OPD chief's comments as a "calculated attempt to intimidate."

Reich had little tolerance for independent-minded reporters. In the summer of 1985, his office helped circulate a specious story suggesting that U.S. reporters received sexual favors from Sandinista-provided prostitutes in return for favorable coverage. "It isn't only women," Reich told New York magazine; for gay journalists, they'd procure men.

The OPD viewed many in the media as allies to be rewarded, particularly on the weekend pundit shows. According to a Feb. 1985 OPD memo, certain correspondents on the McLaughlin, Brinkley and Agronsky programs had "open invitations for personal briefings."

After Reich had left to become ambassador to Venezuela, the OPD was shut down in 1987, in the wake of a U.S. comptroller general's report which concluded that Reich's office had "engaged in prohibited, covert propaganda activities." According to the Miami Herald, a "senior U.S. official" described the OPD as "a vast psychological warfare operation of the kind the military conducts to influence a population in enemy territory." But the population targeted was not an enemy -- it was the U.S. public

A confrontation is brewing on Capitol Hill over Otto Reich. He is supported by the Cuban-American lobby, which is so powerful with the Bush White House that Reich reportedly got the nod for the assistant secretary state job over a career foreign service officer favored by Secretary of State Colin Powell. The Cuban-born Reich, now a corporate lobbyist, helped draft the Helms-Burton Act tightening the embargo of Cuba.

Reich is opposed by Democratic senators who remember his exploits at the OPD. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass) commented in March that Reich's "office may have been the genesis of acts of propaganda not just prohibited in this country, but which reflect a kind of carelessness about the truth."

A key player to watch in any confirmation battle will be the press corps itself. What will be the reaction of journalists who were manipulated by leaks from his office? Or of the newspapers that may have run op-ed columns unaware that his office was behind them?

If senators don't adequately raise questions about Otto Reich's history as a media manipulator, one would hope that journalists will.

Jeff Cohen is the founder of FAIR, a media watch group based in New York -- and a panelist on "News Watch" on the Fox News Channel.

Washington Times, September 24, 2000:

Why Not Open the Debates to Others?

By Jeff Cohen, James Pinkerton, Jane Hall, Cal Thomas and Eric Burns

We are media critics and commentators who are rarely unanimous in our opinions. Yet we are united in our belief that voters would be better served by broader debates than those sponsored by the Commission on Presidential Debates. We believe that the American people should have, at the very least, one nationally televised opportunity to see Ralph Nader, the Green Party nominee, Pat Buchanan, the Reform Party nominee, and Harry Browne, the Libertarian Party nominee, go up against Al Gore and George W. Bush.

This year, the commission plans to exclude minor-party candidates who lack 15 percent support in national polls. From the point of view, perhaps, of the commission, this arbitrary threshold makes sense; after all, the commission is controlled by the two parties. But 15 percent is too high; that's triple the level of voter support that a presidential candidate needs to win federal matching funds.

If such a 15 percent threshold had been applied to the 1998 gubernatorial debates in Minnesota, many of the state's voters might never have seen Jesse Ventura, the candidate they ultimately judged to be the most appealing. Mr. Ventura was at 10 percent in the polls before the debates; he won in November with 37 percent of the vote. Just as important, turnout surged in Minnesota, even though it declined in most states that year.

Indeed, wider debates generate wider enthusiasm all through the process. In 1992, when Ross Perot was included in the presidential debates (because both major parties calculated it would benefit them), they were viewed by 90 million people, with the audience growing in each successive debate. In 1996, with Mr. Perot excluded by the commission, viewership collapsed, averaging only 41 million people. And November turnout collapsed, too.

The decision to close the debates may have been made mostly for administrative and technical convenience. That's good for debate who worry about negotiating complicated debate protocols and camera angles, but it's bad for those millions of Americans who might like to see a genuine argument about issues on which Al Gore and George W. Bush largely agree, such as global trade, the drug war and the death penalty.

As believers in free speech and in the marketplace of ideas, we five think a better approach would be to invite - at least to the first debate-- any candidate on the ballot in enough states to have a mathematical chance of winning an Electoral College majority (which means they've overcome often difficult ballot-access hurdles). This year, that would mean a first debate involving seven candidates: Messrs. Bush, Gore, Nader, Buchanan and Browne, and also John Hagelin of the Natural Law Party and Howard Phillips of the Constitution Party.

Another approach would be to invite only candidates who have either 5 percent support in national polls or at least 50 percent of the American people favoring their inclusion. Under this standard, the debates next month would likely include Mr. Nader and Mr. Buchanan.

In an era of decline in major-party affiliation and a rise in independent voters, presidential debates should not be controlled by the two major parties and the debate commission they jointly established.

Nationally televised debates should be more than just a showcase for the two candidates most likely to win the election. They should be a broad discussion of the problems facing our country, as well as possible solutions-- including proposals that may not yet be in mainstream circulation.

If we can't have that kind of full discussion every four years at election time, when will we?

This commentary was written by Jeff Cohen, founder of Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR); James Pinkerton, a Newsday columnist; Jane Hall, a communications professor at American University; Cal Thomas, a syndicated columnist; and Eric Burns, media analyst at Fox News Channel. They are the five panelists on Fox News Channel's weekly program News Watch.

March 2000

Mainstream News Coverage Of Economics:

by Jeff Cohen

A good place to begin a discussion of media bias on economics is with the price of wine. In 1997, this is how the New York Times wine columnist discussed the issue: "The $100-a-bottle wine, once an example of vulgar excess, is now an everyday occurrence."

What's now an everyday occurrence is celebratory and ignorant elitism in national media. Indeed, it is the overriding bias in economics coverage -- whether the news outlet leans left or right on social issues like gays, guns or abortion. This elite worldview leads to a conservative, pro-corporate slant on issues from trade to wages to Social Security.

For the record, 96 percent of California wines in 1998 retailed for $14 or less per bottle; 81 percent sold for under $7. Let's move from the price of wine to what a Newsweek cover in July 1999 called "The Whine of '99: Everyone's Getting Rich But Me!" It's a variant on Money magazine's less whiny May cover: "Everyone's Getting Rich!"

Echoing Newsweek, CNN's June 30th "Talkback Live" began this way: "Behind the mind-boggling wealth of Bill Gates, there are more billionaires and millionaires than ever before, and it might seem as if everyone you know is in on the action."

Newsweek's cover story focuses on the frustration of those who believe that everyone around them is getting rich. Only alert readers who can concentrate amid a deafening drumbeat would notice that when Newsweek says "everyone's getting rich," it has in mind a tiny subset of Americans: "Almost half of all people who earn $50,000 or more say they know someone who's become rich." Reality check: Newsweek's poll found that seven in ten people had family incomes below $50,000.

Like so much of the happy hype that masquerades as journalism about economics, the Newsweek piece skips breezily over reality: "The income gap remains a thorny problem, but wealth is increasingly spread out as businesses give workers more of a stake. And as everybody starts to ponder his own dot.com business plan, that picks up the pace of innovation."

Reality check: Far from being "increasingly spread out," wealth in the United States is increasingly concentrated. According to New York University economics professor Edward Wolff, most American households have a lower net worth than they did in 1983, when stocks began to climb. The top 1 percent of U.S. households has more wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined and more than 40 percent of total wealth -- doubling the share they had in 1977.

Myths proliferate in mainstream media that tend to see the economy from the perch of corporate managers and investors and not from the perspective of the vast majority of Americans whose income comes basically from wages or salary.

The elevated roost explains why daily newspapers have business pages but not labor or workplace pages. It explains (along with corporate sponsorship and ownership) why national television, including PBS, offers dozens of business and investor programs but not one regular show on labor or consumer rights. It explains why economics coverage is so dominated by pro-corporate sources; FAIR's 40-month study of Nightline in the late 1980s found that for every union official discussing economics there were seven business representatives.

It explains the exalted status of ABC's John Stossel -- a reporter who unabashedly advocates business deregulation on air and in speeches to Capitol Hill and industry lobby groups ("I'm delighted to pitch the miracle of markets and the evils of regulation every chance I get," Stossel told USA Today in 1995.) He had been a consumer reporter, but said after a 1996 speech to The Federalist Society: "I got sick of it. I also now make so much money I just lost interest in saving a buck on a can of peas."

An elite perch explains how, during the Teamsters strike against UPS, columnists Steven and Cokie Roberts could warn against stronger unions by arguing that "a $20-an-hour job doesn't do any worker any good if the company loses business or closes down." Let's do the numbers, as they say on "public" radio: A $20-an-hour UPS driver earns in a year $40,000 -- roughly what Steve and Cokie were paid for lecturing in 1994 to a Chicago bank.

A topdown worldview explains how ABC anchor Diane Sawyer, in a lurid segment on welfare fraud, could confront a single mom of a four-year-old ("people say you shouldn't have children if you can't support them") who secretly worked two part-time jobs to earn -- with her welfare checks -- a grand total of $16,700. Sawyer earns about that much every day from ABC.

In the right-wing's caricature, the Washington press corps is composed of corporate-bashing, big-government liberals. This portrait is debunked by a survey of 141 journalists -- primarily from the most influential outlets -- conducted for FAIR in 1998 by Virginia Commonwealth professor David Croteau. Comparing journalists' responses with public opinion as measured by mainstream polls, Croteau found journalists to be more conservative than the general public on many key economic issues. (www.fair.org/reports/journalist-survey.html).

As for corporate-bashing, journalists were asked: Do "a few large corporations" have "too much power?" Somewhat split on the issue, 57 percent of the journalists answered yes; 43 percent answered no. By contrast, the general public is one-sided on the question, with 77 percent (versus 18 percent) saying yes in a 1995 Times-Mirror poll. If national journalists are business-bashers, soccer moms are veritable communists.

Should Washington "guarantee medical care for all people who don't have health insurance?" Journalists were fairly divided (43 percent pro, 35 percent con), while the public supports a federal guarantee of health insurance by 2 to 1 -- 64 to 29 percent in a 1996 New York Times poll.

What about "free trade"? While the public is generally more negative than positive in assessing the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement, journalists are overwhelming fans of NAFTA (65 to 8 percent in the survey). On granting the president "fast-track" authority to negotiate new trade deals, the public is as widely opposed (67 percent) as journalists are supportive (71 percent).

Raise taxes on the wealthy? That's hugely popular with the general public; not so popular with the surveyed journalists -- most of whom declared annual household incomes above $100,000, with almost a third declaring household incomes above 150,000. Reality check: The median household income in the U.S. is about $38,000.

Far from a leftist cabal, the Washington press corps reveals itself in the Croteau survey to be a conservative elite, out of step with average Americans. It seems that journalists prospering at prestige jobs in big corporations aren't overly worried about health coverage or the impact of overseas sweatshops on U.S. jobs and wages.

My point is not that well-paid journalists with right-of-center economic views can't cover the economy fairly or accurately. They can, but only if their coverage acknowledges that economic events affect different people and groups differently. And only if they commit to balancing sources and experts -- especially on economic issues where their personal biases are in accord with the monied interests that own or sponsor the news. That takes courage.

To cite just two issues where balance is in short supply:

"FREE TRADE": From NAFTA to the World Trade Organization, cheerleading often drowns out reporting. Here's the lead of a front-page New York Times backgrounder on the treaty that gave birth to the WTO: "Free trade means growth. Free trade means growth. Free trade means growth. Just say it 50 more times and all doubts will melt away." The article -- headlined "How Free Trade Prompts Growth: A Primer" -- wasn't satire; only sources lauding "free trade" were quoted. Months earlier, Times management had published an unprecedented 7-page advertorial section promoting passage of NAFTA; opposition, even in paid ads, was excluded.

Some cheerleading is nonsensical: CNN "leftist" Michael Kinsley was so fervently pro-NAFTA that he once argued that U.S.-owned plants in Mexico pay workers in dollars, and that "you can only spend them in the United States."

Sourcing on this issue is no more balanced than the U.S. trade deficit. A FAIR study of reporting on NAFTA (April-July 1993) in the New York Times and Washington Post found that of 201 quoted sources, NAFTA supporters outnumbered critics by more than three to one. Not one source represented a labor union; only six represented environmental groups. (Ironically, an August 1993 Times article claimed that labor and environmentalists "dominate the debate.")

SOCIAL SECURITY: Like trade, a media mantra is repeated unchallenged: Without big reforms (like benefit cuts), Social Security is going broke. Say it 50 times and doubts melt away.

FAIR's 13-month study of nightly network news reporting on Social Security in 1998-99 found not a debate, but a drumbeat: The system is going broke (not one dissenter) and can be fixed by turning it at least partly over to Wall Street (almost no dissenters). Analysts from corporate-oriented think tanks and Wall Street -- which will profit from privatization -- were often quoted; few seniors advocates, and no one from labor, were heard.

Though rarely quoted in mass media, some experts don't see a crisis. They note that the Social Security trustees' projection of a deficit in the year 2034 is based on a strikingly pessimistic average annual growth rate of 1.4 percent over the next 75 years. That's half the average 3 percent annual growth rate of the last 75 years, which includes the Great Depression. With modest growth, say dissenters, Social Security will be solvent well after most Baby Boomers bite the dust.

Today in the media, triumphalism has replaced debate about "our booming economy." Reality check: 44 million Americans have no health insurance and nearly one in five kids still live in poverty. Because the minimum wage has fallen in value, 15 percent of workers receive a wage that would have been illegal in the late 1960s. For the typical worker, real hourly wages were lower in 1998 than in 1973.

For these millions of Americans, a $100 bottle of wine is hardly an everyday occurrence.

February 2000

Gun Control, the NRA and the Second Amendment

by Jeff Cohen

In June of 1999, two weeks after Rosie "The Queen of Nice" O'Donnell used her TV talk show to confront Tom "I'm the NRA" Selleck about gun violence, she was calling in to "Larry King Live" to promote gun control on CNN. Asked by King if she favored amending the Second Amendment to the Constitution, O'Donnell replied: "I think that we need to seriously consider that. Yes, I do, Larry."

The above may appear to some as evidence of gun bashers running amuck in the media, even favoring a rewrite of the Constitution. I submit it as evidence of just the opposite: how the National Rifle Association and gun lobby have dominated the terms of the media debate on gun control.

Indeed, media bias in favor of the NRA's view of the Second Amendment (as protecting individual gun ownership) is so pervasive that even many gun-control supporters seem unaware that the federal high courts have never found a gun law to have violated the Second Amendment.

The Amendment is only 27 words: "A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." While the NRA emphasizes only the last 14 words, the U.S. Supreme Court and appeals courts have focused on "well-regulated militia" and "security of a free State" to rule that Second Amendment rights are reserved to states and their militias – nowadays, the National Guards.

The truth is -- and one would hardly know it from the mass media -- that since the Supreme Court's unanimous Miller decision in 1939, all federal appeals courts, whether dominated by liberals or conservatives, have agreed that the Second Amendment does not confer gun rights on individuals. The NRA view, opposed even by such right-wing judges as Robert Bork, has been consistently rejected.

Unlike the average media consumer, Douglas Hickman knows this truth. In 1991, he invoked the Second Amendment in suing the City of Los Angeles after failing to get a permit for a concealed weapon. In keeping with dozens of cases since 1939, the Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously: "We follow our sister circuits in holding that the Second Amendment is a right held by the states and does not protect the possession of a weapon by a private citizen."

The Hickman decision, like most of the other decisions, went unreported in The New York Times, which once inaccurately reported that "the Supreme Court has never explicitly ruled" on the Second Amendment's meaning.

My point is not that the high courts are correctly interpreting the Amendment (some legal scholars, including liberals, say they're not), or that this unbroken 60-year pattern of decisions will go on forever (a Texas gun owner has found a lower federal court judge who endorses the NRA's view, and that case may one day reach the Supreme Court).

My point is journalistic, not legal: If you just learned that federal case law says the Second Amendment does not protect an individual's right to own guns, do you feel cheated that news outlets have allowed the NRA to impose its Second Amendment worldview on coverage, while marginalizing the federal courts? You're not alone: Former Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger referred to gun lobby propaganda on this issue as "one of the greatest pieces of fraud…on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime."

Howard Friel, editor of "Guns and the Constitution," studied news coverage on the issue for an article in Extra!, FAIR's magazine: "While the NRA's interpretation of the Second Amendment is repeatedly cited in newspapers and on TV, the federal judiciary gets virtually no coverage." When reporters matter-of-factly describe a politician as "a supporter of the Second Amendment," the well-established judicial view isn't even in the picture.

In complaining about bias, conservatives point to surveys indicating that most reporters are personally pro-gun control. But so are most Americans. A more revealing survey finding -- from the anti-gun control Second Amendment Foundation -- indicated that 69 percent of daily newspapers subscribed to the NRA's interpretation of the Second Amendment.

If mainstream journalism were intent on biasing the news in favor of gun control, would reporters be so credulous in accepting the NRA's view of the Second Amendment?

I've found that news coverage of gun control rarely fails to include "both sides." Reporting is usually balanced, often predictably so -- with gun advocates hailing their sacred Second Amendment rights pitted against gun control advocates arguing for incremental reforms like trigger locks and gun-show background checks that hardly address the enormity of the problem of firearms violence.

Even though nearly 40 percent of the American public favors banning the sale of handguns, according to recent polls, it's a proposal deemed too "extreme" for most mainstream media debates. A USA Today columnist dubiously asserted that "such a sweeping measure wouldn't pass constitutional muster." .

Conservatives complain of media bias against the NRA, especially in editorials and op-eds. In fact, the NRA has many allies among opinion-shapers, including some of the biggest voices in talk radio -- such as NRA echo chamber G. Gordon Liddy, who told listeners how to kill federal agents.

Given the inflammatory utterances from NRA leaders, toned down after the Oklahoma City federal building was bombed by ardent member Timothy McVeigh, the NRA has not fared all that badly in the media. One board member wrote that masked federal agents are "scarier than the Nazis" and should be "targets." Another declared: "The purpose of the 2nd Amendment is to threaten the government."

Only after Oklahoma City did national media notice official NRA rhetoric about the "storm-trooper tactics" of firearms agents, a.k.a. "jack-booted government thugs," who have the green light to "murder law-abiding citizens."

Gun advocates are right to gripe about the sometimes hysterical coverage, especially on television, that follows school, workplace or other mass shootings. They are wrong, however, to blame a pro-gun-control bias; the real culprit behind overhyped coverage is corporate-driven, ratings-hungry, tabloid-oriented media that have updated the "if it bleeds, it leads" slogan with a dictum more appropriate to the 24-hour news environment: "If they're dead, we're live."

In fact, given the quantity of coverage devoted to school shootings perpetrated by kids as young as 11, it's startling how little reporting has focused on the efforts of the NRA and the gun industry to market guns to youth. A Violence Policy Center report, "Start 'Em Young: Recruitment of Kids to the Gun Culture," offers graphic details of ads, catalogues and campaigns aimed at attracting kids, even preteens, to shooting. Until 1994, the firearms industry distributed a pamphlet, "When Your Youngster Wants a Gun," saying that "some youngsters are ready to start at 10" as gun owners.

It's basic journalistic instinct, not bias, that prompts reporters to point out that the gun-related crime and death rate in the U.S. is many times higher than that of any other advanced industrial country (in 1994, there were 142.4 gun deaths per million people in the U.S.; 4.1 in England and Wales; 0.5 in Japan). NRA supporters complain that reporters move too quickly from these stark statistical comparisons to differences in gun regulation -- relatively lax in the U.S., very strict in most advanced countries.

Frankly, a correlation between gun laws and gun deaths is too obvious to ignore. Mainstream journalists do often ignore another key factor contributing to our much higher violent crime rate: poverty. The U.S. is the only advanced industrial country with so much of it. But we'll leave media and poverty for a future debate.

December 1999

Media Coverage of Religion: An Overview

by Jeff Cohen

In the wake of the horrific shooting at Forth Worth's Wedgwood Baptist Church, pundit-evangelist Jerry Falwell assumed his usual position in the center of the media story and offered this assertion: "Most hate crimes in America today are not directed toward African-Americans or Jewish people or gays or lesbians," he told Time magazine. "They are directed at evangelical Christians."

Falwell's role in the massacre story symbolizes much of what passes for mainstream news coverage of religion and religious debates: it's loud, divisive, simplistic and full of unchallenged falsehoods. According to the FBI's most recent hate crime statistics, in 1997 there were 3,838 bias-motivated offenses against African-Americans, 1,159 against Jews and 1,351 against gays and lesbians. Bias-motivated offenses against all Protestants totaled 59.

The world of religion and spirituality is vast and complex. Yet mainstream media tend to reduce religion coverage to a narrow set of debates promoted by conservative evangelicals -- gay rights and abortion, plus school and censorship issues -- while mainline denominations and concerns are marginalized.

Beginning with the media-assisted rise of Falwell's Moral Majority (see Tina Rosenberg's May 1982 Washington Monthly piece, "How the Media Made the Moral Majority"), mainstream news outlet have come to equate religious activism with that of the right-wing. They've elevated Religious Right leaders to the top tier of punditry, while shying away from serious scrutiny of their movements.

Indeed, media gullibility over a 20-year period has helped the Religious Right project political power way beyond its real strength. In recent years, credulous journalists have frequently reported that Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition has 1.7 million members (when only 310,000 member-subscribers received the group's magazine, say postal records) and "distributes" 40 million voter guides (though former leaders say it was expected that millions would never be distributed).

One wonders if the dearth of investigative inquiry about conservative evangelical movements stems from journalists' guilt over their largely secular backgrounds -- or fear of being called "Christian-bashers" or "religious bigots."

For all the complaints about "liberal bias" distorting their views, religious conservatives communicate directly to millions of Americans every day through media they own and control -- including more than 1300 Christian broadcast stations (nearly 10% of all TV and radio stations), radio networks such as James Dobson's Focus on the Family and various cable TV platforms. Left-of-center movements -- feminist, labor, environmental, etc. -- have nothing close to this media power.

There's also the constant access that mainstream media have provided to Religious Right advocates like Falwell, Cal Thomas, Gary Bauer and Oliver North as commentators. They've been among the most frequent guests on such TV news shows as Nightline, where Falwell offers his expertise about AIDS and homosexuality. Thanks to CNN and The McLaughlin Group, Religious Right fellow-traveler Pat Buchanan was the first pundit to appear on national TV seven days a week.

By contrast, the Religious Left -- a leading force in most American social movements today for peace, economic justice and human rights -- is virtually missing from mainstream news. Don't take my word for it: A 1993 study of religion coverage on network TV by the right-wing Media Research Center concluded, "With a handful of exceptions, the religious left went unnoticed and uncovered by the networks."

Also undercovered are mainline religious institutions, which regularly issue political/moral positions on controversial topics. In September, two dozen religious leaders -- including the heads of the National Council of Churches, Catholic Bishops and major Christian denominations -- issued an appeal urging President Clinton to end the Iraqi embargo due to the "morally intolerable" suffering and deaths of civilians. The letter was greeted by media silence.

That mainstream news frames religious activism and advocacy as a conservative endeavor is clear from the selective coverage given to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, the church's policymaking arm and a strong voice for the poor in Washington. On many issues, NCCB takes vocal positions that are left of center and left of President Clinton -- opposing, for example, capital punishment, the welfare reform bill signed by Clinton, and the embargoes on Cuba and Iraq. It also, of course, opposes abortion -- the one issue on which its views are eagerly sought by mainstream media.

During the health care reform debate in 1993, the Catholic Bishops put out a letter calling for universal coverage, opposing a "two-tiered health system" in which the well-off would get better services (implicitly criticizing the Clinton plan) and opposing abortion funding. After the press focused only on abortion, NCCB social development staffer John Carr commented: "Many media outlets focus quickly on abortion. There's a tendency to reduce the Church's advocacy to a one-issue approach."

A persistent media bias projects religion or morality as exclusively conservative. "In spite of efforts by some candidates to make religion, or issues of morality, factors in their selection of a candidate," reported The New York Times on the eve of the 1992 election, "there are some indications that voters are not buying it." The evidence that voters weren't applying religion or morality to their choice? Bill Clinton was leading George Bush among Catholics, according to a poll. That Catholic voters may have weighed moral issues -- perhaps on economics -- in preferring the more liberal candidate was apparently not considered.

An enduring myth is that secular mainstream media are hostile to organized religion. Given that journalism is supposed to be hardheadedly fact-based, and religion is faith-based, one might expect tension. But in practice, coverage is often so embarrassingly soft that it seems to be pandering to believers. This was the conclusion of a FAIR survey examining dozens of cover stories on religious themes in recent years in three news-weeklies: Time ("The Search For Jesus"; "Who Was Moses?"; "The Shroud of Turin"; etc.); Newsweek ("The Meaning of Mary"; "Rethinking the Resurrection"; "The Mystery of Prayer"; etc.); and U.S. News and World Report ("Prophecy"; "In Search of Christmas"; "In Search of Jesus"; etc.). Journalistic codes of balance were often jettisoned -- Time's cover article "Does Heaven Exist?," for example, didn't quote a single naysayer.

One religious group that can legitimately complain of recurrent bias are followers of Islam. On talk radio, Islam is denounced as a "violent religion" -- while terrorism "experts" falsely declare that Islamic religious doctrine sanctions genocide. Mortimer Zuckerman, owner and editor of U.S. News and World Report, once wrote that Islam's founder Muhammad had a "doctrine" of "making treaties with enemies while he is weak, violating them when he is strong." Islam has no such doctrine.

Mainstream journalists report on terrorist incidents by matter-of-factly referring to "Islamic violence" (but would know better than to speak of "Christian violence" or "Jewish violence"). After the Oklahoma City federal building was bombed, The New York Times speculated on possible Islamic culprits in part because "the city is home to at least three mosques."

If there's a group that gets coverage more biased than Muslims, it's non-believers. An NBC report on the disappearance of Madalyn Murray O'Hair began with Tom Brokaw's comment "She had the dubious distinction of being known as America's most outspoken atheist" -- and included a soundbite from a Christian evangelical: "If she is indeed dead, then she's burning in the fires of hell." Many Christian fundamentalists believe Catholics and Jews also burn in hell -- it's hard to imagine NBC quoting one upon the death of the Pope or a famous rabbi.

The truth is that if mainstream media were hostile toward the organized church and religious conservatives, Gov. Jesse Ventura's recent remarks disparaging religion would have been greeted by either approval or apathy. Instead, the response was a bit like Moses' reaction on seeing his people worshiping the golden calf.

November 1999

Covering The Private Lives of Politicians

by Jeff Cohen

Long before he became a Comedy Central game show host, Ben Stein was a prominent conservative media critic. On CNN's Crossfire in 1987, Stein praised the news media's exposure of extramarital activity involving then-Democratic presidential frontrunner Gary Hart as "one of the highest moments of the press's utility."

CROSSFIRE HOST: "How far would you have the press go? Would you say that a candidate should be asked if he's ever had a homosexual experience?"

BEN STEIN: "Absolutely, as far as I'm concerned. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely."

Stein appeared again on Crossfire a year later, as reporters were pursuing an alleged dalliance between vice-presidential candidate Dan Quayle and a female lobbyist. With a Republican being probed, Stein remained "absolute" in his convictions, only they'd rotated precisely180 degrees.

CROSSFIRE HOST: Do you think the media was fair in going after Senator Quayle on the subject of Paula Parkinson?

BEN STEIN: Absolutely not. I think that if they started going after all the presidential candidates on the subject of their sex lives, they could really talk about very little else. I think it's a very dangerous subject for the Democrats to open, or for anyone to open, and it's a complete irrelevancy as well.

The moral here is that the continuous carping from conservatives about media unfairness to their candidates has long been more of a tactic (to intimidate reporters toward softer coverage) than a statement of coherent principle or fact.

Today, one hears the absurd claim that Bill Clinton -- with the most scrutinized personal life in presidential history -- has gotten off easy compared to George W. Bush. Cyberpundit Matt Drudge, for example, recently complained about a Los Angeles Times story on Bush's Vietnam era draft-avoidance: "I don't ever remember the Los Angeles Times doing full exposes on Clinton dodging the draft," said Drudge. In fact, the L.A. Times repeatedly probed Clinton's draft evasion and its page-one expose on Sept. 2, 1992 re-ignited the story.

For folks who are more journalist than partisan, it should be possible to apply a single standard to the issue of reporting on the private lives of politicians. Call me old-fashioned, even "conservative," but I like the traditional rules: Except where private conduct strongly connects to public office, a politician's personal life is not news. Nor is gossip about such.

In the last dozen years, these rules have been shattered, as tabloid values and a ratings-above-all-else mentality have taken over much of the corporate-owned mainstream media, especially television. In 1991, NBC devoted a five-month investigation to "The Senator's Secrets," a segment focusing on whether a Democratic Senator had, years earlier, attended parties where drugs were used and whether he'd received sex -- or just a massage -- from a beauty queen. With a political press corps that seems to have grown bored covering politicians who aren't celebrities, personal gossip wins out over public issues and probes of "the character issue" are reduced to sex, drugs and draft dodging.

Pundits more readily find a character flaw when politicians partake of consensual sex than when they partake of policies that comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted. During the journalistic jihad of 1998, it was telling to see national news outlets become ferocious watchdogs chasing President Clinton's evasions about his private life when these same outlets acted more like toothless lapdogs as Clinton dissembled about major public issues from welfare to NAFTA to overseas bombings.

On the slippery slope into politicians' private lives, mainstream journalists have offered various excuses for abandoning old rules.

THE "NEW MEDIA" MADE ME DO IT: Once, only tabloid newspapers trafficked in gossip about public figures. Now there's the World Wide Web, which feeds talk radio, which feeds "all-news" cable. If we don't publish what millions of people have already heard or read, we're acting as censors, or people will think we missed the story. And, in the 24-hour news cycle, if we hold back to check the facts ourselves, we'll be beaten by the competition.

Yes, there are new pressures, perhaps none more significant than conglomerate ownership prodding news outlets toward quick ratings and short-term profits. But mainstream journalistic values themselves have eroded. Take the Gary Hart case. For the historically challenged, in 1987 there was no Web, no Drudge -- and CNN, with little clout, was all that existed in all news cable. It was "old media" journalists who stalked Hart: The Miami Herald set up a stakeout at his D.C. home and a Washington Post reporter asked, "Have you ever committed adultery?"

IT'S NOT ABOUT SEX: What we're covering isn't sex, it's his judgment (Hart).

It's the journalistic ethics of covering politicians' sex lives (Gennifer Flowers, see Nightline's fig leaf, 1/23/92). It's the misuse of government employees (Troopergate). It's perjury and obstruction (Monicagate). It's not the sex, it's the lying and cover-up (all the above).

If Monica Lewinsky coverage wasn't about sex, why did Newsweek's original expose quote a real-estate agent on how she kept condoms by her bedside? Why did Peter Jennings interview a sex columnist about oral sex? Why did Fox News air a poll question: Is Lewinsky an "average girl…or young tramp looking for thrills"? If you think coverage wasn't mostly about sex, you must believe a perjury investigation of Clinton on a land deal or campaign finance abuse would also have garnered thousands of hours of TV coverage.

As for the issue of whether George W. Bush ever used cocaine, it was journalists who made that the central campaign question of summer '99, although some outlets tried to obscure their role (NBC kept calling it "the question that won't go away"). Bush became the victim of a media in heat.

Initially only a few journalists, including columnist Molly Ivins and Newsweek's Stuart Taylor, bothered to point toward the relevant policy issue: Bush's signing of the Texas law that made even first-time possession of small amounts of drugs punishable by prison time. The appropriate questions are ones targeting not private peccadilloes but public policy -- should people less fortunate than Bush be learning from their youthful mistakes inside a jail cell?

No one championed the media's correctness in pursuing the private drug use question more insistently than Gary Bauer, the Bush rival most identified with the Religious Right. During the Lewinsky furor, religious conservatives also defended the questioning of politicians about adultery. At times, mainstream media outlets and the Religious Right seem to operate as a tag team, both driven by a definition of "character" reduced to personal behavior.

In other (perhaps unconscious) teamwork, national media have benefited conservatives by exempting leading right-wing politicians from the kind of sex prying Democrats have been subjected to. Although columnist Maureen Dowd referred to Newt Gingrich's extramarital affair during the impeachment drive as "an open secret," the story was widely deemed off-limits. When Rep. Henry Hyde admitted to a long-term extramarital relationship, reporters became instant libertarians and buried the story beneath Hyde's reference to a "youthful indiscretion." Hyde was in his late 40s when his affair ended; Clinton was 50 when he broke off with Lewinsky. The political press corps is sometimes capable of restraint -- but is it only out of fear of being denounced as "liberal"?

Unfortunately, it's unlikely real restraint will prevail until somehow the tables are dramatically turned and top media professionals and owners -- many with political influence greater than most public officials -- find themselves being asked the same personal questions their outlets are increasingly willing to ask politicians. Privacy limits might seem worthy again if media figures themselves had to answer questions now deemed so enlightening on "character" or "judgment" or "integrity."

Mr. Mogul, have you ever committed adultery? Ever lied about it, Mr. Anchor? Ever snorted cocaine, Ms. Editor?

Oct. 3, 1999

In His Own Words:

by Jeff Cohen

In recent weeks, Patrick Buchanan has vehemently denied accusations of bigotry that stem from his new book questioning U.S. intervention in World War II. And he has accused the news media – including CNN, which provided the national platform from which he has repeatedly catapulted into presidential politics -- of distorted reporting.

Since Buchanan sees himself as a student of history, it's appropriate to check the historical record of Buchanan's own comments and writings. This refresher course in Buchananism sheds light on whether mainstream media have been unfair to him -- or too soft.

Part of the current controversy revolves around Buchanan's insensitivity to the demise of European Jews at the hands of Adolph Hitler. In a 1977 column acknowledging Hitler's anti-Semitism and genocidal bent, Buchanan argued that Hitler was "also an individual of great courage, a soldier's soldier in the Great War, a political organizer of the first rank, a leader steeped in the history of Europe…. Hitler's success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path."

Hitler, a "genius" with "great courage"? Few in the media took exception when Buchanan wrote it. When a similar characterization was offered by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan -- Hitler was a "great man" albeit "wicked" and "evil" -- mainstream journalists went ballistic.

On the issue of the Nazi extermination of Jews, Buchanan is unique as a national figure who has challenged basic facts of the Holocaust and opposed the effort to prosecute war criminals. In 1987, columnist Buchanan urged Ronald Reagan to shut down the Justice Department office pursuing Nazi war criminals -- which Buchanan ridiculed for "running down 70-year-old camp guards."

Decrying "group fantasies of martyrdom," Buchanan questioned the historical record that thousands of Jews at Treblinka had been gassed by diesel exhaust: "Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody," he wrote in a 1990 column. Not only was he wrong on the science, but when asked to provide a source for his claims on Treblinka, the best Buchanan could answer -- "Somebody sent it to me." It turned out that he was circulating one of the canards of those who claim the death camps were a Zionist invention.

Another current Buchanan controversy surrounds his accusations about Jewish influence over foreign policy. Back in 1985, as White House Communications Director, Buchanan pushed hard for President Reagan to visit the cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, where Nazi SS troops are buried – and reportedly wrote the controversial line in Reagan's speech that the SS soldiers were "victims just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps." The trip went forward despite broad protests, including complaints made at a White House meeting by American Jewish leaders, who claim Buchanan lectured them to start acting like Americans first.

In 1990, many Americans opposed the drive toward war in the Persian Gulf; Buchanan was one of the few critics who saw a Jewish plot. "There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East – the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States," he asserted on TV's "McLaughlin Group." While dozens of powerful pundit and policy voices advocated war with Iraq, Buchanan felt the need to single out four saber-rattlers -- A.M. Rosenthal, Richard Perle, Charles Krauthammer and Henry Kissinger -- all Jews.

Here again Buchanan's apparent prejudices about Jews seemed to blind him to the facts. On the key January 1991 Capitol Hill vote authorizing war in the Gulf, most Jewish members of Congress voted no -- on Buchanan's side, not Kissinger's.

Fears about Israeli plotting in Washington D.C. remained evident during Buchanan's 1996 run for the presidency. On his campaign web site, an article blamed the death of Clinton Administration aide Vincent Foster on the Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency. The article, which alleged that Foster and Hillary Clinton were Mossad spies, was removed after a Jewish news service reported on it.

Buchanan of course says he is neither a bigot nor extremist. Here's a sampling of his views.

ON AFRICAN-AMERICANS

In a 1993 column attacking Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun for blocking a patent for a Confederate flag insignia, Buchanan accused her of "putting on an act" by linking the Confederacy with slavery: "The War Between the States was about independence, about self-determination, about the right of a people to break free of a government to which they could no longer give allegiance….How long is this endless groveling before every cry of 'racism' going to continue before the whole country collectively throws up?"

In his 1988 autobiography, "Right from the Beginning," on race relations in the late 1940s and early 1950s: "There were no politics to polarize us then, to magnify every slight. The 'negroes' of Washington had their public schools, restaurants, bars, movie houses, playgrounds and churches; and we had ours."

In his autobiography, Buchanan – who has opposed virtually every civil rights law or court decision of recent decades -- boasted that as an editorial writer for a conservative daily in the 1960s, he had published FBI smears of Martin Luther King Jr. as his own editorials: "We were among Hoover's conduits to the American people."

A 1969 memo from then-White House advisor Buchanan urged President Richard Nixon not to visit "the Widow King" on the first anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King: "Dr. King is one of the most divisive men in contemporary history."

In another Buchanan memo to Nixon: "There is a legitimate grievance in my view of white working-class people that every time, on every issue, that the black militants loud-mouth it, we come up with more money.... If we can give 50 Phantoms [jet fighters] to the Jews, and a multi-billion dollar welfare program for the blacks...why not help the Catholics save their collapsing school system." (Note the equation of the State of Israel with "the Jews" and welfare with "the blacks.")

In a 1988 column, Buchanan issued his oft-repeated assertion that President Reagan had done so much for African-Americans that civil rights groups have no reason to exist: "George Bush should have told the [NAACP convention] that black America has grown up; that the NAACP should close up shop, that its members should go home and reflect on JFK's admonition: 'Ask not what your country can do for you, but rather ask what you can do for your country.'"

In a 1989 column sympathizing with the views of ex-Klansman David Duke, Buchanan scolded the Republican Party for overreacting to Duke and his Nazi "costume": "Take a hard look at Duke's portfolio of winning issues and expropriate those not in conflict with GOP principles…[such as] reverse discrimination against white folks."

In a 1990 column that attempted to justify apartheid in South Africa, he denounced the notion that "white rule of a black majority is inherently wrong. Where did we get that idea? The Founding Fathers did not believe this." A 1989 column referred admiringly to the apartheid regime as the "Boer Republic": "Why are Americans collaborating in a UN conspiracy to ruin her with sanctions?"

ON GAYS

Buchanan has repeatedly referred to gays as "sodomites"; a 1991 column called them "the pederast proletariat." In a 1977 column urging a "thrashing" of gay groups: "Homosexuality is not a civil right. Its rise almost always is accompanied, as in the Weimar Republic, with a decay of society and a collapse of its basic cinder block, the family."

In 1983: "The poor homosexuals -- they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is extracting an awful retribution (AIDS)." Later that year, Buchanan demanded that New York City Mayor Ed Koch and New York Gov. Mario Cuomo cancel the Gay Pride Parade or else "be held personally responsible for the spread of the AIDS plague." In a 1990 column: "With 80,000 dead of AIDS, our promiscuous homosexuals appear literally hell-bent on Satanism and suicide."

ON WOMEN

In a 1983 column: "Rail as they will about 'discrimination,' women are simply not endowed by nature with the same measures of single-minded ambition and the will to succeed in the fiercely competitive world of Western capitalism."

In his autobiography: "The real liberators of American women were not the feminist noise-makers, they were the automobile, the supermarket, the shopping center, the dishwasher, the washer-dryer, the freezer." And: "If a woman has come to believe that divorce is the answer to every difficult marriage, that career comes before children ... no democratic government can impose another set of values upon her."

ON DEMOCRACY

In his autobiography, Buchanan offered praise for Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, calling him a "Catholic savior." A 1989 column called Franco, along with Chile's Gen. Pinochet, "soldier-patriots." Both men overthrew democracy in their countries.

In his "From the Right" newsletter in 1990, Buchanan attacked the "democratist temptation, the worship of democracy as a form of governance…. Like all idolatries, democratism substitutes a false god for the real, a love of process for a love of country." A 1991 column suggested that "quasi-dictatorial rule" might be the solution to the problems of big municipalities and the federal fiscal crisis: "If the people are corrupt, the more democracy, the worse the government." He has written dismissively of the "one man, one vote Earl Warren system."

Buchanan devoted a chapter of his autobiography -- "As We Remember Joe" -- to a defense of inquisitional Sen. Joe McCarthy (blaming his demise on two Jewish aides). Buchanan advocated that Nixon "burn the tapes" during Watergate, and criticized Reagan for failing to pardon Oliver North over Iran-contra.

Given Buchanan's long, consistent and vituperative history -- his new book mostly restates old views – it's understandable why he's squawking about the recent scrutiny and criticism in mainstream media. He'd simply grown accustomed to soft treatment over the years.

Powerful conservative pundits had long been quiet about Buchanan's extremist utterances while he remained a loyal Republican. Funny how some of them have found their voices now that Buchanan may bolt the GOP and split the conservative vote. (George Will even concluded of late that Buchanan exhibits a fascist "sensibility.")

Buchanan didn't always complain about media coverage of his presidential aspirations. In a Los Angeles Times interview during the 1996 campaign, he praised the media for fairness: "I've gotten balanced coverage and broad coverage.… For heaven sakes, we kid about the liberal media, but every Republican on Earth does that."

Racism and Mainstream Media

by Jeff Cohen

When newspaper executives make a commitment to change, they often show great prowess in meeting their goals: Consider the breathtaking speed with which they added color graphics and lifestyle sections to their pages.

When it comes to fulfilling their 1978 pledge to integrate people of color into their staffs, however, most newspaper editors are moving slower than a Gutenberg press. The American Society of Newspaper Editors' goal was to achieve minority employment at daily newspapers "equivalent to the percentage of minority persons within the national population" by the year 2000. Racial minorities now constitute 11.6 percent of news staffs but 27.3 percent of the country's population. At the rate newspapers are going (ASNE last year extended its deadline by 25 years), they won't reach their goal until late in the next century.

Slightly more diversity can be found in TV news staffs, and far less in magazines. But few top news executives in any medium -- real decision makers -- are people of color. This lack of diversity has consequences in terms of content. To take a relatively trivial example, when the decision was made at Time magazine to darken a cover picture of O.J. Simpson, only the lone nonwhite person in the room objected.

A more important consequence is the narrow, distorting lens through which racial minorities are frequently portrayed in mainstream news. Studies commissioned by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists have found that only about 1 percent of the 12,000 stories aired yearly on the three network TV evening newscasts focus on Latinos or Latino issues -- and roughly 80 percent of these stories "portray Latinos negatively," often on subjects like crime, drugs and "illegal" immigrants.

Kirk Johnson's classic study (Columbia Journalism Review, May/June 1987) of 30 days worth of coverage of Boston's two largely black neighborhoods found that mainstream media focused overwhelmingly on lights-and-sirens stories involving some "pathology" -- to borrow a term journalists love to apply to reports about black and Latino communities -- such as violent crime or drugs, and "85 percent reinforced negative stereotypes of blacks."

By contrast, Johnson also found that coverage of the same two neighborhoods by four black-owned news outlets during the same period was more multifaceted, and thus ultimately more accurate. These outlets certainly covered crime, but they also covered local business, school successes and community cleanup campaigns – "57 percent of the stories suggested a community thirsty for educational advancement and entrepreneurial achievement, and eager to remedy poor living conditions made worse by bureaucratic neglect."

Each individual "pathology" story in mainstream news may not be false, but if that's basically the only kind of story presented, the total picture becomes a lie.

The flip side of media's overrepresentation of minorities as criminals and druggies is their underrepresentation as experts and analysts. FAIR's studies in the late 1980s and early 1990s documented not only the incredible whiteness of being an expert in national media (92 percent of Nightline's U.S. guests were white; 90 percent of the PBS NewsHour's were white; 26 of 27 repeat commentators on National Public Radio during a four-month study were white) but a tendency to ghettoize minority experts into discussions of "black" or "brown" issues…often those "pathologies" again.

For Americans still inhabiting largely segregated workplaces and neighborhoods (some as segregated as prime-time TV sitcoms), the media are the main sources of information about people of other racial groups and therefore deserve a share of the blame for the prevalence of racist attitudes.

In 1990, a National Opinion Research Center survey found that 53 percent of nonblack respondents said that African-Americans were less intelligent than whites, 56 percent said they were more violence prone, 62 percent said they were lazier, and 78 percent said they were more likely to "prefer to live off welfare." Majorities of respondents expressed similar views about Latinos, and significant numbers attributed these traits to Asian-Americans.

It would be easy to link such attitudes only to such media forums as talk radio, on which powerful hosts have trafficked for decades in ignorance and myth about people of color. But it was publications like The New York Times and The New Republic that helped resurrect the pseudoscience of eugenics and racial inferiority through prominent, often credulous coverage of texts like The Bell Curve. Take, for example, Malcolm Browne's October 1994 Times review, which praised The Bell Curve for making "a strong case" of a "smart, rich" elite polarizing with an "unintelligent, poor" population.

And it's the major newsweeklies that for years have promoted a white-pundit brethren -- men like George Will, John Leo, and Joe Klein -- who specialize in fiery sermons about the "pathologies" of the "underclass" that do much to absolve the overclass of responsibility.

Here's Time's Lance Morrow: "If I were something like the Pope of black America and had the moral authority to make such suggestions, I would propose that no African-American use the terms racism or racist." Not surprisingly, Morrow is white; one wonders what the reaction would be if he'd advised Jews to abandon the term anti-Semitism.

Conventional media wisdom tends to see our country as a place in which racial discrimination happened in the past, where charges of racism are mostly an excuse, where societal depravity is largely the province of communities of color.

This worldview explains why mainstream journalists:

It's too bad for Bill Clinton, the GOP leadership and corporate lobbyists that these journalists aren't the ones in Congress voting on whether the White House will get "fast track" authority to negotiate new trade deals. The survey shows that journalists would pass it in a landslide-- 71 percent to 10 percent. Recent polls indicate the public is more in accord with Congressional Democrats, opposing fast track by upwards of 2-to-1.

Croteau sees little contradiction between his survey revealing a press corps with right-tilting economic views-- and earlier research showing that some D.C.-based reporters voted heavily for Clinton over George Bush in 1992.

Croteau's survey asked journalists about their own political orientation. While most placed themselves in the "center" on both social and economic issues, significant minorities identified themselves as "left" on social issues and "right" on economic issues. According to Croteau, Clinton's mix of moderately liberal social policies and moderately conservative economic policies fits well with "the views expressed by journalists."

For news consumers, the big question is not so much journalists' private views (or voting patterns) but their public performance. Is their coverage balanced? Which sources and experts get to speak, and which don't?

Given the way news is produced in today's increasingly corporate-dominated news outlets, it may matter little that working journalists harbor "liberal" social views. On hotly-contested social issues, conventions of objectivity dictate that coverage will be roughly 50-50-- which was acknowledged by a conservative watchdog group that studied abortion coverage in 1989.

But on economic issues, journalists' personal views can play a greater role if they are in accord with powerful monied interests. Take an issue like NAFTA, which was backed by an elite consensus that included the political and corporate leadership, media owners and powerful journalists-- and opposed by unions, environmentalists and much of the public. Research shows that news coverage of NAFTA had a glaring pro-pact bias, from supposedly objective reporting to editorial commentary.

Let's hope the new survey of journalists prods conservatives to rethink matters. On economics at least, their complaint isn't with a leftish press corps, but with an American public that supports universal health care, Social Security and other "big government" programs that infuriate the right wing.

PRESS PURSUED PRIVATE, NOT PUBLIC, DECEPTION

by Jeff Cohen

Feb. 15, 1998

Let's hear it for the zealous journalists of the Washington press corps. In recent weeks, they've become fierce watchdogs in pursuit of President Clinton's evasions about his private life.

But hold the applause. Because for years, when Clinton served up evasions and distortions on important public policy matters, these same journalists often performed more like docile lapdogs.

Which raises the question: Shouldn't reporters be more aggressive in pursuing dishonesty in Clinton's public life than in his private life?

Let's review just a few of Clinton's public actions or claims that were less than forthright - and the media reaction, if any.

* CAMPAIGN REFORM: One of Clinton's campaign pledges in 1992 was to enact election finance reform. In his first inaugural address, he promised to "reform our politics so that power and privilege no longer shout down the voice of the people." In his 1993 State of the Union, he called on Congress to "pass a real campaign finance reform bill this year."

But in the two years that Clinton and the Democrats controlled Congress, the President didn't lift a finger for reform. Few journalists probed whether Clinton had misled voters

* INVEST IN AMERICA: During the 1992 campaign, Clinton crisscrossed the country promising new jobs through major investment in cities and infrastructure. "It's time to put the American people first, to invest and grow this economy," he repeated. "You cannot get there just by balancing the budget." After the election, Clinton deftly abandoned these pledges by claiming, Gee, I didn't know the deficit was so big.

Had Clinton been dishonest? Few mainstream reporters seemed to care enough to investigate. And pundits - rather than deploring apparent duplicity - praised Clinton for being realistic.

* NAFTA: Clinton's claims about the North American Free Trade Agreement - both before and after passage - were marked by distortion and exaggeration. He vowed 200,000 new American jobs per year. He promised a $2 - $3 billion clean-up fund to deal with polluting factories on the Mexican border (only about 1 percent of the money has materialized). To win needed votes in Congress, the President brazenly dispensed favors and pork.

Unlike the current media barrage challenging Clinton's evasive comments about his private life, the President's pro-NAFTA double-talking and double-dealing won approval from powerful journalists - applause for being a strong leader who, cheered the New York Times, "bought victory remarkably cheaply."

On public issue after public issue, President Clinton has long displayed a knack for official prevarication. Recall how he justified his 1993 bombing of Baghdad - which killed innocent civilians - as "retaliation" for a dubious Iraqi government plot to murder George Bush. Washington journalists didn't question the honesty of the claim.

Recall how Clinton signed a welfare bill after the White House had suppressed an internal study showing the measure would push countless children into poverty - and after the official behind the study was told by the White House to cease such analyses. The cover-up of research affecting millions of Americans didn't prompt any news specials on network TV.

As long as Clinton's evasions furthered pro-establishment, pro-corporate policies - involving jobs, poverty, even life and death - Washington journalists didn't seem overly concerned about the President's public honesty. They've been far more ferocious lately in exposing whether he lied about his private affairs.

Indeed, the pattern of selective zeal debunks the stale myth of the "liberal media." When Clinton pushed budget, welfare and trade programs favorable to business interests, the Washington press corps was relatively placid. Just as it was when Clinton appointed establishment insiders like Lloyd Bentsen and Les Aspin to his cabinet.

By contrast, remember the clamor from top journalists and pundits the few times Clinton backed - even half-heartedly - liberal policies (like gays in the military) or appointees (like civil rights lawyer Lani Guinier).

The White House sex scandal and its coverage may be tawdry, but some good can come of it if millions of Americans start asking new questions about the national news media - not just their ethics, but their biases.

"MR. ANCHORMAN, HAVE YOU EVER COMMITTED ADULTERY?"

by Jeff Cohen

Feb. 8, 1998

In recent years, mainstream news outlets have found it increasingly acceptable to explore the private lives of public officials. The stated or implied rationale is that the American people, in judging the "character" of a politician, have a right to know if that official has engaged in extramarital affairs. Often, the "character issue" has become a media code word for marital infidelity.

Even though polls indicate that Americans believe the mass media now go too far in investigating the intimate behavior of politicians, little seems to slow down sex-hunting journalists, especially those on network TV and "all-news" cable channels.

Maybe there's only one way to get these journalists to rethink their actions: turn the tables on them. Perhaps it's necessary to vividly demonstrate to top news media personalities - some of whom arguably wield as much power as the politicians they cover - what it feels like to be on the receiving end of persistent questions about their private lives.

So the next time you see a prominent TV journalist like Tom Brokaw or Peter Jennings or Dan Rather at a public lecture or on a call-in talk show, politely ask them if they've ever committed adultery.

If they react by saying that such information is none of your business, you can tell them in self-righteous tones that the American public has a right to judge the "character" of journalists who have vast power to influence millions of people.

If you get a forthright denial, don't stop there -- especially if you've seen any kind of a rumor of extramarital relations on the Internet or a supermarket tabloid. Rephrase your query (this time you might mention oral sex) and point out that your question "is not about sex, it's about integrity and whether the American people can trust you to tell them the whole truth."

If you get a denial that's hesitant or hedged, be prepared with a series of follow-up questions - even if you feel embarrassed. In fact, like a TV news anchor, admit your embarrassment as you proceed to ask "these difficult questions." More importantly, see a hedged denial as your sign to do more investigating, dig up old news or gossip and be ready to challenge this journalist's character the next chance you can.

In the real world, most Americans would feel squeamish asking such questions, even if it's just to prove a point about media overkill.

Unfortunately, journalists at top news outlets have been anything but squeamish lately. It seems likely that well-known correspondents, pundits and anchors would begin to think twice about personal queries if they found themselves on the receiving end. Some questions are easier to ask than to answer.

NEWS MEDIA IN HOT PURSUIT....OR IN HEAT?

By Jeff Cohen

Feb. 1, 1998

MSNBC, the cable news channel, has a headline for its breathless, round-the-clock coverage of the Clinton sex scandal: "The President in Crisis."

A better headline might be: "The News Media in Heat."

In the media environment of 1998, when it comes to a sex-related scandal, many national news outlets can't seem to avoid binge coverage. President Clinton may have a sex addiction - but so does much of the mainstream news media, especially television.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is a bit off-target in blaming a right-wing conspiracy. If there's a cabal driving the story, it's a conspiracy that combines a ratings-hungry, tabloid-oriented news media with a lurid story and a president whose denials on personal matters are widely disbelieved.

No one thinks mainstream media should ignore allegations that have rocked--and might one day end--the Clinton presidency. When NBC/MSNBC anchor Brian Williams asked, "Should we not cover this story at all?," he was erecting a straw man to ward off criticisms of overwrought scandal coverage that had circulated unverified stories based on unnamed sources.

Clearly, this is a big news story due to allegations--and that's all they are--of obstructing justice. It rightfully should have been the top story. But should it have been virtually the only story on TV news hour after hour?

On television, Clinton's State of the Union speech (dealing with Social Security, new child care and education programs, etc.) was clearly viewed as an obstacle to getting back to the real news. Post-speech analysis focused on whether the president's address, an 80-year tradition, had "succeeded in diverting attention from the scandal."

In the last decade, while sliding down the slippery slope of ever-greater scrutiny of the consensual sex lives of politicians, mainstream media have always deployed a journalistic fig leaf.

With each sex panic, news outlets were quick to offer justifications:

* Gary Hart, 1988: "What we're covering isn't about sex, it's about judgment and integrity."

* Clinton/Gennifer Flowers, 1992: "It isn't about sex, it's about whether ethical journalists should report sexual allegations from the supermarket tabloids."

* "Troopergate," 1993: "It isn't about sex, it's about the misuse of Arkansas state employees."

* "Interngate," 1998: "It isn't about sex, it's about obstruction of justice."

To hear journalists talk, it's never about sex. But let's face it: sex sells on TV. This scandal has caused ratings to boom, especially on "all-news" cable channels and on Nightline and primetime newsmagazines.

Try to imagine that the news media had gotten wind of new obstruction of justice allegations involving, say, influence peddling or campaign finance irregularities - but no sex angle. Would we be experiencing such a media deluge?

The problem is not just the quantity of coverage, but the quality. In the current feeding frenzy, the practice seems to be: "If something has been reported anywhere, it's okay to report it everywhere." Hearsay and unnamed sources have been acceptable underpinnings for news, even when they purport to relate extremely intimate information.

Seamy stories (and story tangents) that once would have been left to supermarket tabloids are now readily reported. Mainstream TV correspondents feel liberated to carry on about sexual variations and bodily fluids on garments.

Many national news outlets reported, without verification, the shaky Dallas Morning News story that a Secret Service agent had spoken with the independent counsel about having witnessed a sex act involving the President and the intern. After the story was largely retracted, Nightline's Ted Koppel referred to it as "sort of flaky," though he'd rushed to report it the night before.

Many journalists seem to see themselves in heroic pursuit of Clinton (CNN calls its nightly primetime special "Investigating the President"), but reporting has been propelled less by independent digging and more by leaks emanating from the independent counsel's office and the Paula Jones camp.

There's been much media talk about Clinton's lack of ethics, dishonesty and possible law-breaking - and remarkably little on the unethical and illegal actions of a special counsel's office that leaks its case through the press, especially egregious when the information is so personal.

If Clinton is forced out of office, this scandal's Woodward and Bernstein will likely be seen as Newsweek reporter (and MSNBC analyst) Michael Isikoff. To his credit, Isikoff has shown dogged determination, independence and an unwillingness to settle for White House evasions. But should it give us pause that for a long time he's basically had one beat -- the Clinton sex beat?

In Watergate, Woodward and Bernstein pursued the White House over break-ins, spying and wiretaps aimed at administration opponents. Isikoff has been pursuing the White House over sexual advances, gropes and oral sex.

Near the beginning of Newsweek's "exclusive" on "Clinton and the Intern" co-written by Isikoff, readers are offered many personal details about intern Monica Lewinsky, the "flirty girl in a beret" - including the observations of an Oregon real-estate agent who showed a house Lewinsky was renting: she "kept a container with about a dozen new condoms by her bed on a table."

Over the past week or more, Americans have been awash in factoids like the one about the condom container. Too bad most of us can't identify our member of Congress.

Jeff Cohen is FAIR's Executive Director and the co-author of Wizards of Media Oz (Common Courage Press, 1997).

The Problem isn't Brinkley, it's Corporate Sponsorship

by Jeff Cohen

Jan. 25, 1998

I've discovered a sound even worse than nails dragging across a chalkboard. It's the sound of journalists whining about their fallen "icon," David Brinkley Enough already!

Some journalists can't stop moaning about how the ex-anchorman tarnished his fine reputation by becoming a pitchman for Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), the agribusiness firm and corporate welfare king that sponsored "This Week With David Brinkley" from its launch in 1981.

The problem with all the noise about Brinkley's role as corporate huckster is that these same mainstream journalists are usually silent over a much bigger issue: the power of TV sponsors to shape – and limit – debate.

The truth is that two conservative, politically active sponsors – ADM and General Electric – have long dominated TV pundit programming, often determining which shows and pundits get on the air. (Shouting head John McLaughlin has GE to thank for his overblown prominence on TV.)

Besides ABC's "This Week," ADM has sponsored its competitors, "Meet the Press" (NBC) and "Face the Nation" (CBS). The firm also underwrites the news on "public" broadcasting with annual gifts of over $6 million to PBS's "NewsHour" and $600,000 to NPR's "All Things Considered." .

Needless to say, ADM and GE are not charities. They're profit-driven corporations. When they invest money in news and pundit broadcasts, they expect a return on that investment. Some researchers believe they are buying silence.

Author James Ledbetter has noted that the "NewsHour" virtually ignored the ADM price-fixing scandal throughout 1995, even though it was front-page news elsewhere. Similarly overlooked on the "NewsHour" has been the issue of corporate welfare -- a good thing for ADM, which may be the country's top welfare recipient thanks to hundreds of millions in various federal subsidies every year.

Viewers have reason to question whether sponsors buy silence on the weekend pundit shows. Those programs purport to take us "inside Washington," yet ignore news about the special interests that pay their bills – like stories about how a General Electric lobbyist helped draft a federal tax law that eliminated the company's tax burden, or how GE's political clout continues to stall a clean-up of the Hudson River polluted by toxic PCBs from a GE plant.

Through major donations to both parties, companies like ADM and GE seek a narrow political debate that won't impede environmental waivers, tax breaks or subsidies. And through major sponsorship of TV and radio programming, these firms seek a narrow media debate that leaves out tough scrutiny of corporate influence over the political process.

Far from being a model of journalistic integrity and independence, Brinkley – along with former "This Week" colleagues like Cokie Roberts, George Will and Sam Donaldson – is an icon of insider cronyism. Cozy with top corporate officials and lobbyists, the cast of "This Week" (with or without Brinkley) can be counted on to overlook the power of big business in Washington.

(In his memoirs, Brinkley – a longtime friend of ADM chair Dwayne Andreas -- blasted federal bureaucrats for taking perverse pleasure in taxing business people.)

For years, Brinkley and "This Week" cohorts were premier buckrakers, pocketing hefty fees for friendly lectures to corporate lobby groups. Addressing a trucking industry group in 1992, Brinkley offered a crowd-pleasing denunciation of Bill Clinton's proposal to raise taxes on the well-off: He called it "class warfare" and a "sick, stupid joke."

If there's a sick, stupid joke here it's the idea that journalistic corruption is a problem worthy of denunciation when a TV anchor pitches products, but not so when he pitches corporate news and views.

In many ways, Brinkley has long been a pitchman for corporate America: promoting its world view if not its wares.

Hidden Culprit in Campaign Finance Scandal:
The TV Industry

By Jeff Cohen

The news you are about to read is news you may never see on television.

It's about an industry that has long had unrivaled clout on Capitol Hill, an industry that receives billions in corporate welfare, an industry whose gifts to -- and influence over -- Washington politicians dwarf the lavishly scrutinized Chinese or Indonesian efforts.

Indeed, while many industries benefit from the current corrupt system of campaign finance, no other industry benefits more directly. And it's hard to think of an industry that is a bigger impediment to campaign reform.

This story is about the television industry -- its power and greed.

It wasn't until last October that national TV news finally began serious -- and long overdue -- coverage of campaign finance abuses and the limitless "soft money" to political party organizations. But one piece of the story has been almost totally avoided: the huge soft money contributions served up by the owners of America's top TV news networks.

In the 1995-96 election cycle, over $ 3.2 million was donated to national political organizations by the five TV news networks, their corporate parents, subsidiaries or top officers. The five heavyweights are Disney (ABC), Time Warner (CNN), News Corp/Rupert Murdoch (Fox), General Electric (NBC) and Westinghouse (CBS).

The national soft money was split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, although Rupert Murdoch tipped the balance rightward with an additional $1 million pre-election gift to the California GOP. (The five firms gave another $1.2 million in PAC donations or "hard money" directly to federal candidates.)

Given the size of the donations, it's hard to believe that network TV journalists failed to notice them. Or that TV journalists swallow the insinuation -- found in much of their coverage -- that while donations from foreign interests veil ulterior motives, big gifts from U.S. corporate interests are simply contributions to good government.

The truth is, TV producers and correspondents know that probing the political donations of one's boss is not the surest path to job security or advancement. A surer path is self-censorship.

So certain questions don't get asked, like: What were TV owners hoping to gain from their hefty donations? Were they paying for the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that gave them unprecedented power over America's airwaves and cable TV? The act gave TV moguls assorted prizes: the right to acquire more stations, relaxed license renewal, deregulation of cable rates, etc.

Or were TV owners paying for the federal giveaway of the digital spectrum? The majority of Americans who get their news from television may have never heard of the spectrum giveaway. Bob Dole labeled it "big corporate welfare." The head of the Federal Communications Commission called it "the biggest single gift of public property to any industry in this century."

For those of you who get your news from television, here's what you missed. Last month, the FCC carried out the will of Congress by awarding valuable new digital frequencies to the current TV license holders -- and doing so free of charge. If auctioned, this digital spectrum would have reaped an estimated $20 to $70 billion.

With the new spectrum, instead of just channel 7, a broadcaster may soon be controlling channels 7a, 7b, 7c, 7d, 7e and 7f. TV broadcasters -- long accustomed to high rates of return -- stand to gain even bigger profits.

"The rip-off is on a scale vaster than dreamed of by yesteryear's robber barons," wrote conservative columnist William Safire, not known as a corporate critic. "It's as if each American family is to be taxed $1,000 to enrich the stockholders of Disney, GE and Westinghouse."

Not surprisingly, it's a rip-off that never got mentioned on any of the nightly network news segments that focus on government waste -- like NBC's "Fleecing of America" or ABC's "It's Your Money."

Americans across the political spectrum are amazingly united in their complaints that today's TV broadcasters pollute the airwaves with mind-numbing violence, sensationalism and sleaze -- yet Congress has quietly bestowed still more broadcasting power on these profit-hungry companies.

If ordinary Americans had been consulted, they might have offered alternative proposals for allocating the new spectrum -- perhaps frequencies should have gone to educational, civic and non-profit organizations. After all, by law the airwaves belong to the public, not to private business owners.

So how to explain what Congress did?

In a word, Congress got "nabbed" by the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB). One of Washington's most powerful and feared lobbies, NAB has an annual budget of $35 million and members in every Congressional district with unique power to shape the image of politicians for better or worse.

"No one has more sway with members of Congress than the local broadcaster," NAB President Edward Fritts commented in 1995. It doesn't hurt that Fritts is a longtime friend and college roommate of Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott.

In March 1996, when several members of Congress suggested that broadcasters pay something for the new spectrum they were to receive, NAB launched a $2 million ad campaign with deceptive TV commercials urging viewers to call Congress to protest a "TV tax" that would end free TV.

In March 1997, when President Clinton asked that broadcasters set aside free TV time for candidates, NAB reacted with the indignation one might expect from the NRA if the President had proposed banning not only assault weapons, but hunting rifles, handguns and toy guns. Fritts huffed that mandatory free air time was "blatantly unconstitutional" and unworkable. In fact, free time is provided to candidates in most of the world's industrial democracies -- as Common Cause notes in an eye-opening new report on the U.S. broadcast lobby.

NAB has good reason to lobby forcefully to preserve our money-drenched campaign system. In 1996, TV received $400 million in political ad revenues from candidates and political parties. TV owners end up pocketing a major share of the funds raised by politicians, especially in statewide races.

"Today's Senate campaigns function as collection agencies for broadcasters," remarked Sen. Bill Bradley a few years ago. "You simply transfer money from contributors to television stations."

Year after year, the pay-to-play political system further marginalizes and misinforms average citizens while empowering moneyed interests and enriching the TV industry. Last month, there was an election in Los Angeles for mayor, city council and other posts; on the three network-owned stations, the 11 p.m. news offered viewers three times as much campaign advertising as campaign news.

With vast influence over Congress -- and confidence that its clout will be skirted by network reporters -- the TV lobby is one of the key obstacles to political reform in our country. It's a mark of television's power that this obstacle remains so shrouded.

March 30, 1997

From the Left:

by Jeff Cohen

The punditocracy in our country has been so one-sided for so long that we hardly notice the routine tilt anymore. It seems, like mosquitoes in Summer, to be the natural order of things.

Sometimes, however, a political moment of unusual clarity reveals the profound imbalance that's been there all along.

Tune into TV pundit programs or radio talkshows, or read an op-ed page these days, and you'll behold vociferous attacks echoing against conservative Republican leaders. But the verbal onslaught isn't coming from the left; it's coming from the voices who've reigned loudest for years in media commentary -- the hordes of right-wing pundits.

On television, commentators like George Will ridicule Republican leaders as timid moderates and insinuate that Newt Gingrich may actually be America's "most powerful liberal." In syndicated columns, rightists like Cal Thomas bellow that Gingrich, Orrin Hatch and other top Republicans are abandoning conservative principles.

On talk radio, you hear a deafening roar of attacks on Republicans as cowardly moderates and sell-outs; host Michael Reagan recently announced on his talkshow that he was leaving the GOP because of its "retreat" from "conservative values and beliefs."

This barrage should remind us that dozens of America's most prominent pundits -- folks like Will, Thomas, Pat Buchanan, Bob Novak and Rush Limbaugh -- are more right-wing than the most conservative GOP leadership we've seen in decades. These powerful voices have far more allegiance to right-wing causes than they do to Republican leaders.

But commentators from the opposite end of the political spectrum are virtually excluded from national discourse, especially on network TV. Go hunting for the left-wing of American punditry and you're lucky to find even a few loose feathers.

You don't see dozens of prominent left-wing talking heads in national media denouncing the moderate policies of Bill Clinton. You don't hear powerful pundit voices who owe far more allegiance to causes of the left -- like workers' rights, consumer rights, civil rights, feminism, ecology -- than to Democratic leaders.

Instead, what you get is a lot of apologizing for the President's ideological maneuvers. Sure, the tepid liberals who represent punditry's "left wing" on national TV sometimes wish Clinton weren't so undisciplined or vacillating or sloppy with facts and denials. But they've been almost unanimous in supporting his "New Democrat" politics of hewing to the center and abandoning the old Democrat, old-fashioned New Deal.

On TV, proponents of "the left" are selected to be Clinton defenders. George Will pillories Republican leaders for alleged betrayals of conservatism on ABC's "This Week" -- but there's no leftist on that program to attack the President for his betrayal of long-standing Democratic principles. Certainly not longtime Clinton spokesperson George Stephanopoulos.

Advocates "from the left" on CNN's "Crossfire" are aggressive defenders of Bill Clinton and the Democratic leadership -- but Pat Buchanan gives his loyalty first and foremost to right-wing principles, and uses the show as a platform for his political campaigns against the GOP leadership he deems too moderate.

Due to the marginalization of unabashed leftist commentators, TV's lopsided pundit spectrum extends basically from a baby step left of center to a giant step to the right of Gingrich -- the self-styled revolutionary who, lest we forget, pushed the GOP steadily rightward for the last ten years and promoted the most conservative legislative agenda in decades.

Given the skewed spectrum of opinion, TV viewers miss out on political insights, while being bombarded with wrong-headed clichés -- such as the myth that Clinton is really a liberal at heart. Many Americans may not know that activist leaders and politicians in the left wing of the Democratic Party have mistrusted Bill Clinton since 1991. Or that they blame the President for undermining (and corporatizing) the Democratic Party - to the point of handing over even the issue of campaign finance abuse to Republicans.

Indeed, many civil rights and labor activists blame Clinton for so disorienting and de-mobilizing the party's base -- through unpopular policies like NAFTA -- that Clinton paved the way for the Gingrich victory of 1994.

These insights won't be heard regularly in national TV discourse until bona fide left-wing commentators are invited to sit alongside right-wing and centrist ones. Till that happens, we'll have to suffer through the absurd spectacle of seeing both Clinton and Gingrich denounced as liberals -- when neither one is.

Media Beat

Announcing the P.U.-litzer prizes for 1995

It is time for us to announce the winners of the P.U.-litzer Prize for 1995.

Competition was intense for the fourth annual P.U.-litzers, which recognize some of the stinkiest media performances of the past year.

And now, the envelopes please.

UN-AMERICAN JOURNALISM PRIZE -- Publisher Ted Owen, San Diego Business Journal

According to his staff, publisher Ted Owen banned photos of individuals of certain ethnic backgrounds (including Vietnamese, Iraqis and Iranians) from prominent spots in his weekly business journal on the grounds that such visible coverage was "un-American." Asked about the ban by a local daily, Owen commented: "It is not a public debate how I run the newspaper." But after protests from area businesses, Owen renounced any photo-apartheid policy.

PENTAGON PUNDIT AWARD -- Mark Shields, Steve Roberts, et al.

This year, leading pundits Mark Shields, Steve Roberts, Gloria Borger, Haynes Johnson and Hedrick Smith received paychecks directly from Lockheed Martin -- the country's top military contractor -- to appear on a radio talk show in Washington. Lockheed Martin sees value in funding influential pundits across the media's narrow political spectrum. Meanwhile, media "debates" about budget-balancing concentrate on cuts aimed at seniors and the poor, but not the Pentagon.

RELATIVELY TORTURED PROSE PRIZE -- Reporter Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times

Writing of brutally repressive regimes on Dec. 4, Kristof observed: "While a relatively small number of South Koreans were tortured to death under Mr. Chun and Mr. Roh, the great majority of people gained during their rule."

"THEM, NOT ME" PRIZE -- Editor-in-Chief Mort Zuckerman, U.S. News & World Report

Mort Zuckerman's magazine featured an Oct. 2 cover story titled "Tax Exempt!: You pay Uncle Sam. How come thousands of American corporations do not?" The article focused on non-profit corporations that don't pay taxes; it didn't mention that Zuckerman, the multimillionaire realtor who owns U.S. News & World Report, failed to pay any federal income taxes between 1981 and 1986.

FREQUENT FLYERS AWARD -- Time magazine

Time, the nation's biggest newsweekly, spent $3 million to fly heads of corporations around the world for nine days this fall. Time's top managers and editors escorted several dozen executives from blue-chip firms (such as General Motors, Lockheed Martin, Rockwell and Philip Morris) to India, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Russia and Cuba for private briefings with foreign heads of state. Will Time's reporters be eager to scrutinize the firms their bosses have wined and dined across the globe?

ALL HAIL WALL STREET AWARD -- Christian Science Monitor

Many news outlets rejoiced when the Dow Jones average topped 5,000, but a front-page Christian Science Monitor article on the day before Thanksgiving won first prize for sheer propaganda. Headlined "Wall St. Enriches Main St.," the article asserted that Wall Street's bull market has "helped millions of people, whether they have a stake in the market or just read about it." The celebratory article didn't mention the links between booming stock prices and corporate profits on one hand and the downturn of income for American workers on the other. As the Economic Policy Institute concluded in a recent study, "Business profits have been fueled by stagnant or falling wages."

(DIS)HONEST TO GOD AWARD -- Rush Limbaugh

In a June 12 radio oration, Rush Limbaugh accused the "liberal media" of refusing to mention that Capt. Scott O'Grady, the U.S. pilot shot down and rescued in Bosnia, had credited God. "I haven't found one printed reference to him thanking God." Limbaugh's "facts" were wrong (as usual); major dailies had prominently quoted O'Grady's references to God. "Pilot, Back at Base, Thanks God and His Rescue Crews," said a June 10 New York Times headline over a story that quoted O'Grady in paragraph two: "The first thing I want to do is thank God."

CORRECTION OF THE YEAR -- The New Yorker

In an editor's note, the New Yorker magazine explained that conservative leader William Bennett had criticized presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan's politics as "a real us-and-them kind of thing" -- not, as the magazine had previously reported, "a real S&M kind of thing."

"THE USUAL SUSPECTS" AWARD -- Too many winners to name

Within hours of the murderous explosion at the federal building in Oklahoma City on April 19, dozens of journalists declared that Muslim extremists were the probable culprits. "It has every single earmark of the Islamic car-bombers of the Middle East," wrote syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer. Columnist Mike Royko recommended picking out "a country that is a likely suspect" and bombing its "oil fields, refineries, bridges, highways, industrial complexes." Others who rushed to judgment included Jim Stewart of CBS News, ABC's John McWethy, New York Post editorial writers, New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal and media-touted terrorism "experts" Jeff Kamen and Steve Emerson.

"WAR IS PEACE" PRIZE -- Business Week and Paul Craig Roberts

Commenting on Chile's 17-year military dictatorship that ended in 1990, Business Week writer Paul Craig Roberts lauded the regime for "restoring stability" and creating "a vast capital market." As for the Chilean government's murder of thousands of political dissidents during those years, Roberts credited the dictatorship for "suppressing...terror."

LIBERAL IDIOCY AWARD -- Pundit Christopher Matthews

Discussing the federal minimum wage on "The McLaughlin Group," liberal syndicated columnist Christopher Matthews told television viewers: "The big fight in this country is between the people who don't work on welfare and the people who do work."

LAMEST EXCUSE AWARD -- Newspaper Association of America

Last summer, when a survey found that only 19 percent of the sources cited on newspaper front pages were women, Newspaper Association of America spokesperson Paul Luthringer tried to explain it this way: "The fact that women are quoted less than men has nothing to do with the state of journalism, but has more to do with who -- male or female -- is the first to return a reporter's phone call."

Unfortunately, space does not allow mention of the many runners-up for this year's P.U.-litzers. In the world of journalism, their professional rigor and lofty achievements had profound effects.

On local TV news, if it bleeds it (still) leads

By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon

Step off a plane anywhere in the United States, tune into the local TV news programs -- and you're likely to see a succession of reports on murders, shootouts, rapes, traffic wrecks, fires and other grisly events.

That's how we began a column three years ago. With television news deteriorating in localities across the country, we decried a trend that was making a mockery of claims that commercial TV stations keep the public informed about current events.

Last week, we blew the dust off our commentary after reading a new study. A monitoring group analyzed tapes of local evening news programs that aired the same day this fall on 100 television stations in 35 states.

"Stations use sensation and tabloid journalism to manipulate and condition viewers," concluded the Denver-based Rocky Mountain Media Watch organization. "Crime stories, mainly murder, dominate half the newscasts."

On local news programs around the nation:

• Fully 30 percent of the news was devoted to crime. Coverage of government came in a distant second at 11 percent.
• In a "Mayhem Index" of local newscasts, "stories about crime, disaster and war average 42 percent of the news on all 100 stations."
• Environmental stories accounted for 2 percent of the local TV news time. Poverty received 1.8 percent of air time. Unions and labor overall got 1.6 percent. Civil rights netted 0.9 percent.
• Meanwhile, there was no lack of fluff. Monitors found extensive coverage of such news items as a Miss Bald USA contest, a beauty contest for cows, a bourbon-tasting contest in Texas and a kangaroo who fell into a swimming pool in Australia.

Quality TV news reporting still exists, but it's extremely rare. "The excesses of the local TV news industry are now chronic, habitual and institutionalized," says the new report.

So, unfortunately, the column we wrote on the subject a few years ago is even more relevant today. For this reason, we present a portion of that column:

In many local TV newsrooms, the tacit rule is: "If it bleeds, it leads." Often, the more lurid the story, the better its chances of topping the broadcast. The results are a lot closer to "America's Most Wanted" or "A Current Affair" than anything that might make a journalist feel proud.

Violent calamities -- breathlessly narrated with arresting footage of police tape, body bags and the like -- fascinate TV news programmers. But context is usually absent; attention is lavished on tragic events but not on what might have caused (or prevented) them.

Intent on providing adrenalin-pumping visuals, local TV coverage is apt to emulate the bang-bang tone of prime-time dramas, augmented by comments from tearful loved ones, witnesses and police.

Dramatic crime reports and brief news items are accompanied by anchors' "happy talk" chatter, weather and sports reports...and, of course, plenty of commercials -- about one minute of ads for every four minutes of "news." To round out the show, local broadcasts commonly close with a cuddly "human interest" story affirming the basic goodness of the community.

It all may be a bit bewildering, but TV news is not about making sense -- it's about making money. Lots of it. Advertiser dollars are drawn to local TV news, partly because -- as The New York Times has put it -- "many sponsors think news programs attract affluent viewers." It's a winning formula for the owners, and a losing one for the public.

Even when dealing with substantive topics, local TV news reporting tends to be shoddy. In 1990, the Columbia Journalism Review published a devastating account by researcher John McManus, who spent 50 days inside TV newsrooms in several metropolitan areas.

"Overall," he reported, "18 of the 32 stories analyzed -- 56 percent -- were inaccurate or misleading." Making matters worse, "often, the station made no effort to correct obvious omissions."

McManus found a pattern to the mis-coverage: "There is an economic logic to these distortions and inaccuracies. All but one...were likely to increase the story's appeal, help cut down the cost of reporting or oversimplify a story so it could be told in two minutes."

The abysmal condition of most local TV news largely reflects a deregulated broadcast industry that has scant commitment to the public interest and fervent commitment to maximizing profits.

Eager to know what's going on in their neighborhoods and in the region, many people who have a low opinion of local TV news end up watching it anyway. What they see on television -- night after night -- ignores major issues and hobbles the ability of communities to confront their problems.

"Macneil/Lehrer Newshour" at 20: Hold the Cheers

Media Beat, September 27, 1995

As the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour prepares to mark its 20th anniversary, press releases are hailing the PBS program as "one of the most influential news sources in the world." But from where we sit -- in front of the TV screen -- that's no cause for celebration.

Aired on more than 300 TV stations in the United States, MacNeil/Lehrer has a nightly audience of 5 million people. Meanwhile, the program reaches viewers around the globe via satellite networks -- including the official U.S. Information Agency's "WorldNet" system.

With the NewsHour poised to enter a third decade, some changes are underway. In late October, longtime co-anchor Robert MacNeil will leave the program, which is being re-named The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer. And MacNeil/Lehrer Productions is planning to start a second nightly news broadcast, for an 11 p.m. slot, on the nation's public TV stations.

"We will bring the very same standards to the new program that we've been using on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour," the president of MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, Al Vecchione, told us in a recent interview.

His words were meant to be reassuring. But they sounded ominous to us.

PBS viewers hardly need another national news program with "the very same standards."

The media watch group we're associated with, FAIR, conducted a detailed study of every MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour program during a six-month period in 1989. Among the findings:

• The program's guest list was chock full of think-tank "experts" from conservative, corporate-funded outfits -- in particular, the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the American Enterprise Institute, which had 14 appearances between them. In contrast, analysts from various progressive think tanks never appeared.
• Nine-tenths of the U.S. guests on MacNeil/Lehrer were white, and 87 percent were male.
• Almost half -- 46 percent -- of the U.S. guests were current or former government officials. However, only 6 percent of the guests were from public-interest groups (such as consumer-rights, civil-rights and labor organizations) critical of government policies.
• The program exhibited a knack for having discussions about the environment while excluding environmentalists. Only one of 17 guests on environment-related segments was a representative of an environmental group.
• In seven MacNeil/Lehrer discussion segments on Central America, all 22 guests were either U.S. officials or representatives of U.S.-allied governments in the region. No one was invited from the U.S. mass movement against military intervention.

Overall, the "MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour" has excelled at serving as a nightly transmission belt for official opinion. Most of the time, disagreements are well within the range to be found among powerful politicians and lobbyists in Washington.

No wonder the show has been repeatedly praised as "balanced" by rightist groups -- like Accuracy in Media and the National Conservative Political Action Conference -- which normally bash network TV news for being too "liberal."

The man soon to become chief anchor of the NewsHour, Jim Lehrer, has little patience with calls for genuine diversity. Former NewsHour staffers have told us that Lehrer dismisses progressive policy critics as "moaners" and "whiners" unfit to appear on the show.

The response was similar when we asked the president of MacNeil/Lehrer Productions to comment on charges that the NewsHour lacks diversity. "I think that's an outrageous criticism of our program," Al Vecchione replied. "It's in a class by itself in terms of being fair and even-handed."

Introspection is not a strong suit at the NewsHour.

But then again, those who pay the media piper tend to call the tune -- not every note, but the prevailing melody.

From the outset, the program has depended on corporate "underwriters" for major chunks of its financing. In the past, these underwriters have included AT&T and Pepsico. This year, two politically active firms -- the agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland and the New York Life Insurance Co. -- account for about $11 million, nearly half of the program's budget.

The show's producers, of course, are quick to proclaim total independence from funders. But the companies funneling money to the most important show on PBS have reason to be pleased with their investments. Few of the program's 15,000 minutes of news coverage each year are likely to cause anything approaching distress in corporate suites.

Last December, a subsidiary of the private media-conglomerate TCI purchased two-thirds of MacNeil/Lehrer Productions. The PBS network president, Ervin Duggan, promptly called it "a welcome infusion of capital into the NewsHour."

These days, it seems odd to hear PBS referred to as "public television" when the funding -- and content -- of its public affairs programming are so dominated by private, for-profit, big-money institutions.

So we won't be cheering as the NewsHour begins its 21st year. And we won't be hoping that MacNeil/Lehrer Productions is successful in its plans to team up with the Wall Street Journal to create another national news show.

The new program is slated to draw 90 percent of its funding from outside corporate underwriters. And the show will be owned by a pair of private media powers -- Dow Jones & Co. and TCI. All in all, it's a remarkable concept for a "public" TV program.

Instead of trying to clone the NewsHour, the people running MacNeil/Lehrer Productions should be trying to figure out how to involve a cross-section of the public in "public television."

Jim Hightower: Radio Populist To Be Muzzled?

Media Beat, September 22, 1995

The most distinctive new voice on talk radio is in danger of being silenced.

Populist Jim Hightower has built a following on 150 stations nationwide during the last 16 months -- while breaking most of the rules for talk radio hosts. Instead of shouting, he speaks with a soft Texas twang. He actually lets callers who oppose him be heard. And his barbs are not aimed at women, gays, minorities or the poor -- but at the rich and powerful.

Other talk hosts fulminate about "welfare queens." Hightower dwells on the "welfare kings" -- the Fortune 500.

Hightower has become talk radio's unabashed advocate for blue-collar workers, pensioners, family farmers and middle-class consumers. The real political spectrum, explains Hightower, is not right-to-left: "It's top-to-bottom, and the vast majority of people aren't even in shouting distance of the economic and political powers at the top."

Although he's been likened to Will Rogers, Hightower has met some men he didn't like -- those who rip off workaday Americans. Hightower stands up to the powers-that-be on behalf of the powers-that-ought-to-be.

The bad news is that ABC Radio Networks has decided to end its syndication of Hightower's talk show in November. His removal from talk radio would be enough to wipe the smile off of even Will Rogers' face.

With a progressive populist message that bridges racial gaps (he dismisses California Gov. Pete Wilson, the crusader against affirmative action, as "George Wallace in a Brooks Brother suit"), Hightower has a rare ability to reach conservatives. During the Reagan era, he was elected twice to Texas statewide office as agriculture commissioner.

Originating from his hometown of Austin, Hightower's talk show offers thorough, well-documented analysis of bread-and-butter issues, such as: NAFTA, the Mexico bailout, the export of U.S. jobs to cheap-labor countries and the corporate safety net that undergirds Newt Gingrich's political career.

The country's first investigative talk show begins with Hightower's own newscast -- featuring "Follow the Money" segments on campaign finance, the "Hog Report" on corporate/political greed, and sharp "Eye on Newt" pieces.

Hightower has a novel idea for the 1996 presidential campaign: "Like NASCAR race drivers or PGA golfers, why not require each of the candidates to cover their clothing, briefcases and staff with the logo patches of their corporate sponsors?"

Exposing a recent federal giveaway to a mining company that donated $120,000 to Congress members, Hightower commented: "Under Sen. [Larry] Craig's bill, Cyprus-Amax would pay only $1,000 for a piece of Colorado land that holds $3 billion worth of minerals. They paid 120 times more to buy Congress than they'll pay for the land!... That's why big corporations are so bullish on Congress."

Jim Hightower's show has gotten more raucous since Gingrich -- "a guy who can strut sitting down" -- ascended to the House speakership. "The higher up the ladder the monkey climbs," Hightower says, "the more you see of its ugly side."

After Bell South, a major financial backer of Gingrich, hired the speaker's daughter, Hightower commented: "Bell South is another corporation that knows that if you want to ring-up The Newt, you don't do it with a telephone -- but with a cash register."

During almost every hour of his show, Hightower makes a "Connection" -- providing the phone number of a social change organization that's working to address the problem discussed. "Don't just get agitated," exhorts Hightower, "get to agitating." The call-in number to his show is 1-800-AGITATE.

Although he deserves recognition for his wisdom about economic power, Hightower is far better known for his rollicking one-liners:

• "Ronald Reagan's idea of a good farm program was Hee Haw," quipped Hightower, who launched environmentally conscious programs in Texas for family farmers.

• "George Bush was born on third base and decided that he'd hit a triple," Hightower declared during his riotous speech at the 1988 Democratic convention.

Hightower also mocks fence-straddling Democrats.

• "There's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos."

• When Bill Clinton assembled his team of economic advisers, Hightower dubbed it "the Wall Street firm of Bentsen, Rivlen, Altman and Rubin."

Hightower's main target is corporate America, including some of the same companies that are potential sponsors of national talk shows. He once said of price-gouging pharmaceutical firms: "They're making enough profit to air-condition hell."

While he's attracted uncommon sponsors like labor unions and Mother Jones magazine, his show has been hobbled by a lack of marketing from the ABC network and undermined by right-wing management at ABC mega-stations in New York and Los Angeles.

"Listeners like the Hightower show," says respected radio consultant Jon Sinton, who helped launch the program. "But it makes big companies nervous."

Now, efforts are underway to get Hightower's talk show picked up by another network or syndicate, perhaps Westwood One, CBS or Sony Worldwide. (Meanwhile, his two-minute radio commentaries are heard daily on 70 stations.)

The Hightower termination contradicts talk radio's claim of being America's "national town hall." Something's wrong with a medium that can find so much room for Rush Limbaugh and dozens of Limbaugh clones and wannabees -- but no space for the one-of-a-kind Jim Hightower.

125 West End Ave.
New York, NY 10023
fax: 212-456-5705
ph: 212-456-5100

You might also write letters to the editor and take other action to publicize this effort to mute one of the only progressive voices in mainstream radio.

Routine Somersaults of Self-Censorship

Media Beat, September 13, 1995

"Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip," George Orwell wrote, "but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip." A half-century after Orwell's caustic gibe at compliant editors, self-censorship is one of the least discussed -- and most routine -- media constraints in the United States.

When a dictatorial government decides what can reach print or get on the airwaves, the heavy hand of the censor is apt to be obvious. But in a society where the First Amendment protects freedom of speech, the most significant limits may be obscured.

In contrast to dramatic storms of overt censorship, the usual climate of U.S. journalism is as unobtrusive as morning dew. The dominant seems normal, like a ubiquitous odor. "We scent the air of the office," the great American journalist George Seldes noted in 1931. "We realize that certain things are wanted, certain things unwanted."

Much has changed for reporters and editors since the 1930s. But today's media milieu hardly breeds intrepid journalism. At a time of merger mania in the news industry, journalists are aware that it's risky to directly challenge the corporate elephant fattening in the middle of the newsroom.

It is illustrative that the Today Show on NBC -- a network owned by General Electric -- surgically removed references to GE from a news report on a defective-bolts scandal a few years ago. And that the program's producers told a guest expert on consumer boycotts not to mention a major boycott targeting GE.

It's unlikely that anyone from GE's front office specifically ordered Today Show producers to protect the company's image. No one had to. That's how self-censorship works.

And no one needs to instruct the editor of a magazine dependent on cigarette-ad revenue not to launch a crusade against the tobacco industry.

Blatant instances of owner (or advertiser) pressure on journalists, while significant, are mere tips of icebergs that must be taken into account when navigating a journalistic career. Flagrant intrusion by media owners or sponsors is frowned upon these days; far more common, below the surface, are preemptive decisions often made in silence.

Self-censorship gains power as it becomes automatic. Former FCC commissioner Nicholas Johnson summarizes the process when he tells of "a reporter who first comes up with an investigative story idea, writes it up and submits it to the editor and is told the story is not going to run. He wonders why, but the next time, he is cautious enough to check with the editor first. He is told by the editor that it would be better not to write that story."

Johnson continues: "The third time he thinks of an investigative story idea but doesn't bother the editor with it because he knows it's silly. The fourth time he doesn't even think of the idea anymore."

In the mid-1990s, few other professionals rival journalists in claiming to be unfettered seekers of the truth. And in few jobs are the gaps between pretenses and realities more likely to be injurious to the entire society.

To be fair, journalists are no less courageous than people in other professions. But it's daunting, especially in tough economic times, to consider biting the hand that signs the paycheck.

Options are particularly sparse these days. The news business keeps contracting. Broadcast news departments have shrunk. While some newspapers fold, many others are paring staff.

Journalists who insist that they are hardly akin to Orwell's circus dogs -- that they function without severe constraints -- should try harder to prove such assertions in daily work. They might start by confronting media managers who treat news products like boxes of cereal.

Weeks after transferring from a top post at General Mills this summer, the new chief executive at Times Mirror Co., Mark Willes, lowered the corporate boom -- closing New York Newsday and ordering big layoffs at the Los Angeles Times. Willes does not seem to be embarrassed when he compares managing newspapers to marketing Cheerios.

Many journalists are appalled at the merging of already-huge media conglomerates. But most journalists are inclined to mute their criticisms. People who work in glass suites can't throw many stones.

"The most sacred cow of the press," George Seldes observed long ago, "is the press itself." Now, perhaps, more than ever.

Knee-Jerk Coverage of Bombing Should Not Be Forgotten

Media Beat, April 26, 1995

So much has happened since the horrendous bombing in Oklahoma that the initial media coverage may already seem like a distant memory. But one person who will never forget is Saher Al-Saidi, a refugee from Iraq now living in Oklahoma City.

The morning after the explosion -- following nearly 24 hours of knee-jerk news coverage that linked the terrorism to Muslims and Arabs -- vigilantes shattered the windows of her home with stones. Not quite seven months pregnant, she began experiencing abdominal pain and internal bleeding; her baby was stillborn.

Across the country, many other Muslims and Arab-Americans were harassed and threatened.

Hours after the bomb went off, CBS Evening News featured Steven Emerson, a ubiquitous "terrorism expert," who eagerly presented his biases as objective analysis: "This was done with the intent to inflict as many casualties as possible. That is a Middle Eastern trait."

In the wake of the bombing, media outlets rounded up the stock "terrorism experts" and paraded them across TV screens and front pages. For nearly two days, we heard from touted experts whose utter lack of evidence was masked by bold assertions about a foreign menace threatening America's heartland.

On the CNBC cable-TV network, Cal Thomas's show featured an expert warning of illegal immigrants "coming in to destroy our democracy."

Columnist Georgie Ann Geyer asserted that the bombing "has every single earmark of the Islamic car-bombers of the Middle East." Geyer relied on Emerson's claim that the Oklahoma City area is "one of the centers for Islamic radicalism outside the Middle East."

The New York Times speculated in its first day of reporting on why terrorists would have struck in Oklahoma City: "Some Middle Eastern groups have held meetings there, and the city is home to at least three mosques."

Is the presence of houses of worship now grounds for suspecting a terrorist threat?

What is haunting about the performance of these mainstream, "quality" news outlets is that they exhibited the paranoia and xenophobia -- albeit in milder doses -- that one hears from right-wing militia groups: fear of foreigners and a belief in dark conspiracies beyond our nation's control.

Most mainstream journalists were caught flat-footed by the militia story. Perhaps that's why they believe -- mistakenly, in our view -- that federal agencies need new powers of infiltration in order to monitor and prosecute criminal elements among the extremists.

For two years, "patriot" militias have grown steadily -- as have efforts by neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join and take over the militias. But heightened police powers aren't needed to track these trends.

Human-rights groups and independent journalists have been monitoring these militias from the beginning. It can be as easy as cruising the Internet. Or monitoring short-wave radio. Or turning on AM talk radio.

Two months ago, we wrote a column exposing the supportive role played by certain talk-radio hosts for the militia movement.

We published the remarks of Colorado Springs talk host Chuck Baker, whose program last summer provided a friendly forum for extremist militia strategies, including calls for an armed march on Washington to remove "traitors" from Congress. (Baker sits on the advisory board of the National Association of Radio Talk Show Hosts.)

We also reported on G. Gordon Liddy's instructions to militia groups -- offered last August on his nationally syndicated radio talk show -- about how to kill agents of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms: "They've got a big target on there, ATF. Don't shoot at that because they've got a vest on underneath. Head shots. Head shots."

Since the Oklahoma bombing, Liddy has amended his instructions -- "shoot to the groin area" -- while telling listeners how to build a home-made bomb.

Broadcasting from WABC in New York, hate-radio pioneer Bob Grant has been a magnet for callers from neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups, who use Grant's show to publicize their propaganda and phone numbers.

The day after the Oklahoma bombing, Grant was in usual form: declaring that Islam is a "violent" religion, that Muslims were behind the detonation -- and expressing his desire to shoot a caller who warned of rushing to judgment.

Instead of engaging in dangerous speculation, the media's "terrorism experts" might do better to monitor extremists ... by flipping on the AM radio dial.

And besides scrutinizing states that sponsor international terrorism, they might examine media companies that promote domestic extremism. They could begin with ABC/Capital Cities -- whose stations air such programs -- and Westwood One, which syndicates both Bob Grant and Gordon Liddy.

Downpour of Media Cliches Threatens To Flood Nation

Media Beat, January 11, 1995

We interrupt this newspaper for a special bulletin! A media flood warning is now in effect for the entire United States.

A torrential January storm continues to dump large quantities of media cliches on the American public. And the floodwaters are still rising.

But there's nothing natural about the current downpour of political cliches. In recent years a lot of work has gone into seeding the clouds. The new speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, has described his goal as "reshaping the entire nation through the news media."

You can assume that the media climate is backing up the sewers when the same cliche appears on the covers of the country's two biggest news weeklies. That's what happened with the Jan. 9 editions of Time magazine ("Exclusive: How Gingrich plans to pull off his revolution") and Newsweek ("Gingrich's Revolution").

Which brings us to the most popular -- and possibly weirdest -- media cliche of the year so far:

"Revolution"

No longer able to utilize the worn-out description of Gingrich as a "bomb-throwing backbencher," the news media now insist that he is leading a "revolution."

If the Republicans are igniting a "revolution," it must be the first one in world history aimed at giving the entrenched interests that run the country still more entrenched power.

Since when is it a "revolution" to make things even more cushy for the wealthy and powerful, while making the rest of us even more vulnerable to their prerogatives?

"Big government"

But news reports on "big government" virtually ignore the most costly and wasteful federal bureaucracy -- the Defense Department -- spending $270 billion this year on the military (almost as much as the amount spent by the rest of the world combined). President Clinton has urged a hefty increase, and the new GOP majority in Congress wants to hike the department's budget even more.

A rarely mentioned fact is that the Pentagon purchases two-thirds of the U.S. government's goods and services. And it issues 70 percent of all federal paychecks.

But when was the last time you heard a media outlet mention the Pentagon in a discussion of deplorable "big government"?

And when was the last time you saw a tough national news report on the F-22 fighter jet, which moves forward even though the General Accounting Office concluded that it is now unneeded and should be put off? The jets are to be assembled by Lockheed, adjacent to Gingrich's congressional district in Georgia.

"Middle class"

To hear many politicians -- and journalists -- tell it, the "middle class" is just about anyone who isn't below the official poverty line and doesn't qualify as a millionaire.

Reporting from Southern California in 1993, under the headline "GOP Blitz Against Budget Puts Democrats on Defensive", the New York Times explained on its front page that President Clinton was not offering much to "people earning more than $115,000, which is middle class in this high-cost region." Six figures a year, and part of the beleaguered middle class.

"Reform"

Our forecast for this political season calls for continued rhetorical downpours, heavy at times, with only occasional periods of clarity.

But don't despair -- and don't worry about carrying a rhetoric-proof umbrella. Once you decode the main cliches, the torrents of media blather will roll off you like water off a duck's back.

Media Beat, January 4, 1995

The Martin Luther King You Don't See On TV

It's become a TV ritual: Every year in mid-January, around the time of Martin Luther King's birthday, we get perfunctory network news reports about "the slain civil rights leader."

The remarkable thing about this annual review of King's life is that several years -- his last years -- are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole.

What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968).

An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn't take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever.

Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they're not shown today on TV.

Why?

It's because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for during his final years.

In the early 1960s, when King focused his challenge on legalized racial discrimination in the South, most major media were his allies. Network TV and national publications graphically showed the police dogs and bullwhips and cattle prods used against Southern blacks who sought the right to vote or to eat at a public lunch counter.

But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation's fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without "human rights" -- including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.

Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for "radical changes in the structure of our society" to redistribute wealth and power.

"True compassion," King declared, "is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."

By 1967, King had also become the country's most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his "Beyond Vietnam" speech delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 -- a year to the day before he was murdered -- King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."

From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was "on the wrong side of a world revolution." King questioned "our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America," and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions "of the shirtless and barefoot people" in the Third World, instead of supporting them.

In foreign policy, King also offered an economic critique, complaining about "capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries."

You haven't heard the "Beyond Vietnam" speech on network news retrospectives, but national media heard it loud and clear back in 1967 -- and loudly denounced it. Time magazine called it "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi." The Washington Post patronized that "King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."

In his last months, King was organizing the most militant project of his life: the Poor People's Campaign. He crisscrossed the country to assemble "a multiracial army of the poor" that would descend on Washington -- engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be -- until Congress enacted a poor people's bill of rights. Reader's Digest warned of an "insurrection."

King's economic bill of rights called for massive government jobs programs to rebuild America's cities. He saw a crying need to confront a Congress that had demonstrated its "hostility to the poor" -- appropriating "military funds with alacrity and generosity," but providing "poverty funds with miserliness."

How familiar that sounds today, more than a quarter-century after King's efforts on behalf of the poor people's mobilization were cut short by an assassin's bullet.

As 1995 gets underway, in this nation of immense wealth, the White House and Congress continue to accept the perpetuation of poverty. And so do most mass media. Perhaps it's no surprise that they tell us little about the last years of Martin Luther King's life.

Glimmers of History Improve Coverage of Native Americans

Media Beat, November 23, 1994

Time will tell whether it's a journalistic trend or merely a fad. But Cable News Network may have started something in recent weeks with its 20-part series, "Native Americans: The Invisible People".

During the past month, CNN viewers saw numerous well-researched reports venturing beyond the usual media treatment of Indians to explore what rarely gets much air time -- in a word, history.

Most news outlets are loath to recount the realities -- recurring betrayals, broken treaties and virtual genocide -- inflicted on this continent's native peoples over the course of 500 years.

The customary media approach is akin to assessing what's on stage without considering the play's earlier acts. Typical news items are brief snapshots of current conditions -- high rates of unemployment and alcoholism on Indian reservations, or disputes that involve fishing rights or gambling casinos -- without historical context.

Television tends to be the worst media offender. But CNN broke away from the pattern with "The Invisible People." What distinguished the network's special reports was attention to the content of treaties.

"When a government makes an agreement with another nation, that government is expected to abide by the terms of the agreement," said a CNN anchor, introducing one segment. "But many Native American nations are struggling to uphold rights granted in treaties with the United States."

Correspondent Stephen Frazier explained that more than 150 years ago, a pact with the Mille Lacs band of Ojibwa Indians "reserved the right to gather and hunt and fish on the land they were giving up. Otherwise, they said, they would starve." Although the U.S. government signed the treaty, "when Minnesota became a state it deliberately did not recognize any treaty privileges of Indians."

The CNN story gave coverage to foes of Indian rights, like the Minneapolis businessman who blasted Indian activism as "political revisionism of history." But the report also provided a platform for defenders of Indian treaty rights.

The Mille Lacs won their court case last summer. And, correspondent Frazier concluded, "157 years after the Mille Lacs made a treaty with the United States, it is still valid. It is still the law of the land. It must still be respected."

Without historical explanation, the Mille Lacs' court victory -- retaining special hunting and fishing rights -- might have seemed unfair to viewers. With the factual background, it was much more likely to seem just.

In another CNN segment, focusing on a land dispute in Nevada, correspondent Bonnie Anderson explained that "the only treaty between the United States and the Western Shoshone was signed here in Ruby Valley in 1863 and it seemed to affirm the Indians' ownership of the land." In modern times, most Western Shoshone people "did not want money for land they did not want to sell."

Reporting from Indiana, CNN chronicled the struggle of Miami Indians to regain tribal recognition from the U.S. government. Across the country, "150 tribes have petitioned the Bureau of Indian Affairs but the odds are against them. Thus far fewer than a dozen have been recognized."

And, near the Grand Canyon, CNN spotlighted an example of how lucrative projects -- in this case uranium mining -- can run roughshod over lndian spiritual rights. A woman who is part of the Havasupai tribe said, "It's sacrilegious to go build a mine or make a profit off of an area which people respect and consider sacred or is part of their culture or their religion."

As CNN's Anderson reported: "Tribes across the United States are waging similar battles to protect more than 50 sites sacred to them. But they're up against formidable opponents, like oil, gas and logging companies -- modern-day enemies armed with big bucks and industry-friendly laws. So far, Native Americans have not won a single sacred sites dispute based on the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of religion."

In a poignant moment, a Native American activist commented: "I don't believe that if these were Christian sites important to mainline religions that we would see them being bulldozed without any legal protection."

The executive director of the Native American Journalists Association, Ruth Denny, told us that she had "mixed feelings" about the CNN series. She noted that the network's father, Ted Turner, has helped to perpetuate negative stereotypes with his Atlanta Braves baseball team and its "tomahawk chop."

In the future, you may be seeing a lot more Native Americans on network television. CBS has announced plans for a major eight-hour series about North American Indians, to be hosted and co-produced by Kevin Costner.

Whether such upcoming TV projects will represent genuine progress, or just a Hollywood gloss, remains to be seen.

Announcing the P.U.-litzer Prizes for 1994

Back by popular demand, here are the third annual P.U.-litzer Prizes -- recognizing some of the stinkiest media performances of the year.

This isn't one of the awards that recipients boast about in the newsroom.

THE BEAUTIES OF BIAS PRIZE -- ABC's John Stossel

This fall, TV correspondent John Stossel acknowledged that he sees his job more as a promoter of "free-market" ideology than as a reporter. Known for ABC News specials and 20/20 segments deriding consumer protection and environmental regulations, Stossel told the Oregonian newspaper: "I started out by viewing the marketplace as a cruel place, where you need intervention by government and lawyers to protect people. But after watching the regulators work, I have come to believe that markets are magical and the best protectors of the consumer. It is my job to explain the beauties of the free market."

LOST IN SMOKE AWARD -- Weekly Reader

In October, sixth-graders read a Weekly Reader cover story reporting that "taxes and bans have caused many tobacco growers and workers to lose their jobs." Playing down the health effects of cigarettes, the article was illustrated by a photo of tobacco workers holding "No More Taxes" and "Freedom of Choice" placards. The 11-year-old readers weren't told that the rally pictured was organized by tobacco companies -- nor that Weekly Reader is owned by a communications division of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Co., the largest investor in the RJR Nabisco tobacco firm.

MOST SIMPLE-MINDED SCAPEGOATING -- Newsweek's Jonathan Alter

Competition in this category was fierce, with pundits frequently bashing low-income single mothers throughout the year. But Newsweek senior editor Jonathan Alter surged to a year-end victory with his Dec. 12 column, clinching the honor with a single sweeping sentence: "The fact remains: every threat to the fabric of this country -- from poverty to crime to homelessness -- is connected to out-of-wedlock teen pregnancy." Every threat? The export of manufacturing jobs to cheap-labor countries? Toxic pollution? Bigotry? The megabillion dollar S&L rip-off?

MEDIA HYPOCRITE OF THE YEAR -- Rupert Murdoch

Magnate Rupert Murdoch, owner of the Star TV global satellite network, has hailed the democratic power of new media technologies as a "threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere. Satellite broadcasting makes it possible for information-hungry residents of many closed societies to bypass state-controlled television." But to appease Chinese authorities -- who were upset over Star TV's transmissions of BBC News reports on China's human rights abuses -- Murdoch's network obligingly dropped the BBC from its broadcasts aimed at China. Too bad for "information-hungry residents."

DEMOCRATIC APARTHEID AWARD -- The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour

In a June 3 discussion about the effectiveness of economic sanctions...

Pundit Mark Shields: "The one place where there seems to be a success story and a lot of other factors converging on it for sanctions was South Africa."
Anchor Margaret Warner: "Where, of course, it was a democratic government."
Shields: "That's right."

THE OSCAR FOR CENSORSHIP -- PBS, Lifetime Achievement

Year after year, Oscar-winning documentaries have been declared unfit for national airing on PBS: For example, The Panama Deception about the U.S. invasion of Panama, and Deadly Deception about General Electric's nuclear record. This year, no sooner had Defending Our Lives (about battered women) won an Oscar than PBS rejected it -- on the grounds that the movie's co-producer was a leader of the battered women's group featured in the film.

PBS guidelines are remarkably flexible, however. Last year, PBS won a P.U.-litzer for airing a glowing documentary about a New York Times columnist that was funded by the Times and produced "in association with The New York Times" by a member of the family that owns the Times.

DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE AWARD -- New York Times et al.

During a summer of historic anniversaries (the Moonwalk, Woodstock, Nixon's resignation, etc.) with profuse media reminiscences, major news outlets dodged the 30th anniversary of the fabricated Gulf of Tonkin crisis. The 1964 White House deception was swallowed by the national press, and ushered in the full-blown Vietnam War. In August 1994, on the very weekend of Tonkin's anniversary, The New York Times devoted a full-page spread to roughly three dozen anniversaries, including Chappaquiddick (25 years ago), Barbie dolls (35 years) and the bikini (50 years). No mention of Tonkin.

TWO-FACED TABLOID PRIZE -- Ted Koppel

Although he has criticized the tabloidization of TV news, Ted Koppel began 1994 in the glitz lane with a focus on a story of global importance: the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan saga. In about seven weeks (Jan. 24 to March 16), Nightline devoted five entire broadcasts to the figure skaters -- over 13 percent of total air time. During that period, Nightline offered no programs on such issues as unemployment, declining U.S. wages, world hunger or nuclear proliferation.

MAN OF THE PEOPLE PRIZE -- Rush Limbaugh

On Jan. 28, Limbaugh told his TV audience: "All of these rich guys -- like the Kennedy family and Perot -- pretending to live just like we do and pretending to understand our trials and tribulations and pretending to represent us, and they get away with this!" Limbaugh's income this year is estimated at $18 million.

Thankfully, that's all the prizes that space permits. Nominations for 1995 P.U.-litzers will soon be open. Please submit them in scented envelopes.

Media Beat, December 7, 1994

A Tale of Two Broadcasters

By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon

Jack Welch oversees a project that fills America's airwaves with millions of watts. His outfit has committed felonies that include bribery and large-scale fraud.

Stephen Dunifer oversees a project with 15 watts of radio power. He and his organization have never been found guilty of a crime.

Guess which man is in trouble with the Federal Communications Commission.

It isn't Welch, the chair of NBC's parent company, General Electric. In spite of a criminal rap sheet as long as a transmitting tower -- with massive swindles involving sales of military equipment -- GE continues to run NBC's broadcasting operations.

In theory, the FCC evaluates the "character" of would-be broadcast licensees. A few years ago the agency declared it would "consider all felony convictions" and sometimes even misdemeanors. But GE, a corporate felon, has gotten no grief from the FCC about its criminal record.

On the other hand, Stephen Dunifer is one of the FCC's prime targets. He has developed a low-cost, low-watt way that neighbors can use radio to communicate with each other. For $600, he discovered, people can build a mini-station and go on the air.

Dunifer takes seriously the idea that the airwaves belong to the public, not just those with big bucks. Worst of all, from the FCC's vantage point, Dunifer has spread the idea around.

His nonprofit newsletter recently touted gizmos like "a phase lock loop controlled half-watt transmitter kit," designed to meet "all the technical objections of the FCC regarding drift and harmonic interference."

But Dunifer's emphasis is hardly technical; it's community oriented. His newsletter hails micropower broadcasting as a tool that communities can use to break down the barriers of "suspicion, mistrust, anger and violence" bred by a lack of communication.

The micropower concept got a boost four years ago, when Mabana Kantako -- living in a housing project in Springfield, Ill. -- founded Black Liberation Radio, a low-watt station. Despite harassment from local police and the FCC, Kantako and the station are still on the air, serving needs of nearby residents unmet by mass media.

Dunifer, who lives in Berkeley, Calif., learned from Kantako's example, and set to work refining the micro-technology. Now, he says, "We are riding the wave of a movement that will not be stopped." He may be right.

Across the bay, in San Francisco, two independent microbroadcasters are on the radio every night.

In the Mexican state of Chiapas, microradio programs aligned with the rebel Zapatistas can be heard, courtesy of equipment supplied by Dunifer. In downtown Mexico City this fall, a central traffic island became the base of Radio TeleVerdad ("Radio Tell- the-Truth"), providing five-watt FM transmission while hundreds of thousands of vehicles passed by each day.

When we spoke with founders of Radio TeleVerdad a couple of weeks ago, they seemed determined to continue their independent broadcasts -- despite an Oct. 19 raid by 150 Mexican police, who swarmed over the traffic island and confiscated the transmitter along with studio equipment.

In Taiwan a few months ago, several thousand government troops raided 14 unauthorized makeshift radio stations on the same day. Protests and riots ensued.

Here at home, the FCC has slapped Stephen Dunifer with all kinds of legal documents, threatening to fine him $20,000. The goal: to prevent him from going into hills near his home and airing a mix of music and political commentary. But Dunifer keeps transmitting "Free Radio Berkeley."

A guiding principle of microbroadcasting is that small- scale decentralized communication can nurture democracy. In contrast to media behemoths, requiring huge financial resources and dominating wide geographic areas, microbroadcasters don't need a lot of money -- and if a listener wants to talk with the broadcasters directly, they're no more than a bicycle-ride away.

The FCC contends that such unauthorized broadcasts interfere with big-power licensed stations. But Dunifer points out that in neighborhoods there are many openings on the dial. After about 100 of his broadcasts, Dunifer says he has yet to receive a complaint of radio frequency interference -- except for objections from FCC officials, who went out of their way to intercept and monitor his signal with their radio gear.

San Francisco attorney Luke Hiken asserts that the FCC actions against his client are "content oriented," motivated by government hostility toward Dunifer's anti-establishment activism. Hiken cites unlicensed radio broadcasters operating with FCC knowledge but without FCC opposition -- such as an unauthorized Southern Oregon station airing Tommy Dorsey music.

Even if the FCC is able to stop Dunifer -- who has invited federal enforcers to "kiss my Bill of Rights" -- it's probably too late for the feds to short circuit microradio. Says Dunifer: "It is our intent and purpose to see thousands of transmitters taking to the air in an all-out, no-holds-barred movement of electronic civil disobedience." (He can be reached by phone at 510-464-3041, or via e-mail: frbspd@crl.com.)

While Dunifer does battle with the FCC, the General Electric moguls in charge of NBC are engaged in a very different turf battle -- with a competing media giant, the Fox TV network.

In early December, Fox went to the FCC with a petition challenging General Electric's control of broadcast licenses in view of GE's "pattern of illegal activity." The Fox petition was a counterattack against GE, which a week earlier had told the FCC that Fox's foreign ownership violates federal rules.

The chances are tiny that the FCC will banish GE from the broadcasting business. But if lightning strikes and GE loses its status as a mega-broadcaster, Jack Welch might want to consider trying his hand at a more humble role.

For a few hundred dollars, Welch can set up his own 15-watt radio station. Stephen Dunifer would be glad to show him how.

Spotlight Finally Shines On White Hate Radio

Media Beat, November 3, 1994

What a difference eight months can make.

Back in March, we wrote a column about powerful radio personality Bob Grant and his brand of hate-filled talkshow. We complained that the rantings of bigots like Grant -- who hosts the biggest talkshow on the country's biggest radio station, New York's WABC -- were largely ignored or winked at by the mainstream press.

We noted that while national news outlets were fixated on black haters among the Nation of Islam leadership, they were neglecting white racists whose messages are amplified by the largest broadcast stations in the country.

We observed that media commentators kept prodding black politicians to distance themselves from the Louis Farrakhans -- but did not ask white politicians to distance themselves from the Bob Grants.

How things have changed...at long last. In recent weeks, news reports spotlighting Grant's on-air racism have appeared prominently in New York media, national outlets, and even the British press.

Over the years, major national advertisers like Sears, Amtrak and Lincoln-Mercury have paid big bucks for access to Grant's 1 million listeners per week. Now, the threat of a sponsor boycott led by African-American ministers has caused several advertisers to pull away from the show.

In past elections, Republican politicians from George Bush on down have cozied up to Grant, seeking his support. Now, his endorsement may be a liability. The high point of a recent televised debate came when New Jersey's Democratic senator handed a cassette tape containing samples of Grant's racist remarks to his Republican challenger and demanded that he reject the talkshow host's support.

A year ago Republican Christine Todd Whitman -- who'd just won a close election for New Jersey governor -- appeared on Grant's show to thank him for "all that you did to help the campaign." She appeared again two weeks later to personally invite him to her inauguration. Whitman now says she will never again be a guest on Grant's show -- unless it's to confront him about his bigotry.

Because Grant has been so successful in building his drive-time audience (he grosses $7 million yearly for his ABC-owned station), he has imitators across the country. As one of the originals in talkshow hate, Grant runs a program that often resembles a Ku Klux Klan rally of the airwaves -- cruel, racist, with hints of violence.

Grant espouses a "scientific" form of racism known as eugenics and speaks of the bad "genes" of black youths. He praises City College of New York professor Michael Levin, who asserts that blacks are hereditarily less intelligent than whites, and he regularly promotes the "Bob Grant Mandatory Sterilization Plan" for women on welfare.

Never heard the Bob Grant show? Here's the kind of dialogue you're missing.

Caller: "Well, like you say, we'll become a Third World--I think you know, in another 50 or 60 years where everybody is half-black, half-white, and the mentality has gone down around 10 IQ points."

Grant: "By the way, we're not supposed to talk about genetics in all of this. And I've been called a lot of names because I do believe in the science of genetics."

Referring to thousands of blacks who attended a celebrity basketball game involving rap stars, he spoke of "subhumanoids, savages, who would feel more at home careening along the sands of the Kalahari...people who, for whatever reason, have not become civilized."

The few blacks who call the show can expect to be insulted -- and perhaps derided as "shoeshine boys." In hanging up on a black caller, Grant said: "Get off my phone, you creep, we don't need the toilets cleaned right now." When he hangs up on black women, he yells: "I don't need the windows washed today."

When an African-American caller pointed out that the KKK was more violent than the Nation of Islam, Grant hung up on the "swine": "On the evolutionary scale, you're about 25 generations behind me."

Besides verbally abusing callers, Grant continually expresses violent fantasies. "I'd like to get every environmentalist, put 'em up against a wall, and shoot 'em," he once said. Last June, he spoke of his wish that police had machine-gunned New York City's gay pride parade. He frequently hopes for the deaths of those he dislikes -- Magic Johnson, Bill Clinton, Haitian refugees and others.

His regular listeners cannot escape the violent message. Several months ago, an obviously troubled man phoned the show: "I just wanted to call and vent the hurt and anger I'm experiencing now.... What could I do as a citizen of this country, which I believe in and have seen fall apart as I've been growing up?" Grant's response: "Well, get a gun and go do something, then."

We could say that Bob Grant wannabees have sprouted across the country like mushrooms after a downpour -- but that would suggest a wild or natural process. What's happened is something else: a deliberate process in which major broadcasters like ABC/Cap Cities have chosen to narrowcast to conservative audiences by stoking prejudice and fear.

Quaint concepts like decency, fairness and rational debate have been tossed out the window.

(The talk lineup on WABC, for example -- even in a city as liberal as New York -- is so filled with right-wing hatred that Rush Limbaugh almost sounds like a voice of compassion on the station.)

The best answer to hate speech is not suppression, but more speech. And the best answer to hate radio is diverse programs offering opposing views. Unfortunately, since the FCC abolished the Fairness Doctrine seven years ago, many station managers don't feel the need to offer even the semblance of balancing perspectives.

The recent uproar over Bob Grant may point to a brighter future. For now, however, on talk radio -- the hate just keeps on coming.

Just Imagine: A Media Crusade Against Big-Money Politics

Media Beat, October 5, 1994

After campaign finance reform died recently in the U.S. Senate and health care reform was buried beneath the biggest avalanche of political donations in the history of Congress, we came across an astounding Washington Post column by Norman Ornstein, aka "Dr. Soundbite."

One of the most quoted experts in media history, Ornstein argued that campaign money "has a very limited impact" on Congress -- and criticized the press for its "obsession" with the subject.

Ornstein's through-the-looking-glass view sparked a vivid fantasy, which we'd like to share with our readers. What if news media actually were "obsessed" with exposing the stranglehold that big money has on American politics?

In our fantasy, it's no half-hearted effort driven by an occasional news report or editorial. No, this media crusade roars from the web-fed presses to network TV.

It's the kind of crusade that media consumers have seen many times before -- in the war on drugs or crime, or in the months before the Gulf War when many news outlets demonstrated a commitment to proving that Saddam Hussein was Adolf Hitler Jr.

Our fantasy is a media campaign that gets laws passed -- like the "drug crisis" coverage that dominated the news a few years ago. The New York Times averaged close to three drug stories per day in 1988 and 1989, reaching a frenzy in September 1989 when the paper ran about seven articles each day on drugs.

Since journalists sustained that kind of coverage when illegal drug use was actually declining, imagine how much energy they could muster for tackling big money in politics -- a problem that is getting dramatically worse.

All the ingredients exist for a story that causes news consumers to be riveted -- and angered. It names names, exposes politicians and their financial patrons "caught in the act," and reveals how the average voter has become a spectator in a "democracy" dominated by big campaign donors.

• Night after night, NBC's Tom Brokaw presents features on Washington "Greedlock," explaining -- for example -- how campaign donations from agribusiness firms derailed nutritional labeling on food products. We're shown which companies give the money, which members of Congress take it, and how the public is ripped off.
• ABC's Peter Jennings renames his "Person of the Week" segment "Person on the Take." He starts by featuring Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN), a once-obscure congressman who parlayed his pro- business "health care reform" proposal into a massive campaign war chest filled with money from insurance and drug company executives. And Jennings spotlights Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), who criticized a bill restricting lobbyist gifts to politicians by wailing: "You are going to close 90 percent of the restaurants in Washington."
• CBS's Dan Rather offers "They Bought the Ballot" segments. One assails the Philip Morris tobacco company for bankrolling the misnamed "Californians for Statewide Smoking Restrictions" whose initiative on next month's ballot would replace and weaken local smoking ordinances.
• ABC's "20/20" launches a regular "Greenwashing" feature, exposing such nice-sounding groups as "Oregon Citizens for Recycling" (formed by Union Carbide, Dow, Chevron, Exxon and Occidental Chemical) which spent $2 million to defeat a ballot measure offering genuine recycling.
• On Sunday politics shows, pundits begin scrutinizing the excessive money behind politics. Often cited as a symbol of the problem is lawyer-lobbyist Thomas H. Boggs, whose D.C. law firm uses a computer to match corporate donors with Congress members who have power over pending bills that are of financial interest to those donors.
• "Meet the Press" devotes a whole program to the dealings of Dwayne Andreas, chair of the Archer Daniels Midland grain and ethanol company, which won favorable EPA rulings from President Bush after Andreas donated $400,000 in "soft money" to the Republican Party -- and from the Clinton administration after he donated $100,000 to the Democrats. Even John McLaughlin gets into the spirit, bellowing angrily about the General Electric lobbyists who helped draft the corporate tax law that reduced the company's tax to below zero.
• The media crusade regularly presents experts like Ellen Miller of the Center for Responsive Politics and Ralph Nader -- detailing legislation that would solve the problem. Within months an aroused public is pressuring an exposed and intimidated Congress to pass serious reforms.

It's not going to happen that way -- despite the recent debacles in Washington over health care and political reform. Such a crusade would offend the powerful. And the biggest campaign donors are major media advertisers and owners who like the status quo.

Archer Daniels Midland sponsors "Meet the Press" and many weekend pundit shows, along with the "MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour"; GE owns NBC and CNBC, and sponsors politics shows across the dial, including McLaughlin; CBS is owned by a tobacco tycoon; Cokie Roberts is the sister of power-lobbyist Tom Boggs; the executive producer of ABC's "20/20" is married to a major PR agent for the chemical and nuclear industries.

Which brings us to quotemaster Norman Ornstein, who has said he logged 1,294 calls from 183 news outlets in one year, a scholar who seems too busy appearing on TV to have much time for scholarship.

Ornstein works at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank funded by the same monied interests that donate big bucks to politicians. He's the perfect "expert" for today's media: glib, credentialed, and propounding the view that mainstream media are overly "obsessed" with campaign funding. Unfortunately, he's no fantasy.

Jimmy Carter and Human Rights: Behind the Media Myth

Media Beat, September 21, 1994

Jimmy Carter's reputation has soared lately.

Typical of the media spin was a Sept. 20 report on CBS Evening News, lauding Carter's "remarkable resurgence" as a freelance diplomat. The network reported that "nobody doubts his credibility, or his contacts."

For Jimmy Carter, the pact he negotiated in Haiti is the latest achievement of his long career on the global stage.

During his presidency, Carter proclaimed human rights to be "the soul of our foreign policy." Although many journalists promoted that image, the reality was quite different.

Inaugurated 13 months after Indonesia's December 1975 invasion of East Timor, Carter stepped up U.S. military aid to the Jakarta regime as it continued to murder Timorese civilians. By the time Carter left office, about 200,000 people had been slaughtered.

Elsewhere, despotic allies -- from Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines to the Shah of Iran -- received support from President Carter.

In El Salvador, the Carter administration provided key military aid to a brutal regime. In Nicaragua, contrary to myth, Carter backed dictator Anastasio Somoza almost until the end of his reign. In Guatemala -- again contrary to enduring myth -- major U.S. military shipments to bloody tyrants never ended.

After moving out of the White House in early 1981, Carter developed a reputation as an ex-president with a conscience. He set about building homes for the poor. And when he traveled to hot spots abroad, news media often depicted Carter as a skillful negotiator on behalf of human rights.

But a decade after Carter left the Oval Office, scholar James Petras assessed the ex-president's actions overseas -- and found that Carter's image as "a peace mediator, impartial electoral observer and promoter of democratic values...clashes with the experiences of several democratic Third World leaders struggling against dictatorships and pro-U.S. clients."

From Latin America to East Africa, Petras wrote, Carter functioned as "a hard-nosed defender of repressive state apparatuses, a willing consort to electoral frauds, an accomplice to U.S. Embassy efforts to abort popular democratic outcomes and a one-sided mediator."

Observing the 1990 election in the Dominican Republic, Carter ignored fraud that resulted in the paper-thin victory margin of incumbent president Joaquin Balaguer. Announcing that Balaguer's bogus win was valid, Carter used his prestige to give international legitimacy to the stolen election -- and set the stage for a rerun this past spring, when Balaguer again used fraud to win re-election.

In December 1990, Carter traveled to Haiti, where he labored to undercut Jean-Bertrand Aristide during the final days of the presidential race. According to a top Aristide aide, Carter predicted that Aristide would lose, and urged him to concede defeat. (He ended up winning 67 percent of the vote.)

Since then, Carter has developed a warm regard for Haiti's bloodthirsty armed forces. Returning from his recent mission to Port-au-Prince, Carter actually expressed doubt that the Haitian military was guilty of human rights violations.

Significantly, Carter's involvement in the mid-September negotiations came at the urging of Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras -- who phoned Carter only days before the expected U.S. invasion and asked him to play a mediator role. (Cedras had floated the idea in an Aug. 6 appearance on CNN.)

Carter needed no encouragement. All summer he had been urging the White House to let him be a mediator in dealings with Haiti.

Carter's regard for Cedras matches his evident affection for Cedras' wife. On Sept. 20, Carter told a New York Times interviewer: "Mrs. Cedras was impressive, powerful and forceful. And attractive. She was slim and very attractive."

By then, Carter was back home in Georgia. And U.S. troops in Haiti were standing by -- under the terms of the Carter-negotiated agreement -- as Haiti's police viciously attacked Haitians in the streets.

The day after American forces arrived in Haiti, President Clinton was upbeat, saying that "our troops are working with full cooperation with the Haitian military" -- the same military he had described five days earlier as "armed thugs" who have "conducted a reign of terror, executing children, raping women, killing priests."

The latest developments in Haiti haven't surprised Petras, an author and sociology professor at Binghamton University in New York. "Every time Carter intervenes, the outcomes are always heavily skewed against political forces that want change," Petras said when we reached him on Sept. 20. "In each case, he had a political agenda -- to support very conservative solutions that were compatible with elite interests."

Petras described Carter as routinely engaging in "a double discourse. One discourse is for the public, which is his moral politics, and the other is the second track that he operates on, which is a very cynical realpolitik that plays ball with very right-wing politicians and economic forces."

And now, Petras concludes, "In Haiti, Carter has used that moral image again to impose one of the worst settlements imaginable."

With much of Haiti's murderous power structure remaining in place, the results are likely to be grim.

Media Beat, August 3, 1994

Another Media Celebrity Charged With Murder

Paul Hill is no O.J. Simpson. His path to media stardom was not athletic greatness and a pleasing public persona. Hill became a media celebrity his own way: by advocating murder.

America was shocked when Simpson became a murder suspect, but it wasn't too surprising when Hill went to jail for killing a doctor and his escort outside a Pensacola, Florida, abortion clinic on July 29. After all, the ex-pastor had been advocating such action on national TV for over a year.

On television, Hill's belief that a holy book commands the murder of physicians who perform abortions was uttered with the same religious zeal one might expect from those who advocate car- bombings against satanic Westerners.

Except proponents of car-bombing don't get the media forums Hill did.

The point here is not that fanatics like Hill should be banned from the airwaves -- but that their extremism ought to be exposed when they do speak on the air.

Appearing as a guest on CNN's "Sonya Live" program on March 8, Hill hailed the man who had murdered abortion provider Dr. David Gunn as a hero "willing to lay down" his life to fulfill "the commandment of Christ."

Host Sonya Friedman responded by seeming to question Hill's commitment to action: "But Mr. Hill, indeed, you personally are not laying down your life. One might suggest that you are offering that message to others and they may be laying down their lives."

Less than five months later, police say, Hill chose action over words, murdering Dr. Gunn's successor at the Pensacola abortion clinic.

Extremism went almost unscathed when Hill appeared on Ted Koppel's Nightline last Dec. 8. Koppel opened the show by comparing legal abortions with violent incidents against abortion clinics -- "the latest casualty count" from the abortion "battlefront" -- a numerical comparison often made by those who attack clinics: "Thirty million aborted fetuses over the past 30 years [sic] since Roe v. Wade was handed down by the Supreme Court. On the other side of the ledger, 7,709 incidents of violence and disruption targeting doctors and abortion clinics since 1977...[including] one attempted murder and one successful murder."

Missing from the numbers were pregnant women -- including the estimated 200,000 women who die each year across the globe from illegal abortions.

The Nightline discussion -- which involved only Koppel, Hill and Helen Alvare of Catholics for Life -- was a remarkably polite dialogue on an insane topic: whether killing physicians who perform abortions is justifiable.

While Hill advocated violence to stop abortion, and Alvare didn't, Koppel treated the topic as a legitimate one for serious discussion -- allowing Hill to expound at length on his belief that since one can kill to defend a day-old child, it's justifiable to kill an abortion provider.

"God has given us this responsibility," proclaimed Hill, "and if we stand by with our hands in our pockets and watch, say, our wives kill our unborn children, we are actually culpable of not trying to prevent murder... Sometimes you have to use force to stop people from killing innocent children."

Rather than challenge the violence (or misogyny) inherent in Hill's remarks, Koppel asserted that Hill had raised an important moral issue: "When we come back, Ms. Alvare, I wonder if you would pick up that very, very difficult moral question, the difference between a child that is one day old and a child that is one day away from birth."

After a commercial break, Koppel acknowledged that abortions are rarely performed in the last months of pregnancy. But he -- like his two anti-abortion guests -- continued to blur any distinction between a child and a fetus: "If a parent would be justified in using violence, even deadly force, to protect a one- day-old infant," Koppel asked, "why is that same parent not justified in using the same kind of force to prevent the abortion of, let's say, a five-month-old child?"

Had an abortion-rights advocate taken part in the discussion, he or she might have mentioned that 99 percent of U.S. abortions occur before the fetus reaches five months -- and might have challenged Hill's constant equation of terminating a pregnancy with "killing a child." Koppel never did.

When we refer to the morality of doctor-murder as an "insane" topic for TV news forums, we do not mean to imply that Paul Hill is a lone nut.

Hill is hardly alone. Violence against physicians and family planning clinics has been escalating. Faced with defeats in the political arena and the courts, a growing number of anti-abortion crusaders have turned to terror, organizing a nationwide movement to promote it. Hill's petition defending "lethal force" against doctors had been signed by several dozen priests, ministers and religious activists from around the country.

And while more mainstream "pro-life" leaders were quick to distance themselves from Hill after he was charged with murder, he had been invited into their midst for a national strategy meeting in Chicago three months earlier. The line between advocates and opponents of violence seemed thin; a major discussion item on the meeting's agenda was "Violence and Nonviolence: How to Work With Disagreement".

The gathering was dominated by debates over the morality of killing doctors. "I was surprised at how much support there was for Paul Hill," remarked the director of the Pro-Life Action League. An Operation Rescue leader who said he argued against murder, told the New York Times: "I think I was in the minority."

News media today should be exposing those who turn to violence when they can't win over their fellow citizens through democratic debate. A movement that rationalizes murder as "pro- life" deserves at least as much news coverage as an individual athlete accused of murder.

A floodlight needs to be focused on these extremists. Not merely another spotlight.

Media Beat, July 27, 1994

30-Year Anniversary: Tonkin Gulf Lie Launched Vietnam War

Thirty years ago, it all seemed very clear.

"American Planes Hit North Vietnam After Second Attack on Our Destroyers; Move Taken to Halt New Aggression", announced a Washington Post headline on Aug. 5, 1964.

That same day, the front page of the New York Times reported: "President Johnson has ordered retaliatory action against gunboats and 'certain supporting facilities in North Vietnam' after renewed attacks against American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin."

But there was no "second attack" by North Vietnam -- no "renewed attacks against American destroyers." By reporting official claims as absolute truths, American journalism opened the floodgates for the bloody Vietnam War.

A pattern took hold: continuous government lies passed on by pliant mass media...leading to over 50,000 American deaths and millions of Vietnamese casualties.

The official story was that North Vietnamese torpedo boats launched an "unprovoked attack" against a U.S. destroyer on "routine patrol" in the Tonkin Gulf on Aug. 2 -- and that North Vietnamese PT boats followed up with a "deliberate attack" on a pair of U.S. ships two days later.

The truth was very different.

Rather than being on a routine patrol Aug. 2, the U.S. destroyer Maddox was actually engaged in aggressive intelligence-gathering maneuvers -- in sync with coordinated attacks on North Vietnam by the South Vietnamese navy and the Laotian air force.

"The day before, two attacks on North Vietnam...had taken place," writes scholar Daniel C. Hallin. Those assaults were "part of a campaign of increasing military pressure on the North that the United States had been pursuing since early 1964."

On the night of Aug. 4, the Pentagon proclaimed that a second attack by North Vietnamese PT boats had occurred earlier that day in the Tonkin Gulf -- a report cited by President Johnson as he went on national TV that evening to announce a momentous escalation in the war: air strikes against North Vietnam.

But Johnson ordered U.S. bombers to "retaliate" for a North Vietnamese torpedo attack that never happened.

Prior to the U.S. air strikes, top officials in Washington had reason to doubt that any Aug. 4 attack by North Vietnam had occurred. Cables from the U.S. task force commander in the Tonkin Gulf, Captain John J. Herrick, referred to "freak weather effects," "almost total darkness" and an "overeager sonarman" who "was hearing ship's own propeller beat."

One of the Navy pilots flying overhead that night was squadron commander James Stockdale, who gained fame later as a POW and then Ross Perot's vice presidential candidate. "I had the best seat in the house to watch that event," recalled Stockdale a few years ago, "and our destroyers were just shooting at phantom targets -- there were no PT boats there.... There was nothing there but black water and American fire power."

In 1965, Lyndon Johnson commented: "For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there."

But Johnson's deceitful speech of Aug. 4, 1964, won accolades from editorial writers. The president, proclaimed the New York Times, "went to the American people last night with the somber facts." The Los Angeles Times urged Americans to "face the fact that the Communists, by their attack on American vessels in international waters, have themselves escalated the hostilities."

An exhaustive new book, The War Within: America's Battle Over Vietnam, begins with a dramatic account of the Tonkin Gulf incidents. In an interview, author Tom Wells told us that American media "described the air strikes that Johnson launched in response as merely `tit for tat' -- when in reality they reflected plans the administration had already drawn up for gradually increasing its overt military pressure against the North."

Why such inaccurate news coverage? Wells points to the media's "almost exclusive reliance on U.S. government officials as sources of information" -- as well as "reluctance to question official pronouncements on 'national security issues.'"

Daniel Hallin's classic book The "Uncensored War" observes that journalists had "a great deal of information available which contradicted the official account [of Tonkin Gulf events]; it simply wasn't used. The day before the first incident, Hanoi had protested the attacks on its territory by Laotian aircraft and South Vietnamese gunboats."

What's more, "It was generally known...that `covert' operations against North Vietnam, carried out by South Vietnamese forces with U.S. support and direction, had been going on for some time."

In the absence of independent journalism, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution -- the closest thing there ever was to a declaration of war against North Vietnam -- sailed through Congress on Aug. 7. (Two courageous senators, Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska, provided the only "no" votes.) The resolution authorized the president "to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression."

The rest is tragic history.

Nearly three decades later, during the Gulf War, columnist Sydney Schanberg warned journalists not to forget "our unquestioning chorus of agreeability when Lyndon Johnson bamboozled us with his fabrication of the Gulf of Tonkin incident."

Schanberg blamed not only the press but also "the apparent amnesia of the wider American public."

And he added: "We Americans are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth."

Tobacco Wars: The First Casualty Is Candor

Media Beat, July 20, 1994

In the midst of an escalating media war over tobacco this summer, the cigarette industry has complained loudly about bad press. But the industry has benefitted from shoddy journalism -- as key facts keep disappearing in clouds of smoke.

Take the case of America Tonight, the prime-time CBS news magazine co-hosted by Deborah Norville. Tobacco companies can't advertise on TV. But if they could, no paid ad would have as much propaganda value as the one-sided "news" segment on July 6 ridiculing Canada's cigarette taxes.

The segment -- which focused on cigarette smuggling from the United States to Canada -- lit up myths that the U.S. tobacco lobby has been packaging to block higher cigarette taxes in our country.

Proponents say that cigarette tax hikes reduce smoking while raising revenues. But no proponents appeared on the broadcast.

Opponents, though, were quite visible. In sync with them was CBS correspondent Bob McKeown, who seemed to interview himself at one point: "Did those high taxes convince Canadians to kick the habit? No. Last year, smoking in Canada actually increased for the first time in a decade."

If McKeown had interviewed anyone at the Canadian Cancer Society, CBS viewers might have learned that since 1982 -- the year cigarette taxes began rising in Canada -- smoking has decreased about 40 percent, even more among teenagers.

CBS reporter McKeown continued his self-interview: "The government's hopes for more tax revenue? Well, they went up in smoke, too. Because what high cigarette taxes in Canada did do was create a billion-dollar smuggling industry all along the Canada-U.S. border."

Wrong again. Cigarette tax revenues rose from $2.26 billion in 1982 to $6.3 billion in 1993 (in Canadian dollars). This occurred despite decreased smoking and increased purchases of cigarettes on the black market. (Cigarette taxes in Canada during this period climbed from an average 59 cents to $3.86 per pack.)

One of the on-air experts in the broadcast was Rod Stamler, identified by CBS only as "a former top officer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police." Unnoted was a more relevant and current affiliation: Stamler is a paid consultant on cigarette smuggling for a firm retained by the Canadian Tobacco Manufacturers Council.

CBS presented Stamler saying that organized crime was involved in the smuggling. But no one on the broadcast pointed out how the Canadian tobacco industry encouraged the smuggling -- by overexporting, to the U.S., cigarettes which re-entered Canada illegally.

Nor did anyone suggest that smuggling was fostered not by cigarette taxes being too high in Canada -- but too low in the United States.

So biased was the America Tonight segment that it was hard not to recall the controversial 1989 moonlighting appearance by co-host Deborah Norville (then a TV anchor for another network) at a Philip Morris USA convention in Hawaii. She was paid to anchor a mock TV show: "Norville tossed soft questions at Philip Morris executives and read promotional copy," reported the New York Times.

Also unmentioned on the broadcast was the fact that CBS is owned by tobacco tycoon Laurence Tisch.

New smoke in the cigarette wars has been generated by a multimillion-dollar blitz of full-page newspaper ads from tobacco companies, many assailing the prospect of higher cigarette taxes.

Philip Morris USA, America's top cigarette producer, bought ads in 40 dailies to reprint -- beneath the headline "Were You Misled?" -- a lengthy article from the new magazine Forbes MediaCritic. The article challenged the Environmental Protection Agency on its statistical survey of 30 studies examining a link between secondhand smoke and lung cancer in women whose husbands smoke.

The EPA's 1993 finding -- that environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) causes lung cancer and damages the respiratory health of children -- went beyond statistics. The EPA also cited evidence that ETS contains carcinogenic compounds and can cause cancer in laboratory animals and damage to DNA...and that non-smokers absorb and metabolize significant amounts of ETS.

The key to the Philip Morris ad strategy was the appearance of objectivity. After all, this was no tobacco industry propaganda -- it was a reprint of a seemingly unbiased article. "In any controversy," the ad concluded, "facts must matter."

But one fact unmentioned in the ad was that Philip Morris and its subsidiary, Kraft General Foods, donated over $10,000 in 1993 to the research group that employed the Forbes MediaCritic writer.

(Do facts really matter to Philip Morris? "Company Vice President Steve Parrish says he doesn't care how many independent scientists back EPA," reported Associated Press. "He'll never believe secondhand smoke is bad.")

Forbes is known for publishing hatchet jobs on Ralph Nader and other business critics. Its launch of a quarterly on media ethics last year was akin to Bob Packwood starting a publication on sexual etiquette.

At the same time Forbes MediaCritic was denouncing the EPA over secondhand smoke, Forbes magazine published a peculiar article -- titled "Thank you for smoking...?" -- which argued that smoking may sometimes be good for your health. The writer was identified only as "Nonsmoker, but tolerant."

We too are tolerant nonsmokers. But we're intolerant of deception.

News Flash: O.J. Simpson Is Not Robbing You And Your Children

Media Beat, July 13, 1994

With television fixated on the O.J. Simpson story, we're awash in "news" broadcasts that are sensational, entertaining -- and ultimately quite pointless.

As with previous TV spectacles -- Tonya and Nancy, John and Lorena, Joey and Amy -- no matter how the story ends, our lives will go on unchanged.

But other news events can change our lives forever. These stories are often sensational -- involving massive raids on our bank accounts -- without sex or violence.

Two new blockbuster reports have been virtually ignored by network TV during this O.J. summer. These scoops didn't result from parking a camera inside a courtroom. They required dogged investigations by print journalists willing to fight their way through documents and official smoke screens.

That's how Richard Keil of Associated Press uncovered malfeasance at the Resolution Trust Corporation, the federal agency in charge of the savings-and-loan bailout -- slated to cost generations of taxpayers several hundred billion dollars.

Back in 1989, when Congress and the White House approved the S&L bailout, influential news outlets joined in a sigh of relief. "It provides substantial assurance," editorialized the Washington Post, "that this immensely expensive assault on the U.S. Treasury won't be repeated."

But five years later, that "assault on the U.S. Treasury" continues -- with the help of the cleanup crew.

As Keil reported in AP dispatches on July 10 and 11, the RTC is a big part of the problem. The agency has regularly sold off real estate from failed S&Ls at far below market value -- to buyers who were able to quickly resell the properties at much higher prices. As usual, our tax dollars are subsidizing someone else's profit.

Keil unearthed many irregularities, including these:

• Last December, the RTC sold an Arizona property -- once owned by convicted S&L operator Charles Keating -- for $875,000. "The same day, the buyer resold the parcel to other buyers for $1.225 million, a one-day profit of 40 percent."
• In February 1993, the RTC sold a luxury office complex near Dallas to the owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team for $22.6 million. The new owner has reportedly made a deal to resell the property "for about $36 million -- a 59 percent return."
• In late 1991, the agency sold its interest in Keating's Phoenician hotel outside Phoenix to a Kuwaiti investment group, which later resold it to ITT-Sheraton at a profit. Taxpayers lost up to $35 million on the deal.

Keil told us it took him six weeks to piece the story together, especially since the RTC was "totally unhelpful."

No TV network has yet contacted Keil about picking up the story, although it certainly offers the kind of "visuals" that television savors. Keil's description of the undervalued Phoenician hotel -- "with its mother-of-pearl swimming pool tiles, gold ceiling inlays and marble columns" -- sounds like a "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" TV segment.

A second blockbuster story appeared on the Wall Street Journal's front page June 30. The report by Timothy Aeppel explained that the effort to "clean up" America's nuclear weapons complex -- with 17 key plants and labs nationwide -- has become a nightmare.

"The cost is expected to make the savings-and-loan bailout look like a bargain," Aeppel wrote. He quoted an Energy Department spokesman who said: "We're talking about an expenditure that will run into the hundreds of billions of dollars."

Savings-and-loan bailout a bargain! When we called Aeppel, he referred to the nuclear cleanup as "an unfundable item that has to be funded somehow."

Aeppel's article focused on the ill-fated "cleanup" of the Fernald uranium plant, located amid dairy farms near Cincinnati: "The slurry pond, where liquefied wastes were dumped over the years, was allowed to overflow regularly into a stream... Fernald's dust catchers were poorly monitored for many years, allowing radioactive dust into the air... Uranium had seeped into the groundwater, spreading contamination far beyond the factory gates..."

If TV networks love horror stories, why have they missed this new one? It's got visuals straight out of "Toxic Avenger."

"Farther down the road," wrote Aeppel, "past Fernald's radioactive slurry pond, is the really nasty stuff: Two silos holding 9,700 tons of radioactive ooze... The silos are so deteriorated that workers long ago piled dirt around them to shore them up."

According to Aeppel, many other weapons plants are "in much worse shape than Fernald."

Aeppel's reporting is the kind that can inform action-minded citizens. They might begin by asking the federal government -- which hasn't a clue how to clean up its nuclear complex -- why it continues to develop new atomic bombs. Or why taxpayers are footing the bill for messes left by nuclear weapons contractors like GE and Westinghouse.

Don't get us wrong. Escapist TV news stories have their place.

But if we don't get coverage of the ways that big business and government are raiding our pocketbooks, the day may come when we won't be able to afford a television.

Extra!

Whitewater Under the Bridge:

How the Press Missed the Story

Supporters of the Clintons suggest that Whitewater, a failed real estate venture from Bill and Hillary's Little Rock days, is old news. The election campaign is over, the argument goes, and the voters chose Clinton.

But Whitewater never really became a campaign issue in 1992. Most media gave a great deal of space to allegations of Clinton's sexual affairs and accounts of his draft maneuverings, but shied away from a story about corporate collusion with politicians--perhaps because the story wasn't pushed by an establishment party or politician.

Today, leading Republicans seem to want to talk about nothing but Whitewater and the Madison Guaranty S&L. That wasn't the case during the '92 campaign, when George Bush and his allies had reason to keep quiet: Bush had his own--much more costly--bank scandals to worry about.

Taxpayers lost $47 million when Madison, owned by Clinton crony James McDougal, failed. But taxpayers lost $1 billion in the collapse of the Silverado S&L, which boasted "First Son" Neil Bush as boardmember. And George Bush was implicated in the BNL bank scandal--which helped arm Iraq's Saddam Hussein with $5 billion of the U.S. public's money.

One Clinton opponent who wasn't silent in 1992 about Whitewater and related issues was Jerry Brown. But his calls for more investigation were silenced in much of the press.

As a media issue during the campaign, the whole affair rose and fell in about three weeks. On March 8, 1992, investigative reporter Jeff Gerth broke the story on the front page of the New York Times--presenting much of the essential information about the scandal that would be "exposed" more than a year later.

The article, "Clintons Joined S&L Operator in an Ozark Real-Estate Venture," asserted that Bill and Hillary Clinton "were under little financial risk" in the Whitewater venture initiated by McDougal. The implication was that this was a "sweetheart deal" offered in return for political favors. Gerth also pointed to Hillary's partnership in the powerful Rose law firm, which represented McDougal's S&L in filings before a state agency.

Gerth wrote that the McDougal/Clinton relationship "raises questions of whether a governor should be involved in a business deal with the owner of a business regulated by the state and whether, having done so, the governor's wife through her law firm should be receiving legal fees for work done for the business."

The next day's newspapers featured Bill Clinton's responses to the article--for example, that the venture did carry risk for the Clintons, who lost thousands. Ignored was Jerry Brown's news release calling on Bill Clinton to "release all papers pertaining to his ties to the failed Madison Guaranty."

Six days later, a Washington Post (3/14/92) report scrutinized the Rose law firm's representation of corporate clients--including Madison and bigger businesses--in front of state regulators appointed by Gov. Clinton. "If you want something from the state," a Clinton rival was quoted, "you go to the Rose firm." The article also reported, "One of Rose's most lucrative clients is the state government."

Hours after the Post story broke, in a Chicago debate that was the most heated of the campaign, Brown accused Gov. Clinton of "funneling money to his wife's law firm for state business." Clinton called it a "lying accusation."

The next day, Hillary Clinton responded to Brown's charges against her husband with a feminist appeal that would be prominently quoted for days and years to come: "I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas. But what I decided to do was pursue my profession."

By contrast, her revealing response to a question about whether she had represented Madison Guaranty was hardly quoted at all: "For goodness sake, you can't be a lawyer if you don't represent banks."

Although Brown's criticism was aimed at Bill--not Hillary--newspapers in the next two days were full of macho posturing from Gov. Clinton: "If somebody jumps on my wife, I'm going to jump them back." Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (3/18/92) even mocked Brown for being a bachelor: "One thing he knows nothing about--zilch, nada, zero--is marriage."

Within a week, Whitewater was virtually dead as a campaign issue. With press attention shifting to depictions of Brown as a character assassin--and discussions about "cookies" and "teas"--the issue of candidate Clinton's links to corporate power in Little Rock disappeared.

Our computer search of major dailies revealed only a couple dozen articles in 1992 mentioning Whitewater or Madison--compared to hundreds mentioning Hillary's "cookies" remark.

These days--as if overcompensating for dropping the ball on what should have been a serious campaign issue--national media have been inflating the story. As "presidential" scandals go, this one seems distinctly gubernatorial. It's silly to compare it to Watergate, a presidential abuse of the U.S. Constitution, or Iran-Contra, which involved the White House in secret wars and arms to terrorists.

The media onslaught on Whitewater has been propelled day after day by quotes of outrage from Republican senators like Phil Gramm, who received favors from a Dallas operator of three failed S&Ls, and Alfonse D'Amato, whose dealings in support of friends and relatives were investigated and rebuked by the Senate Ethics Committee.

But in 1992, a key reason elite media dropped the story was that the only newsmaker pushing it was Jerry Brown, who often spoke out about the corrupting influence of money in politics--but was considered an anti-establishment candidate, whom journalists were more prone to deride than quote.

December 18, 2003

Announcing the P.U.-Litzer Prizes for 2003

The P.U.-litzer Prizes were established more than a decade ago to give recognition to the stinkiest media performances of the year.

As usual, I have conferred with Jeff Cohen, founder of the media watch group FAIR, to sift through the large volume of entries. In view of the many deserving competitors, we regret that only a few can win a P.U.-litzer.

And now, the twelfth annual P.U.-litzer Prizes, for the foulest media performances of 2003: