Clarence Thomas: Affirmative Action Success Story (6/21/95) By Jeff Cohen & Norman Solomon There is something unseemly about a guy who has just built a house on the beach and is now leading the charge to stop all further beach-front construction. Or a recent immigrant who climbs the soapbox to call for a halt to further immigration. Or a beneficiary of affirmative action programs who climbs the ladder of success by attacking affirmative action. That kind of unseemliness was demonstrated this month by Justice Clarence Thomas. But few reporters took note -- even though it should be the media's job to spotlight hypocrisy. Thomas cast the deciding vote in the Supreme Court's 5-to-4 decision to narrow federal affirmative action programs. But Thomas went beyond even fellow conservatives on the bench -- he argued for an immediate end to affirmative action. There's an obvious contradiction here: Clarence Thomas benefited enormously from the kind of affirmative action programs he now seeks to kill. Indeed, Thomas' rise from his dirt-poor upbringing in rural Georgia into an elite Ivy League law school is an affirmative action success story. But don't take our word for it. Take his. In a November 1983 speech to his staff at the federal Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, Thomas called affirmative action ''critical to minorities and women in this society.'' Then, his remarks got personal: ''But for them (affirmative action laws), God only knows where I would be today. These laws and their proper application are all that stand between the first 17 years of my life and the second 17 years.'' As an undergraduate at Holy Cross College, Thomas received a scholarship set aside for racial minorities. He was admitted to Yale Law School in 1971 as part of an aggressive (and successful) affirmative action program with a clear goal: 10 percent minority enrollment. Yale offered him generous financial aid. Affirmative action can't guarantee success, but it can open doors previously closed to women and people of color. The rest is up to those who walk through the doors. By all accounts, Thomas was a hard worker who studied long hours. But his place at Yale Law School -- his key to later success -- was opened by a race-conscious admissions program, the kind he is now intent on outlawing. After this month's Supreme Court decision, few news outlets explored the sharp contrast between Clarence Thomas' obsession with destroying affirmative action and his own personal history. One wonders what Thomas believes about his past. Maybe he prefers the fairy-tale account provided by Rush Limbaugh, whose talk show he listens to each day: ''Clarence Thomas escaped the bonds of poverty by methods other than those prescribed by these civil rights organizations.'' The truth is that Thomas owes thanks to the civil rights movement -- whose decades of lawsuits, protests and lobbying removed barriers for individuals like Thomas. Yet he seems to relish his role as one of the movement's main enemies. Since the early 1980s, Thomas' career soared thanks to a perverse form of racial preference. It was his race, as Thomas has admitted, that got him two civil rights posts in the Reagan White House; the jobs came because he opposed the civil rights movement. So did his boss, President Ronald Reagan, whose opposition dated back to the years of Martin Luther King Jr. President Bush -- who, like Reagan, had opposed the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act -- later chose Thomas to fill the Supreme Court seat of civil rights legend Thurgood Marshall, the only other African-American to sit on the highest court. In his recent Supreme Court opinion blasting affirmative action, Thomas could find no moral difference between ''laws designed to subjugate a race'' and laws that benefit a race ''in order to foster some current notion of equality.'' Thomas went on to complain that affirmative action programs stigmatize the beneficiaries -- an argument not raised by the plaintiff in the case, a white building contractor who says he unfairly lost federal work to a Latino-owned business. Responding to Thomas, Justice John Paul Stevens pointed out that if beneficiaries of affirmative action feel stigmatized, they can simply ''opt out of the program.'' It's worth considering. If Thomas feels traumatized or stigmatized for having benefited from affirmative action, he could give back his law diploma. Such a move would be absurd -- since Thomas earned his degree by studying hard and passing all required exams. Even more absurd, though, is Thomas' current mania for closing doors to others that the civil rights movement helped open for him. -- Jeff Cohen is executive director of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Norman Solomon is co-author of ''Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in the News Media.'' Advertising: Cash Cow for TV Networks (6/14/95) By Jeff Cohen & Norman Solomon The U.S. economy may be in a slump, but executives at the four major television networks are feeling upbeat. That's because they've just set a record -- $ 5.6 billion in advance sales for commercials in the next TV season TV commercials are more lucrative than ever, but they wore out their welcome for many viewers long ago. Even Mr. Advertising himself, the famed ad wizard David Ogilvy, confessed in a 1963 memoir that he was ''angered to the point of violence'' by commercials intruding on TV programs. ''As a practitioner, I know that television is the most potent advertising medium ever devised, and I make most of my living from it,'' Ogilvy wrote. ''But, as a private person, I would gladly pay for the privilege of watching it without commercial interruption.'' That's supposed to be possible on PBS, also known as ''public'' television. But the plugs for program funders have been getting longer and flashier. And some PBS affiliates are now planning to air 30-second ''enhanced underwriter credits'' -- a euphemism for commercials. The renowned historian Arnold Toynbee declared several decades ago that ''the destiny of our Western civilization turns on the issue of our struggle with all that Madison Avenue stands for.'' Toynbee might have been exaggerating, but the fact remains that ads are rarely condemned in the media outlets they're subsidizing. Ogilvy was candid when he wrote, ''It strikes me as bad manners for a magazine to accept one of my advertisements and then attack it editorially -- like inviting a man to dinner and then spitting in his eye.'' In broadcasting, even more than in print, the ads paying the piper seem to be above criticism. The wider its reach, the more that advertising melds into the prevailing scenery. We take ads for granted -- and sometimes we look at them fondly. With so much care and money lavished on TV commercials, they're sometimes far more creative than the programs they sponsor. But modern TV commercials are a slick version of an age-old advertising quest -- to suck us into an unreal world of fabrication and mesmerizing artifice. As one observer put it back in 1924, ''Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it.'' When television was in its infancy four decades ago, the sociologist C. Wright Mills challenged the notion that people were just getting the commercial messages they wanted: ''Consumers are trained to 'want' that to which they are most continually exposed. Wants do not originate in some vague realms of the consumer's personality; they are formed by an elaborate apparatus of jingle and fashion, of persuasion and fraud.'' Meanwhile, Vance Packard raised a key question: ''By encouraging people constantly to pursue the emblems of success, and by causing them to equate possessions with status, what are we doing to their emotions and their sense of values?'' Here's one answer to that question: The daily advertising barrage deepens feelings of inadequacy, making us more receptive to the quick fixes offered by commercials. As author Felix Greene wrote in 1970: ''Advertising is nothing more than a technique to keep people in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction with what they possess and in a permanent state of itchy acquisitiveness.'' Now, of course, hucksters are exploring the frontiers of high-tech. The Internet beckons, and America's advertising industry is accelerating onto the information superhighway. For years, the Internet was almost commercial-free -- a forum for direct, decentralized communication among scholars, scientists and just plain folks. But, in the last year, the tacit taboo against ads in cyberspace has been broken. Initial on-line advertising by such companies as Volvo, Hyatt Regency, MasterCard, Ragu, J.C. Penney Co. and Reebok is clearly the harbinger of a much bigger corporate selling blitz on the Internet. For now, Internet ads are fairly limited and experimental. Yet, we should remember that advertising started out as an oddity on television, too. The first TV commercial was probably on July 1, 1941, during a Dodgers-Phillies baseball game on New York station WNBT. The ad, for Bulova watches, aired at a cost of $ 9. Fifty-four years later, the network execs at ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox are celebrating their slices of a $ 5.6 billion advertising pie. They call this progress. Many viewers might call it something else. -- Jeff Cohen is executive director of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Norman Solomon is co-author of ''Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in the News Media.'' The Distant Stars of the Pundit Elite (6/7/95) By Jeff Cohen & Norman Solomon Are you tired of TV politics shows? We're talking about the programs starring elite insiders -- pundits who've grown so close to the money and power corrupting Washington that they're almost blind to the corruption. Here's our proposal for a totally new TV show, with a panel of interesting, informed, down-to-earth people: perhaps a teacher, auto worker, nurse, retiree, small-business owner and homemaker. Instead of chatter among Washington's nobility, the show would feature people of ordinary means debating the issues and questioning those in power. It would be less like ''Meet the Press'' than ''Meet the Oppressed.'' Less like ''This Week With David Brinkley than ''This Week With Roseanne Conner'' -- the canny heroine of the TV sitcom. A rule would be needed: If any of our working-class pundits evolve into stars who accept $ 30,000 for a one-hour speech, they'll immediately be fired -- and replaced by folks whose incomes are about $ 30,000 per year, close to the country's median family income. Why is a new show necessary? Because the existing punditocracy has lost touch with most of us. They don't just inhabit a different neighborhood, but a different planet. Let's pilot a spacecraft around the present-day studio of ABC's ''This Week With David Brinkley.'' GEORGE WILL: The well-connected Will insists that viewers have no right to know about his connections. In April, Brinkley's executive producer asked Will -- before interviewing Bob Dole -- to reveal that his wife would soon be communications director of the Dole presidential campaign. Will claims the disclosure was unnecessary, even though Dole's answers to Will's future questions will be partly shaped by Will's wife. In recent weeks, Will has crusaded -- on the Brinkley show and in his syndicated column -- against Bill Clinton's sanctions on Japanese auto imports. When newspapers reported that Will's wife, Mari Maseng Will, was paid $ 199,000 last year to lobby for the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association, Will denied any duty to disclose that fact. ''I was for free trade long before I met my wife,'' said Will. On our proposed non-elite pundit show, an auto worker moonlighting as a pundit would probably offer a different perspective on how ''free trade'' affects the U.S. economy. COKIE ROBERTS: Few would mistake Roberts for a working-class hero. Her parents were members of Congress. Her brother, Thomas Boggs, is a top corporate lobbyist. Her establishment views are imbued with an attitude that she was born into power and deserves to stay there. The June issue of American Journalism Review shows that Roberts resents scrutiny of how she supplements her six-figure income from ABC-TV and National Public Radio. Two months ago, she received $ 35,000 to speak at a Junior Leagubusiness conference -- a fee supplied by JM Family Enterprises, a giant Toyota distributor. According to the Chicago Tribune, Cokie and Steven Roberts, her TV-pundit husband, picked up $ 45,000 from a Chicago bank for a joint appearance last October. Now that's togetherness. On Feb. 20, the couple was scheduled to speak at a gathering of Philip Morris executives, but Steve had to appear alone when Cokie canceled at the last moment. Philip Morris, the world's biggest cigarette manufacturer, is a force on Capitol Hill -- the beat that Cokie Roberts covers. On our ''outside the beltway'' show, it's likely that a nurse on the panel -- having seen the effects of tobacco up close -- would be less cozy with Philip Morris. SAM DONALDSON: A multimillionaire who has pocketed up to $ 30,000 per speechto corporate gatherings, Donaldson holds down the ''left wing'' of the Brinkley show. He has also pocketed $ 97,000 in federal wool and mohair subsidies in the last two years for owning a ranch in New Mexico. He lives in a suburb of Washington, D.C. On the people's pundit show, we'd probably hear a different perspective on agriculture from a family farmer struggling to earn in a year what Donaldson earns from a single speech. DAVID BRINKLEY: The program's host exudes an air of being above it all. But he's not above taking fees -- $ 18,000 per speech -- from Washington's monied interests. Last July, Brinkley joined Donaldson, Roberts and other ABC News stars in protesting the network's hesitant limits on outside lecture fees. Maybe a real-life Roseanne Conner - whose smart-alecky outlook doesn't stem from an elite perch - would be an ideal host of a pundit show. Is there a TV network ready to air this ''outside the beltway'' show? Are there sponsors ready to fund it? As Roseanne would say, ''Don't hold your breath.''