This week, Media Matters for America launched a Hands Off Public Broadcasting campaign to stop partisan attempts to infuse public broadcasting with conservative political beliefs.

Week ending May 27, 2005
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This week:

Media Matters launches Hands Off Public Broadcasting

Increased criticism of media coverage of Iraq war

Media quickly drops stories critical of Bush administration

NYT Magazine profiled Santorum as “The Believer” -- but ignored evolution of his beliefs

Right-Wing murder fantasies escape media scrutiny

Media Matters launches Hands Off Public Broadcasting

This week, Media Matters for America launched a Hands Off Public Broadcasting campaign to stop partisan attempts to infuse public broadcasting with conservative political beliefs.

Rep. John Dingell (D-MI), ranking Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Rep. David Obey (D-WI), ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, have written letter to the inspector general of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) calling for an investigation into recent efforts apparently aimed at imposing a conservative political agenda on public broadcasting. You can help stop CPB chairman Kenneth Y. Tomlinson's partisan attempts to re-shape public broadcasting by asking your member of Congress to support the Dingell/Obey letter.

What could happen to public broadcasting if Tomlinson gets his way? Salon.com's Eric Boehlert points out:

Tomlinson's conviction is so strong he once suggested to the CPB board that Fox News anchor Brit Hume be invited to “talk to public broadcasting officials about how to create balanced news programming,” according to a report broadcast May 20 on National Public Radio.

We concede that the idea of public broadcasting taking lessons on “balanced news programming” from Fox News has some value -- humor value, that is. But there is nothing amusing about the early days of Tomlinson's journalism career. Boehlert reported that Tomlinson -- like William Schulz, who was recently hired by Tomlinson as one of CPB's two right-leaning ombudsmen -- worked for Fulton Lewis Jr., a “prominent radio broadcaster in the '40s, '50s and '60s ... known for his complete lack of objectivity” and for ruthless “smears”:

Lewis did not simply target liberal Democrats but also went after Republicans who strayed from the far-right agenda. In 1958 Caspar Weinberger, who later served as President Reagan's secretary of defense, ran for attorney general in California as a moderate Republican against an arch-conservative Republican who was a close ally of Richard Nixon's. Lewis, a Nixon acolyte, derided Weinberger during the campaign as “the People's World candidate,” referring to a communist newspaper.

Hunting communists became a full-time job for Lewis. According to a flattering 1954 biography of the broadcaster, “Praised and Damned: The Story of Fulton Lewis, Jr.,” Lewis was “as close to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy as any other man in the national scene.” Look magazine agreed, calling Lewis one of McCarthy's “masterminds.”

In “Praised and Damned” Lewis describes his loyalty to McCarthy this way: “When you know an individual to be attempting to do a public service, a patriotic service, and you see him maligned by groups which are not thinking in the public interest, you have a tendency to be a little over-generous with the guy.”

Boehlert noted that, according to the ultra-conservative NewsMax.com, Tomlinson worked as an intern for Lewis, and that Schulz was a writer for the radio broadcaster. While Tomlinson and Schulz may have only second-hand ties to McCarthy, Schulz's fondness for the demagogue was his own, as Boehlert demonstrates:

At the time, Schulz was running the [Reader's Digest] D.C. bureau. As [John] Heidenry [who wrote “the definitive history” of Reader's Digest] describes it in his book, “Though cynical about the Digest's grind-it-out conservatism, he kept an autographed photograph of Joe McCarthy in his home and claimed that the Wisconsin senator was a very misunderstood man.”

Public broadcasting isn't -- and never has been -- perfect. Media Matters has pointed out numerous instances of conservative misinformation on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR) (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here for examples) in the past, and we'll likely find many more in the future. But public broadcasting's problem certainly isn't that it's too liberal, as Fox News fan Ken Tomlinson would have you believe.

Why, then, is the right so intent on undermining public broadcasting? Maybe because news programs on PBS and NPR offer frequently solid, independent, serious reporting about serious topics -- something many on the right don't like. Turn on a public broadcasting news program, and you'll likely see reports about war, the economy, and health care -- but you probably won't hear about the “Runaway Bride” or Paula Abdul or Paris Hilton. That makes public broadcasting -- warts and all -- well worth protecting.

Learn more at www.HandsOffPublicBroadcasting.org.

Increased criticism of media coverage of Iraq war

Demonstrating the need for serious, independent journalism, a new congressional study and a report on Democracy Now! questioned the media's coverage of the war in Iraq.

A study conducted by the Congressional Research Service and released by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) and other House Judiciary Committee Democrats compared cable news coverage of serious issues, such as the Downing Street Memo, with matters of decidedly less global importance, like the “Runaway Bride” and the verdict in the Scott Peterson trial. The study, released in conjunction with a forum on “media bias and the future of freedom of the press,” found extensive coverage of Peterson, Michael Jackson, and similar stories, while the Downing Street Memo was ignored by cable news.

Following up on a Los Angeles Times report that found “U.S. newspapers and magazines print few photos of American dead and wounded,” Democracy Now! hosted a discussion of “How The U.S. Press Has Sanitized The War in Iraq”:

Images of thousands of dead U.S. soldiers helped to turn the tide of public opinion against the Vietnam War, but now photo-journalists are even banned from military funerals at Arlington national cemetery. A report this weekend in the Los Angeles Times documented the extremely rare publication of photos of American casualties in six major newspapers during a sixth month period. Readers of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Washington Post never saw a single picture of a dead serviceman or servicewoman in their morning papers.

Media quickly drops stories critical of Bush administration

Washington Post reporter Terry M. Neal wrote this week:

A certain and clear pattern has emerged when a damaging accusation or claim against the Bush administration or the Republican-led Congress is publicized: Bush supporters laser in on a weakness, fallacy or inaccuracy in the story's sourcing while diverting all attention from the issue at hand to the source or the accuser in the story.

Often this tactic involves efforts to delegitimize the entire news media based on the mistakes or sloppy reporting of a few. We saw this with the discrediting of CBS's story on irregularities in President Bush's Texas Air National Guard service in the 1970s. Although the CBS “scoop” was based on faked documents, the administration's response and backlash from both conservative and mainstream media essentially relieved Bush of having to deal with the story. In other words, the allegedly “liberal” media dropped the story like a hot rock.

We saw ex-members of the Bush administration -- former Treasury secretary Paul H. O'Neill, former White House counterterrorism adviser Richard A. Clarke, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John M. Shalikashvili and former director of faith-based charities John J. DiIulio Jr. -- similarly attacked by conservative bloggers and columnists. The mainstream media eventually backed away from coverage of their claims as well.

[...]

For conservatives and liberals alike, attacking the media has become a cottage industry, the very thing that drives both talk radio and blogs. Delegitimizing the media is seen as a legitimate way by some to protect those you support politically from the media's critical eye.

To be clear about something, the Bush administration's attacks on Newsweek don't represent a new phenomenon. The Clinton administration often attacked its accusers and criticized unflattering media reports. The big difference is that the Clinton administration didn't have any such supportive echo chamber of talk radio and blogs that now exist to amplify it.

Neal is right, of course, that the right-wing “echo chamber” gives conservatives a huge advantage in shaping what the media covers. But he left out another “big difference”: President Bush has benefited from a news media that has seemed to have little taste for following stories damaging to him, and even less for standing up to the right's assault on journalism.

To name only the most obvious example: The same news organizations that pursued the Whitewater “scandal” as though it were Watergate, Teapot Dome, and the Lindbergh Baby all wrapped into one virtually ignored Bush's controversial sale of Harken Energy stock. The basic information about that sale -- that Bush, while serving as a Harken director and member of the company's audit committee, dumped more than 200,000 shares of the company's stock shortly before Harken publicly announced massive losses -- was publicly available long before Bush ran for president. Yet The Washington Post, to name one news outlet, gave the matter a total of 26 words of attention during the 2000 presidential campaign. The July 30, 1999, edition of the Post reported:

Even now, questions linger about a 1990 sale of Harken stock by Bush that was the subject of a probe by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

That's it. Twenty-six words

On matters ranging from the Harken stock sale to his National Guard record to the Downing Street Memo and nearly everything in between, Bush has escaped the level of media scrutiny one would expect after seeing how the media treated President Clinton. Some of that, as Neal noted, is a result of conservatives' highly effective use of their “echo chamber” to push back on negative stories. But not all of it; there was no “echo chamber” drowning out coverage of Bush's Harken sale during the 2000 campaign. Such an “echo chamber” was unnecessary: the Post and other leading news outlets chose to ignore the story all by themselves.

And it isn't only that the attacks on Clinton got far greater coverage than those on Bush; the attackers did, too. In the 1990s, making wild and unsubstantiated allegations against President Clinton was a sure-fire way to become a media darling. And even when those allegations fell apart under even casual examination, the media kept going back to the David Bossies and Ann Coulters for more. Coulter made her name by suggesting it might be appropriate to assassinate a sitting president of the United States; just this week she was welcomed as a guest on CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight, as though she is a serious person with serious policy insights. When will we see a Bush critic like Joe Conason or David Corn grace the cover of Time magazine?

Some of the media's reluctance to aggressively cover stories damaging to conservatives, and tendency to quickly back down when challenged, are no doubt the result of decades of conservative attacks on the media. From trumped-up "studies" by the Media Research Center to the statement by Bush that he isn't “so sure it's credible to quote leading news organizations,” the constant stream of largely spurious conservative media criticism has cowed news organizations into a presumably subconscious pattern of giving conservatives a pass and bending over backwards to criticize progressives. That's not an original observation; similar sentiments have been expressed by journalists, former journalists, and media experts. But it is a simple reality that should be a part of any discussion of how the Bush administration avoids negative coverage.

NYT Magazine profiled Santorum as “The Believer” -- but ignored evolution of his beliefs

Media Matters noted this week:

In an 8,262-word New York Times Magazine profile of Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), contributing writer Michael Sokolove devoted considerable attention to Santorum's Christian conservative views, including his vehement opposition to abortion, but he failed to note that Santorum supported abortion rights before becoming one of Congress's most outspoken abortion rights opponents. In addition, though Sokolove did note in a parenthetical that Santorum attended a political fund-raiser during a visit to Florida to meet with Terri Schiavo's parents before Schiavo's death, he failed to mention that Santorum was criticized for attending the fund-raiser while skipping a forum on Social Security, purportedly out of respect for Schiavo's family.

While Sokolove stated that opposition to abortion is Santorum's “central issue,” he failed to explore how Santorum, who has stated that he was pro-choice until he ran for Congress, came to this belief. Sokolove omitted any mention of Santorum's about-face on abortion, including Santorum's own statement: “I was basically pro-choice all my life, until I ran for Congress. But it had never been something I thought about” [Philadelphia Magazine, December 1995]. Instead, Sokolove noted that Santorum worked for pro-choice Republican state Sen. Doyle Corman for five years and quoted Corman's wife saying of Santorum's stance on abortion, ''One of the interesting things about Rick is, the whole time he worked for us, we didn't know what his views were on that issue.''

Later in the article, Sokolove noted that Santorum “not only pushed the Senate to intervene in the Terri Schiavo case, but he also traveled to Florida and prayed with her parents.” But while Sokolove reported that Santorum also “attended fund-raisers for his Senate campaign while he was in Florida,” he neglected to mention that Santorum did so while canceling a scheduled forum on Social Security in Tampa “in what his aides described as a gesture of respect for Schiavo's family” [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 3/30/05].

Right-Wing murder fantasies escape media scrutiny

Last week, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly bizarrely speculated about the decapitation of Los Angeles Times editorial page editor Michael Kinsley, leading the Times to editorialize in response:

What popped O'Reilly's cork was an editorial one week ago on the Newsweek controversy. The magazine reported, apparently without good evidence, that American guards at the Guantánamo prison for terrorism “detainees” had flushed a copy of the Koran down a toilet. This reportedly led to riots in Pakistan and Afghanistan in which 14 people were killed.

Contrary to the impression you might get by following the story in the U.S. media, the riots were not about the journalists' use of anonymous sources. They were about perceived American contempt for the faith, the culture and ultimately the lives of Muslim Arabs and other dark-skinned people in distant lands.

[...]

Where did The Times' editorial page get the idea that winning the war on terrorism depends on persuading societies that breed terrorists that they should like us and adopt our values? Actually, this is not some wooly left-wing notion concocted over a joint during a lesbian wedding reception in Santa Monica. It is the cornerstone of the George Bush presidency, according to Bush himself.

In his State of the Union address in January, for instance, Bush said, “In the long term, the peace we seek will only be achieved by eliminating the conditions that feed radicalism and ideologies of murder. If whole regions of the world remain in despair and grow in hatred, they will be the recruiting grounds for terror, and that terror will stalk America....”

O'Reilly should be careful. Any further decapitation fantasies could get him in serious trouble with the Secret Service.

The Times was clearly making the point that President Bush has expressed sentiments similar to those O'Reilly objected to in the Times, and that, were O'Reilly to say about President Bush what he said about Michael Kinsley, he might find himself in hot water. Yet the right-wing NewsMax.com went out of its way to miss the point:

For the moment, O'Reilly is in the liberal paper's crosshairs, warning: “O'Reilly should be careful. Any further decapitation fantasies could get him in serious trouble with the Secret Service.”

It seems the paper has difficulty distinguishing between a threat and a “fantasy.” And when it comes to actual threats against its employees, the paper may want to check with its lawyers on whom to contact.

The Secret Service deals with threats against the president and vice president, not editorial writers.

Other than the Times' editorial, NewsMax's misplaced sneer, and O'Reilly himself, O'Reilly's comments about cutting Kinsley's head off escaped media attention.

Speaking of bizarre right-wing murder fantasies: On May 18, Media Matters revealed that Clear Channel radio host Glenn Beck said on-air that he was “thinking about killing [filmmaker] Michael Moore” and wondered whether “I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it.”

And the media didn't care.

Beck is syndicated on more than 100 radio stations; 3 million people listen to him each week -- as many as listen to Don Imus and O'Reilly -- and he fantasized on-air about killing a man. And there has been no outrage, no uproar, no media coverage at all -- save one article in the Columbus Dispatch that reported that two liberal radio hosts “needle[d] conservative radio talk-show host Glenn Beck for saying he'd like to kill Michael Moore.”

An obscure college professor named Ward Churchill wrote an obscure essay comparing victims of 9/11 to Nazis, after which an obscure college invited him to speak to a few hundred students -- and suddenly you couldn't turn on the television without hearing his name. A search of the Lexis-Nexis database yields more than 700 “hits” for “Ward Churchill and Nazi”; Bill O'Reilly alone has covered Churchill on 25 separate shows this year, according to the weblog CJR Daily.

Yet a right-wing radio host with a weekly audience in the millions can openly contemplate killing a man, and news outlets don't consider this a story.

At least he hasn't been featured on the cover of Time -- yet.

Jamison Foser is Executive Vice President at Media Matters for America.