“Media Matters”; by Jamison Foser
Written by Jamison Foser
Published
Quote of the Week: "[I]f I'm wrong, Media Matters will probably correct me tomorrow." -- Tim Graham of the Media Research Center
Quote of the Week
"[I]f I'm wrong, Media Matters will probably correct me tomorrow."
-- Tim Graham of the Media Research Center
Cheney's chief of staff indicted
With today's indictment of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff (until his resignation in the wake of his indictment), for obstruction of justice, perjury, and making false statements, the conservative misinformation surrounding the Valerie Plame investigation will only intensify.
Media Matters has extensively documented and rebutted conservative misinformation that dominated news coverage up until now. Two summaries of some of the most widely repeated false claims can be found here and here. Our full coverage can be found here.
Last week, we offered refutations of some false, misleading, and irrelevant claims we expected to see more of as the Plame investigation came to a head. This week, we offer a look at some more rhetoric you can expect to hear and read in coming days -- and the reality:
Rhetoric: Democrats and liberals didn't think perjury was a serious charge when President Clinton was accused of it.
Reality: As Paul Begala, who was a senior aide to President Clinton during the Lewinsky investigation, pointed out on CNN, Democrats typically did not defend Clinton by saying perjury is insignificant; they said he was not guilty of perjury, often, in part, because they contended that a false statement about a consensual relationship that wasn't material to the lawsuit in which it occurred does not constitute perjury. The Republican-controlled Senate seemed to agree, acquitting Clinton of all charges (including perjury) in his impeachment trial.
Rhetoric: Special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald's investigation has dragged on for two years; he indicted Libby only so he would have something to show for it.
Reality: Republican lawyer Joseph diGenova repeatedly emphasized on CNN in the hours surrounding the indictment announcement the fact that the investigation has taken two years, as though that reflected poorly on Fitzgerald or the indictment. These claims ignore the possibility that the investigation took two years in part because of Libby's alleged false statements and obstruction.
Rhetoric: Fitzgerald's decision not to indict anyone for outing Plame means nobody did anything wrong in disclosing her affiliation with the CIA.
Reality: This is simply baseless. There is no indication the investigation has been concluded. And the absence of criminal charges does not prove the absence of wrongdoing. Among other things, even if no crime were committed, government officials may have violated the terms of their nondisclosure agreements, penalty for which could include loss of security clearance and even dismissal.
Ex-Bush State Department chief of staff blasts Bush administration; media ignores comments
Former Bush State Department chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson has blasted the administration, saying in a speech and an op-ed that it has “courted disaster” in Iraq, Iran, and North Korea and referring to the “ineptitude of this government.” Wilkerson added that Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld formed a “cabal” to construct foreign policy in isolation from other government figures, weakening the decision-making process, said that Congress failed in its oversight role, and said Condoleeza Rice was “extremely weak” as Bush's national security adviser.
Surely the news media devoted extensive coverage to such stinging criticism from a former official who served at the highest levels of the Bush administration? While the print news covered the speech, broadcast and cable news outlets virtually ignored it -- despite the fact that Wilkerson's speech was videotaped, meaning footage was available for broadcast:
[A] Media Matters for America review of broadcast and cable transcripts since October 19 shows only six mentions of the speech on television news -- once each on two segments from Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume (“Fox News All-Stars” and “Political Grapevine”), three instances on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews, on October 20, 24, and 25, and once on NBC's Meet the Press. Aside from Meet the Press, no network news program has covered it. CNN, as well as the three broadcast networks' nightly newscasts, have failed to cover the speech altogether.
O'Reilly really dislikes Media Matters
Bill O'Reilly doesn't like us. In case that wasn't clear from his previous comparisons of Media Matters to Mao, Castro, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Nazis, O'Reilly has renewed his assault on us in recent weeks. On his radio show, he called us “100 percent dishonest” -- without offering a single example of a factual error on our part. And he devoted three consecutive television broadcasts this week to attacking Media Matters, with the help of activists funded by right-wing conspiracy theorist financier Richard Mellon Scaife -- again, all without pointing out a single factual error on our part.
In between taking cheap shots at Media Matters, O'Reilly used his radio show to unveil his “coward” list -- his list of “people who are afraid to answer any questions.” Earlier in the show, O'Reilly described the list as “people who will not stand up and answer questions about their bomb-throwing statements,” adding: “You have a moral obligation to do that. If you don't, you're a coward.” Presumably, O'Reilly thinks it would be immoral as well. And so we have a new word with which to describe O'Reilly's continued refusal to allow a Media Matters representative to appear on Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, despite O'Reilly's repeated attacks on us. Previously, we've noted that -- by his own definition of the words -- O'Reilly's refusal proves him to be a “gutless” “coward.” Now we can add “immoral” to that list.
O'Reilly's continued attacks on Media Matters establish him to be, in his own words, an immoral, gutless coward.
Media ignored Bush administration's manipulation of outsourcing report
A Media Matters analysis found next to no media coverage of the Bush administration's delay of a congressionally mandated report on outsourcing until after the 2004 election:
The news story that the Bush administration may have defied a June 2004 deadline and delayed a congressionally directed report on outsourcing until well after the 2004 elections, then edited the final report to generally support the practice, has largely failed to gain any media attention. [...] According to these reports, the Commerce Department finally released its report on the outsourcing of information technology (IT) and high-tech service jobs to other countries on September 8, more than a year after the June 2004 deadline that was written into the conference committee report of the 2004 consolidated appropriations bill (House Report 108-401) funding the study and six months after MTN [Manufacturing & Technology News] had filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking the report.
Outsourcing was controversial during the 2004 elections, and by not releasing the report upon the deadline directed by Congress, the administration avoided a possible election-year discussion regarding its findings. In addition, MTN and Business Week found that the final report, in contrast to the original government staff's six months of research, had almost entirely edited out the possible disadvantages of outsourcing, often using data from groups that support outsourcing. This entire incident, however, has largely gone unnoticed by the news media, being picked up thus far only in a single segment on CNN and three print media stories since the initial reports.
CBS, MSNBC, American Forces Radio shun liberals; prefer conservatives?
New CBS News president Sean McManus gave $250 to President Bush's 2004 re-election campaign, as first revealed by the Petrelis Files blog. As Media Matters has noted, the CEO of CBS' parent company, Viacom, endorsed Bush in October 2004. Despite the claim made by Tim Graham of the Media Research Center during an October 26 appearance on The O'Reilly Factor that CBS anchor Bob Schieffer “is out to embarrass Bush,” Schieffer is, in fact, an old friend of Bush's. Media Matters has extensively documented examples of conservative misinformation on CBS broadcasts.
On October 26, MSNBC Countdown host Keith Olbermann revealed that an MSNBC vice president chastised him in 2003 for having two liberal guests on his programs within a few days of each other. Olbermann told author and Air America Radio host Al Franken:
OLBERMANN: You were good enough to come on this newscast with me late in the summer of 2003. It was August or September. And by coincidence, either the next day or the day before, [actress and Air America Radio host] Janeane Garofalo had been a guest on the newscast. And I got called into a vice president's office here and told, “Hey, we don't mind you interviewing these guys, but should you really have put liberals on, on consecutive nights?”
As FAIR has pointed out, the Franken and Garofalo appearances in 2003 happened over three days, “a period of time in which Olbermann's show interviewed a total of 9 guests.”
According to Olbermann, MSNBC's hostility to liberal guests is a thing of the past. But Media Matters recently demonstrated that MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews has featured panels discussing the Plame matter that skewed to the right:
A review of Hardball programming since July 2 revealed nine separate discussions of the Plame investigation with panels solely composed of Republicans, prominent conservatives, and journalists or political figures with no public partisan or ideological affiliation. By contrast, Media Matters found only one instance of a panel that was arguably skewed left.
Finally, nearly a year and a half after Media Matters first drew attention to Rush Limbaugh's status as the only political commentator on American Forces Radio, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) has introduced legislation that would require the American Forces Radio and Television Service (AFRTS) to establish an Office of the Ombudsman and satisfy its own mandate of providing fair and balanced political programming.
Limbaugh's status as the only political commentator with a show on American Forces Radio was preserved by the Defense Department's last-minute cancellation of plans to broadcast progressive radio host Ed Schultz beginning October 17.
NY Times columnist apparently thinks “middle class” and “white” are synonymous
New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote that the Republican Party is becoming “the party of the middle class.” To support this claim, Brooks wrote that “Bush beat [Sen. John] Kerry [D-MA] among whites earning between $30,000 and $75,000 a year by 22 percentage points.” Brooks thus excluded all non-white people from his definition of “middle class.”
After 2,000th U.S. fatality in Iraq, Operation Truth launches campaign to “Honor the Fallen”
Operation Truth has launched a campaign asking newspapers to give more prominent coverage to the deaths of troops serving in Iraq.
Jamison Foser is Executive Vice President at Media Matters for America.