PUNDIT WATCH
Dykstra, Peter
pundit watch Peter Dykstra He Who Is Without Sin The celebrities of the Washington talk shows displayed their wisdom, insight, and, above all, experience on the Clarence Thomas controversy. While...
...He unveiled his full political makeover in a January column which criticized black Gulf War protesters as ingrates, and an incendiary October column excoriating Clarence Thomas's detractors...
...While The McLaughlin Group and Inside Washington waged war on Anita Hill's credibility, the leading attacker on both shows was a man with his own sexual-harassment credentials...
...Among those put off by Williams's snide analysis were four female Post staffers, whose own sexual-harassment charges against Williams were under house investigation...
...Jane Fonda, fiancee of Braves owner Ted Turner, vowed to abstain from further racist rooting...
...A local TV station spilled the beans several days later, prompting Williams to launch a Thomas-like offensive...
...Two years later, McLaughlin labeled Anita Hill a "fraud" and called her allegations "raw sewage...
...After all, it's only a game, and who could object to a little genocidal humor...
...When Floyd Brown talks character assassination, people listen...
...I hope he's able to maintain some of his bullheadedness," said Williams of Justice Thomas, "be strong, and be a man of principle...
...Brown bankrolled the infamous TV commercial which ran during the hearings, bludgeoning Ted Kennedy, Alan Cranston, and Joe Biden for their own murky pasts...
...Black America is a winner" from the upscale career images both Thomas and Hill present, he condescended...
...The American Indian Movement and other groups took exception...
...The McLaughlin Group took an equally dignified approach to the Thomas controversy...
...ABC Sports pundit Dan Dierdorf and New South columnist Lewis Grizzard—who has more than a touch of the Old South in him—chose to attack Fonda...
...Fellow panelist Morton Kondracke advanced the discussion, invoking the credit-to-their-race strategy...
...Paying for their tickets were the Disney Corporation and Delta Airlines...
...She was asking for it: That old standby, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times, gave us one of the silliest moments in the Thomas controversy...
...The unexpected success of baseball's Atlanta Braves brought in a tide of overwhelmingly white fans waving foam-rubber tomahawks and singing mock-Indian war chants...
...Dean alleged in the case that after she confronted McLaughlin for harassing both his receptionist and Dean herself, McLaughlin ordered her to phone the family of the receptionist to report that she was "both mentally disturbed and suicidal...
...John McLaughlin compared Hill to Janet Cooke, the Washington Post reporter who ten years ago admitted to fabricating a Pulitzer Prize-winning story...
...his former assistant Linda Dean and supported by testimony from two other women employees, in 1989...
...Operation Mickey Mouse: NBC News, under fire for its leadership role in slicing newsroom budgets, came up with an innovative way to fund its coverage of a marginal news event in October...
...The Thomas column featured a broadside against Anita Hill in particular and a belittling treatment of sexual harassment in general...
...Atlanta talk show host Neil Boortz organized a counterdemonstration of "cavalry" to head off the AIM protesters who gathered outside the Atlanta ballpark during the World Series...
...Post media-beat reporter Howard Kurtz reportedly filed a story on the fracas, only to have it killed by the paper's management...
...Calling feminists' wrath over the Thomas travesty "sour grapes," Williams appeared on Inside Washington in direct violation of a Post order banning his further comments on the touchy subject...
...Bryant Gumbel and the Today show crew journeyed to Disney World for a two-day Love Feast...
...Even though they don't understand it...
...Schlafly added that the Hill story was "a last-ditch effort" by feminists who "consider men the enemy and abortion the goal...
...He settled his own case, brought by Peter Dykstra is taking early retirement from his job as national media director for Greenpeace...
...Finally came conservative activist Floyd Brown, who called a Washington news conference to decry the "character assassination" of Clarence Thomas...
...The press has been somewhat less gracious...
...McLaughlin is practiced at this sort of dodge...
...Good sports: The sporting world responded to Native American groups' protests of Indian team nicknames with characteristic finesse...
...In it, Williams accused journalists following the story of "sacrificing journalistic balance for a place in the mob...
...do not view Clarence Thomas as another Willie Horton...
...Fred Barnes, a regular on McLaughlin's Flatulent Five, took the Discredited Black Women Conspiracy Theory a step further by comparing Hill to Tawana Brawley...
...For this, Juan Williams and John McLaughlin are our twin Windbags of the Month...
...Only after uproars in his and other newsrooms did NBC News boss Michael Gartner nix the deal by reimbursing Disney and Delta for Today's goofy judgment...
...Under the front-page headline Women Speak Out for Judge, the paper declared, "Contrary to what feminists and the media suggest, many American women...
...Williams, a Washington Post reporter who worked on the acclaimed civil-rights movement documentary Eyes on the Prize, has become a political chameleon in recent years...
...Meanwhile, NBC's Weather Buffoon, Willard Scott, caused a few embarrassing moments at the network headquarters when it came out that he had for years been pitch man in ads for First America Bank, owned by none other than BCCI...
...Heroine of the Times story was Phyllis Schlafly, who theorized that it appeared that Thomas's accuser, Anita Hill, "was chasing him...
...Before settling, McLaughlin termed the charges against him "bizarre and outrageous...
Vol. 55 • December 1991 • No. 12
