Presswatch (II) / In God They Trust
Cony, John
everybody should have is Time's preference for hagiography over journalism. Carlson treats lightly the closed-door meetings of the health-care task force. She virtually neglects Hillary's role as...
...You must understand the media guidelines under which stories like this are covered...
...The Rev...
...There might have been some light shed, though, during the gay, lesbian, and bisexual march in Washington, which took place at the same time as the school battle in New York...
...In an editorial, it warned about "the potentially destructive involvement of the religious right...
...She virtually neglects Hillary's role as the administration's diversity commissioner...
...The answers grow elusive...
...been "guillotined," and the Times demanded that everyone on the central board be ousted...
...But now the time has come for me to yield this department, as I will be editing the Forbes MediaGuide Quarterly...
...Thus Cardinal O'Connor and PatRobertson were officially joined, along with all the benighted parents who thought it a bad idea to teach fourth-graders about condoms and spermicidal creams...
...Instruction would start with first-graders, and God forbid anyone should call it proselytizing...
...The question of who opposed whom was a puzzler...
...It deserved a tougher look than Sherrill gave it...
...None of this, however, ever attracted much attention in the national media...
...The religious right was anyone opposed to the enlightened ideas of Joseph Fernandez, the schools chancellor...
...The quarterly also will report stories that journalism has ignored or for other reasons failed to cover...
...The schools chancellor was mincing no words...
...The difficulty here, of course, was oversimplification, compounded by the fact that Robertson was not in New York...
...But readers of this space should know that I am not leaving the pages of this magazine, the first to publish me (you can look it up—June 1975: "The Amazing Grace of C.S...
...Another journalistic genuflection: Bill may be doing poorly, but Hillary's doing great...
...i W hat is the religious right, and who are its members...
...The elections, it said, will be a "big test for the religious right...
...Our opponents," she said, "believe in monotheism...
...Sherrill focused in particular on HRC's April 6 speech at the University of Texas—her "politics of meaning" speech...
...O'Connor, Schlesinger said, seemed to be confirming "the fears long cherished by the No-Nothings [sic] in the 1850s, the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, and a succession of anti-Catholic demagogues that the Roman Catholic Church would try to overrule the American democratic process...
...A principal one is that if the religious right is on one side, then everyone else must be on the other...
...It also pointed out that two lawyers who represented the apostate board in Queens had once worked for the archdiocese...
...One of the fieriest was identified as Urvashi Vaid, an attorney...
...The Times even advanced the novel argument that the central school board was interfering in the school system...
...Meanwhile, the previously unimaginable was taking place in New York...
...Few columnists or commentators become distressed when Catholic bishops make liberal pronouncements on disarmament, say, or foreign policy...
...The press began to see the outlines of a plot...
...Even the most progressive politician may now admit, however, that the community boards did not always attract the best people...
...Even on election day, the New York Times was still worried...
...The Times reported that Cardinal O'Connor planned to officiate at the wedding of a member of the central board who had objected to the Rainbow Curriculum...
...This, however, always left them with the problem of what to call Cardinal O'Connor...
...I've now written this column since President Bush's first hundred days—which is to say, I've written it for more than 1,500 (fifty-four consecutive issues)—a record, as I see it, nearly on the order of Lou Gehrig's...
...To debut this fall, the quarterly will evaluate the print and broadcast news media according to the traditional standards of accuracy, balance, fairness, depth of insight, and (for opinion pieces) the quality of the arguments...
...And is HRC really, as Carlson writes, "the icon of American womanhood...
...They did not like the Rainbow Curriculum or the free distribution of condoms, either...
...ABC once went with "the Christians and the liberals," but surely there had to be at least some liberal Christians, and so that didn't do it, either...
...Even students whose parents objected would be able to get them...
...This was no small act of bravery on the board's part...
...This time the central board balked, and when it did the New York press got upset...
...Meanwhile, local television commentators, or maybe Bryant Gumbel, often tried to encapsulate the ideological factors by identifying Pat Robertson as an "ultra-conservative...
...Thus, the battleground became confused...
...but whatever it was, it was to become a part of "all curricular areas" in the public schools...
...n fact, big media has always suspected that the Catholic clergy does not recognize the separation of church and state, and should be watched closely, although there is an inconsistency in how this is done...
...Fernandez was a secular saint done in by the forces of darkness, andattention had to be paid...
...Then the Catholic Archdiocese of New York had had the audacity to help distribute the pamphlets in which the coalition reported the answers...
...At some point, the Hillary Journalism (most of it written by women) needs a thorough review—though don't expect such an effort to win a Pulitzer...
...Its stated aim was to teach children about different cultures—multicultural diversity—with one of the cultures being that of gay men and lesbian women...
...Lewis...
...Al Sharpton, one of the city's reigning clown princes, was quoted as saying it was the "religious white" and not the religious right, but that never caught on...
...Vaid attacked the far right, theocracy, and all the other usual things, and then let go with a dark indictment...
...The true higher morality showed itself only after Fernandez introduced the now-famous Rainbow Curriculum...
...Unlike ministers, rabbis, or imams, they were best seen but not heard...
...Emboldened by the stand of the community school board in Queens, parents elsewhere in the city began to make noise...
...New York Newsday said the schools chancellor had...
...It said they might destroy "the truce of tolerance" they had been granted by other Americans...
...It warned Catholic bishops about being too pushy in the exercise of their faith...
...The first is a one-day story, but the second is a cause...
...The, bishops, apparently, operate only under sufferance...
...The media had always known about Pat Robertson, of course, but now there were John Cardinal O'Connor and goodness knows who else, all joined as co-conspirators...
...What first alarmed CBS, and indeed almost everyone else in big media, was the intrusion of Robertson's Christian Coalition into New York's official culture...
...In 1991, Fernandez proposed the distribution of free condoms in high schools...
...Or consider the Post's Martha Sherrill, long on the HRC beat...
...It was not quite clear what kind of culture this was, or indeed whether gays and lesbians really had one...
...There is seldom a middle ground, and so semantic problems abound...
...Fernandez himself was clear about that...
...When he criticized Mario Cuomo for his views on abortion, for example, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...Meanwhile, the bribing of board members for jobs in school districts has become almost routine...
...As he told the presumably shocked listeners of National Public Radio, "This is a highly organized group of the extreme religious right wing...
...I've read that speech...
...Then Fernandez recommended a new curriculum in AIDS education...
...The big idea was to get to the kids early...
...p ause now for some background: The community school boards were legislated into law in 1969 after the counter-culture chanted "Power to the people," and progressive politicians responded...
...It is the speech of a college sophomore, full of what columnist Charles Krauthammer called "adolescent self-discovery...
...ABC's "World News Tonight" named Fernandez its "Person of the Week," and praised his moral courage...
...Some liberals were uncomfortable with the Rainbow Curriculum, too...
...All this, however, was only prelude...
...Press, politicians, and the chattering classes all supported Fernandez...
...Nine members of a board in the Bronx, for example, have been arrested on various charges since 1988, while a board in Brooklyn recently named as "principal of the year" a man once indicted for grand larceny...
...ABC did not make it clear what Fernandez had been so morally courageous about, but it managed to suggest somehow that he was right up there with Gandhi and Schweitzer...
...Fernandez's contract as schools chancellor was to expire in June, but the board voted not to renew it...
...But corruption is one thing, and the higher morality is another...
...Fourth-graders would get the dope on the spermicidal creams and condoms, while fifth graders would learn about the mechanics of oral and anal sex...
...I'll be back, and often, writing on the presidency, legal issues, the courts, maybe even a journalist or two—and whatever else needs the eye of this American spectator...
...She has "warmth" and "charm"—even "gravitas...
...Cardinal O'Connor has often been reprimanded for speaking out about homosexuality or abortion...
...A Times editorial earlier had said much the same thing...
...Neither the coalition nor the archdiocese actually endorsed any candidates, but there was no telling what they might do next...
...Subsequently, the central school board did the right thing...
...New York's central school board, which stood above all the community boards, approved Fernandez's proposal with a four-tothree vote...
...A whiff of papism hung in the air...
...Then, two nights before the elections, CBS grew somber again...
...Who would be the first editorial writer to recall rum, Romanism, and rebellion...
...wrote a Times op-ed piece warning him to watch out...
...The incomparable C-Span showed us the orators who spoke that day at the Mall...
...Sometimes they solved this with a quick verbal reference to Robertson, followed by a mere visual reference to O'Connor...
...Sherrill wrote a front-page Style section piece that sought to probe "Hillary Clinton's Inner Politics...
...The coalition had had the temerity to send questionnaires to the candidates for the 288 positions on the city's thirty-two community school boards, asking them how they stood on some moral issues...
...The usually impeccable Robert MacNeil introduced a "MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour" report on the school-board controversy by calling it a battle between the "Christian right and liberals," but that did not do...
...Obviously, the citizenry had to be warned...
...As the "CBS Evening News" somberly noted the week before the community school board elections in New York, "Voter apathy elsewhere has led to victory by the religious right...
...Maybe, you thought, she had something...
...Pronouncements on faith or morals,though, can upset them...
...The sissy Times and CBS might have thought it was only the "religious right," but he knew it was "extreme...
...My new assignment will chart new territory, and it promises to be some adventure...
...There is no point in delineating everything in the controversy that followed, but it must be noted that a community board in Queens told Fernandez to take his Rainbow Curriculum and shove it, and that the members of the community board were predominantly Catholic...
Vol. 26 • July 1993 • No. 7
