Presswatch I Dim Sam
Corry, John
Dim Sam Time chose John Paul II as Man of the Year-a nice selection, although not the right one. The Pontiff may have graced Time's cover far better than some of the lemons the magazine has chosen...
...The Times editorial on his maiden speech as Speaker was ungracious, but it did say he had "a zeal for reform...
...On "This Week With David Brinkley," for instance, Sam Donaldson declared that a 17-percent flat tax meant that everyone, rich and poor, would pay the same amount in taxes...
...A more serious problem is when the news pages of the Times show a similar obtuseness...
...One of its dizzier editorials-"In Praise of the Counterculture"-would have embarrassed even the Nation or Mother Jones...
...in its Periscope section about the fearsome Black Rhino bullet...
...William F. Buckley's National Review, for example, was a mouthpiece for the Old Right...
...Jennings did not bat an eye...
...Compared to old Herblock cartoons of Nixon, it was almost benign...
...Brinkley grew exasperated, and had to explain it again...
...The cheap shot was by CBS News...
...According to Anthony Robbins, one of the self-improvement experts Clinton recently invited to Camp David, "Your reality is the reality you create...
...Rich then called her...
...Gingrich, though, seemed more angry than embarrassed, and "Eye to Eye" flopped in the ratings...
...Fortunately, the editorial said, Senator Al D'Amato, as "the new chairman of the Finance Committee, is uniquely positioned" to avert this...
...Frank Rich of the Times, who has never forgiven him for either Troopergate or The Real Anita Hill, was distressed this time by Brock's evisceration in the January Spectator of Strange Justice, the book that did its best to prove Clarence Thomas was a liar...
...Since the election, he said, Clinton had talked "to all sorts of people, including a couple of widely recognized gurus in self-improvement...
...That was nonsense...
...Gingrich...
...It ran far behind "Seinfeld," and barely tied "Matlock...
...The Washington Post reported that Marianne Williamson, who wrote A Return to Love, also visited Clinton at Camp David...
...As has been widely noted, Gingrich has turned to Alvin Toffler, author of The Third Wave, even though as gurus now go, Toffler may be oldfashioned...
...D'Amato is the chairman of Banking...
...The media seem to have given up on Bill Clinton, and only diehardsPeter Jennings, most notably-are trying to resurrect him...
...The election has left much of the media muddled in different ways...
...Williamson, apparently, is also in tight with Anthony Robbins...
...This was picked up and expanded upon by the New York Times, AP, and all the networks...
...The Pontiff may have graced Time's cover far better than some of the lemons the magazine has chosen in recent years, but surely the Man of the Year was Newt Gingrich...
...M ore trouble came when Connie Chung asked Newt Gingrich's mother what her son had said about Hillary Clinton: "Why don't you just whisper it to me, just between you and me...
...Clinton replied as expected: The people were unaware of all the wonderful things he had done...
...The New Yorker described the Speaker as sinister: "Gingrich has not mastered even the appearance of benevolence...
...In our poll today, the absolute critical items for Congress to address: number one, cutting the deficit...
...A week later, the New Yorker said the Spectator specialized in "vitriolic abuse...
...Meanwhile, the Times ran an editorial-deeply felt, even if speciously argued-insisting that the Republican tax and budget proposals would be disastrous for New York...
...The Times said it was worried that a joyless Newt Gingrich "may prefer a stricter regimen of social conformity and religious observance" than all the rest of us...
...number two, health-care reform...
...The charge was preposterous...
...O 47 The American Spectator March 1995...
...It was good to see the Spectator out on the cutting edge, of course, although it cherishes its independence, and its editors become cross when they are thought of as anyone's mouthpiece...
...Why then, Jennings asked, didn't more people like him...
...The anchorette had done no more than to solicit a response from Mrs...
...Brinkley tried to explain to him that 17 percent of a wealthy person's income was more money than 17 percent of an ordinary wage earner's income...
...Time may have thought one more Gingrich cover was too much, although, then again, it may only have been confused...
...What, Jennings asked, had he learned about himself...
...This was an improbable worry, but no matter...
...Then Jennings spoke again...
...The criticism, however, was misplaced...
...However, Robbins's infomercials, which are seen on television late at night, seem to offer some hints...
...But even as she spoke, Hall was being interviewed on CBS and ABC...
...On this slender evidence, Rich accused Brock, and the Spectator, of going "beyond the pale of even tabloid journalism...
...Hysteria is in their voices...
...When he had met them earlier that day, "they really said that a mistake was made in 1981 when they put in trickle-down economics and ignored the deficit and quadrupled the debt of this country...
...he was "King of the Hill" on another...
...A grateful Clinton took off on that...
...But more important, the connection between the Spectator and Gingrich suggests why this magazine has been under so much recent attack...
...Gingrich will probably survive the Times...
...The Times, however, was out to lunch...
...It said the '60s counterculture freed us from "the dictatorship of the majority culture," spawned a "new morality-based politics," and fulfilled the ideals "at the heart of the American intellectual tradition...
...perhaps Clinton even believed it himself...
...She is featured in Power-Talk, his new audio magazine, which he will send you free if you buy his tapes...
...Putnam's Sons...
...by John Corry The lesson was that the things that grip big media are not of great interest to most people...
...Cokie Roberts said, "There's never been anything like it...
...The interview took place before Christmas, but it was not broadcast until Gingrich became Speaker...
...Clinton danced around the question...
...to get her to sign a statement denying her contribution to the book...
...The two issues, which were absolute priorities for two years, and you don't get any credit for it...
...Robbins himself, a large young man with a lantern jaw, declares that even though we live in trying times, "the past does not have to equal our future...
...The paper does not like him or his policies, and neither does most of big media, but he is getting some grudging respect...
...Gingrich then made her famous reply: "She's a bitch...
...These included old and new "leaders," "groups," and "mouthpieces" in the conservative movement...
...Big media, or, the "old media," has lost its authoritative voice...
...Change, it seems, is everywhere...
...the editorial page is allowed to express its opinion, even if, in its opinion, conservatism is best ignored...
...It has been wrong too often on too many issues...
...Williamson became famous when she was endorsed by Oprah Winfrey, and then officiated at the marriage ceremony for Elizabeth Taylor and her eighth husband, Larry Fortensky...
...It employs the best reporters in the business, but when it speaks now as an institution, it is hard to imagine who listens...
...Meanwhile, David Brock continues to be subjected to mindless attack...
...For reasons of her own, though, she complained to a leftist academic about Brock...
...The message there for Clinton seems clear: the election doesn't matter...
...The academic told Rich...
...Still, you cannot fault Time overmuch...
...Gingrich barely made the first page in the next day's edition...
...Perhaps he believed the new Republican leaders really had said that...
...It had already given us Gingrich as "Uncle Scrooge" on one cover...
...Then Gingrich gave an extraordinary speech when he was sworn in as Speaker, and the press as a whole paid attention...
...two weeks later...
...Gingrich was on the covers of Newsweek, Time, and U.S...
...According to Newsweek, its mouthpieces -are C-Span, Rush Limbaugh, and The American Spectator...
...Change was hard to come by, he said, and when he pursued it he had encountered "fanatic opposition" and "the politics of destruction...
...Nouetheless, he said, he was impressed by the new Republican leaders...
...Donaldson said then that he understood, but he still looked utterly baffled...
...The Times has become our most prominent example...
...Here's another one," he said...
...In fact, Bob Packwood is the new chairman of the Finance Committee...
...The success of the one has been commensurate with that of the other, and the two often share the same critics...
...America's premier newspaper sounded like an aging hippie with a couple of bum marriages behind him and a yearning to return to Haight-Ashbury and reclaim his lost youth...
...When CBS put this on the air, other journalists criticized Chung for a cheap shot...
...In the second part of the ABC interview, Jennings alluded to Clinton's New Age guest...
...Katie Couric announced an "exclusive" NBC "Today" show interview with Bobby Hall, the helicopter pilot just released by the North Koreans...
...The source Rich referred to already had retracted on television what she purportedly had said in the book...
...CBS wanted to embarrass Gingrich, and publicize Chung's "Eye to Eye...
...He had kept the House in session until 2:24 that moming, but his most prominent page-one mention was in a story about -one of his aides...
...He confounded all the deep thinkers who insisted political parties were dead, and now he may force Congress to get a grip on itself...
...Mrs...
...It also empowered just about everyone, and "gave people in dead or abusive relationships permission to break out...
...People who either have attended his seminars or bought his audio tapes-three payments of $59.95 each-say, among other things, that they have lost weight, restored personal relationships, and made lots of money...
...As evidence it cited a cover illustration of Hillary Clinton as a witch, although as vitriol this wasn't much...
...Newsweek even published a chart, "From Old Right to Newt Right," laying some of them out...
...Besides, Robbins's disciples are supposed to include "some of the ultimate achievers in our culture...
...Simultaneously, transcripts and press releases were freely distributed, along with the usual platitudes from CBS about how it was only reporting the news...
...It also said that "at least for the moment, Newt Gingrich is America's pivotal political figure...
...The Black Rhino was supposed to pierce armor, or leave an exit hole as big as a baseball bat...
...Obviously, we are in a new age of media and politics, with gurus on all sides...
...The accusation made no sense, but Rich also despises Gingrich, and the election had left him undone...
...Whatever he had learned, he just wasn't telling...
...It turned out, of course, that it did neither...
...She "confirmed the story," Rich wrote, "but would not comment further...
...What inspired the editorial, of course, was the Republican ascendancy in Congress...
...This time he did not even bother to disguise his prompting by putting it in the form of a question...
...J ennings, for example, began a twopart interview with Clinton on ABC's "World News Tonight" by telling him he had accomplished wonders-reducing the deficit, creating jobs, and scoring one triumph after another...
...Donaldson, however, was insistent: 17 percent of the one was the same as 17 percent of the other...
...Jim Lehrer said 46 The American Spectator March 1995 the coverage had "the feel of a presidential inauguration...
...But years pass, politicians move on, and the Old Right has long since been replaced by the "Newt Right...
...All the network anchors were on Capitol Hill for the opening day...
...Newsweek ran an item John Corry, a former New York Times media critic, is the author of My Times: Adventures in the News Trade (Grossed G.P...
...Rich cited no errors in Brock's story, and probably had neglected to read it, but he insisted that Brock had attempted "to bully a source in Strange Justice...
...Surely that was correct...
...News & World Report the week the new Congress went into session...
Vol. 28 • March 1995 • No. 3
