Presswatch: Network Meanness
Cony, John
"Presswatch: Network Meanness" GOP defensiveness is entirely a function of media bias....
...Do not look for Bob Dole to talk directly about Whitewater, much less about Paula Jones...
...and much more...
...that meant the Republicans were running a cover-up...
...his opponents "practice the politics of destruction...
...On the first two nights of the convention, ABC, NBC and CBS averaged only 25 minutes apiece of podium coverage during their one-hour programs...
...Now Kemp was being hailed as the savior of his party, and Black was a senior adviser to Dole...
...It is a rum group, as the Brits might say, that hangs out in the White House...
...Crime and Weyrich...
...I've maintained that this campaign is going to be one of the nastiest, bare-knuckled, directto-the-gut campaigns in America's political by John Corry history," CNN anchor Bernard Shaw said after he heard Dole's acceptance speech...
...It seems that CBS had displayed better judgment when, instead of showing the videotape, it showed Dan Rather questioning Susan Molinari...
...The priesthood isn't just another occupation...
...If they did not, the Republicans might look, well, attractive...
...Abuse of position...
...Bigots and extremists were nowhere in sight...
...Paula Zahn to Jeb Bush after Mrs...
...If it talks about Little Rock ethics or the character issue it can do so only subliminally...
...Clinton apologists have been remarkably successful in promoting the rule here: Even if either Clinton has ever done anything unseemly, which, of course, neither one has, talking about it, or even suggesting it, is much worse...
...On the other hand, even Elizabeth Dole had to stay away from Hillary Clinton, who is off limits now even subliminally...
...The big story coming out of the Republican convention was that the networks were mad as hell and they weren't going to take it anymore...
...George Bush appeared on CBS and NBC, but hardly at all on ABC...
...In her walk-about speech at San Diego, Elizabeth Dole did this nicely, although she was the only Republican 42 October r 9 9 6 . The American Spectator able to manage it in prime time...
...Ford is an ex-president...
...That was inexcusable...
...Conscrzsafrvc America is the most extensive collection of conservative writings, documents, illustrations, periodicals, boxoks, newsletters, policy & issue papers ever assembled on a single CD-ROM...
...Mandatory celibacy isn't the problem...
...On the day the convention opened, R. W. Apple, Jr., the paper's chief Washington correspondent, filed a page-one news analysis that began with an indictment: "This is a convention run by revisionists, determined to obscure if not rewrite recent history, to the electoral advantage of the Republican Party...
...The networks' herd of independent minds all agreed with the Times and Johnny Apple...
...The game was to suggest the Republicans were character assassins, even though at their convention they were almost entirely benign...
...This reaffirms that she is a liar, although political etiquette now insists it would be rude to point this out...
...As noted by many observers, they seldom knew when to shut up...
...No Republican, for example, not even Kay Bailey Hutchison, heaped as much ridicule on Clinton as Texas Gov...
...Rooks and How to Win Many Other Topics Literature an Election • The Constitution • Remembering Learn proven tech- • Amer can History Reagan niques for power- • 1997 Federal • Environmental Gore ful...
...It would be reassuring to think they observed sound principles when they did, but often they seemed to be acting out of either incompetence or malice...
...The image of inclusion" is "starkly at odds with reality," Jim Wooten declared on ABC...
...There was a biting suggestion in this, although it would have made the anchors and commentators uncomfortable to acknowledge it...
...Clinton has always insisted she had nothing to do with the highhanded firings, but the new documents suggested she was involved with them even before she left Little Rock...
...But in all too many parishes we don't hear much, if anything, about the ongoing slaughter of preborn babies, or the Church's teachings on homosexuality, pre-marital sex, pornography, etc...
...The Republicans can raise the character issue only obliquely...
...On the other hand, it might also have been good that the networks did not really try...
...Dole was making a pertinent point, but he was thought to be out of bounds for making it...
...Well, I believe that everyone knows my wife believes she has class, style, caring and love," Clinton replied...
...Dick Gephardt, the House minority leader, was furious because he believed Clinton had sold him and his House colleagues out...
...How it should be regarded, however, is determined largely by the media...
...Clinton himself praised Dole in "A Place Called America," the treacly 16-minute film the delegates saw the next night On the other hand, even the delegates ought to have been embarrassed by that...
...Dole spoke: "Did Elizabeth Dole supersede your mother tonight...
...Never before has it been so easy to access so much information in so little time for such a low cost" Conservative America Scholars and Reprlie111tatire Leaders Groups Ronald Reagan • Heritage Foundation • Barry Goldwater • American • Margaret Thatcher Enterprise Institute • Russell Kirk • Empower America • Newt Gingrich • Free Congress • James Madison Foundation • Plato • Intercollegiate • Moses Studies Institute • and more...
...Broken vows...
...It seems the Republicans had turned them all into patsies...
...The ingenuous Tipper Gore deplored the "unimaginable incivilities" against Mrs...
...Priests are charged with the cure, not the ruin, of souls...
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...Jack Kemp got only 6 percent of the Republican primary vote in 1988, while Charles Black, his campaign manager, spent $20 million...
...We just get marshmallows - and platitudes and pop psychology...
...A field day for those, especially in the media, who hate the Church...
...Not hues Periodicals and • Culture Wars Newsletters • Big Government • National Review • Right to Life • Human Events • Taxes • Imprimis • Welfare Reform • First Things • Crime • Crisis • Feminism • Commentary • 1996 Presidential • Family Voice Election • Wirthlin Report • and more...
...What had really gone on here...
...Bush had been out of line...
...Broadly speaking, the real problem is that in certain sectors of Catholicism there's been a failure of faith in the teaching authority Christ conferred upon His Church, and consequently a tragic capitulation to a decadent culture...
...Clinton is forever being maligned...
...Television has been a boon to them on that...
...Clinton and Hollywood producer Harry Thomason had discussed plans to fire the travel office staff even before Bill Clinton was inaugurated as president...
...and more...
...Sold separately, the information contained on this disc in its printed form would cost over $l2,O...
...Then Rather quoted Bush saying Barbara Bush had upheld the honor of the White House, and asked him what he thought about it...
...The film was produced by Harry Thomason, the player in the travel office scandal, and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, his wife, who had told the Washington Post that Dick Morris talked to her about what he thought should be in the film...
...until she became my partner in this great endeavor...
...Clinton may not have been speaking from his heart, but clearly he was at the top of his form...
...As an indication of one of the nastiest campaigns in history, though, this wasn't much -Barry Goldwater, after all, was supposed to be a cardcarrying Nazi-and any number of Democrats in Washington privately acknowledge that the White House is full of young smartasses who never grew up, and ought not to be trusted even with lunch money...
...Nonetheless, that would not happen if there was a small rise, say, 2.7 percent, up from a.5 percent, in the economic growth rate, and the Republicans could pass the budget that Clinton vetoed...
...Dole was contrasting a wounded war veteran with a draft-dodging, skirt-chaser...
...Mail to: NEW OXFORD REVIEW Room 148 1069 Kains Ave...
...In keeping with their once and future predilections, though, the correspondents had treated her speech as all in good fun...
...The Republicans had won, according to the Times, because NBC and ABC had shown a six-minute videotape about Ronald Reagan...
...Rather had helped him to hit one out of the ballpark...
...There was a lesson in this, although none of the networks would admit it...
...they were not worth network coverage...
...Clinton when she introduced her at the Democratic convention...
...Koppel, the New York Times reported the next day, was reflecting "the widespread feeling here that news organizations are being had...
...Violated trust...
...Some things never change...
...But clearly they had this backwards...
...Hooray for CBS and its refusal to be hoodwinked and bamboozled, but note that CBS trailed NBC and ABC all week in the Nielsen ratings for the convention coverage...
...The conventions were fine, and it was the anchors and commentators who were superfluous...
...Ann Richards heaped on Bush at the Democratic convention in 1988...
...Considering the network records, infomercials may have been more worthwhile...
...Anchors and commentators decried the "tightly scripted conventions" and the absence of "real news," and, as Ted Koppel said, the Republicans had produced an "infomercial...
...happened, and Apple, and the Times, were sounding a call to arms: The networks had to repel the revisionists...
...If, like Chesterton, you want the Church to move the world rather than move with the world - or if you're just curious - subscribe today...
...No network showed the speech by Gerald Ford on opening night...
...The story about Clinton adviser Dick Morris having his toes sucked by a happy hooker with whom he shared White House secrets is delicious, but mentioning it openly will be made to seem churlish...
...If Koppel was right, and the conventions were mere infomercials, it might have been because the networks did not know how to report them...
...and more...
...In fact, the Times had seen this coming...
...The White House had resisted doing this by claiming executive privilege, and it succumbed only because it faced a contempt charge by Congress...
...And so on, and so on, while hardly anyone on television noticed that no one in San Diego mentioned the Republican Revolution, and only Kemp said that it would be nice to re-elect a Republican Congress...
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...The Republicans will have a hard time on the character issue, but the Democrats will exploit what might be called the meanness issue...
...Republican Bush was not...
...Apparently the revisionists would not tolerate reminders of either the "shrill animosity" that marred the Houston convention four years ago or of the "confrontational record" of the Republican Congress...
...PRESS W A T C H Network Meanness GOP defensiveness is entirely a function of media bias...
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...When Gore told the delegates in Chicago that Dole was "a good and decent man," they all applauded, moved if not by genuine feeling, then at least by the convention's floor whips...
...What shocked him so was Dole saying that "within the Clinton administration a core of the elite never grew up, never did anything real, never sacrificed, never suffered and never learned," but could use public money to finance itself...
...The network newspeople were not interested...
...Suspicion cast upon our good, hardworking priests...
...Severe penalties would be attached...
...The media, however, barely noticed, even though the documents indicated, among other things, that Mrs...
...Thus the character issue may be a wash for the Dole campaign...
...So a married priesthood is no cureall...
...Some clerics, we now know, have been pretending to be celibate...
...0 bserve some wonderful ironies here...
...On "6o Minutes," the Sunday after the Republican convention closed, an obsequious Dan Rather said to Clinton that "some of your staff members" say Dole has been "captured by the extremists in the Republican Party, the radical part of the Republican Party, including Newt Gingrich - Is that what you think...
...JOHN CORRY is The American Spectator's senior correspondent...
...References to an elite that never grew up touch on the character issue...
...Papal authority and Hell are taboo subjects...
...The Dole campaign is trying to create amnesia about the party's negative image," Leslie Stahl said on CBS...
...Rather asked Clinton then if he got mad "when this sort of thing happens...
...It's all so very sad...
...it's a sacred calling...
...Therefore the anchors and correspondents agreed that conventions no longer served a useful purpose...
...But we expect more of priests than we do of others...
...When Pat Buchanan declared war on the culture in Houston four years ago, the correspondents and anchors described the Republican ethos as insular and bigoted, or, that old standby, extreme...
...Flagrant sin...
...We at the NEW OXFORD REVIEW, a Catholic monthly magazine, stand with Rome in its efforts to reinvigorate the Faith and restore discipline...
...They wanted the people who lived in what Apple quaintly called "videoland" to see only happy or inspiring images...
...It still found the networks wanting...
...But as often as not it was just plain dumb...
...Hillary Clinton, he continued, "had never been subject to any of this sort of criticism...
...Her mother, she said, had called Bob Dole's withered arm a "badge of honor," and now, she continued, Americans could earn their own "badge of honor" by electing Dole president...
...Dole said he wanted to cut taxes by 15 percent, and the commentators said it would surely increase the deficit if he did...
...He also told Rather he had not bothered to watch the Republican convention on television, but that he understood it had been full of "snide remarks" and "negative personal asides...
...For a moment Clinton's eyes seemed to grow misty...
...No doubt Bush wanted everyone to contrast her behavior with that of you know who-commodities trading, travel office firings, lost and then found billing records, and so on-and ABC knew a good thing when it saw it...
...Ht v Radic,rl To order call 1-sot-61-RIGHT (74448) all for only J, 43 The American Spectator • October 19 9 6 To which Clinton replied as expected: Everyone ought to take the high road, and the campaign should be about issues...
...The Vatican thunders against abortion, illicit sex, assisted suicide, dissenting theologians, and more...
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...The day after Apple had warned them, the paper had another pageone story...
...If the full Catholic Faith isn't being preached from the pulpit, we shouldn't be too shocked if it isn't being observed in the rectory either...
...The same day Dole made his acceptance speech, the White House surrendered some 2,000 pages of documents on the travel office firings to the House Oversight Committee...
...Grover • Economics Freedom Norquist, Frank • Foundations of • Conservative Mind Luntz, and others...
...Obviously it would be bad if that...
...He pledged that the Democrats would not do anything like that...
...They had gone to ever so much trouble-CBS even put a camera, or Bobcam, on top of Bob Schieffer's head-but the party had not cooperated, and the correspondents and anchors had nothing to do...
...and more...
...It cleverly cut to him only when he introduced Barbara Bush as "a woman who unquestionably upheld the honor of the White House...
...He had made a personal attack...
...This means that things look better now for Clinton than they do for Dole...
...The headline said: "Networks vs...
...Morris, of course, had costarred in his own two-character film, and reportedly it was full of high kinkiness...
...The Times reported, approvingly, that "he pressed her on whether the convention's images suited its reality...
...Where's the beef...
...The networks had been warned...
...Therefore the Dole campaign has a handicap...
...This convention is more of an infomercial than a news event," Ted Koppel said snippily, explaining to viewers why he was pulling "Nightline" out of San Diego while the convention was only half-way through...
...When he interviewed Richards in Chicago, Tom Brokaw recalled it as "rollicking...
...But we have a problem, and it's profound...
...Sex scandals in the Catholic Church were few and far between before the sex revolution of the fibs and before Vatican Il got misinterpreted to mean "anything goes...
...Newt Gingrich did not speak in prime time because the Republicans did not want to appear "mean-spirited and extremist," Tim Russert said on NBC...
...At the same time, her apologists assert, contrary to all evidence, that Mrs...
...Clinton liked that phrase so much he repeated it later in an interview with Newsweek, which, in turn, used it in its headline...
...Nobody's perfect...
...We cover the full range of issues of concern to Catholics who are trying, often against considerable odds, to uphold the Faith...
...Maria Shriver to Mrs...
...Good stories went uncovered, and analysis was shallow...
...Democratic strategists, helped by a quiescent media, have turned her into a victim, bravely enduring unfounded attacks...
...The Greatest Conservative Library of All Time - on CD-ROM for Instant Access How ri ht do you want to be...
...After all, Rather said, Bush obviously was casting aspersions on his wife...
...Indeed, many of the recent offenders aren't attracted to the opposite sex, and remember that Bakker and Swaggart were married men when they fell...
...t 44 October 19 9 6 • The American Spectator Treacherous Catholics...
...the Organizers: Early Rounds Go to the GOP...
...conservative Budget • Unlimited Access campaigns from • US Code • Agenda for America greats like Paul • Statistics • Guns...
...Despite that, though, the Times remained displeased...
...Those who make excuses for wayward priests, bishops, and Religious are logically required to excuse all the Jim Bakkers and Jimmy Swaggarts too...
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...Democrat Richards was a popular media figure...
...he appeared to be trying to get a grip on himself...
...Western Civilization • and more...
...Make check payable to NEW OXFORD REVIEW...
...The audience preferred Reagan over Rather and also that ridiculous Bobcam...
...Al Gore slipped a mumbled line into his speech about Clinton defying the Republicans in Congress, but never stooping to their level and attacking "his opponent's wife...
...Sometimes, of course, this was good dumb fun...
...Say now that the networks did their best...
...The Democrats are being ostentatious about their own high-mindedness...
...In San Diego, though, they were annoyed because everything seemed so bland...
...According to The Catholic Answer, we're having "a notable impact" for the good on our troubled Church...
...Network television was to be their battleground...
...Even if these parishes and their priests look Catholic, we may wonder if they're just pretending to be Catholic...
...The rule is enforced by the media...
...Clinton, asking her about her late father: "What do you think he would have thought about you, his little girl...
...Jesse Jackson got his loudest applause when he conjured up the "moral obligation to defend the integrity of the First Lady...
...This would be to make a farce of Christianity...
Vol. 29 • October 1996 • No. 10
