Ships Be Sinking
goldberg, bernard
"Ships Be Sinking" If PCBs were sufficiently soluble and reactive in water instantly to destroy fish, there would be no persistent deposits to dredge. Most of the rest of the story hinges on the claim that PCBs...
...Rather, Brokaw and Jennings...
...Over the years, an inconvenient reality cropped up that Dan and Tom and Peter had nothing to do with and had no power to stop...
...So Mr...
...So how does Bill O'Reilly, the man Newsweek calls the "Fox News phenom," assess the future of Messrs...
...In the 1979-80 season, 75 percent of all TV sets that were on in the early evening were tuned to a network news program, either ABC, CBS or NBC...
...The ancient Greeks ate various delicious clays not only for their tangy taste but also to combat various infirmities...
...Poring through huge quantities of company documents collected since the 1930s and secured through the court's discovery process, Grunwald recounts a set of salacious out-of-context quotes in which various executives explain their ruthless acts by saying things like: "We can't afford to lose one dollar of business...
...The poll finds what seems to be at least a circumstantial link between viewers' noticing "a liberal media tilt" and their defection to cable...
...Seventy-four percent of Republicans believe that most journalists are more liberal than they are...
...And this, I think, is what throws the critics of O'Reilly and Fox...
...As for the alleged chemical leavening, it is unconscionable for environmentalists to continue to term- them contaminants...
...The ABC and NBC nightly newscasts, during the same period, didn't do as badly, but their ratings plummeted, too...
...It consisted of just four simple words, but in the world of sport it has been enshrined...
...People will get their news from the people they like and believe, which is very bad news for the old guard...
...With each passing year, the national evening newscast, as an American institution, is becoming less and less relevant...
...How else can we account for Bill O'Reilly and The O'Reilly Factor on the Fox News Channel...
...Yet today PCBs are proven to be essentially benign, less carcinogenic by the established Ames test method than broccoli, peanut butter, coffee or dozens of other commonly consumed products...
...Incidentally, along with his other crimes, Mr...
...No bulletin, there...
...Grunwald's ignorance of geophagy is unpardonable...
...Grunwald, sneers at citizens from the "poor side" of Anniston who "ate dirt...
...But instead of voting with their feet, Americans began voting with their remote control devices...
...Copyright 2002, Regnery Publishing...
...Consider a poll (of 822 randomly selected Americans) conducted by Brill's Content and published in its March 2000 issue...
...There certainly is a conservative "attitude" at Fox, a conservative sensibility...
...Most of the rest of the story hinges on the claim that PCBs are deadly toxic chemicals proven carcinogenic and known to be carcinogenic for decades...
...The sky's the limit...
...When I spoke to Bill, he pointed to a favorite Ailes example of how ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN frame the debate on a big issue like abortion...
...Salon -RET JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 23 sions' own flagship: their evening newscasts...
...That disparity says far more about the competition...
...creek...
...Looks like the sky's the limit...
...But we are not a conservative network...
...The story ends with a mendaciously menacing moral...
...And that would have been the end of it, except that another reporter asked a follow-up question...
...Nowhere does he acknowledge that he has encountered geophagy, dirt eating, which dates back to 40 B.C...
...It's as if the Berlin Wall had come down...
...In the 199495 season, for example, 51 percent ofArnericans with TV sets on were watching Dan or Peter or Tom...
...To assess the damage, just look at the scoreboard-the Nielsen ratings...
...24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2002...
...They'd rather show someone who just shot up an abortion clinic...
...It's like the last days of Pompeii...
...For 1996-97 and 1997-98, it was 49 percent...
...The Washington Post did a profile and said O'Reilly was "cable TV's ascendant talk star...
...Some whites in the American North sea son their meatloaf with dirt, as I personally have observed in at leastt one rustic organic restaurant near Harvard University...
...No one is confusing Bill O'Reilly with Bill Moyers, or Fox with PBS...
...And just as their overall broadcast entertainment ratings have dropped, broadcast-television network newscasts are losing to cable channels, especially those cable channels with name brands in particular news categories...
...They exclude voices in America like crazy," he told me...
...You'd expect Republicans to think that way...
...How far can the evening news ratings sink...
...Or "there is no point in going to expensive extremes in limiting discharges...
...This is how Roger Ailes, O'Reilly's boss at Fox News, explained it in a New York Tunes Magazine piece in June 2001: "There are more conservatives on Fox...
...Micheal (that's how he spells his name) considered the question, then put forth another four-word masterpiece...
...How far can it sink...
...Cited with inflammatory relish by Grunwald, none of the quotes from Monsanto executives are incriminating in the least, since as even the Post as much as admits in paragraph 73 of 85-there is no evidence whatsoever linking PCBs to cancer in humans...
...In time they may even be recognized as health foods of a sort...
...The company's critics "warn that Monsanto, which no longer produces chemicals [driven out of the business by litigation], is now promising the world that its genetically engineered crops are safe for human consumption...
...Or to put it another way: the ship be sinking...
...Not by a long shot...
...But there's obviously a corporate culture of deceiving the public...
...Seventy-five percent...
...Move over, Mr...
...The practice was brought to America by African slaves and survives today in the rural South...
...O'Reilly is currently the hottest anchor on the hottest news and information program on cable television...
...For years these guys said PCBs were safe too," Mike Casey of the Environmental Working Group told Grunwald...
...They're just not used to hearing so many diverse views on TV, most of them fairly intelligent...
...But, as the magazine puts it, "Perhaps more surprising, Democrats also perceive a liberal media tilt: 47 percent believe that most journalists are more liberal than they are...
...They're desperately trying to hold on.They see the smoke...
...Just the news people they no longer trust...
...If the networks were selling shoes instead of news, they'd be out of business by now...
...In Anniston and other affected cities, however, the abolitionists are forcing the extraction of every last trace of a part per million of PCBs from playgrounds and schoolyards, where children are assumed to gather to consume them al fresco...
...In other words, if Fox is alleged to have a conservative bias, that's only because there are so few conservative voices on the air at ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and MSNBC...
...SHIPS BE SINKING IN THE BUSINESS appeared in the Washington Post, though it could have been Mother Jones...
...You don't see an articulate spokesman who's pro-life on the network evening newscasts...
...After setting the Manichean scene, Grunwald proceeds to the libelous heart of his argument...
...Shakespeare, there is a new Bard in our midst...
...When Walter Cronkite handed Dan Rather the baton in spring 1981, The CBS Evening News was in first place...
...But except in the huge concentrations found in small streams once directly fed with factory refuse, even fish are little affected...
...In 1995-96 it was 50 percent...
...Of course, there's a good chance that a lot of the defectors from ABC, CBS and NBC nightly news are going to O'Reilly because, no matter what they say about wanting a fair, down-the-middle newscast, what they really want is a program with a conservative tilt...
...The ship be sinking," Micheal Ray said, rivaling "To be or not to be" for sheer elegance and beating it by two words for utter succinctness...
...Far more accurately, he could have been referring to the environmental coverage of Michael Grunwald and the Washington Post Company...
...I would direct him to the esteemed Miss Alice Walker's essay "The Black Writer and the Southern Experience" wherein she discourses- on the rural tradition of dirt eating with great judiciousness and even tenderness...
...They haven't abandoned the news...
...The decades of speculations about the telltale thinning of raptor eggshells, whether from DDT or PCBs, turn out to be just another urban ecomyth, refuted by voluminous evidence from ornithologists in the wilds...
...But twenty-one years later, in 2001, the share of the audience watching network news had sunk all the way to 43 percent...
...But that's not entirely the fault of the evening stars...
...I'm sure that a lot of O'Reilly's fans are right of center, that some are angry white males and females, live in the red states and voted for George W Bush...
...The men of Monsanto were absolutely correct in their belief that they were producing a valuable product, which prevents environmentally detrimental fires and explosions in electrical equipment and which, while toxic to rats in huge doses, is innocuous in its industrial uses...
...Perhaps they do...
...Here's where the bad news comes in for Rather, Jennings and Brokaw...
...Twenty years later, CBS was in last place, having lost more than half its ratings...
...Today, there are cable and satellite TV and the Internet, competition that Cronkite and Huntley and Brinkley didn't even have to think about...
...And as far as I'm concerned, the three people Bill owes so much of his success to are Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather...
...But whenever I tune in to The O'Reilly Factor, I hear opinions and arguments about the news of the day coming from the right and from the left...
...I spoke to Bill O'Reilly about this just before Christmas 2000, and he told me his viewers "perceive Rather and those guys as being left, but even more, they see them as being elitist, as not being in touch with them...
...and in July 2001, 43 percent...
...Roger definitely is on to something, but so are the critics...
...The numbers get worse every year...
...These days another ship is taking on water, The network news divi Former CBS News correspondent Bernard Goldberg is the author of Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News, from which this is excerpted...
...For all these wonders of junk science sciolism, we proudly award Michael Grunwald and the Washington Post the first J. Gordon Coogler !! BBY BERNARD GOLDBERG ack in 1982, when a reporter asked NewYork Knicks guard Micheal Ray Richardson what the problem was with his lastplace team, he offered up a succinct analysis...
...Then it slipped to 47 percent...
...Why else would so many conservatives be watching shows like The O'Reilly Factor...
...by the end of 2000, it was 44 percent...
...As anti Coogler Bill Tucker demonstrates starting on page 52, PCBs are harmless...
...Newsweek did a big spread-the "Life of O'Reilly," they called it-that says he makes more than a million dollars a year and has "the highest-rated cable-news program on TV" He wrote a book, The O'Reilly Factor, that was a New York Times number-one bestseller for ten weeks...
Vol. 35 • January 2002 • No. 1
