A perfect storm of anti-conservative news items led and dominated the network newscasts on Thursday night as ABC, CBS and NBC all featured the same subjects, with only the sequence varying. CNBC’s The News with Brian Williams and CNN’s NewsNight also followed the same news agenda.
The anti-conservative news agenda: A last-minute, October Surprise hit at the most viable Republican candidate in California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, with sexual impropriety charges going back to 1975, David Kay not being able to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the “expanding” investigation into the already media exaggerated “leakgate” controversy and jumping on a National Enquirer story (euphemistically called “published reports”) about illegal drug purchases by Rush Limbaugh.
For a flavor of the October 2 newscasts, the opening teases from the top of the ABC, CBS and NBC broadcasts:
-- ABC’s World News Tonight. Peter Jennings: “On World News Tonight, the frontrunner in the California Governor's race has a rough day. Arnold Schwarzenneger apologizes for past behavior. The country's most popular talk show host has a rough day. The controversy involving Rush Limbaugh. The investigation into who leaked a CIA officer's name to the press is expanding. And the government's top weapons inspector says no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq. The Bush administration says it needs $600 million more to look.”
-- CBS Evening News. Dan Rather: “Tonight in a new poll the American people indicate declining confidence in President Bush on the economy and Iraq. Weapons of mass destruction search comes up empty, but the hunt goes on. Arnold Schwarzenegger admits behaving badly after new accusations of his past with women. And Rush Limbaugh losing a job and now facing new accusations about drugs.”
-- NBC Nightly News. Tom Brokaw: “Hide and seek. Weapons of mass destruction in Iraq: Where are they? The chief U.S. inspector before Congress today. Arnold's apology. Charges of misconduct and then today a stunning development: Schwarzenegger admits he's behaved badly with women and says he's sorry. Rush and race. Rush Limbaugh resigns from his new ESPN job after comments about a black quarterback. And now more trouble: Reports of drug abuse.”
On the WMD in Iraq, NBC, like the other networks, failed to note how politicians of both parties, and intelligence agencies around the world, believed Iraq possessed WMD. Instead, they focused solely on the Bush team. Brokaw began Thursday’s Nightly News:
“In the days leading up to the war against Iraq, President Bush and his most senior advisers told anyone listening that Saddam Hussein had to be overthrown because of his vast stocks of weapons of mass destruction and his willingness to share them with terrorists and use them against the United States. Members of Congress were briefed on the WMD threat and many of them voted for he war based on what they were hearing. Tonight, the man in charge of finding those weapons in Iraq, David Kay, went before Congress and said so far he has come up dry: No weapons, no mobile labs, no nuclear weapons or even an advanced program...”
Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz on Friday picked up on conservative anger at the liberal media for its obviously slanted agenda in hyping the stories of the CIA leak, Limbaugh’s drug use and Schwarzenegger’s past indiscretions. “For the Right, Bad News Day Or Media Bias?” read the “Style” section headline over this subhead: “Conservatives See More Than Coincidence in Recent Scoops.” See:
http://www.washingtonpost.comCBS News Finds Republican
Tom Brokaw’s hypocrisy. Back in 1999 when his own colleague, Lisa Myers, landed an interview with Juanita Broaddrick, who accused President Clinton of raping her 20 years earlier (1978), Brokaw refused to report it on the NBC Nightly News. But on Thursday night, Brokaw jumped right on the Los Angeles Times story about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s inappropriate sexual advances, going back to 1975, three years before the Broaddrick claim, and which fell far short of rape.
In 1999 February of 1999 Bill Clinton was not facing an election, while Schwarzenegger is facing one less than a week away and that, you’d think, would make the media more reticent to bring up events from decades ago.
Back in February of 1999, Brokaw only allowed Broaddrick’s name onto his show as part of a brief plug for the Myers interview on Dateline and he could muster nothing stronger that referring to her “controversial accusations.” As recounted in the February 26 CyberAlert about the February 24 NBC Nightly News and Dateline:
“When Today landed an exclusive with Linda Tripp a couple of weeks ago, Tom Brokaw played an excerpt the night before. But in this case, despite another exclusive for NBC, this vague end of show plug Wednesday night from Brokaw represents the totality of NBC Nightly News time devoted to Broaddrick: 'Tonight on Dateline NBC Lisa Myers with an exclusive interview with the woman known as Jane Doe No. 5, Juanita Broaddrick. Her controversial accusations about President Clinton. Dateline tonight at 8, 7 Central.’”
Fast forward to Thursday night and Brokaw didn’t hesitate to jump on the charges against Schwarzenegger forwarded by another media outlet: “A graphic article on the front page of today's Los Angeles Times detailing the allegations of a half dozen women. They told the paper Republican candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger sexually groped and humiliated them in actions that supposedly took place over three decades.”
From Costa Mesa, Campbell Brown summarized the allegations: “Among the claims: That he groped their breasts, made lewd sexual suggestions and tried to remove one woman's bathing suit in an elevator.” Brown helpfully added how “a campaign aide to Democratic Governor Gray Davis called Schwarzenegger's actions a crime meriting charges.”
Brown concluded by giving credibility to another allegation she had no ability to verify: “The Schwarzenegger campaign had hoped the candidate's apology would out the issue to rest, but at Schwarzenegger's very next campaign event Democratic protesters showed up with a young women who made yet another claim that Schwarzenegger had harassed her too.”
NBC followed up with a piece from George Lewis on the impact, on female California voters, of the article.
Tom Brokaw is not the only journalist or outlet to demonstrate a double standards and some hypocrisy in jumping on the allegations about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s inappropriate sexual advances when those same journalists and outlets delayed or downplayed the more serious Juanita Broaddrick charge that Bill Clinton raped her and, in late 1993, the Arkansas troopers’ claims about procuring women for Bill Clinton -- stories which both broke no where near election time and, therefore, the media should have been less reticent to report than a charge raised days before balloting.
It was the Los Angeles Times, in fact, which in December 1993 was the first mainstream media outlet to report the recollections of the troopers, but the networks didn’t find that anywhere near as newsworthy as this week’s LA Times story on Schwarzenegger.
Brit Hume recalled the LA Times’ hypocrisy, reporting in the “Grapevine” segment of his October 2 Special Report with Brit Hume on FNC: “The LA Times today ran a front page article, accompanied by two pages inside, on the accusations now lodged against Arnold Schwarzenegger for making unwanted advances years ago. Not until the tenth paragraph of that story do readers get a response from the Schwarzenegger camp. But, four years ago when then-President Clinton was being accused by Juanita Broaddrick -- remember her? -- of a brutal sexual assault 20 years earlier the LA Times buried that story on page 13 under a headline that read quote, 'Clinton Camp Denies Alleged Sex Assault.' And he article began with a denial from Mr. Clinton's lawyer.
“And when syndicated columnist George Will later wrote that quote, 'it is reasonable to believe that Clinton was a rapist 15 years before becoming President,' the Times cut that line out of the column.”
Tim Graham, the MRC’s Director of Media Analysis, passed along this summary of past media resistance to touching initial allegations against Bill Clinton:
While the Los Angeles Times laid out its investigation of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s alleged sexual harassment, the Times isn’t always interested in running last-minute exposes that have the potential to derail a political campaign. In 1999, the New York Times recalled allegations that Gov. Bill Clinton may have raped Juanita Broaddrick: “The allegation was passed on to reporters for the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times in the waning days of the 1992 presidential campaign. Regarding it as the kind of toxic waste traditionally dumped just before Election Day, both newspapers passed on the story.”
For its part, the Times also dismissed the Broaddrick story in 1999 with a media navel-gazer by Josh Getlin and Elizabeth Jensen, with the subheadline "Whether a woman’s allegation of sexual assault by Clinton in 1978 is true is secondary to competitive pressure." In the story, Times national editor Scott Kraft sniffed Broaddrick can "almost certainly not be proved or disproved today."
As for the networks’ receptivity to Los Angeles Times investigations of sexual impropriety, recall that in 1993, Times reporters William Rempel and Douglas Frantz reported on the allegations of Arkansas state troopers that then Gov. Bill Clinton used them to set up meetings with women. See how other media outlets shrunk from that investigation, as recounted in MRC’s MediaWatch newsletter:
