Tag Archives: Media Bias

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Legal Affairs – The Media, The Military, and Striking the Right Balance

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

National Journal

This war will severely test the inherently uneasy relationship between the government-especially the military-and the media. The chafing has already begun. While the Bush Administration so far seems largely to have avoided the outright deceptions practiced by its predecessors, it has exhibited an unhealthy impulse to control the news by leaning on the media not to publish enemy "propaganda." And while much of the news coverage has been superb, some journalists have exhibited a reckless indifference to endangering military operations and the lives of our soldiers, and a reflexive hostility toward the military.

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Legal Affairs – The Media Should Beware of What It Embraces

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

National Journal

The uncritical enthusiasm of most media organizations for abolishing "soft money" and restricting issue advertising by "special interests" prompts this thought: How would the networks and The New York Times like a law imposing strict limits on their own rights to editorialize about candidates? After all, if some of their favored proposals were to be enacted, the media would be the only major interest still enjoying unrestricted freedom of political speech.

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The Case for Self-Censorship

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

In what may be the most dramatic clash of free press and fair trial values in the nation’s history, The Dallas Morning News has taken a position very like that adopted in a very different context by Vice President Al Gore.

Both are proud of what they did-and promise not to do it again.

On March 3, Gore said he would not make any more fund-raising calls from the White House. That same day, The News-in the wake of its spectacular report that Timothy McVeigh had told his defense team that he bombed the Oklahoma City federal building in daytime to maximize the "body count"-filed the following statement with U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch in Denver:

"The Dallas Morning News …has no further plans to report unpublished information from material used as the source for the previous articles.

"The information … has been placed in the exclusive possession of [two outside law firms]…. Counsel will not thereafter provide The News access to the information for news reporting purposes. The News has placed the information with its counsel to preclude attention focused on Mr. McVeigh’s fair trial rights if it made further use of the material."

I especially like the part about the need "to preclude attention focused on Mr. McVeigh’s fair trial rights."

In fairness to The News, its intent was not to confess error, but to avoid being slapped with a gag order-just as its apparent intent in breaking its story on the Internet on the afternoon of Feb. 28, rather than waiting for the next day’s paper, was to get it out before defense lawyers could seek a gag order.

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Outrages and Curmudgeonly Complaints

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

In the spirit of the season, and in the hope of a fresh start-with malice toward none, with charity for all-in the new year, I hereby purge myself of various vexations left over from the old year.

LEFT-WING CLAPTRAP

• President Bill Clinton’s bold transcendence of all previous standards of shamelessness in his virtual auctioning off of prizes-nights in the White House’s Lincoln Bedroom, smaller slices of face time with the president, posts on piddling presidential panels-to the highest bidders from Wall Street to Djakarta. This from a man who said in his Inaugural Address: "Let us resolve to reform our politics so that power and privilege no longer shout down die voice. of the people."

• Vice President Al Gore Jr.’s slimy effort to make political hay out of his sister’s death from lung cancer. Telling tearful delegates at die Democratic National Convention how he had knelt by die two-pack-a-day smoker’s bed while she "breathed her last breath" in "nearly unbearable pain," Gore said, "That is why, until I draw my last bream, I will pour my heart and soul into the cause of protecting our children from the dangers of smoking."

This from a man who during the six years after his sister’s 1984 death had taken some $16,000 from the tobacco industry-which had also helped to fund the very convention at which he spoke. A man who had continued growing tobacco on his own land after his sister’s death, and who had rhapsodized at a 1988 campaign rally about how he had "shredded it, spiked it, put it in the bam and stripped it and sold it"

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Monsters and Boy Scouts

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

At first blush, accused Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh’s pending motion for permission to give media interviews-including one with a famous TV journalist, to be chosen from a gaggle of eager applicants who have already auditioned for the opportunity-might seem an occasion for revulsion.

Here’s how the prosecution characterized the motion in a seething Aug. 29 court response filed with Chief Judge Richard Matsch, of the U.S. District Court in Denver:

"McVeigh… seeks this court’s authorization of an extraordinary attempt to manipulate the news media to produce a favorable impact on the potential jury pool. According to the motion, defendant’s counsel has already met with such well-known television reporters as Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather and others-and now wants to ‘choose among’ them the one least likely to ‘exploit’ an interview of Mr. McVeigh, ‘brow-beat’ the defendant, or ask Mr. McVeigh questions ‘he cannot answer.’… Mr. McVeigh also has ‘interviewed’ representatives of major national newspapers, and now wants to choose among them as well…. And he wants to make a similar selection from among local television and newspaper reporters."

But the motion should be granted. (Indeed, even the prosecution’s response, which exudes distaste for the motion, stops short of explicitly urging that it be denied.) Meanwhile, the media should spurn any conditions restricting what they can say about McVeigh before or after airing any interviews.

This spectacle raises two distinct questions, one of law and one of journalistic ethics:

Should courts allow McVeigh (who is in jail awaiting trial) and other accused monsters to give media interviews when their primary purpose is obviously to curry sympathy with the jury pool?

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Lame Journalism Makes Bad Law

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

"Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose," as Janis Joplin sang it most memorably in "Bobby McGee." With billions of dollars to lose, big news organizations don’t seem to feel so free anymore, at least when it comes to exposing corporate misconduct. On the other hand, some of these mega-businesses seem all too free about taking advantage of their sources.

Consider these recent examples:

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Witch-Hunt or Whitewash?

by Stuart Taylor, Jr

The American Lawyer

There are three ways of trying to make sense of the Federal Communications Commission’s much-publicized probe into whether Rupert Murdoch’s Fox television network gulled the FCC, for nearly nine years, into overlooking the fact that 99 percent of Fox’s equity was foreign-owned, possibly in violation of federal law:

(1) The multi-lawyered Murdoch team cleverly (or perhaps unwittingly) has hidden the ball since 1985 by stressing that Murdoch (who became a U.S. citizen in 1985) would control Fox – while burying, in the moral equivalent of fine print, and in documents filed at different times that were unlikely to be read with care, some fragmentary disclosures from which a careful reader would have inferred that most of Fox’s equity would be owned by Murdoch’s Australia-based News Corp.

(2) The FCC was really dumb – or so eager to help the politically connected Murdoch crack the ABC-CBS-NBC oligopoly that it averted its eyes from awkward details-when it found in 1985 that Fox’s proposed $1.6 billion purchase of six big-city television stations complied with a stature restricting foreign ownership or control of over 25 percent of any broadcaster.

(3) The FCC is being really dumb now – if not grinding Clintonite political axes against the archconservative Murdoch and his Clinton-bashing New York Post – by harassing Murdoch for no good reason, and thereby stalling, at a critical time, his Fox network’s remarkable push toward parity with ABC, CBS and NBC.

Murdoch, Fox, their current FCC lawyers at Washington’s Hogan & Hartson, and some others are pushing hypothesis three – a theory that also draws some credence from the FCC’s peculiar handling of this investigation. "All this is another way of [FCC staffers] saying, ‘If we screwed up, it must be because you misled us,’ " says a source familiar with the investigation.

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Outrages and Curmudgeonly Complaints

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

In the spirit of the season, and in the hope of a fresh start-with malice toward none, with charity for all-in the new year, I hereby purge myself of various vexations left over from the old year.

LEFT-WING CLALAP

• The dangerous demagoguing of the Medicare issue by President Bill Clinton and other Democrats, who seek profit from big lie that the Republicans would destroy the program-when, in fact, they would not cut much more than the president himself has proposed. The Democrats’ tactics may make it politically impossible to avoid budget deficits that are so huge, for so long, as to risk fiscal disaster.

• The Sept. 29 suggestion by Willie Brown-the former speaker of the California Assembly who was elected mayor of San Francisco this month-that students should "terrorize professors you don’t like" to demonstrate displeasure when those professors support the "racist" and "crazy" idea that university admissions should not be based on race.

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Outrages and Curmudgeonly Complaints

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

In the spirit of the season, and in the hope of a fresh start-with malice toward none, with charity for all-in the new year, I hereby purge myself of various vexations of the old year:

LEFT-WING CLAPTRAP

• The hypocrisy of feminists who airily dismissed former clerical worker Paula Corbin Jones’ claim of sexual harassment against President Bill Clinton this year (Pat Schroeder "It just makes me want to throw up.") after having reflexively embraced law professor Anita Hill’s not-necessarily-more-credible claim against Clarence Thomas in 1991.

• Especially rich was the complaint by then New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen (PC feminism’s George Will) that "[a]bove all, her timing is troublesome," because Jones waited almost three years, until Clinton was president, to go public. Perhaps Quindlen forgot that her heroine Anita Hill waited 10 years to blow the whistle on Thomas, who was voted a federal judgeship (and from whom Hill sought and accepted a few favors) in the interim.

• The Rev. Jesse Jackson’s demagogic claim that the Rev. Pat Robertson’s conservative Christian Coalition (or its antecedents) had been a "strong force in [Nazi] Germany" and was associated with the Holocaust and with slavery in the old South.

• The "Equal Employment Opportunity Handbook" of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Biologies Evaluation and Research, a formula for quota hiring that warns against inquiry into virtually all of the things that an employer might want to know about an applicant’s qualifications. For example: