-Caveat Lector-
Subject: MRC Alert: CNN Contends: 'Governor Howard Dean Was No Left-Wing
Liberal'
***Media Research Center CyberAlert***
10:55am EST, Friday January 9, 2004 (Vol. Nine; No. 3)
The 1,641st CyberAlert. Tracking Liberal Media Bias Since 1996
> CNN Contends: "Governor Howard Dean Was No Left-Wing Liberal"
> CNN's Jeffrey Toobin Insists Again That Gore Really Won Florida
> Actor Robert Duvall Denounces Steven Spielberg for Castro Visit
> Brokaw Finds MRC "Wearying" Since MRC "Everywhere Every Day"
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When posted, this CyberAlert will be readable at:
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1) CNN set out Wednesday night to prove that Howard Dean was no
liberal as Governor of Vermont, but reporter Kelly Wallace used as
her authoritative sources the editor of a self-described
"alternative" newspaper and a local Democratic legislator. Wallace
declared as a "misperception" any idea that Dean governed Vermont
as a liberal: "Those who know him well say Governor Howard Dean
was no left-wing liberal." Peter Freyne of the Seven Days
newspaper opined: "We all laugh at that. Howard Dean represented
the Republican wing of the Democratic party." On his Web site for
Seven Days, described as "Vermont's Alternate Weekly," Freyne
boasted of how he got CNN to publicize his point of view.
2) Here we go again. President Bush's visit on Thursday to Palm
Beach County for a fundraiser, his first time in that chad-
counting county since the 2000 election, prompted CNN to give time
to its legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin to declare, contrary to what
the media recounts found: "It is an absolute certainty that if
Palm Beach had designed a ballot that correctly reflected the
views of the voters Al Gore would be President of the United
States today."
3) Actor Robert Duvall, during an interview on Wednesday's 60
Minutes II, denounced film director Steven Spielberg, a major
contributor to the Holocaust Museum, for visiting Fidel Castro
last year. Duvall told Charlie Rose that he'd like to ask
Spielberg: "'Would you consider building a little annex on the
Holocaust Museum or at least across the street to honor the dead
Cubans that Castro killed.' That's very presumptuous of him to go
there."
4) NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw can't escape the MRC -- and that
annoys him. In an interview in the latest edition of the Columbia
Journalism Review magazine, Brokaw denied he's guilty of any
liberal bias and seemed to be referring to the MRC's CyberAlert as
he called the constant drumbeat of criticism from the MRC "a
little wearying" since the MRC's "fine legal points" are
"everywhere every day." He charged that "most of the cases" of
liberal bias complaints "are pretty flimsily made," but Brokaw had
no problem seeing bias on FNC: "It's a lively, right-of-center
opinionated all-news channel."
> 1) CNN set out Wednesday night to prove that Howard Dean was
no liberal as Governor of Vermont, but reporter Kelly Wallace used
as her authoritative sources the editor of a self-described
"alternative" newspaper and a local Democratic legislator.
In a piece run on the January 7 Paula Zahn Tonight, MRC
analyst Ken Shepherd noticed, Wallace declared as a
"misperception" any idea that Dean governed Vermont as a liberal.
She contended: "Those who know him well say Governor Howard Dean
was no left-wing liberal." Peter Freyne of the Seven Days
newspaper opined: "We all laugh at that. Howard Dean represented
the Republican wing of the Democratic party. Some even thought it
was the Republican wing of the Republican party at first."
On his Web site for Seven Days, described as "Vermont's
Alternate Weekly," Freyne boasted of how he got CNN to publicize
his point of view. Freyne bragged about how CNN "came to town on a
quest. They wanted to find out if the current portrayal of Dean as
an angry, left-wing extremist rabble-rouser is correct. Yours
truly was only too happy to take them on a stroll down memory
lane, back to the good old days when Howard Dean represented the
Republican wing of the Democratic Party. Back to reality."
This was a repeat performance on CNN for Fraeyne, who seems to
be CNN's favorite Green Mountain Stater. Judy Woodruff noted in a
July 11 piece on Inside Politics: "But the rap on Dean is that the
Burlington Birkenstock crowd, people who put Dean signs in bars
called the Red Square, can't take their man to the White House,
that he's just too far left."
Woodruff then played this clip of Freyne: "His entire time in
Vermont politics, going back to his days in the legislature then
as Lieutenant Governor and then as Governor in the '90s, there was
never a sentence in any newspaper in the state of Vermont that
contained the word 'liberal' and 'Howard Dean.'"
At the time, in the July 14 CyberAlert, I observed: "Amazing.
I suppose that compared to the socialist Bernie Sanders, Dean
looks downright right-wing, especially to Vermonters who think
Sanders is too conservative."
It may well be that Dean was not consistently liberal on every
issue during his decade leading Vermont, but George W. Bush was
far from consistently conservative as Governor of Texas, and is
certainly far from it now as President as he pushes a series of
liberal spending initiatives, but do you recall back in 1999/2000,
or now, any stories which set out to prove that considering Bush a
conservative was a "misperception"?
On Zahn's show on Wednesday night, Wallace first dismissed the
idea that Dean was an "angry" Governor. Wallace asserted: "Angry,
no. Intense, yes."
Wallace then got to his supposed liberalness: "Misperception
number two, those who know him well say, Governor Howard Dean was
no left-wing liberal."
Freyne: "We all laugh at that. Howard Dean represented the
Republican wing of the Democratic party. Some even thought it was
the Republican wing of the Republican party at first."
Wallace: "In fact, his biggest critics during his 11-year
tenure were not Republicans but left-leaning Democrats who
sometimes found him too conservative, like Democrat Francis
Brooks."
Rep. Francis Brooks, Vermont legislature (D): "There were
times when leaving his office, we were a long ways from
agreement."
Wallace: "Howard Dean is popular here. He was elected to five
consecutive two-year terms as governor. His biggest political test
perhaps, coming on an issue which thrust this tiny state onto the
national stage. That was in 2000, when Howard Dean reluctantly
signed a law legalizing gay civil unions."
Vince Iluzzi, Republican state senator: "The Governor said
very clearly there are times in politics where you have to do the
right thing, even though you're sometimes ahead of where people
are at. This is the right thing to do."
Wallace concluded: "People here now wait to see if that record
and no nonsense leadership style can sell outside Vermont. Kelly
Wallace, CNN, Burlington."
In his latest "Inside Track" column for Seven Days, posted on
January 7, Peter Freyne boasted:
"The good news is, there's some indication this week that the
real story of Howard Dean's Vermont experience may get out. CNN
stopped by Seven Days Tuesday morning. Producer Rose Marie Arce
and reporter Kelly Wallace came to town on a quest. They wanted to
find out if the current portrayal of Dean as an angry, left-wing
extremist rabble-rouser is correct.
"Yours truly was only too happy to take them on a stroll down
memory lane, back to the good old days when Howard Dean
represented the Republican wing of the Democratic Party. Back to
reality.
"Anyone can get a story. Getting it right is the challenge.
Kudos to CNN for being the first to make the effort."
That's online at: http://www.sevendaysvt.com/insidetrack/
> 2) Here we go again. President Bush's visit on Thursday to
Palm Beach County for a fundraiser, his first time in that chad-
counting county since the 2000 election, prompted CNN to give time
to its legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin to declare, contrary to what
the media recounts found: "It is an absolute certainty that if
Palm Beach had designed a ballot that correctly reflected the
views of the voters Al Gore would be President of the United
States today."
In 2001 Toobin penned Too Close to Call: The Thirty-Six-Day
Battle to Decide the 2000 Election, a book in which he argued Bush
stole the presidency. He charged in it: "The wrong man was
inaugurated on January 20th 2001 and this is no small thing in our
nation's history. The bell of this election can never be un-rung
and the sound will haunt us for some time."
Toobin's fresh re-writing of history came during a January 8
Inside Politics piece by John Zarrella who showed 2000 video of
Judge Charles Burton, "Burton's election supervisor Theresa LePore
and county commissioner Carol Roberts" as they "worked more than
three dozen nights" counting the ballots by holding them up to the
light. Zarrella updated their status: "As President Bush makes his
first return visit to the county of infamy, Burton is still a
judge, LePore is still election supervisor and Roberts is out of
office. Back then they were at the center of a recount and a
butterfly ballot fiasco."
Toobin then claimed: "It is an absolute certainty that if Palm
Beach had designed a ballot that correctly reflected the views of
the voters Al Gore would be President of the United States today."
Zarrella added: "The ballot, designed to make it easier for
people to read, made it harder in some cases for people to vote,
resulting in, many analysts say, thousands of miscast ballots. To
this day, Democrats here are bitter. They call the President
selected not elected."
Toobin's quite liberal and has hostilities toward
conservatives. When he jumped from ABC to CNN in April of 2002,
CyberAlert recalled: Jeffrey Toobin, recently of ABC, is now the
network's "legal analyst." In a book last year he charged: "The
wrong man was inaugurated on January 20th 2001 and this is no
small thing in our nation's history." On ABC in 2000 he maintained
that Hillary Clinton's "conspiracy" claim was "more right than
wrong." He also contended: "Clinton was, by comparison, the good
guy in this struggle. The President's adversaries appeared
literally consumed with hatred for him."
For details on all those charges:
http://www.mediaresearch.org/cyberalerts/2002/cyb20020423.asp#6
> 3) Actor Robert Duvall, during an interview on Wednesday's
60 Minutes II, denounced film director Steven Spielberg, a major
contributor to the Holocaust Museum, for visiting Fidel Castro
last year. Duvall told Charlie Rose that he'd like to ask
Spielberg: "'Would you consider building a little annex on the
Holocaust Museum or at least across the street to honor the dead
Cubans that Castro killed.' That's very presumptuous of him to go
there."
MRC analyst Brian Boyd caught the comment and checked CBS's
transcript against the tape.
During the January 7 profile, Rose segued to the topic: "No
subjects are off limits for Duvall, his politics are no exception.
Fiercely libertarian, he's always eager to weigh in. At his
favorite caf in Buenos Aires, one topic was Steven Spielberg's
visit to Cuba in 2002 and Spielberg's widely reported meeting with
Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Duvall says Spielberg should not have
gone in the first place."
Duvall: "Now, what I want to ask him -- and I know he's going
to get pissed off -- 'Would you consider building a little annex
on the Holocaust Museum or at least across the street to honor the
dead Cubans that Castro killed.' That's very presumptuous of him
to go there."
Rose: "Will you tell him that?"
Duvall: "You bet I'll tell him that. I'll never work at
Dreamworks again, but I don't care about working there anyway."
Rose: "At this stage in his life, Duvall can afford not to
care what others think. He's made a very good living playing tough
men who make tough choices and then make no apologies. They're
among Hollywood's most original and memorable characters, and so
is the man who created them."
The CBS News Web page for 60 Minutes II posted this retort
from Spielberg: "Spielberg's spokesman, in a statement in response
to Duvall's comments on 60 Minutes II, said the Hollywood
director's trip to Cuba was authorized by the U.S. government as a
cultural exchange program: 'His trip to Cuba in 2002 was cultural,
not political. It was an opportunity to share his films and his
values with the Cuban people. In addition to screening eight of
his films for hundreds of thousands of Cubans, he visited with the
Jewish community, paid his respects at the Holocaust memorial in
Havana, and met with U.S. diplomats stationed there.'"
That's online, along with a picture of Duvall from the Rose
interview, at:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/06/60II/main591671.shtml
For the Internet Movie Database's page on Duvall:
http://imdb.com/name/nm0000380/
And on Spielberg: http://imdb.com/name/nm0000229/
> 4) NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw can't escape the MRC -- and
that annoys him. In an interview in the latest edition of the
Columbia Journalism Review magazine, Brokaw denied he's guilty of
any liberal bias and seemed to be referring to the MRC's
CyberAlert as he called the constant drumbeat of criticism from
the MRC "a little wearying" since the MRC's "fine legal points"
are "everywhere every day."
In the interview, Jane Hall, a regular panelist on FNC's Fox
Newswatch, an assistant professor at American University's School
of Communication and a former Los Angeles Times reporter, raised
the MRC: "The Media Research Center, the conservative media
watchdog group, has been getting a lot of attention for its
reports alleging liberal bias in the media."
Brokaw called the complaints of a liberal bias "a little
wearying" and charged that "most of the cases are pretty flimsily
made." Brokaw kvetched: "What I get tired of is Brent Bozell
[president of the Media Research Center] trying to make these fine
legal points everywhere every day. A lot of it just doesn't hold
up. So much of it is that bias -- like beauty -- is in the eye of
the beholder."
Brokaw, who described FNC as "a lively, right-of-center
opinionated all-news channel," saw no bias on his network or
elsewhere, but he touted an attitude which is behind liberal bias
as he insisted that the media's duty is to "represent the views of
those who are underrepresented in the social context or the
political context and to make sure that they're not overlooked and
that their wrongs get the bright light of journalistic sunshine."
Brokaw recognized how that can be seen as a bias, "and therefore,
because of the nature of what we cover, people may think that
we're biased. But the fact is, that's part of the obligation of
journalism."
Some excerpts from the interview by Jane Hall of Tom Brokaw in
the January/February issue of the Columbia Journalism Review,
joined about a fourth of the way into it:
Hall: "The Media Research Center, the conservative media
watchdog group, has been getting a lot of attention for its
reports alleging liberal bias in the media. They've been severely
critical of Peter Jennings's and ABC World News Tonight's
reporting before the war in Iraq -- and their reports get a lot of
pickup on the Internet, through e-mails and on cable talk shows."
Brokaw: "Look, I've been dealing with this myself since the
Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, when reporters were
accused of having a liberal bias.
"The fact of the matter is, if I don't establish a bond with
the NBC News audience that is based on my credibility and my
integrity, then I go out of business. We've been doing this for a
long time. NBC Nightly News still has the largest single audience
of any media outlet, print and electronic, in the news business.
The simple test is that if people thought I had a bias, they
wouldn't watch me."
Hall: "What is the impact, do you think, of a steady drumbeat
of such criticism? Does it not have an impact on the network?"
Brokaw: "It is a little wearying, but you've got to rise above
it and take it case by case. Most of the cases are pretty flimsily
made. I'm glad that Peter, Dan, and I have been doing this long
enough that we're confident in our own abilities to withstand
that. I understand the Rush Limbaughs of the world. I have less
trouble with that. That's who he is and what he does -- and he's
very skillful at it. Rush has a strong point of view -- and that's
fine. What I get tired of is Brent Bozell [president of the Media
Research Center] trying to make these fine legal points everywhere
every day. A lot of it just doesn't hold up. So much of it is that
bias -- like beauty -- is in the eye of the beholder."
Hall: "So it hasn't impacted the way you cover stories?"
Brokaw: "No, it hasn't. We work very hard at trying to
determine what the facts are on a weekly basis -- and that's a
full-time job. I don't have time to engage in some kind of a
conspiracy."
Hall: "You and Tim Russert had Rush Limbaugh on as an analyst
in the midterm elections in 2002. Was that in any way an attempt
to speak to the criticism from conservatives?"
Brokaw: "Rush Limbaugh is a powerful force in this country --
and a smart guy. I watched him -- he was invited to address the
freshman class in Congress in 1994 when Newt Gingrich took hold of
Congress. You know, Rush has gone to a different level."
Hall: "Your conservative critics would probably say that you
decided you needed some more conservatives on the air."
Brokaw: "Well, they may say that. But I thought that we asked
Limbaugh some difficult questions about the deficit and other
policies, and it's worth hearing what he has to say about the
election returns. If I were out there with a team of supersleuths,
I could find, I suppose, a reason from day to day to find liberal
bias one day and a conservative bias the next day on some given
story."
Hall: "So you don't see a liberal bias in the mainstream
media?"
Brokaw: "No. Speaking generally, people who are drawn to
journalism are interested in what happens from the ground up less
than they are from the top down. And they see that part of their
role -- which I think is appropriate -- is to represent the views
of those who are underrepresented in the social context or the
political context and to make sure that they're not overlooked and
that their wrongs get the bright light of journalistic sunshine.
And therefore, because of the nature of what we cover, people may
think that we're biased. But the fact is, that's part of the
obligation of journalism."
Later, Hall raised FNC: "Let me ask you about Fox News."
Brokaw: "Don't overstate Fox News -- I mean, they're
enormously successful, but it's still the most successful niche,
is what it is. The spectrum now has spread out so much. But the
broadcast networks still have the biggest chunk of that spectrum.
When you get into the cable niches, Fox has the biggest cable
niche. But it's still much smaller than the least of the network
niches."
Hall: "What I think is that Fox has done a very smart job of
carving out their place. How would you describe that place?"
Brokaw: "Well, it's a lively, right-of-center opinionated
all-news channel."
For the complete interview:
http://www.cjr.org/issues/2004/1/QA-Brokaw.asp
On Thursday, MRC President Brent Bozell issued a challenge to
Brokaw. A reprint of a January 8 press release:
Media Research Center President Brent Bozell is issuing a $1
million challenge to NBC and NBC Nightly News Anchor Tom Brokaw,
calling Brokaw on his comments made in a recent interview with
Columbia Journalism Review. In the interview, Brokaw directly took
on Bozell and the Media Research Center while denying the
credibility of their evidence of liberal bias in the press. Among
other things, Brokaw said:
"What I get tired of is Brent Bozell trying to make these fine
legal points everywhere every day. A lot of it just doesn't hold
up. So much of it is that bias -- like beauty -- is in the eye of
the beholder."
Bozell responded: "I know our evidence does 'hold up' and we'll
prove it. I issue this challenge to NBC and its anchor: let's
assemble a mutually agreeable third-party panel and have them
review a compilation of the Media Research Center's 16 years of
evidence of liberal media bias. If this panel agrees with Brokaw's
contention, the Media Research Center will donate $1 million to
the anchor's favorite charity. If the panel agrees with us, NBC
and Brokaw will donate $1 million to the Media Research Center.
"Oh, and to sweeten the pot we'll do this: we'll limit our
evidence only to Tom Brokaw and NBC. Frankly, that's all the
evidence we need to prove the point."
END of Reprint of press release
Last September, to mark Brokaw's 20th anniversary as sole
anchor of the NBC Nightly News, the MRC produced a Media Reality
Check which recounted the most flagrant examples of his liberal
bias over the years. For "Marking Tom Brokaw's Twenty Years
of Tilt," go to:
http://www.mediaresearch.org/realitycheck/2003/fax20030903.asp
As noted in the January 7 CyberAlert, appearing on Comedy
Central's Daily Show on Tuesday night, Brokaw said that he
believes President Bush is so much more successful at fundraising
than Howard Dean because Bush is a Republican President
"representing corporate interests" and, therefore, "he can go out
there, push the button and get a lot of money."
Since this is Brokaw's last year as anchor of the NBC Nightly
News, I guess we only have one year left to annoy him. But if he
weren't so wearyingly liberal in his reporting, maybe he wouldn't
find our analysis of his reporting so wearying. The ball is in his
court. All he has to do is stop delivering biased reporting.
-- Brent Baker
"I pledge Allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America and to
the REPUBLIC for which it stands, one Nation under God,indivisible,with
liberty and justice for all."
visit my web site at
http://www.voicenet.com/~wbacon My ICQ# is 79071904
for a precise list of the powers of the Federal Government linkto:
http://www.voicenet.com/~wbacon/Enumerated.html
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