Now Playing: Media Matters
Topic: Broadcast Betrayal
Excerpts from Media Matters:
The Lack of Gender & Ethnic Diversity on the Sunday Morning Talk Shows
Not only are the Sunday morning talk shows on the broadcast networks dominated by conservative opinion and commentary, the four programs -- NBC's Meet the Press, ABC's This Week, CBS' Face the Nation, and Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday -- feature guest lists that are overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male.
Image:sanjoseca.gov
And the top-rated Sunday show -- Meet the Press -- shows the least diversity of all. The NBC program is the most male and nearly the most white (Face the Nation beats it out by 1 percentage point), and it has the highest proportion of white males to all other guests.
A breakdown of the guests who appeared on the Sunday shows in 2005 and 2006 shows that men dominate these shows. In fact, men outnumber women by a 4-to-1 ratio on average.
Media pounced on Edwards' haircuts, but ignore Giuliani's Iowa farm snub
Image: Wonkette.com
As Media Matters for America documented, the media recently devoted extensive coverage to a report -- first "broken" by Politico senior political writer Ben Smith on April 16 -- that Democratic presidential candidate and former Sen. John Edwards' (NC) campaign spent $800 on two haircuts. The story was covered by major print, broadcast, and cable outlets, and often featured characterizations of Edwards as "pretty" and the "Breck girl" -- echoing Republican and conservative attacks on Edwards dating back to 2004. These same media outlets, however, have shown almost no interest in recent reports that the presidential campaign of former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) scheduled -- and then abruptly canceled -- a campaign rally at the home of two Iowa farmers because they were not wealthy enough to be affected by the estate tax.
In a May 3 article, the Anamosa Journal-Eureka (Jones County, Iowa) reported: "Deb and Jerry VonSprecken of Olin received a call from former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani's campaign office asking them if they would be interested in holding a campaign rally on May 4, after she had donated to his campaign." According to the article, the VonSpreckens, who "have a modest 80 acre farm and raise cattle," agreed to the proposal and prepared for a 75-100 person rally. However, according to Deb VonSprecken, the Giuliani campaign later canceled the event, telling her: "I'm sorry, you aren't worth a million dollars and he is campaigning on the Death Tax right now." According to the Journal-Eureka, a Giuliani campaign spokesman would not comment on the issue. As Media Matters has noted, Republicans and conservatives who support repealing the "death tax" (a poll-tested GOP buzzword for the estate tax) have claimed that it hurts family farms and small businesses -- when in fact a very small percentage of the affected estates -- 2 percent in 2004 -- in which more than half of the assets are farms and family-owned businesses. At the May 3 Republican presidential debate, Giuliani declared: "We have to get rid of the death tax."
Blogger and media critic Greg Sargent highlighted the Journal-Eureka article on May 10, confirmed the details of the story with the Iowan paper and the VonSpreckens, and wrote that the "Rudy campaign just confirmed to me that its non-denial to the paper is real." On May 11, Sargent reported that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) "put in a personal call today to an Iowa woman that was snubbed by Rudy Giuliani's campaign, asking to meet with her and apologizing to her on 'behalf of all politicians,' the woman told me this evening."
However, a Media Matters Nexis search revealed that this story has been almost completely ignored by the media in the 11 days since it was first reported, even after McCain's reported phone call. The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and USA Today have not reported on the story. In his May 14 "Media Notes Extra" online column, Post media critic Howard Kurtz noted that the story "has gained some traction in the liberal blogosphere," but he dismissed blogger Kevin Drum's observation that "Giuliani's gang was playing an old time conservative game: trying to find a family farm that would eventually have to be sold in order to pay inheritance
taxes," writing: "Come on -- don't all politicians look for people who illustrate the problem that their plan (on taxes, Social Security, whatever) is going to solve?" When asked about the story during a May 11 washingtonpost.com online discussion, Washington Post congressional reporter Jonathan Weisman
responded: "There really aren't too many farmers affected by the death tax, although most of them think they are, so if
that's his criteria, he's gonna have some trouble stumping in farm country." The Politico's Smith and Jonathan Martin noted the
story on their respective blogs, but it was completely ignored by CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, CBS, and NBC. ABC noted the story on its Political Radar weblog on May 12.
Giuiliani In Drag photo from:thebluerepublic.com
Conservative media tout flawed poll to call Dems 9-11 conspiracy theorists
Several conservative commentators have misrepresented the results of an April 20-May 1 Rasmussen Results poll question -- which was itself ambiguous -- to accuse a substantial percentage of Democrats of believing that President Bush knew about the 9-11 attacks in advance and deliberately did nothing to stop them. According to Rasmussen Reports, respondents were asked, "Did Bush know about the 9/11 attacks in advance?" Twenty-two percent replied that he did, 55 percent that he did not, and 22 percent were not sure. According to the poll: "Thirty-five percent of Democrats believe he did know, 39% say he did not know, and 26% are not sure. Republicans reject that view and, by a 7-to-1 margin, say the President did not know in advance about the attacks. Among those not affiliated with either major party, 18% believe the President knew and 57% take the opposite view."
In his May 15 nationally syndicated column, titled "Just How Crazy Are the Dems?" National Review Online editor-at-large Jonah Goldberg claimed that the poll found Democrats "are evenly divided on the question of whether George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in advance," and declared that "a majority of Democrats in this country are out of their gourds." Yet as Goldberg himself admitted, the poll question was ambiguous. As Goldberg said, "Many Democrats are probably merely saying that Bush is incompetent or that he failed to connect the dots or that they're just answering in a fit of pique." In other words, respondents could have been merely saying that Bush received ample warning of possible attacks.
Indeed, President Bush received a briefing on August 6, 2001, titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US," which indicated that Osama bin Laden wanted to conduct terrorist attacks on U.S. cities, that members of his Al Qaeda terrorist network had lived in or traveled to the U.S. for years, that bin Laden had previously said he wanted to hijack an American aircraft, and that "FBI information since that time indicate[d] patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings."
Investigative journalist Ron Suskind wrote in his
Image: www.piratenews.org
book The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 (Simon & Schuster, June 2006) that Bush responded to this report by telling his CIA briefer, "All right, you've covered your ass."
Others have also touted this poll but ignored the ambiguity of the question entirely, in some cases misrepresenting the question and responses and ridiculing Democratic voters as delusional conspiracy theorists.
- On the May 7 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor, host Bill O'Reilly characterized the poll question as having said more than it actually did -- that "35 percent of American Democratic voters believe President Bush knew about the 9-11 attacks in advance and allowed them to happen." He later claimed that it indicated that "35 percent of Democratic voters believe that President Bush stood by and allowed 3,000 Americans to die on the streets." O'Reilly repeatedly referred to this as "madness," and claimed, "Sane people do not make that kind of leap."
- On the May 7 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, Rush Limbaugh claimed that according to the poll, "35 percent of this country's Democrats think that there was a government conspiracy about this and allowed these attacks to happen." He asserted that due to the poll, that "it's no longer funny to call [Democrats] kooks and freaks and so forth. This is -- they are deranged, dangerously uninformed, misinformed, or what have you." He continued: "The Democrat [sic] Party is not mainstream. It is literally a bunch of deranged, delusional radicals." Limbaugh postulated the poll results were due to the influence of the American news media and education system, which had "poison[ed] people's minds" against Bush since the attacks of 9-11.
- In a May 9 post to his blog at townhall.com, nationally syndicated radio host Michael Medved claimed that according to this poll, "a stunning 61% of Democrats believed that the President of the United States may well have collaborated in the murder of 3,000 of his fellow citizens." He cited this poll as proof of "Democratic paranoia and conspiracy mongering," which he asserted "pushes the party to the lunatic fringe and leftwing edge of national opinion."
