Clinton Priorities on the Home Front,
Hidden History

excerpted from the book

Through the Media Looking Glass

Decoding Bias and Blather in the News

by Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon

Common Courage Press, 1995, paper

Clinton Priorities on the Home Front

p142
Media Elite Prods Clinton Toward Status Quo
June 2,1993

For days after the selection of David Gergen to be a top White House adviser [in May 1993], the Washington press corps showered President Clinton's move with near-unanimous praise.

If we had real diversity in national media, tough questions would be widespread. For example: Is it hypocritical for a man who became president by denouncing 12 years of Reagan-Bush trickle-down economics to appoint Gergen, one of the most successful salesmen of Reaganomics?

But such blunt questions were rarely posed-even after Clinton proclaimed that the Gergen appointment "signals to the American people where I am, what I believe and what I'm going to do."

Far from being diverse or "liberal," the national media have functioned with remarkable uniformity in recent months, pressuring Clinton away from key campaign pledges. Bringing in a former Reagan media strategist was a symbolic white flag hoisted by the current White House-a gesture of surrender to an establishment press that has pounded at Clinton to avoid serious reform.

The New York Times, which has contributed to the pounding, headlined its report on the Gergen appointment: "An Offering To the Wolves."

The headline had unintended insight. Among the wolves of the media elite, anxiety over the intentions of the first Democratic president in a dozen years has been palpable. They've snarled and snapped at any indication the new man in the White House might actually carry out the populist promises that helped put him there.

On a daily basis during the summer and fall campaign, Clinton condemned policies that favor the rich over people of ordinary means. He attacked the Republicans as captives of corporate lobbyists and contributors. He promised to reform the tax structure, and to invest in job creation as a way of reducing the deficit. He pledged that his inclusionary politics would bring new faces to Washington.

The campaign paid off for Clinton-especially among women and racial minorities. If only white men had voted, George Bush would still be president.

But from the day Clinton was elected, leading political journalists-such as Steve Roberts of U.S. News ~ World Report-began instructing him on how to break his promises of change, including his pledges for campaign finance reform. A post-election New York Times report stated: "For a politician with as many promises as Mr. Clinton, keeping to a few priorities will require self-restraint."

Journalists are supposed to expose politicians who break promises-not encourage them, or hail them for "self-restraint."

Mass media also weighed in against Clinton when he sought to fulfill his pledge of looking beyond the Beltway to include fresh faces in his administration. A media furor greeted several such outsider candidates.

President Clinton's continual backpedaling on reform promises-military cuts, job stimulus, Haitian refugees, gays in the armed forces, etc.-has alienated key Democratic Party constituencies. Their leaders, whose views about the administration rarely appear in establishment media, say that White House waffling and indecisiveness are largely to blame for Clinton's drop in the polls.

But in recent weeks, many national news outlets have united in blaming Clinton's failures on one main factor: the "lurch to the left." Reports on this theme have ignored basic standards of balanced journalism-especially the requirement that people from various sides be quoted.

Typical was a "Clinton has veered left" news story in the New York Times a week before the Gergen appointment. Quoting only disgruntled conservative Democrats, the article offered an unrebutted compilation of dubious claims: That Clinton was elected because he campaigned as a conservative. (No evidence was cited.) That liberals dominate Clinton's cabinet-news that would surprise Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, Defense Secretary Les Aspin and others.

The story included the assertion that Clinton has "done everything Jesse Jackson could have asked for." Times reporter Michael Kelly didn't bother quoting Jackson or kindred spirits. If he had, that statement and the whole article would have been rendered absurd. When we called Jackson's office, we were provided a laundry list of (Jackson-supported) progressive measures which Clinton endorsed during the campaign, but abandoned after entering the White House.

Given the media drumbeat about Clinton's supposed "leftward lurch," perhaps it's no surprise that in selecting David Gergen, a compliant president spouted media catchphrases about purging his administration of "a tinge that is too partisan and not connected to the mainstream."

To those who voted for Bill Clinton because of his message of change, these words of contrition might sound disappointingly like "Return to the status quo."

New York Times columnist William Safire, who helped popularize the "lurch to the left" myth, used the Gergen appointment as an opportunity to gloat and declare victory. He concluded his May 31 column by exhorting Clinton to prove his compliance by recognizing that "taxpayer-subsidized health insurance does not fit into the mainstream."

As with most "leftward lurch" propaganda, there was a tiny problem: evidence. In poll after poll conducted by Safire's New York Times, majorities of the public endorse "tax-financed health insurance."

Fitting "into the mainstream"-as defined by Washington's media elite-means scorning programs that could benefit most Americans.

p150
"Middle Class" Image Veils Fat-Cats Behind Democrats
June 15, 1994

Few political groups have won such consistently favorable media treatment in recent years as the Democratic Leadership Council.

Founded in 1985 by Bill Clinton, Al Gore and other Southern Democrats as a pressure group within the national Democratic Party, the DLC pledged to move the party away from "special interests" and toward "the middle class." Since then, the DLC has gained enormous power and prestige.

But few journalists have bothered to report that the DLC is itself rife with "special interests."

Now, leaked DLC documents provide new evidence of corporate ties that bind the Clinton presidency and the Democratic Leadership Council.

A memo from the DLC's development director, dated March 7 [1994], clearly was not intended to see the light of day. It identifies specific DLC politicians-including the president and vice president of the United States-who would "be most successful in soliciting the contribution" from particular fat-cats for the DLC's political policy arm.

The memo suggests that President Clinton approach poultry tycoon Donald Tyson, of Tyson Foods, for a hefty contribution. In addition, it urges that Clinton target multibillionaire businessman Warren Buffett, the principal stockholder of the ABC/Cap Cities media conglomerate.

The memo also sets out a plan for Vice President Gore to seek funds for DLC operations from Disney cable executive John Cooke. Conveniently, Gore heads the Clinton administration's policy team on the information superhighway-with huge implications for Disney's cable investments.

A newsletter called Counterpunch (published by the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies) obtained the DLC memo-later described by a DLC spokesperson as "an internal fundraising document."

One key question remains about the memo: Did Clinton or Gore know about their behind-the-scenes fundraising roles spelled out in the memo?

In the very first words of its May 30 [1994] news report on the existence of the DLC memo, the Washington Post cleared the nation's top two officials of any complicity: "President Clinton and Vice President Gore don't know it yet, but the Democratic Leadership Council...has listed them on internal memos as 'solicitors' to court wealthy people for a new DLC fundraising drive."

There's one problem with that statement. The Post reporter who wrote it, Charles Babcock, didn't know if it was true. And he still doesn't.

"I probably should have said may not know it," Babcock told us in a June 13 interview. The first ten words of his article, he said, were based on a "hunch."

Like the Washington Post, we were unable to get the White House to comment on when Clinton and Gore knew about the memo.

In any case, the scenario sketched out in the DLC memo signifies a new low in the DLC's tawdry activities. And that's low, indeed.

Year after year, DLC national meetings have been dominated by corporate lobbyists, many of them Republicans. At the DLC annual conference in March 1989, nearly 100 lobbyists subsidized the event by paying between $2,500 and $25,000 each. (In a moment of candor, DLC president Al From acknowledged: "There's no question you can define 'special interest' as our sponsors.")

The DLC's main thrust inside the Democratic Party has been to deride loyal activist constituencies-such as labor, racial minorities and feminists-as pushy special interests.

But the negative "special interests" tag is rarely affixed to the DLC and its big-money backers, including the top echelons of Arco, Prudential-Bache, Dow Chemical, Boeing, RJR Nabisco, Georgia Pacific, the Tobacco Institute, the American Petroleum Institute and Martin Marietta.

The corporate heavies behind the Democratic Leadership Council wouldn't know a middle-class person if their limousines ran over one. Yet that hasn't stopped the DLC-and Clinton, who was hoisted to the national political stage by the DLC-from swearing dedication to "the middle class" almost daily.

President Clinton rang the trusty bell in a speech to the DLC six months ago: "We must be the party of the values and the interests of the middle class..." In late 1992, President-elect Clinton appeared at a DLC banquet in his honor, helping to raise $3 million for the group in a single night; as usual, middle class folks and "values" were hard to find at the DLC event-which cost $15,000 per plate.

The DLC has specialized in blaming the victims of chronic discrimination, instead of faulting conditions of unequal opportunity. "It's time to shift the primary focus from racism, the traditional enemy from without, to self-defeating patterns of behavior, the new enemy within," declared close Clinton ally and DLC stalwart Charles Robb, then governor of Virginia, in 1986.

Hailing that approach as evidence of new maturity among "New Democrats," the news media have routinely depicted the DLC as a force for sobriety within a party in recovery from liberal inebriation.

With typical hype, Newsweek senior editor Joe Klein once lauded the DLC as "the party's most intellectually adventurous group."

The fawning coverage of DLC-style Democrats by powerful media outlets may explain why some conservatives complain of "pro-Democrat" news bias. There's only one catch: These Democrats are more like Republicans.

"The DLC has largely won both the strategic fight over the importance of the middle class and the substantive fight over what values should be reflected in social programs," Washington Post journalist (and Clinton guru) E.J. Dionne Jr. wrote last December. In a telling observation, he added that the DLC hierarchy's "most important White House ally is David Gergen"- the former aide to President Reagan now handling media strategy for President Clinton.

The sleaze that flows between high-rolling corporations and high-placed politicians is bipartisan, and deserves much more media scrutiny than it gets-especially when perpetuated by political groups claiming to speak on behalf of "the middle class."

Hidden History

p170
Do the Founding Fathers Benefit From Media Bias?
July 6, 1994

Patriotic holidays come and go, but one theme remains fairly constant in our country's mass media: The Founding Fathers were a sterling bunch of guys.

Their press notices were the usual raves this July Fourth-superficial accolades for leaders of the struggle for independence.

"The Founding Fathers," according to the New York daily Newsday, "declared that they were willing to fight for the principles of freedom and self-determination, and then went on to create a form of government that has allowed its people to endure and prosper."

The Orlando Sentinel issued a typical proclamation: "The Fourth of July, the birthday of this grand experiment in human liberty, should be a reminder of what it's all about-not material wealth or political advantages, but human freedom. Those who made the American Revolution are its best explainers."

While such puffery was making its accustomed rounds this Fourth of July, other perspectives occasionally reached newsprint. "From the outset, ordinary people decried America's great contradiction-proclaiming liberty for all while practicing slavery," wrote Linda R. Monk in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Columnist Vernon Jarrett of the Chicago Sun-Times was blunt: "Among the Founding Fathers, there was no broad commitment to freedom for all."

It's true that the famed men of the American Revolution were brave, eloquent and visionary as they challenged the British despot, King George III. But present-day news media usually avoid acknowledging an uncomfortable fact: Many heroes of American independence didn't seem to mind very much when they benefitted from injustice.

Take the brilliant man who wrote the Declaration of Independence, 218 years ago. Thomas Jefferson certainly had a passion for freedom: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights..."

All men? Not quite. The luxuries of Monticello were made possible by slavery. Jefferson may have wrestled with his conscience, but it lost. He remained a slave-owner until he died.

As for women, forget it. Jefferson assumed that females should have no right to own property, or to vote. Women, he contended, would be "too wise to wrinkle their foreheads with politics."

The truth be told, some of the leading patriots were downright greedy.

George Washington was America's richest man. And he had a record as a land speculator that makes Donald Trump seem like a penny-ante realtor. After the Revolutionary War, Washington used his enormous wealth and power to snap up vast tracts of land.

Patrick Henry was also among the heroic fighters for independence who went on to make a killing in westward real estate. After demanding "Give me liberty or give me death," Henry wanted Indians out of the way. His slogan could have become: "Give me property or give them death."

James Madison and many other founders of the United States were masters of large plantations. They made sure that the U.S. Constitution would perpetuate slavery: counting each slave as three-fifths of a person, with no rights.

Is this just old, irrelevant history-dredged up from water over the dam? Not at all.

Turning a blind eye to ugly aspects of the past can be a bad habit that carries over into the present: Too often, journalists and media commentators focus on P.R. facades (old or new), and pay little attention to the people left out of the pretty picture.

In A People's History of the United States, author Howard Zinn observes: "The point of noting those outside the arc of human rights in the Declaration [of Independence] is not...to lay impossible moral burdens on that time. It is to try to understand the way in which the Declaration functioned to mobilize certain groups of Americans, ignoring others."

Back in 1776, all the flowery oratory about freedom did nothing for black slaves, women, indentured servants or Native Americans. If we forget that fact, we are remembering only fairy tales instead of history.

During the Constitution's 1987 bicentennial, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall punctured the time-honored idolatry of the Constitution's framers: "The government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war and momentous social transformation to attain the...respect for individual freedoms and human rights we hold as fundamental today."

Most of the delegates who gathered in Philadelphia to draw up the Constitution were wealthy. And they "were determined that persons of birth and fortune should control the affairs of the nation and check the 'leveling impulses' of the propertyless multitude that composed 'the majority faction,"' writes political scientist Michael Parenti.

In his book Democracy for the Few, Parenti notes: "The delegates spent many weeks debating their interests, but these were the differences of merchants, slave owners, and manufacturers, a debate of haves versus haves in which each group sought safeguards within the new Constitution for its particular concerns."

However, "there were no dirt farmers or poor artisans attending the convention to proffer an opposing viewpoint. The debate between haves and have-nots never occurred." And "the delegates repeatedly stated their intention to erect a government strong enough to protect the haves from the have-nots."

After two centuries, you'd hope that more journalists would be willing to set aside fawning myths about the Founding Fathers. If that happens, the emergence of candor might even help to shed some light on the Ruling Fathers of today.

p177
Author of The Jungle Was a Fierce Media Critic
May 19,1993

This year [1993] many news stories about tainted beef have credited Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle with forcing the federal government to establish a meat-inspection program back in 1907

It's true that the novel-with its nauseating depiction of Chicago meat-packing plants-quickly led the U.S. Department of Agriculture to begin inspections. But recent press accounts haven't mentioned key aspects of the author's battles with "the Beef Trust."

If he were alive today, Upton Sinclair probably would not be surprised that E. coli bacteria had harmed hundreds of people 87 years after his novel caused such a stir. As Sinclair saw it, the 1907 law never amounted to much: "The lobbyists of the packers had their way in Washington; the meat inspection bill was deprived of all its sharpest teeth, and in that form [President Theodore] Roosevelt accepted it..."

Most of all, Sinclair blamed the news media. "Because of the kindness of American editorial writers to the interests which contribute full-page advertisements to newspapers," he wrote a dozen years after the law went into effect, "the American people still have their meat prepared in filth."

In those days, of course, print media were the only news media. From the outset, the press gave The Jungle a rough reception. "Can it be possible that any one is deceived by this insane rant and drivel?" one widely syndicated newspaper column scoffed. The meat industry mailed out a million copies of that article.

"I was determined to get something done about the atrocious conditions under which men, women and children were working in the Chicago stockyards," Sinclair recalled. "In my efforts to get something done, I was like an animal in a cage. The bars of this cage were newspapers, which stood between me and the public; and inside the cage I roamed up and down, testing one bar after another, and finding them impossible to break."

Sinclair developed intense enmity toward the Associated Press (and vice versa). "Throughout my entire campaign against the Beef Trust," he wrote in 1919, AP's editors "never sent out a single line injurious to the interests of the packers, save for a few lines dealing with the Congressional hearings, which they could not entirely suppress."

Upton Sinclair came to see the problem as chronic. "American newspapers as a whole represent private interests and not public interests," he declared. "But there will be occasions upon which exception to this rule is made; for in order to be of any use at all, the newspapers must have a circulation, and to get circulation they must pretend to care about the public." To Sinclair it was all too apparent that "American Journalism is a class institution, serving the rich and spurning the poor."

In May 1914, labor strife drew Sinclair to Colorado in the wake of the "Ludlow Massacre." Armed thugs working for the Rockefeller mining interests had killed women and children in a tent colony of striking coal miners and their families. Sinclair seethed at what he called a "concrete wall" that kept accurate information from the American people.

It was the mighty AP wire service that infuriated Sinclair most of all. "The directors and managers of the Associated Press were as directly responsible for the subsequent starvation of these thousands of Colorado mine-slaves as if they had taken them and strangled them with their naked fingers," he contended.

Sinclair presented AP with evidence that Colorado's governor had lied to President Woodrow Wilson about the state's role in the miners' strike. When the news agency refused to report on the matter, Sinclair rushed to the Denver telegraph office and cabled the information himself to 20 of the nation's biggest newspapers.

He later observed: "There was no capitalist magazine or newspaper in the United States that would take up the conduct of the Associated Press in the Colorado strike."

Sinclair expounded on his media critique in a nonfiction book titled The Brass Check, which he published himself in 1920. It went through six printings and 100,000 copies within a half-year-though the book is difficult to locate today.

"I do not expect to please contemporary Journalism," he wrote, "but I expect to produce a book which the student of the future will recognize as just." As far as Sinclair was concerned, "Journalism is one of the devices whereby industrial autocracy keeps its control over political democracy."

Such an attitude, expressed by a tireless and renowned author year after year, did not exactly endear Upton Sinclair to newspaper executives around the country.

When Sinclair moved to Southern California and gave a speech to the Friday Morning Club of Los Angeles, an editorial in the Los Angeles Times-headlined "UPTON SINCLAIR'S RAVINGS"-lamented that "the club rostrum should be used for such ungodly purposes" by "an effeminate young man with a fatuous smile, a weak chin and a sloping forehead, talking in a false treble" and uttering "weak, pernicious, vile doctrines." Soon after World War I ended, the L.A. Times spearheaded a campaign to jail Sinclair as a subversive.

In 1934 - after more than a quarter-century of doing battle with the major news outlets in the country-Upton Sinclair almost became governor of California. Running on a campaign platform called "End Poverty In California"(EPIC), Sinclair won the state's Democratic primary.

State business leaders panicked. They took the unprecedented step of hiring an ad agency to warn that election of the Socialist-turned-Democrat would destroy California. In another innovation, Hollywood studios saw to it that newsreels smearing Sinclair would fill movie theaters throughout the state.

Despite the intense media battering that included constant denunciations by the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle and other powerful daily papers, Sinclair was able to win 38 percent of the votes in a three-person race.

Today Upton Sinclair is known mainly for The Jungle. But he should also be remembered as a courageous media critic and activist who took his lumps from the press lords for speaking his mind and his heart.

Through the Media Looking Glass

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