Fear & Loathing at the Democratic Convention
By the end of the Democratic Convention, media cliches about the campaign had outpaced peaches as Georgia’s leading export. Through dint of repetition, the most dubious claims became truisms. If there was a chorus that resounded in Atlanta’s Omni Coliseum even louder that Neil Diamond’s “Coming to America,” it was the media’s unanimous refrain about those darned “special interests.” Reporters applied this pejorative label mostly to Jackson constituencies. Bruce Morton (CBS, 7/16/88) spoke of the Democrats’ need “to shed the image of the special interests.” John McLaughlin (NBC/PBS, 7/17/88) warned of a Democratic Party “in the vest pocket of special ...
KAL 007 and Iran Air 655
The day after a Soviet interceptor plane blew up a Korean passenger jet, the first sentence of a New York Times editorial (9/2/83) was unequivocal: "There is no conceivable excuse for any nation shooting down a harmless airliner." Headlined "Murder in the Air", the editorial asserted that "no circumstance whatever justifies attacking an innocent plane." Confronted with the sudden reality of a similar action by the U.S. government, the New York Times inverted every standard invoked with righteous indignation five years earlier. Editorials condemning the KAL shoot down were filled with phrases like "wanton killing," "reckless aerial murder" and "no ...
Nicaragua's Drug Connection Exposed as Hoax
On July 28, the House Judiciary subcommittee on crime, chaired by Congressman William Hughes (D-NJ), held the first of a series of hearings into whether Reagan administration officials condoned drug smuggling and other criminal activities to further its Central America policy. Among other things, the panel sought to determine if top leaders of the Colombian cocaine cartel escaped arrest because the much ballyhooed "war on drugs" took a back seat to a covert operation designed to discredit the Nicaraguan government-this at a time when the administration was seeking additional aid to the contras. CBS Evening News (7/28/88), the only major ...
