‘Anti-Liberal’ Media
Dorrance Smith
Dorrance Smith, a top media strategist for the Bush White House, will join fellow administration alumni C. Boyden Gray and Evan Kemp in launching an “anti-liberal public affairs network” on cable TV, the LA Times reports (1/11/93).
Smith has the right experience for the task: As a former news executive at ABC, he was the creator of This Week With David Brinkley, and was, until he was hired by Bush in 1991, the executive producer for Nightline. Apparently he doesn’t find the shows he used to run “anti-liberal” enough.
Interlocking Directorates
Last issue, Extra! noted that the New York Times had a fairly strong editorial (11/12/92) criticizing the fact that Clinton transition chair Vernon Jordan was also on the board of the tobacco company RJR Nabisco, then the next day ran another editorial that essentially retracted and apologized for the first one. Could the sudden switch have anything to d0 with the fact that the chair of the board of RJR Nabisco, Louis Gerstner, is a board member of the New York Times Company, which owns the Times?
Made to Be Broken
James Reston
PBS rules are supposedly designed to prevent conflicts of interest in the production of programming. Anti-establishment programs are rigidly scrutinized: PBS execs objected to Made in USA, a dramatic series on the history of labor, because it received money from unions; they rejected the Academy Award-winning documentary Deadly Deception because it was funded and produced by the same entity, the nonprofit group IN-FACT.
But the rules seem to he flexible enough to allow PBS to air a series on the history of the New York Times that is funded by the Times and produced “in association with the New York Times.” The first installment, James Reston: The Man Millions Read, aired January 8, and unsurprisingly treated the Times’ retired pundit with “admiration and respect,” according to the Times’ own review (1/8/93). The director and producer, Susan Dryfoos, is a member of the Sulzberger family, which owns the Times, and a first cousin of Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.
If it seems strange for “public” television to broadcast films about a for-profit company that are paid for by that company and made by one of the company’s owners–then you probably think the same rules apply to powerful media companies as to everyone else.
Mixed Messages
Newsweek’s December 28 cover story on “Women of the Year” presented a series of portraits of the “power players” who are “going to reshape the way Washington does business.” But the portraits themselves send a different message: In four of the nine carefully composed photographs, the subjects are pictured with children (either their own or someone else’s); in five of the portraits, the women are lying on the floor or otherwise horizontal. Is that how Newsweek thinks its readers like to see powerful women?
Help for ‘Television Victims’
Young people spend more time watching TV than they do in school, according to Don’t Be a TV: Television Victim, a new video designed to help junior high and high school students watch TV more critically. The video, produced by the Santa Cruz-based group Media Watch, challenges youths’ conceptions about TV by using the same tactics that attracted them to it in the first place.
Combining clips from TV shows with music, animation and commentary from young people, Don’t Be a TV criticizes corporate control of the media, news coverage of the Gulf War, and the racial and gender stereotypes that are so prevalent in children’s programming. The video ends with a call to media activism, telling young people to challenge TV programming that offends them.
