August 22, 2006
January 7, 1999 Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:20 AM EST In their emerging discussion about the (liberal?) media, both John Steele Gordon and Joshua Zeitz have made reference to an ABC News Special Report from January 7, 1999. This edition of ABC News is a favorite example of those, like Bernard Goldberg, who seek to demonstrate media bias in favor of the left. I have located a transcript of the original ABC broadcast, which contains some information that will help inform the dispute at hand. During the broadcast, Peter Jennings and a group of commentators (Linda Douglass, Cokie Roberts, and Sam Donaldson) and guests (Jeffrey Toobin, Bill
Kristol, George Stephanopoulos, Terry Moran, and Michael Beschloss) discussed the beginning of the Senate’s trial of Bill Clinton. They began by talking about the divisions within the Senate, particularly over the question of whether witnesses should be included in the trial. Eventually, president pro tempore Strom Thurmond swore in William Rehnquist to oversee the proceedings, and the senators were called to sign an oath of impartiality. Mr. Gordon is right that, during the signing of the book, Peter Jennings identified several Republican senators as conservative. One was Bob Smith. Mr. Gordon is incorrect, though, in suggesting that he might have chosen “half a dozen other very conservative senators” as examples of Jennings’s ideological labeling. Jennings only identified two other senators as “conservative”: Mitch McConnell and Rick Santorum. He also mentioned that John McCain’s politics leaned to the right. That, though, was in the context of a corny joke about the Arizona senator being left-handed, but “more right than left in his politics.” Context is important, too, for the other cases in which Jennings pointed out GOPers’ conservative politics. Joshua Zeitz has suggested one explanation for the identification of Bob Smith as a conservative: At the time, the senator was complaining that his party had abandoned its conservative underpinnings. The transcript of the broadcast suggests another reason: Smith was hoping to run for president, and Jennings was observing that an official with national ambitions would benefit from having such “strong political views.” This is hardly a disparaging mention of Smith’s conservatism. In pointing out the conservatism of Senators Santorum and McConnell, it is interesting to note that Jennings called each man a “very determined conservative.” In the context of the broadcast, this description functioned less as an ideological label than as an illustration of each man’s place in the impeachment debate. Republican commentator Bill Kristol had only a few minutes earlier finished describing the struggle, within the GOP caucus, between “moderate Republicans” and hard-line impeachment advocates like House Judiciary
Committee chairman Henry Hyde. Kristol argued that the moderates were deferring to the more implacable conservatives—”determined” supporters of impeachment like Santorum and McConnell. Jennings was identifying these two members as major actors within the dominant faction of the Republican caucus. That’s not bias; that’s accurate, relevant information. John Steele Gordon may very well be right that there is bias in the media. But in scholarship, as in law, such an argument requires evidence. Mr. Gordon included one piece of evidence and passed the argument on to Fred Barnes. As it turns out, that one piece of evidence is not evidence of anything at all. On the basis of their 1/7/99 broadcast, Jennings and his fellow ABC panelists could more effectively be criticized for being obsessed with describing senators’ hair than with pillorying their conservatism (John Kerry has “all that nice hair;” Fred Thompson is a “slightly balding character.”) Maybe that can be the subject of Bernard Goldberg’s next book.
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