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Ronald Reagan is gone, but at least as far as the cable news networks are concerned, he is not forgotten. Not so with most of the other important news items this week, which were relegated to the nooks and crannies between the Gipper coverage. OTM pauses to consider the casualties in a week of saturation death coverage.
The Reagan presidency was famous for its declaration of morning in America, no matter what time of day it was. And the man in charge of reminding the public that the sun was always on the horizon was Reagan's longtime deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver. In early 2001, Deaver told Bob about the techniques he used to shape the media coverage of his boss.
In 1982, The New York Times reported on a massacre that had taken place at the hands of American-trained counterinsurgency forces in the Salvadoran village of El Mozote. But the Reagan administration insisted that no massacre had taken place, and eventually The Times, under pressure from the administration, reassigned the reporter who had broken the story. Journalist Robert Parry, who first reported many aspects of the Iran-Contra Affair, tells Brooke that it was just one example of how the Reagan administration discouraged unfavorable coverage of its policies in Central America.
On Wednesday, a judge in Florida heard arguments in a case brought by CNN against the State of Florida. At issue is the list of convicted felons in the state, who under Florida law, must be purged from the voting rolls. State law allows the press to view the list, but not to copy or disseminate it. Florida Senator Bill Nelson, who has joined CNN in its lawsuit, tells Brooke why he thinks it's so important that the media have full access to the list
Clear Channel Communications has agreed to pay the government $1.75 million, in exchange for the FCC scrapping all pending indecency complaints against the radio conglomerate. It's the largest indecency settlement ever, but it could have been even larger. Lawmakers have proposed boosting fines for broadcasters to 500 thousand dollars, which could then be multiplied by the number of stations which aired the material. Then again, the prospects for any indecency legislation reaching Bush's desk this year aren't what they were a few months ago. The New York Times' Jacques Steinberg updates Bob on the campaign against broadcast indecency
This weekend marks the ten-year anniversary of the murders of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson, a crime that culminated in the century's last "Trial of the Century." The televised proceedings of O.J.'s murder trial mesmerized America for nine months. But Slate.com Senior Editor Dahlia Lithwick can't quite figure out why. She joins Brooke to discuss courtroom drama's perfect storm
The space inside the beltway has no shortage of wonks. And for every wonk, there's a wonkette - or rather, there's the Wonkette. The eponymous gossip weblog has recently become the talk of DC, what with its blow-by-blow documentation of the sex-for-hire exploits of a certain Hill staffer. Bob chats with Ana Marie Cox about her life as The Wonkette.
Last fall, gossip columnist Lloyd Grove packed up and moved his operation from The Washington Post to The New York Daily News. And that set all the gossipers to gossiping about one of their own. Brooke took the opportunity to peek inside the world of professional dirt-dishing in the city where celebrity and politics collide in a dazzling extravaganza of 24-7 gossip. She returned with this report.
Highlights from Past ShowsWhen the Public Broadcasting Service was set up 37 years ago, its founders made various bylaws to insure that it could operate entirely free of political pressure. So for many years, the American right, which saw the network as a mouthpiece for the left, tried to divert public support away from the network. But now, according to New Yorker Ken Auletta, Republicans are changing course. He tells Brooke about how conservatives are changing PBS from the inside-out.
On Wednesday the New York Times ran an editor’s note taking stock of the paper’s coverage of the run-up to the war in Iraq. The note referred to an unquestioning reliance on Iraqi defectors such as Ahmed Chalabi, as principal sources, often without verification or follow-up. Of the six articles used to illustrate the problem, four of them bore the byline of Judith Miller, though she wasn’t mentioned by name in the note. Jack Shafer writes the Press Box column for Slate and he has been calling for a reexamination of Miller’s work for more than a year. But now that it’s come to pass, he tells Brooke that he sees no reason for singling Miller out.
On the Media is funded by The Bydale Foundation, The Ford Foundation, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Overbrook Foundation.
