MSNBC, the New Clinton News Network?
Jim Dandy
FrontPageMagazine.com
2/18/04
Lowell Ponte
MSNBC DIED THIS WEEK, but few have yet noticed.
Third among cable news networks, this joint venture begun in July 1996 by
Microsoft and General Electric, owner of NBC, has lagged far behind rival Fox
News Channel and CNN in viewers. But it has offered an alternative source of
viewpoints, ranging from “Hardball” hosted by veteran Democrat Chris
Matthews to “Scarborough County” hosted by former Republican Congressman
Joe Scarborough from the conservative Florida panhandle.
“It was time for a change, to bring a new perspective to the channel,” an
NBC executive this week reportedly told the New York Times. This “new
perspective” will be a new President and General Manager of MSNBC – Richard
N. Kaplan.
With Kaplan’s entrenchment, MSNBC will, like the other establishment
networks, almost certainly become just another cookie cutter stamping out a
daily batch of predictable one-sided, pro-Democrat, anti-Republican,
pro-Leftist propaganda.
Rick Kaplan, 56, is a huge, energetic bear of a man who got into the wrong
profession a third of a century ago. Ever since, he has tried to twist his jobs
as a broadcast news producer and executive into the role he wanted instead –
partisan political operative, Leftist ideologue, and, since 1977, political
ally and intimate friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Along his Leftward way, Kaplan has tarnished the reputations of broadcast
network news departments from ABC to CNN….and he is about to do the same to
ruin MSNBC. Our only consolation is that his partisan propaganda will be
infecting one of the tiniest audiences in all of television. The larger lesson
is what this reveals about an NBC willing to hire such a person to run one of
its networks.
“Kaplan was born in the Rogers Park section of Chicago,” wrote David
Margolick in a January 1998 Vanity Fair profile. “His childhood was filled
with friends and Democratic politics; Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley and John
F. Kennedy were icons in his home.
“He envisioned a life of political activism,” Margolick continued, “and
joined the 1968 presidential campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy as an advance
man. A week later, when Bobby Kennedy won the California primary, Kaplan
prepared to switch sides, and headed to Kennedy’s hotel to meet him. He ended
up that night alone on a Santa Monica beach, watching the waves, listening to
radio reports about Kennedy’s slow death. He contemplated a radically altered
future outside politics.”
Turning instead to broadcast journalism, Rick Kaplan was a producer for Walter
Cronkite in 1977 when Susan Thomason introduced him to the obscure Attorney
General of Arkansas named Bill Clinton.
“Both gregarious, both personable, both deeply interested in politics, both
news junkies, both charmers, both voracious eaters (their first encounter,
appropriately enough, was in a restaurant), they hit it off instantly,” wrote
Margolick. “’I just remember he was a terrific guy,’ Kaplan said.
‘Fun.’”
“If anything,” wrote Margolick, “Kaplan was at least as close to Hillary,
who shares his Chicago roots; he even hired her to work on coverage of the 1980
Democratic convention. When Chelsea was searching for a 49th-birthday present
for her dad, Kaplan sent along a titanium golf club fashioned from a melted
down Soviet missile. After Kaplan’s younger daughter underwent serious
surgery in 1994, calls from both Clintons helped a near-miraculous recovery,
Kaplan said.”
During the 1980s Kaplan helped talk Bill Clinton out of giving up politics to
take a million-dollar job on Wall Street. After Clinton’s much-ridiculed
speech at the 1988 Democratic convention in Atlanta, writes Margolick, “it
was Kaplan’s shoulder Clinton cried on, over Chinese takeout…” and Kaplan
who persuaded Clinton that his political career was not over.
(Clinton’s droning speech became such a national joke that he was invited by
Democrat Johnny Carson to appear and play his saxophone on the “Tonight
Show,” which turned the Arkansas Governor into a star.)
After a stint during the 1980s as Executive Producer of ABC’s
“Nightline,” Kaplan was promoted to Executive Producer of ABC’s “Prime
Time Live.” In 1992 he dispatched reporters to work undercover as employees
at the supermarket chain Food Lion, then a target of the United Food and
Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) trying to put the company out of business. The
ABC reporters got Food Lion jobs by using credentials and references ABC faked
with the help of the UFCW.
The resulting expose, aired by ABC around election time that year, depicted
Food Lion as an unethical seller of outdated and contaminated foods. Food Lion
sued, and a jury that saw the 45 hours of video from which Kaplan and ABC
distilled a 10-minute hit piece awarded Food Lion $5.5 million in punitive
damages for fraud committed by Capital Cities-ABC against the company.
Such a judgement is extremely rare because it requires clear evidence not only
of wrong and false information but also of malice, a calculated and knowing use
of falsehood by journalists to cause damage to an innocent party. These damages
were greatly reduced by subsequent liberal judges, and a jury fine of $35,000
against Kaplan himself was overturned by a judge.
What the un-aired videotape revealed was that in several instances the
wrongdoing ascribed to Food Lion was actually committed by or at the direction
of these ABC producer fake employees. In one instance, when a genuine Food Lion
employee noticed and cleaned a dirty meat slicer that ABC was preparing to film
as evidence, one of the ABC producers could be heard “muttering
obscenities.” It was evident that ABC was covering the story with a
pro-union, anti-company agenda and was stacking the deck to produce the
propaganda it wanted to air. The man in charge of this Leftist smear piece was
Executive Producer Rick Kaplan.
But by 1992 Kaplan was beginning to leave any pretense of journalistic ethics
behind. “Kaplan,” wrote Tim Graham of the Media Research Center, “has
been the prime example of a TV news producer who did not just blur, but
demolished the wall between reporting on liberal politicians and openly helping
them.”
With Bill Clinton at risk of extinction in the 1992 New Hampshire primary,
Kaplan reportedly influenced ABC News to delay reporting for three crucial days
its discovery of the 1969 Clinton letter to Col. Eugene Holmes. This is the
notorious letter, as described by Accuracy in Media, in which “Clinton
confessed to having tricked Col. Holmes, getting him to violate federal law to
get him ROTC deferment” and in which Clinton “said he loathed the
military.” The delay gave Clinton time to prepare damage control to blunt
the letter’s impact.
While Executive Producer of ABC’s “Prime Time Live,” Kaplan in 1992
advised candidate Bill Clinton how to deal with the Gennifer Flowers affair
issue, recommended that the Clintons appear on rival CBS’s program “60
Minutes,” and advised the Clintons on how to handle that interview.
In his 1994 book Strange Bedfellows, a study of press coverage of the 1992
campaign, Los Angeles Times reporter Tom Rosentiel described, in Margolick’s
words, “a frantic evening when Clinton called Kaplan repeatedly, baring his
soul and seeking strategic advice.”
“Weeks later,” reported Graham, “when Clinton’s campaign struggled in
the New York primary, Kaplan rode to the rescue again, getting Clinton booked
on the Don Imus radio show. Kaplan not only arranged the interview, he prepared
him for it – and ABC cameras taped both ends of the conversation and aired it
on ‘Nightline.’ Later, Kaplan did not deny a Spy Magazine report that he
boasted of attending Clinton campaign staff meetings and helped set up the
campaign’s press office.”
On the eve of the 1992 election ABC reporter Sam Donaldson had taped interviews
with both President George H.W. Bush and candidate Bill Clinton. Kaplan ordered
Donaldson to do a tag line to his Clinton interview “to make it clear that
you don’t hate Clinton.” This tag, of course, weakened Donaldson’s
credibility and the power of his questions, leaving an impression that the
reporter was somehow biased and that the interview therefore should be taken
with a grain of salt. The effect was to tilt the two interviews more in
Clinton’s favor.
Kaplan “played golf with Bill shortly before the inauguration,” according
to the liberal magazine The New Republic, “and watched movies with both
Clintons at the Governor’s mansion.”
In 1993 Kaplan spent the first of his nights in the Lincoln Bedroom in the
Clinton White House. He was among those thus rewarded for services to the
Clintons at least as valuable as the $100,000 they would charge mere political
donors for a single night’s stay in this public property.
In late October 1994, “Kaplan killed [ABC reporter] Jim Wooten’s exclusive
interview with an Arkansas state trooper who claimed a Clinton aide had tried
to muzzle him,” reported Margolick. “After that, Wooten refused to do any
more pieces on Whitewater.” Another ABC news producer told Margolick that
“the bar kept getting higher” for such investigations into Clinton dealings
with Whitewater.
“Phone logs revealed that on the night Vince Foster killed himself Kaplan
called Hillary Clinton….” wrote Margolick. “When Webster Hubbell
resigned, he called him too. ‘I happen to like Webb,’ Kaplan said.”
[In February 2003 ABC re-hired Kaplan as a Senior Vice President to oversee
“World News Tonight,”“Nightline,” the ABC News Political Unit gearing
up for 2004 election coverage, and “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”
MSNBC must have paid a pretty penny, not disclosed, to hire him away from ABC.
Nowadays ABC openly acknowledges its pro-Left, anti-Conservative political
bias.]
By 1997, after Kaplan moved to Cable News Network as one of its chieftains,
with evidence of campaign fundraising improprieties threatening to submerge
Bill Clinton, CNN unleashed a Kaplan-produced special. U.S. News & World
Report found that Kaplan had ordered CNN reporters to “limit the use of the
word ‘scandal’ in reporting on Clinton’s campaign fundraising.” The
message to CNN reporters was clear: go easy on the boss’s friends in the
White House.
As the Lewinsky scandal broke in 1998, wrote Graham, “Kaplan leapt into
action at CNN with two-hour specials attacking any and all Clinton critics. The
programs included ‘Media Madness,’ which asked ‘what the hell are you
people doing’ probing Bill Clinton’s sex life?; and ‘Investigating the
Investigator,’ which described Ken Starr as ‘suspect’ over his
‘religious and Republican roots.’ In May, Kaplan devoted an hour to
demonizing Rep. Dan Burton, who was compared by reporter Bruce Morton to
English despot Oliver Cromwell.”
Kaplan saw to it that CNN gave softball coverage to the Clintons and threw
hardballs at their enemies. Under his watch, CNN came to be known as the
Clinton News Network for its pro-Bill&Hill bias. As Bill O’Reilly of rival
Fox News Channel has noted, “financial reporter Lou Dobbs quit CNN because
Kaplan was cutting into ‘Moneyline’ to give Mr. Clinton some marginal
coverage.”
(CNN also came to be called the Castro News Network for its coverage
unwaveringly favorable to the Cuban Marxist dictator. Kaplan and Castro have
been good friends since at least 1978, Margolick reported, and during a Castro
United Nations visit to New York while they were dining together, Kaplan
invited Fidel to come with him to a private dinner with President Clinton,
deputy White House Chief of Staff Harold Ickes, and Susan Thomases. “Castro
paused, for what seemed like an hour, before declining,” wrote Margolick.
“He didn’t want to embarrass Clinton, he explained.”)
In 1998 CNN President Kaplan also oversaw production of the first documentary
for his new show NewsStand. The documentary called “Tailwind,” narrated by
hyper-Leftist journalist Peter Arnett, alleged that during the Vietnam War the
United States had used poison gas against women and children in Laos.
Challenged for proof by other journalists and the Pentagon, CNN’s documentary
fell apart like the tissue of lies it was. But that did not stop its use around
the world as a tool of Marxist anti-American propaganda.
Kaplan’s Leftist love did not end with the Clintons. “The November 20,
2000, Newsweek reported Kaplan had helped Al Gore prepare for a debate against
Bill Bradley,” wrote Graham. “At a rehearsal for a California debate on
March 1, former CNN President Rick Kaplan joked, ‘Let’s do the debate
now.’” But as Graham notes, Kaplan “was still CNN president in March,”
while acting openly as a Gore partisan and enabler.
“I keep looking for what I should be ashamed of, long and hard,” Kaplan
told Margolick of those who question his Clinton sycophancy and lack of
journalistic distance from those he covers, “and I just can’t find
anything.” He dismisses his critics such as Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media
and Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center as “liars.”
And now, trailing clouds of glory, Rick Kaplan reportedly will be taking
control of the helm at MSNBC.
The problem this poses for MSNBC is that nobody familiar with Kaplan’s past
can trust anything reported on a network under his control. And without viewer
trust in its integrity, a news network dies. This is why CNN’s credibility
and ratings collapsed during Kaplan’s reign of blatant bias. MSNBC could
scarcely have found a worse President anywhere than this poster boy for
Left-wing media bias.
Among the first things Kaplan installs in a new office, wrote Margolick, is
what he calls ‘”my favorite picture in life.’ It was a 1986 Vladimir
Sichov photograph of a homeless man, who holds a sign declaring ‘I’m
hungry. Please help’; copies of [betrayer of President Ronald Reagan] David
Stockman’s The Triumph of Politics are visible in a bookstore window behind
him. ‘That’s trickle-down economics,’ Kaplan said” of the crude Leftist
agitprop photo.
Kaplan’s announced coming may already have begun changing things at MSNBC.
Monday, the day this was first reported, Chris Matthews with a moistened finger
in the wind aired an episode of “Hardball” slanted almost entirely to the
Left, nearly bereft of even a pretense of balance from the other side.
(MSNBC has already started to go “fluffy,” its shows larded with guests
during the current ratings sweeps to promote shows on other NBC channels such
as the Today Show’s Matt Lauer and his Guess-Where-I-Am travel contest.)
It’s easy to anticipate that Republican Joe Scarborough will soon be either
purged or gelded. Gelding would take the form of Kaplan requiring that every
conservative guest and statement on MSNBC’s “Scarborough Country” be
“balanced” with a Leftist guest or statement. At best this will dilute the
show and destroy its savor and ability to balance Matthews. At worst it will
goad Scarborough to turn his attention to relatively apolitical topics like the
Michael Jackson scandals.
Needless to say, MSNBC Democrats like Matthews or the “Countdown” laughing
Lefty Keith Olbermann will get no comparable command to “balance” their
Left-leaning shows with right-wing voices and views.
The concept behind any such Kaplan directive would, of course, be the old
“fairness doctrine” that John F. Kerry now says he would like to re-impose
on licensed broadcasters. This doctrine pretends to open the airwaves to a wide
diversity of views. In practice, as past decades of experience showed, it does
the opposite. By making broadcasters afraid of punishment for failing to
satisfy some bureaucrat’s or political ideologue’s arbitrary notion of
balance, most broadcasters simply ceased airing controversial views.
An enforced “Fairness Doctrine” has a chilling effect on free speech. It
would let Democrat politicians demand that any talk radio station airing Rush
Limbaugh or Lowell Ponte be required to air Al Franken, whose new show
commences, appropriately enough, on the eve of April Fool’s Day.
The evidence of Senator Kerry’s disingenuousness in calling for such
political control over free speech is clear. A segment of broadcasting is still
under a “fairness doctrine.” The Charter of the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting requires PBS television stations and National Public Radio
stations to deal with topics in a fair, balanced and even-handed way.
Does anybody with more than a room temperature I.Q. or Third Grade education
believe PBS and NPR are anything more than house organs of the Left and the
Democratic Party?
If Senator Kerry is serious, then let him do what Republicans should be doing.
He should call for Senate and House subcommittees to do objective research to
determine whether PBS and NPR are violating their own “fairness doctrine”
by airing programs that tilt relentlessly to the Left.
We should be following the example of Great Britain, where serious
consideration is underway over whether to dismantle the taxpayer-supported
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) altogether. Leftists at the BBC slanted
their coverage against the recent Gulf War with such virulent, toxic bias and
dishonesty that crews on British warships switched away from BBC to private
Rupert Murdoch’s SkyNews. It seems that BBC has been taken over by outright
ideological enemies of Britain – much as has happened in the U.S. with
anti-Americans now controlling most of what airs on PBS and NPR. Free,
capitalist societies do not need, and are harmed by having, government-owned,
politically controlled broadcast networks.
The biggest uncertainty in how Leftist Rick Kaplan will tilt MSNBC comes from
his love, verging on worship (remember, he believes in their
“near-miraculous” power to heal his daughter), of the Clintons.
If Hillary Clinton wants this year’s Democratic nominee to lose so that the
White House will be open for her to run in 2008, then her friend and vassal
Rick Kaplan will use MSNBC to help defeat John F. Kerry or whomever else
becomes the Democratic 2004 presidential candidate. His personal loyalty to
the Clintons seems even stronger than his ideological love of the Left.
If this comes to pass, then Joe Scarborough will likely remain on the air until
the day following the November election, when a loyalist of the Hillary 2008
campaign will replace him. That’s trickle-down politics. That’s Rick
“Capo” Kaplan, reportedly the new boss of a now-dying private network that
once held much promise, MSNBC.
We may soon be changing the nickname on its gravestone to
Marxist-Socialist-NBC.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
------
Mr. Ponte hosts a national radio talk show Saturdays 6-9 PM Eastern Time (3-6
PM Pacific Time) and Sundays 9 PM-Midnight Eastern Time (6-9 PM Pacific Time)
on the Liberty Broadcasting network (formerly TalkAmerica). Internet Audio
worldwide is at LibertyBroadcasting .com. The show’s live call-in number is
(888) 822-8255. A professional speaker, he is a former Roving Editor for
Reader’s Digest.
"If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless
work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her old
age." -- Charles Pierce, Boston Globe, Jan 5, 2003
jayembee
> MSNBC, the New Clinton News Network?
>
> FrontPageMagazine.com
> 2/18/04
>
> Lowell Ponte
>
> MSNBC DIED THIS WEEK, but few have yet noticed.
> [...]
> With Kaplan’s entrenchment, MSNBC will, like the other
> establishment networks, almost certainly become just
> another cookie cutter stamping out a daily batch of
> predictable one-sided, pro-Democrat, anti-Republican,
> pro-Leftist propaganda.
And where, exactly, does Fox News fit in Mr. Ponte's view of
the "predictable one-sided, pro-Democrat, anti-Republican,
pro-Leftist propaganda" geography of the "estabishment networks"?
-- jayembee
D.F. Manno
jayembe...@snurcher.com (jayembee) wrote:
No fair! You're using _facts_.
--
D.F. Manno
domm...@netscape.net
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." (Benjamin Franklin)
Richard
> MSNBC, the New Clinton News Network?
>
> FrontPageMagazine.com
> 2/18/04
>
> Lowell Ponte
>
For a right winger, this guy is as long-winded as some leftwing speech
makers.
-Rich
James
Street Journal are evil liberal propaganda.
MSNBC tried to suck the saggy and sour teat of Ann Coulter fringe for years.
They have gotten nothing but scorn and increasingly low ratings in return. I'm
glad they have woken up and left the fascist lies to Faux News.
ruud
The DAY a news outlet owned by WAR CONTRACTOR General Electric is
slanted to the LEFT will be a cold day in HELL.
Rick Kaplan is a good soldier IE: he's not going to bring any balance
to the news.
He has to be a good soldier - or he would not have been HIRED,
imbecile.
jxnk...@aol.comengetit (Jim Dandy) wrote in message news:<20040218065333...@mb-m21.aol.com>...
ruud
The "media is liberal" mantra is SO tired. And so the opposite of the
reality.
The best form of attack is defense. Portray yourself as the victim.
It's always "oh, the media is at fualt" - whenever something does not
go their way in politics or news. The typical right wing answer to
any argument: point fingers.
Tom Cervo
>Wall
>> Street Journal are evil liberal propaganda.
When he was young, Horowitz was an embarassment to the far left. Having worn
out his welcome there, it's his turn to embarass the far right
Mojo
"Tom Cervo" <tomc...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:20040218224434...@mb-m15.aol.com...
How very, very true.
William December Starr
sennas...@hotmail.com (ruud) said:
> The "media is liberal" mantra is SO tired. And so the opposite of
> the reality.
>
> The best form of attack is defense. Portray yourself as the
> victim. It's always "oh, the media is at fualt" - whenever
> something does not go their way in politics or news. The typical
> right wing answer to any argument: point fingers.
"The angry style is a hallmark of neoconservatives and their more
traditional conservative colleagues. Though they run the most
powerful country in the history of the world, controlling the
federal government, the courts and a majority of state
legislatures and executives, they still speak like a bitter
minority, constantly outraged by the powers that be."
-- Fareed Zakaria, reviewing _An End to Evil_ by David
Frum and Richard Perle, New York Times, 8 Feb. 2004.
-- William December Starr <wds...@panix.com>
D.F. Manno
sennas...@hotmail.com (ruud) wrote:
> frontpagemagazine.com: The Bush Propaganda Web Site??
>
> The DAY a news outlet owned by WAR CONTRACTOR General Electric is
> slanted to the LEFT will be a cold day in HELL.
>
> Rick Kaplan is a good soldier IE: he's not going to bring any balance
> to the news.
Not to mention that the "MS" in MSNBC stands for Microsoft, a company
that has no reason to love Clinton (whose administration started the
anti-trust case).
Ed
<tomc...@aol.com> wrote:
"If you can not answer a man's argument, all is not lost; you can
still call him vile names."
Elbert Hubbard
James
>
> "If you can not answer a man's argument, all is not lost; you can
> still call him vile names."
>
> Elbert Hubbard
Was he reviewing Michael Savage's last book?