Unbiased reporting?

[Morgeruat]

For those on the "looney left" who think so poorly of Fox News, one of the heroes of leftist media has quite a history of twisting the news to suit HIS agenda.

link

· Anchor and Senior Editor of ABC Television’s “World News Tonight with Peter Jennings” · Avoided describing murderers of Israelis at Munich Olympics as “terrorists” · Slanted ABC’s reporting to benefit Communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua · Born and raised in Canada, retained Canadian citizenship even after becoming a dual U.S. citizen in 2004 · “My mother…was pretty anti-American. And so I was, in some respects, raised with anti-Americanism in my blood, or in my mother’s milk at least. -- Peter Jennings, 11/6/02 on CBS Late Show with David Letterman · “We may tell you all the time that our principal aim in life is to communicate and assist, inform. But if you see injustice and you can get people to do something about it, ahh, it’s just a glorious feeling…. There’s nothing a reporter likes more than to have an effect on policy.” -- Peter Jennings on CBS News Special Breaking the News Peter Jennings is Anchorman and Senior Editor of ABC Television’s “World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.” Peter Charles Archibald Ewart Jennings was born in July 1938 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. His father Charles Jennings was, from the founding of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in the 1930s, the voice of CBC and came to be known as the “Edward R. Murrow of Canada.” His powerful father gave his nine-year-old son his own nationwide show, “Peter’s People,” on CBC Radio. The weekly half-hour program featured news and music for children. As a child he was “bone lazy and a bit delinquent,” Jennings told a Good Housekeeping Magazine interviewer, and he found school “boring.” He was expelled from several private schools, then dropped out of school forever before completing 10th Grade. His father discouraged him from seeking a career in broadcasting, so the high school dropout worked for three years as a teller at the Royal Bank of Canada before taking a job at a small Ontario radio station. In 1961 Peter Jennings found work at one of Canada’s first private television stations, where his jobs ranged from newscaster to host of a Canadian version of “American Bandstand.” When this station became part of the new private national network CTV, his famous last name vaulted Jennings to the position of co-anchor of its national evening news. Executives of the fledgling American Broadcasting Company (ABC) quickly noticed this rising northern star. “My mother…was pretty anti-American,” Jennings said on the September 6, 2002 CBS “Late Show with David Letterman. “And so I was, in some respects, raised with anti-Americanism in my blood, or in my mother’s milk at least.” In 1964 Peter Jennings was hired by ABC, moved to New York City, and within a year the 26-year-old Canadian became America’s youngest network news anchor. ABC saw Jennings as a way to attract young and urban viewers to its then-15-minute-long newscast “World News Tonight.” “It was a little ridiculous when you think about it,” Jennings is quoted as saying in Barbara Matusow’s 1983 book The Evening Stars: The Making of the Network News Anchor. “A twenty-six-year-old trying to compete with [CBS’s Walter] Cronkite, [NBC’s Chet] Huntley, and [NBC’s David] Brinkley. I was simply unqualified.” Jennings had limited knowledge of American history and culture. He pronounced words like “schedule” and “lieutenant” in a distinctly Canadian and aristocratic way – “SHED-u-al,” “lef-TEN-ant.” He once mispronounced Appomattox, site of Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s surrender that effectively ended the War Between the States. He confused the U.S. Marine Corps anthem with the U.S. Navy’s, “Anchors Aweigh.” Newscast ratings were weak. A few ABC affiliates refused to air Jennings at all. After three years, ABC replaced Jennings as anchor with veteran newscaster Frank Reynolds. Peter Jennings remained with ABC, however, as a network reporter covering the 1968 political conventions and Civil Rights movement. The following year he became the network’s correspondent based in Rome, then Lebanon. He impressed bosses by doing the first-ever interview with terrorist Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat. “In the early 1970s, when he was single [i.e., divorced from his first wife] and head of the ABC bureau in Beirut, Peter Jennings dated Hanan Ashrawi, who at the time was also single and a graduate student in literature at the American University in the Lebanese capital,” reported the December 30, 1991/January 6, 1992 U.S. News & World Report. “Jennings was introduced to Ashrawi’s parents and sisters and became part of her circle of friends.” Ashrawi was, in fact, the youngest of five daughters of a politically active doctor. At American University she was a leader of the General Union of Palestinian Students while dating Jennings. As an adult the chain-smoking Ashrawi became part of the public ruling circle of the Palestinian Authority in Arafat’s regime. “Anyone who has known Hanan as long as I have,” Jennings said, “is not surprised to see her emerge as a persuasive spokesperson for the Palestinians.” On September 11, 2001, Jennings was Anchor of ABC when Islamist terrorists killed nearly 3,000 Americans in a series of attacks that destroyed New York’s World Trade Center and struck the Pentagon. “It is certainly a motivating factor,” Jennings told viewers during his coverage of this horror, “that the hatred of the United States, and the hatred of the United States as a patron of Israel, whether you’re from Afghanistan, or whether you’re from Iran, Iraq, or inside the Palestinian territories is so intense at some levels, and has become more intense in recent months, that nobody will be, very many people will not be surprised at this attack today though like everybody else will be amazed at the magnitude and success of it.” “[Peter Jennings] hosted what looked like a little intercontinental tea party for alleged experts on the Middle East,” wrote liberal television critic Tom Shales in the September 17, 2001 Washington Post, “one of whom was professional Palestinian spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi, whom Jennings hailed as ‘widely known in the United States.’ “Jennings wanted to know,” wrote Shales, “…how anyone could hate America so much that they would launch this kind of vicious, calamitous attack. Ashrawi blamed U.S. foreign policy (for having ‘fought Arab nationalism’) and, predictably for her, Israel. Ashrawi complained that ‘Israel is given preferential treatment, treated as a country above the law, as part of her condemnation. Jennings deferred to Ashrawi, as usual, and let her filibuster. It was a nauseating display,” concluded Shales. Jennings never informed his audience about his close relationship with Ashrawi, nor of his having been “part of her circle” of radical friends in Beirut. In 1972, while covering the murder of 11 Israeli athletes by Palestinians at the Munich Olympics, Jennings went out of his way to refer to the murderers as “guerrillas” and “commandos,” never using the word “terrorists.” “I first saw Jennings on ABC when, as a young TV journalist, he reported from the Munich Olympics,” wrote Martin Peretz, publisher of the liberal The New Republic in its September 13, 2001 issue. “And I was filled with disgust that his subsequent career has only deepened. At Munich – I still remember it, 30 years later – Jennings tried to explain away the abductions and massacre of the young Israeli athletes. His theme: The Palestinians were helpless and desperate. Ipso facto, they were driven to murder. That’s life….” “In Sept. 2002, when ABC News aired a retrospective on the Olympic Massacre,” wrote the web site HonestReporting.com, “Jennings unabashedly said that Israel should stop regarding the Palestinians as terrorists as a result of the Olympic Massacre of three decades ago. Jennings dismissed the continual barrage of thousands of Palestinian terror attacks against Israelis, not only before, but also since the ’72 Olympics.” In large part because of Peter Jennings, ABC News was quicker than its rivals to air foreign criticism of Israel and to portray Palestinians, other Arabs, Iranians and even terrorist organizations sympathetically. “I felt very strongly – and I still do – that there is much more than the Israeli side to the Middle East story,” Jennings told Rolling Stone Magazine. “There are nineteen countries in the Arab world, and I worked in all of them.” “It is Hezbollah, which means ‘The Party of God,’ that gets credit for liberating Lebanon from the long Israeli occupation,” said Jennings in his report from Beirut on March 27, 2002. “Yesterday, I went to see its 38-year-old leader, Hassan Nasrallah. He is a popular member of the political establishment. The Bush administration says Hezbollah is a terrorist organization. ‘Hezbollah was proud to resist the Israeli occupation,’ he says. ‘We gave our lives. We are not terrorists.’” Jennings never informed his audience that Hezbollah was responsible for bombing the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon and a U.S. military barracks where 241 Marines were murdered by a Hezbollah truck bomb. He also neglected to mention the theocratic dictatorship of Iran’s role in arming and funding Hezbollah, a Shiite terrorist organization with close ties to Tehran. As war with Iraq approached in 2003, Peter Jennings did reports favoring continued inspections by the United Nations. On January 21, 2003 Jennings reported on “several hundred artists and writers walking through the streets of Baghdad to say thank you to Saddam Hussein” whose regime “has always supported the arts.” On his newscasts Jennings featured anti-war activists, described as noble idealists, but he never told viewers of the radical background of many activists nor that the organizer of the largest anti-war protests was the Marxist-Leninist pro-terrorist group International A.N.S.W.E.R. After U.S. troops removed Saddam, Jennings described those gathered at the toppling of the dictator’s statue as “a small crowd.” Jenning’s protégé during the war, fellow Canadian and MSNBC reporter Ashleigh Banfield, ascribed U.S. policy to the influence of what she called “the Jewish Lobby.” In 1975 Jennings returned to Washington, D.C. to host “A.M. America,” forerunner to today’s “Good Morning America.” By 1977 he transferred to ABC’s London bureau, from which in 1978 he became part of a triumvirate of evening news anchors along with Frank Reynolds and, from Chicago, Max Robinson. In 1983 Frank Reynolds was suffering from cancer, and ABC chose Jennings to replace him. “Anchor people are slaves to the daily broadcast,” Jennings has said. “Very high-priced slaves I grant you. But slaves.” He has been enslaved as anchor of “World News Tonight” for more than 20 years. In 1990 he also began doing specials under the name “Peter Jennings Reports.” These have often dealt with controversial topics. In 1999 he anchored a 12-hour series titled The Century and co-authored a best-selling book with the same name. In 2004 he anchored “Jesus and Paul – The Word and the Witness,” a three-hour special that provocatively interpreted these founders of Christianity through the views of radical theologians such as Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong. “We may tell you all the time that our principal aim in life is to communicate and assist, inform,” said Jennings on a 2001 CBS News special Breaking the News. “But if you see injustice and you can get people to do something about it, ahh, it’s just a glorious feeling…. There’s nothing a reporter likes more than to have an effect on policy.” In what directions has Peter Jennings shaped ABC News coverage to influence policy? Decades of documentation and analysis by the Media Research Center and others, as well as statements by Jennings himself and those with whom he has worked, provide answers. “Peter, I believe, genuinely thinks of himself as a nobleman doing public good,” former ABC News Correspondent Peter Collins told Cybercast News Service (CNS) in December 2003. “When he and his producer load and tilt a story, you can argue it’s leftist bias, but it’s just as effective to say they left out basic facts because they couldn’t see them or they are incompetent to see them….. In order to save the peasantry in America…it’s their obligation to present these facts the way they present them.” Jennings’ patronizing condescension towards American “peasants” – “Americans are pretty insular people for the most part,” he told David Letterman in 2001 – was never more on display than in November 1994 days after voters removed Democrats and put a Republican majority in control of both houses of Congress for the first time in four decades. “Ask parents of any two-year-old,” said Jennings in his daily ABC Radio commentary on November 14, 1994, “and they can tell you about those temper tantrums: the stomping feet, the rolling eyes, the screaming. It’s clear that the anger controls the child and not the other way around. It’s the job of the parent to teach the child to control the anger and channel it in a positive way. Imagine a nation full of uncontrolled two-year-old rage. The voters had a temper tantrum last week…. Parenting and governing don’t have to be dirty words: the nation can’t be run by an angry two-year-old.” Jennings did not vote in that election. He was a citizen of Canada, ineligible to cast a ballot in the United States. When his rival American news anchors were prevented by a legal travel ban from visiting Communist Cuba, Jennings traveled there to do reporting with his Canadian passport. In 2004 Peter Jennings announced that he had become a U.S. citizen, but this statement was incomplete. He in fact also retains Canadian citizenship and is therefore a dual citizen. Jennings’ political views remain those of a cosmopolitan Canadian. He is far more European than American in values and culture. Among the most repeated themes in stories by Peter Jennings are that the United States is “lagging behind” the rest of the “industrialized world” (and Europe in particular) in government-provided health care, child care, paid leave for parents and other social programs. “The best child care system in the world….the Swedish system is run and paid for by the Swedish government, something many Americans would like to see the U.S. government do as well,” declared Jennings in a virtual editorial on “World News Tonight” on November 22, 1989. Jennings did not mention that in the socialist nanny state of Sweden, children have been taken away from parents who were declared unfit for being overweight. “Mr. Bush believes in a universal tax cut,” reported Jennings on October 4, 2000, “which would mean a very large chunk of money not available for government programs.” His reporting depicts nearly every potential tax cut negatively. Jennings in 1996 dismissed the proposed “flat tax” as “a very radical notion.” But Peter Jennings admires radicalism on the left. “Medical care was once for the privileged few. Today it is available to every Cuban and it is free,” Jennings on April 3, 1989 told “World News Tonight” viewers. “Some of Cuba’s health care is world class. In heart disease, for example, in brain surgery. Health and education are the revolution’s great success stories.” He did not mention that patients must bring their own sheets and light bulbs to the operating room or may die from lack of antibiotics. He did not mention that education includes making children work unpaid in factories, and that it includes military training to teach children how to “kill the Yanquis.” After the mother of five-year-old Elian Gonzalez died trying to bring her son across the waters between Communist Cuba and the United States, the prison island’s Marxist dictator Fidel Castro demanded the boy’s return. President Bill Clinton’s Administration sided with Castro and on an Easter Sunday used shock troops to attack reporters and at gunpoint to tear the boy from the arms of relatives in Little Havana, a suburb of Miami, Florida. “In Miami today, immigration officials met with the Miami relatives of Elian Gonzalez again,” said Jennings, also siding with Castro, to begin his newscast on March 28, 2000. “And once again the government has failed to get the kind of cooperation from the relatives that might allow the case of this young boy to end in a civilized manner that is best for him.” According to former ABC Correspondent Peter Collins, when in 1989 he proposed to do a report from Nicaragua on the 10th Anniversary of rule by the Soviet-aligned, Fidel Castro-supported Marxist Sandinista regime, Peter Jennings intervened. “[Jennings] himself called me up in Managua and essentially dictated to me what I should say. Basically what Mr. Jennings wanted was for me to make a favorable pronouncement about the 10 years of the Sandinista revolution,” Collins told Cybercast News Service, “and he called me up, massaged my script in a way that I no longer recognized it.” “The Sandinistas brought with them Marxist ideas about spreading wealth and creating a new, unselfish society,” read part of the Jennings-rewritten script that ABC broadcast. “And in the first few years, they did manage to reduce illiteracy, the infant death rate and launched the biggest land reform in Central America. But the Reagan administration saw the Sandinistas as a threat and forced them into a war with the U.S.-backed Contras.” Jennings frequently pressed ABC reporters to rewrite their stories with a more leftward slant. In recent years he has supported efforts by ABC News Political Director Mark Halperin to do the same. Halperin on the day of the final 2004 presidential debate, a debate moderated by Charlie Gibson of ABC News, sent out a memo directing all ABC news reporters and other personnel to deal more harshly with any misstatement by Republican candidate President George W. Bush than any by Democratic presidential candidate Senator John Kerry (D.-Massachusetts). “In terms of the direction that Peter Collins recalls Peter Jennings pushing in – and that was to the left of where the correspondent is – that’s consistent with my experiences, and I think most [ABC News correspondents’] experience,” Bob Zelnick told Cybercast News Service. Zelnick ended his 21-year career as an ABC News reporter in 1989 and now chairs the Department of Journalism at Boston University. Is Jennings a biased journalist? “I’m a little concerned about this notion everybody wants us to be objective,” he said in October 2004, noting that journalists are human and have points of view through which they filter their perceptions of the news. He added: “There’s a whole industry of conservatives saying, ‘Ah, it’s those damn liberals,’ and a whole group of liberals saying, ‘It’s all those damn conservatives.’” “Historically in the media, it has been more of a liberal persuasion for many years,” L. Brent Bozell III quotes Jennings as saying in his 2004 book Weapons of Mass Distortion: The Coming Meltdown of the Liberal Media. “It has taken us a long time, too long in my view, to have vigorous conservative voices heard as widely in the media as they now are.” “I think there is a mainstream media,” Peter Jennings told CNN’s Larry King on May 15, 2001. “CNN is mainstream media, and the main, ABC, CBS, NBC are mainstream media. And I think it’s just essentially to make the point that we are largely in the center without particular axes to grind, without ideologies which are represented in our daily coverage, at least certainly not on purpose.” On the October 17, 2000 “World News Tonight,” Peter Jennings eulogized Soviet apparatchik and Communist Party USA leader Gus Hall, who died that week at age 90. Gus Hall devoted his life to defeating America in the Cold War and to establishing a totalitarian dictatorship in the United States, none of which was mentioned by Jennings. “Hall,” said Jennings, “never wavered.”

Originally posted by Morgeruat: For those on the "looney left" who think so poorly of Fox News, one of the heroes of leftist media has quite a history of twisting the news to suit HIS agenda.

Speaking of twisting, the site you pulled this from is anything but an unbiased source. As a bit of humor, your post is pretty good, as a coherent argument however, it's pathetic.
Attempting to present an argument by constantly using sources that are incredibly biased is laughably poor form. Opening a post with a general insult to the people you're attempting to debate with is rude.

Not that anything better can be expected of you...

[Morgeruat]

Who said I was trying to debate anything, I've learned that on this forum there are the looney left, and the hard-line right, anyone even remotely close to the middle is quickly chased out by the flame-wars and anti-whatever bias that closed-minded fools shower the forum with. The image I'm presented with most of the time from both sides is a giant ass spewing forth diarhea all over the place, once again for those who can't not read dem hard words so gud - from both sides of the political spectrum. With very few exceptions no real debate actually occurs here.

PS. you didn't refute a single point in the article, simply dismissed it as right wing bias, another complaint I have about the "looney left" here.

[ 02-25-2005, 04:33 PM: Message edited by: Morgeruat ]

[Sir Degrader]

Originally posted by Morgeruat: Who said I was trying to debate anything, I've learned that on this forum there are the looney left, and the hard-line right, anyone even remotely close to the middle is quickly chased out by the flame-wars and anti-whatever bias that closed-minded fools shower the forum with. The image I'm presented with most of the time from both sides is a giant ass spewing forth diarhea all over the place, once again for those who can't not read dem hard words so gud - from both sides of the political spectrum. With very few exceptions no real debate actually occurs here. PS. you didn't refute a single point in the article, simply dismissed it as right wing bias, another complaint I have about the "looney left" here.

He DOES have a point there, Absynthe didn't really mention anything, simply dismiss the source due to "bias".

[Violet]

Is Jennings a biased journalist?

Show me a journalist who isn't. It's politics. They all are.
If he wasn't a slave to his position as an anchorman for ANY network he'd be out of a job. He is also a slave with the advantage of a very large paycheck. Think he'll give it up anytime soon to go back to work in his home country? I doubt it. (Change the channel there is plenty of either "side" to go around)

[shamrock_uk]

Well, many of their criticisms I would rebut with arguments you've all heard before from me so I won't bore you with them. Suffice it to say that much of what Jennings says has a point to it - but by attacking his omissions, the source seeks to discredit his reporting completely. This is perhaps misleading, especially when this usually occurs when he refers accurately to events in which the truth is often politically unpalatable to Americans...

Not that I don't agree with some of the criticisms (eg. his olympic coverage), but I don't think we should hang him from the yard-arm just yet...

Maybe a left-wing bias is the price you have to pay for greater information?

Anyway, this one cracked me up:

He pronounced words like “schedule” and “lieutenant” in a distinctly Canadian and aristocratic way – “SHED-u-al,” “lef-TEN-ant.”

1) This just looks a bit like a character assasination - that has nothing to do with his ability to give accurate and unbiased news

2) He is, of course, pronouncing them correctly


Edit: Many edits, sorry

Jennings’ patronizing condescension towards American “peasants” – “Americans are pretty insular people for the most part,” he told David Letterman in 2001..

And I have to say, in my experience, American's generally are insular. Iraq may have changed that a little bit, but when international news does appear on American tv's its often highly emotional and distorted coverage of events and some kind of 'human interest' theme woven in wherever possible.

When I stayed in the States, I met a schoolteacher who thought England was physically attached to Europe, every person held the universal belief that America had never been defeated in a war, a complete ignorance of current affairs outside of America (or even the existence of whole major countries!) and on the rare occasion where knowledge did exist it was in the most simplistic and moralistic 'cold war' form.

Obviously you guys are all much better informed than the average person out there because you post in here, but really I'm not convinced that he should be criticised for expressing those views. I'll edit the above if too many people are offended, but its just based on my experiences in America - I found that the 'outside' view of the insular American was generally an accurate one.

I should add however, that the American's I met were the friendliest and most welcoming out of any people I know: simply fantiastic hospitality - certainly the average American is far friendlier than the average Briton I guess every country has its fortes and foibles.

[ 02-25-2005, 09:05 PM: Message edited by: shamrock_uk ]

[Chewbacca]

Any post using shallow generalizations like "loony left" is hardly worth replying too. Such blanket namecalling does nothing to elevate the quality of discourse in the fora.

Funny, I consider myself a centrist Libertarian and a bona-fide skeptic. My veiws are hardly fringe. Nobody has chased me away from here, though some have tried pretty hard with abusive namecalling and character assassination.

[Felix The Assassin]

Originally posted by Absynthe: quote: Originally posted by Morgeruat: For those on the "looney left" who think so poorly of Fox News, one of the heroes of leftist media has quite a history of twisting the news to suit HIS agenda.

Speaking of twisting, the site you pulled this from is anything but an unbiased source. As a bit of humor, your post is pretty good, as a coherent argument however, it's pathetic.
Attempting to present an argument by constantly using sources that are incredibly biased is laughably poor form. Opening a post with a general insult to the people you're attempting to debate with is rude.

Not that anything better can be expected of you... [/QUOTE]It's okay, do you need John & John to come tuck you in?

Your handle doesn't ring a bell, so I'm not sure if you were here during the 'heavy' debates, but this is very charming for a topic title, and much befitting for 'lonney lefties'. I've spent some time in 'your' neck of the woods, so I can see how you would think it rude.

Good one Morgeruat !

Hey Chewie, that look's like Jimi in your sig, could it be?

[Morgeruat]

Originally posted by shamrock_uk: Well, many of their criticisms I would rebut with arguments you've all heard before from me so I won't bore you with them. Suffice it to say that much of what Jennings says has a point to it - but by attacking his omissions, the source seeks to discredit his reporting completely. This is perhaps misleading, especially when this usually occurs when he refers accurately to events in which the truth is often politically unpalatable to Americans... Not that I don't agree with some of the criticisms (eg. his olympic coverage), but I don't think we should hang him from the yard-arm just yet... Maybe a left-wing bias is the price you have to pay for greater information? Anyway, this one cracked me up: quote: He pronounced words like “schedule” and “lieutenant” in a distinctly Canadian and aristocratic way – “SHED-u-al,” “lef-TEN-ant.”

1) This just looks a bit like a character assasination - that has nothing to do with his ability to give accurate and unbiased news

2) He is, of course, pronouncing them correctly

[/QUOTE]I agree that it is petty, but pronouncing words the same way as your audience is a fairly important part of making them take you seriously, South park does a fairly brisk business mocking canadian speach quirks like "aboot"

[ 02-26-2005, 01:13 AM: Message edited by: Morgeruat ]

[Davros]

Just wanted to show the rabid right my signature once again [img]smile.gif[/img] .

No need for me here - Shamrock and Absynthe have done enough work in answering the wandering whinings of a rather baised source article.

Nuff said really [img]smile.gif[/img] .