Investor's Business Daily, March 8th, 2007
Media Bias: After "60 Minutes" used fake documents to accuse President Bush of avoiding war service, how could CBS News possibly stoop lower? By hiring a longtime Clinton crony to rescue its evening news show.
Consider this quote, dating from a few months after Bill Clinton first took office: "If we could be one-hundredth as great as you and Hillary Rodham Clinton have been in the White House, we'd take it right now and walk away winners."
Those are not the words of a campaign operative or grass roots fundraiser, but of then-CBS Evening News anchorman Dan Rather, speaking on behalf of himself and co-anchor Connie Chung via satellite to President Clinton during a May, 1993, CBS affiliates meeting.
Rather added, "tell Mrs. Clinton we respect her and we're pulling for her."
With Rather's retirement last year, CBS Evening News lost its big Clinton fan to sit in front of the cameras. With former first lady Hillary now running for president, however, the network has decided to place one behind the cameras instead as executive producer.
Rick Kaplan, who calls Dan Rather "the gold standard journalists today have struggled to live up to," has been a close friend and political adviser of the Clintons all the way back to the 1970s, when the future president was Arkansas attorney general and Kaplan was producing Walter Cronkite.
During the 1992 campaign, while he was executive producer of ABC News' "Nightline," Kaplan repeatedly advised Clinton on how to handle the revelation of the then-Arkansas governor's affair with Gennifer Flowers.
A Newsweek report found Kaplan, while he was CNN president, apparently assisting Al Gore during a debate rehearsal for the 2000 presidential campaign.
Golf with Bill, overnights in the Lincoln Bedroom, a personal two-and-a-half-hour tour of the White House by the president for his 21-year-old daughter are among the perks Kaplan has enjoyed. His response to press questions about the conflict of interest: "It's nobody's business." And CBS news viewers are now asked to believe it will have no effect on the former "World News Tonight" and "PrimeTime Live" producer's coverage of Hillary.
Kaplan, in fact, has long lacked professionalism and traded in bias:
CNN had to retract its 1998 "Tailwind" report in the very first edition of the Kaplan-created "NewsStand" news magazine show. The program claimed the U.S. military used nerve gas in a mission to kill American defectors in Laos during the Vietnam War.
In the 1993 Food Lion lawsuit against ABC's "PrimeTime Live," a jury demanded ABC pay the supermarket chain $5.5 million for fraud -- and that executive producer Kaplan personally pay $35,000. Food Lion had accused the show's producers of deceiving the public with "staged events and selective editing." (ABC successfully appealed the verdict.)
Vanity Fair reported in 1998 that Kaplan in October 1994 killed an ABC "World News Tonight" segment on the Clintons' Whitewater scandal featuring an exclusive interview with an Arkansas state trooper who claimed a Clinton aide had tried to silence him, and that Kaplan discouraged other Whitewater coverage.
It also revealed Kaplan advised Bill on how to bounce back from his disastrously tedious speech to the 1988 Democratic National Convention, in which he was practically booed off the stage.
The magazine also reported that Kaplan even once hired Hillary "to work on coverage of the 1980 Democratic convention."
According to a CNN producer quoted in the Washington Monthly in 1993, Kaplan arranged for Bill to appear on New York's Don Imus radio program during the 1992 campaign.
CBS "Evening News" has become third in the network ratings since infotainer Katie Couric arrived as hostess. For some reason, CBS thinks having a bosom buddy of the Clintons turn it into a nightly commercial for Hillary's presidential campaign is the solution.
Copyright 2007 Investor's Business Daily, Inc.
