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American Morning

'Media Roundtable'

Aired January 11, 2002 - 09:38   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JACK CAFFERTY, CNN ANCHOR: The Enron debacle, homeland security, the latest crisis in the Mideast, a lot of meat on the media roundtable this morning.

Joining us to talk about it all Michael Kramer, columnist for the "New York Daily News," and Rich Lowry, editor for "The National Review."

Gentlemen, welcome. Nice to have you with us.

So we've got this boatload of munitions, enough to blowup state the size of Connecticut. It's got Yasser Arafat's fingerprints all over. Captain saying I'm just following orders that came from people around Arafat. The story was almost an afterthought in the United States. What's up with the way covered. Why wasn't this thing...

RICH LOWRY, "THE NATIONAL REVIEW": This is one of the great media mysteries of our time. I think Arafat is arguably the foremost anti-semite in the world, and generally, he gets very sympathetic coverage in the United States, and that's because I think he still has this romantic, third-world revolutionary thing going.

PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: Sympathetic coverage? There was no coverage of this story.

LOWRY: Well, there was some.

MICHAEL KRAMER, "NEW YORK DAILY NEWS": From the media he says is controlled by the Jews.

LOWRY: The media is locked into this peace process ideology, which is dependent on both sides being dependent partners on peace, so you never want that illusion and myth to be blown away the way this story really does.

KRAMER: Right, and so would the administration to a certain extent. I mean, we take a lot of our cues from how they respond to it. The evidence seemed unambiguous. Although there a few tentacles hanging out there that you could hang your hat on if you say Arafat wasn't behind it. I the administration doesn't scream and yell, as it had been previously about everything else Arafat had been doing, then we kind of, you know, recede into the background.

I think generally Rich is right, we're all invested in this process, that if he's not there to talk to, who do you talk to.

CAFFERTY: And can you have a conversation about peace with Yasser Arafat in that part of the world? It's an open question, and a lot of people would suggest that as long as he's president, this whole process is a hypocritical farce; it's not going anywhere.

KRAMER: I think the general feeling is that if he can't -- you know, in the Jack Nicholson way, you know, he can't handle peace. I mean, what happens if he actually has a Palestine state and he has to collect the garbage do the mundane tasks?

CAFFERTY: And put his buddies in jail.

LOWRY: Someone remarked the other day, if Yasser Arafat were running Switzerland, Switzerland would not be a viable state. So he's just corrupt, and he's out there for his own power, and he's not serious about peace. If he were going to be serious about peace, it would mean putting his life on the line, and he's not willing the do that.

KRAMER: No.

ZAHN: Let's move on to the Enron coverage. Has it been fair this week? I mean, a lot has been made in the papers this morning of the fact that John Ashcroft has recused himself from the investigation. You have the old U.S. attorney's office in Houston recusing themselves, and then we hear this statistic that 70 percent, hello, of all U.S. senators have taken money from Enron as well. Has the coverage been balanced?

KRAMER: I think it's been underplayed for a while, and now it's finally reaching critical mass, and it will grow, and grow and grow from here. This is Yogi Berra deja vu all over again. The arc of these scandals is pretty well-known and now you have with destruction of documents, you know, that the powder keg that you really need to set this thing off, and I think we'll hear the word "special prosecutor" before long, because who's left investigate? Everybody else taken money from these guys.

LOWRY: Yes, that phrase showed up on the front page of "The New York Times" for the first time today.

I do think a subtext here is a lot of media is going to be very eager after eight years of scandal coverage and a Democratic administration to kind of share the wealth, so to speak, with the Bush administration. Now Enron, obviously, is a legitimate story. It's a bit of a panzi (ph) scheme, at best, maybe a criminal enterprise, but the political aspect, I think, could get pretty tenuous. President Bush wasn't doing their accounting or anything.

KRAMER: Well, we don't know, we really don't know, and this is a live...

LOWRY: You think he was doing their accounting? KRAMER: No, no, no, I'm not saying that. This is like Whitewater, you know, we've got who, what, we don't know. All these names we couldn't -- don't know yet.

ZAHN: That's the other thing, do you think the tone of the coverage would be the same if we were talking about a Democratic presidency right now? When you are looking at the ties that are being made between top Bush administration officials, some of whom actually worked for Enron before they came on board, would it be any different if Bill Clinton were president?

KRAMER: I think it would have been different probably at the end of Clinton administration, when we were so inured to the fact that he was so scandal-plagued, but probably not at the beginning, and I think now you have so many key players involved that you can't make any argument really that the press is going easy or going too tough. I mean, it's just, it has a life of its own, and it's really taking over.

LOWRY: It will be another huge, huge, supposedly huge, important story that no one ever really understands. If I had to explain what Whitewater and Castle Grande and all the rest were about, still probably couldn't do it, and I'm not sure anyone will ever really understand what made Enron work.

KRAMER: There's a tie between Whitewater and Enron. That's will be impressive really...

(LAUGHTER)

ZAHN: Quickly, five seconds apiece.

Dick Cheney? "New York Times" asking him to come forward and make a public accounting of his agenda and what not? Is he in trouble?

LOWRY: I don't think he's in trouble. I do think that's it's been a mistake not to release the information from the beginning. Before there was a scandal involved, and the Bush administration just learned the Clinton lesson: push everything out the door as soon as possible.

ZAHN: Quickly, Michael.

KRAMER: Yes, I mean, the cover-up is always worse than the crime. How many times do you have to learn that? They should go to school on Richard Nixon, again.

ZAHN: Michael Kramer, Rich Lowry, as always, good to have you with us on Friday morning to analyze all of our jobs.

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