 |
|
 |
 |
|
|
|
Transcript - October 6, 2006
BRANCACCIO: Everyone's angry at Congress. The latest scandal has liberals saying, connect the dots.
MELANIE SLOAN: The connection is an arrogance of power. It's the ability to abuse power and think that there is nothing that will happen to you, that you are invincible.
BRANCACCIO: Social conservatives say they've been betrayed.
CLIFF KINCAID: The House leaders did not do their job. They didn't protect the children. They were protecting one of the gang.
BRANCACCIO: So where was the leadership… and who's policing our lawmakers?
And an FCC study finds the giant size of media companies has harmed local news but why did the FCC hide it?
KAPLAN: The public only found out about this last month, thanks to a whistleblower, and its data has still not been released.
BRANCACCIO: Welcome to NOW…Congress has passed laws against crude language on television so what's an acceptable euphemism for the behavior we see in the U.S. Congress these days? We've already seen resignations-even criminal indictments-- this past year over the congressional abuse of money and abuse of influence… and this time, it's another form of grotesque behavior. Ever since news reports surfaced that Rep. Mark Foley had been cruising after congressional pages as an online cyber creep…the House Republican leadership has been reeling from the fallout. Foley's resigned but politicians have been scrambling to get their stories straight on who knew what when. Senior Correspondent Maria Hinojosa and Producer Peter Meryash now ask an overarching question: Why Congress seems unable --or unwilling-- to police itself.
HINOJOSA: A rare sight … the Speaker of the House apologizing for his role in a political thriller that Hollywood could have written ... Just weeks before the election, a Washington scandal combining sex and power … that has rocked the Capitol.
It erupted quickly … with news reports of sexually explicit internet messages sent by Republican Congressman Mark Foley … to a number of underage, congressional pages.
Foley abruptly resigned last Friday … his statement was read on the house floor. But soon attention turned to who knew what, when. Over the course of the week, it emerged that Republican leaders in the house had been warned months, if not years, earlier … about inappropriate behavior by congressman Foley. Yet, little had been done to investigate or punish him.
CLIFF KINCAID: The Republicans really didn't want to look into it.
HINOJOSA: Cliff Kincaid isn't usually one to criticize the House leadership. He's with the socially conservative watchdog group, accuracy in media.
CLIFF KINCAID: The Republican leaders only have themselves to blame because they didn't investigate thoroughly after that first set of e-mails surfaced showing a 52-year-old man asking a 16-year-old boy for his age and for a photo. That's when they could have stopped it.
HINOJOSA: And that failure by Republican leaders has left Kincaid … and a growing chorus of critics across the political spectrum wondering … what has gone wrong on Capitol Hill … and why are the nation's lawmakers apparently no longer able to police themselves?
MARIA HINOJOSA: Why do you think that the Republican leadership didn't move fast enough to act on this?
CLIFF KINCAID: Why didn't they react to it sufficiently? Mark Foley was one of them. He's a member of the House leadership, House Deputy Majority Whip, raising money for other Republicans, putting money into their campaigns. So, he was a valued member of the team. They didn't wanna know.
HINOJOSA: At the heart of the matter are a series of emails sent in the summer of 2005 by congressman Mark Foley … to a former and under-age congressional page from Louisiana. In the emails, Foley asks the young man "… what do you want for your birthday … what stuff do you like to do" and "… send me an email picture of you as well …" The former page passed these messages along to someone in his congressman's office … writing "this freaked me out." And then repeating the work "sick" over and over. Earlier this summer, copies of these emails made it to the offices of Melanie Sloan.
MELANIE SLOAN: I'm a former prosecutor. They immediately caused me-- great concern. Alarm bells went off. They seemed like the kind of email that-- a sexual predator uses to entice a victim into further conversation.
HINOJOSA: But Foley's emails didn't raise the same alarms in Congress … Senior Republicans, it turns out, kept the matter quiet … simply telling Foley to stop contacting the young man. No official investigation was opened ... And on the page oversight board, only the senior Republican was informed.
PETE MCCLOSKEY: I think the sexual impropriety is minor compared to the attempted cover-up by the Republican leadership.
HINOJOSA: California Republican Pete McCloskey should know about cover ups. He was in Washington during Watergate … serving in Congress from 1967 until 1983.
PETE MCCLOSKEY: Speaker Hastert is too smart not to have picked up that this was an inappropriate communication. That should have rung alarm bells all through the leadership. And you have to feel that they've tried to cover it up, and that cover up is worse than the act itself.
HINOJOSA: McCloskey a lifelong Republican … says his party came to power 12 years ago promising to stamp out corruption.
PETE MCCLOSKEY: I think when Newt Gingrich took over in 1994; one of the first principles of the Contract with America was a return to decency. They'd had 40 years of Democrat control. The 15 years that I was in Congress I think we had something like 35 Congressmen indicted. 34 of them were Democrats. And so with power-- you have corruption. And I think we've been in power now for what, 12 years? And you've seen us rapidly become corrupted by power. And in this case there's an arrogance that goes with it.
HINOJOSA: Melanie Sloan says what's missing is accountability. She now runs the progressive watchdog group … Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
MELANIE SLOAN: We've had all of these scandals like the Jack Abramoff scandal and-- and Duke Cunningham and Bob Ney and Tom DeLay. And we've had Speaker Hastert refuse to ever take any responsibility for any of that.
MARIA HINOJOSA: These have to do with corruption in terms of quid pro quo money. And this has to do with perhaps sexual misconduct. Many people might say there's no connection. Is there?
MELANIE SLOAN: I would say that the connection is an arrogance of power. It's the ability to abuse power and think that there is nothing that will happen to you, that you are invincible.
HINOJOSA: Invincible, perhaps, because of the poor track record of the house ethics committee … that committee is supposed to keep an eye on congressional behavior, but in recent years, politics has gotten in the way. The trouble began early in 2005 … after the former powerful majority leader, Tom Delay, was admonished by the committee for three separate improper incidents. Pete Mcclosky says the House leadership closed ranks and shut oversight down.
PETE MCCLOSKEY: And the Speaker steps up and effectively abolishes the committee. And the Republicans go along and say, you can't investigate Mr. Delay any further without at least a Republican vote. And we're removing from the committee the three Republicans that voted against him. The signal went out all over the world that Republicans were going to protect their chief fundraiser, even though their chief fundraiser had made most of his money from Mr. Abramoff.
HINOJOSA: For over a year, the ethics committee was effectively out of business. And in the meantime Former majority leader Tom Delay was indicted for violating campaign finance laws in Texas. Two of his former aides have been convicted in the Abramoff lobbying scandal. Out-going representative Bob Ney along with one of his former aides got caught up in the Abramoff scandal too. And former representative Randy "Duke" Cunningham … pled guilty to accepting more than two million dollars in bribes. But, Melanie Sloan says the Republicans aren't the only ones to blame for the problems with the ethics committee. Back in the 1990s, after a period of highly politicized cases … Sloan says Republicans and Democrats agreed not to file ethics complaints against each other. Consider what allegedly happened to former Democratic congressman Chris bell.
MELANIE SLOAN: Chris Bell was ready to file an ethics complaint against DeLay. And he had to do it against the wishes of the Minority Leader, Nancy Pelosi. You would think that the Democrats, knowing how terrible Tom DeLay had been, would support an ethics complaint. But because of the long-standing truce, the agreement by which no member of one party would file an ethics complaint against another party, Chris Bell was asked not to file that.
MARIA HINOJOSA: You would think that the Democrats would say, "Yes, we want you to file this complaint."
MELANIE SLOAN:
Yes.
MARIA HINOJOSA:
And yet?
MELANIE SLOAN:
You would think that, but you would be wrong. I think was-- it was one of the hardest parts of his career was how little support he got from the leadership for filing a complaint against somebody as unethical as Tom DeLay. This has been a problem in Congress for a while now, where the inmates are basically running the asylum. There is no oversight over Congress.
HINOJOSA: Which brings us back to who knew what, when … in the matter of Mark Foley? Speaker Dennis Hastert first said he didn't know about the emails until just last week. But John Boehner, the number two Republican in the house, told the Washington Post last Friday … that he had personally told Hastert about the emails. Just hours later, however, Boehner got back in touch with a new story … saying, in fact, he could not remember whether he had talked to Hastert. Then, at a news conference on Monday, surrounded by children of political supporters, another top Republican, congressman Tom Reynolds … says he definitely told speaker Hastert months ago.
THOMAS REYNOLDS: I thought it was appropriate and prudent and common sense to take that to the Speaker of the House.
HINOJOSA: Reynolds has come under extra criticism because the committee he heads which is responsible for electing Republicans to the House accepted $100,000 in campaign contributions from Foley. And that was even after learning about the inappropriate email exchange. And in an interview on Tuesday with a Cincinnati radio station, Majority Leader Boehner pointed responsibility back to speaker Hastert.
REP. JOHN BOEHNER: I believe I talked to the Speaker and he told me it had been taken care of. And, and, and my position, it's in his corner, it's his responsibility. The Clerk of the House who runs the page program, the Page Board all report to the Speaker. And I believe that it had been dealt with.
HINOJOSA: Meanwhile, instant messages from Foley to young pages are still surfacing much more sexually explicit than the emails that began it all. Speaker Hastert and some who defend his actions have charged the public release of congressman Foley's internet messages just weeks before the mid-term elections is politically motivated. On Tuesday, Hastert spoke with Rush Limbaugh on his radio show.
Limbaugh: You know that the Democrats and the media are going to continue to press the Foley issue - even though you've dealt with it, even though he's gone, even though the mistake has been corrected.
HASTERT: The Democrats have in my view have put this thing forward …
CLIFF KINCAID: Dennis Hastert goes on all these conservative talk radio shows to defend himself. That's not gonna hack it. I don't think that's gonna be convincing to a lot of people out there, that the response to the scandal is a PR campaign?
MARIA HINOJOSA: When you step back now, do you believe that this is a Republican Party, a House leadership that was more interested in protecting itself, its position of power than in protecting the public trust and teenagers?
CLIFF KINCAID: The House leaders did not do their job. They didn't protect the children. They were protecting one of the gang. And this is a big scandal. This is weighing on those pro-family social conservatives out there who see the elections coming up. I talk to them.
HINOJOSA: Yesterday, the House Ethics Committee announced an investigation into exactly who else knew what and when. Nearly four dozen subpoenas have been issued. So, will that settle the matter?
CLIFF KINCAID: I think we need some outside experts coming in to examine this. Don't let this good old gang of buddies up there on Capitol Hill investigate themselves. That's what got us in this problem to begin with.
HINOJOSA: Former congressman McCloskey says more fundamental change is needed.
PETE MCCLOSKEY: I can tell you that the public distrust of the Congress. Not just the Democrats or the Republicans. But the Congress. I've never seen it this low.
HINOJOSA: He's been so discouraged with what's happened to his party in Washington that after 23 years of being back home in California he decided to run for Congress again.
PETE MCCLOSKEY: I campaigned against Mr. Pombo, one of the Republican leaders, for four months. All over the San Joaquin Valley I would say to people, but he's a crook. He's taken all this money from Abramoff. And people would say, sure. But aren't they all crooks back there? And how do you answer that?
HINOJOSA: McCloskey lost the primary to the incumbent Richard Pombo so now this maverick, life-long republican has done something highly unusual he's endorsed the democratic challenger in the race.
PETE MCCLOSKEY: The only way it's gonna change in Washington, I think, is if the Democrats take over the House in November. That's the only possible way to restore good ethics. And then you've gotta watch the Democrats-- two to four years hence, because they will be abused by power. It is in the nature of the beast.
BRANCACCIO: You can check out the very latest on this congressional scandal by firing up the internet and surfing over to pbs.org.
BRANCACCIO: Do you miss the days when TV and radio were plugged into events at the local level? So do a lot of people. These folks turned out in force this week at a hearing in Los Angeles of the federal communications commission. The FCC is once again considering ways to let big media get even bigger. Betsy Rate produced our report.
BRANCACCIO: Standing room only in an auditorium at the University of Southern California. Hundreds jammed in to take part in what has become a rare event in recent FCC history: a hearing with all five members of the commission in attendance. The topic? The resurrected idea of relaxing the laws that keep a lid on media mergers.
JONATHAN S. ADELSTEIN: Thank you for being here exercise in tightening our democracy. I look forward to the testimonies of the witnesses and the public comments we're here to see. So thank you.
BRANCACCIO: The last time the FCC tried to ease media ownership rules -- in 2003 -- things were seen to backfire after the wider public heard about it and raised a stink. People sent nearly three million emails and letters in opposition to the FCC driving Congress to take action. Eventually, a federal appeals court rejected the changes try again, it said.
MICHAEL J. COPPS: Now we're back at square one. It's all up for grabs. And if we are going to do a better job this time around, it's going to be because of input from folks like you.
BRANCACCIO: Here's what has media watchdog groups up in arms: they believe the FCC is again working to increase both the number and the types of media outlets a company can own in any local market. Critics worry some communities could become "company towns" - where the main sources of news and entertainment would be under the control of a single media conglomerate. The industry has said in the past that the old rules are outdated in this internet age…although big media chose not to speak out at the hearing. One lone voice said the market should decide who wins and loses.
BRENDAN STEINHAUSER: The free market should decide that and I'm sorry if your ideas don't win out in the marketplace. That's the beauty of this country.
BRANCACCIO: But that decidedly was not the consensus.
SAUL LEVINE: There's no public benefit to allowing them to have more stations.
JOHN CONNOLLY: The airwaves belong to the American people.
BRANCACCIO: Media companies ballooned after Congress passed the 1996 telecommunications act, lifting most of the limits on media ownership. One of that law's stated goals was to increase competition. But now just six companies own the channels watched by 75 percent of Americans and a third of the country's local radio stations are owned by out-of-town conglomerates. Critics -including some in the music business--see a major cost.
MIKE MILLS: We must ask the question: Is American radio better today than it was ten years ago? That was the answer. Media consolidation has, without question, harmed localism in radio.
BRANCACCIO: If consolidation is bad for music, it could be catastrophic for public safety…particularly in those places where one company owns almost all of the airwaves. In 2003, now reported on what happened in Minot North Dakota when a train wreck sent a toxic cloud of ammonia into town. Authorities wanted to get the word out to Minot residents: stay indoors and avoid the area near the derailment. So they tried to get in touch with six local, commercial radio stations. All six of those commercial stations out of a total of seven in Minot are owned by one huge radio and advertising conglomerate: clear channel communications their shows are often recorded in far off studios and only sound local.
CLEAR CHANNEL DJ: "I'm Becky Wright -- have a great weekend!"
BRANCACCIO: Minot authorities say when they called with the warning about the toxic cloud, there was no one on the air who could've made the announcement. Clear Channel says someone was there who could have activated an emergency broadcast. But Minot police say nobody answered the phones. Back at this week's hearing, critics of the FCC said that this way of doing business is a symptom of what's wrong with the American media today and when the local news becomes a commodity to be bought and sold, it is democracy that suffers most.
MONA MANAGAN: News story is the sentencing of Enron's Jeffrey Skilling and the jailing of Tyco's Bernie Ebbers were bumped at WABC TV in New York in favor of a story reporting on the rock band U2's book signing tour.
BERNIE ALAN: How do you expect these corporations to give us a diversity of opinion if they can't even give the marketplace a diversity of programs?
SUMMER REESE: You have the keys to communications in your hands. You are responsible for whether we hear what's going in this country right now!
BRANCACCIO: And what else gets lost when local media disappear? Well, how about local political coverage? "Now" looked at that issue back in 2004. Just take a spin through your local television dial, and more often than not, you'll find stories like this one. Political coverage reduced to celebrity endorsements or how candidates are doing in the polls and not much about what they stand for. Why is it important for broadcasters to cover the national, state and local issues of the day? Because most Americans get their news from local television. Martin Kaplan of the University of Southern California's Annenberg School follows political coverage on stations across the country.
MARTIN KAPLAN: The sad truth is that local stations show almost nothing of the campaigns that they could cover if they wanted to.
BRANCACCIO: For example at the ABC station in San Francisco, it literally took a car accident for one local candidate to get on the air.
Martin Kaplan: We've been looking at the way in which local television covers politics in campaigns since 1998. It wasn't a pretty picture then, and it's not a pretty picture now.
BRANCACCIO: It turns out the FCC has also been looking at the effects of big media and, apparently, it didn't like what it saw either, because as it's recently been reported the commission hid what it found. Several years ago the FCC commissioned studies to assess what media consolidation was doing to both local TV news coverage and radio ownership. In both cases, the commission's own researchers found that when it comes to media bigger is not necessarily better. A 2003 study demonstrated that the telecommunications act actually decreased competition in the radio industry but that study never saw the light of day and another study in 2004 showed that local ownership airs almost 5 and a half more minutes of local news per newscast than their big media competition. That study also got buried.
MARTIN KAPLAN: This one concluded that local ownership dramatically increased localism. This one the industry did not want to hear and this one was suppressed. reportedly the FCC ordered staff to destroy all the copies. The public only found out about this last month, thanks to a whistleblower, and its data has still not been released.
BRANCACCIO: The commission says it's investigating exactly what happened to those reports. The FCC's final vote on any rule changes should come early next year.
BRANCACCIO: Another big story this week: a ruling by the national labor relations board that could force millions of Americans out of their labor unions even as business groups hail the decision. For perspective, I have a web-exclusive interview at pbs-dot-org. And here's a look at what we're working on for next weeks program. An American woman spends eight dangerous months in Iraq, living with Iraqis to see how the war has changed their lives. But when Laura Poitras gets back to America, her adventure's not over.
POITRAS: The film's been completed, I've been put on a-- a security threat list.
BRANCACCIO: And that's it for NOW. From New York, I'm David Brancaccio. We'll see you next week.
BRANCACCIO: Connect to NOW online at pbs.org. Learn more about who's who in the Congressional page scandal. Did the Congressional leadership try to cover up the scandal? Take our online poll. Read heated comments from the FCC testimony. Follow the flow of campaign cash with NOW Election Insight 2006. Connect to now at pbs.org
|
|
|
|
|
