News Release Archive - 2000

WILL GLENNON
Glennon is author of Fathering: Strengthening Connection with Your Children No Matter Where They Are, for which he interviewed 180 fathers, aged 15 to 87, almost all of whom cried during their interviews. He said today: “Fathers need to get deeply engaged in the upbringing of their children. Fathers don’t want to be isolated, children don’t want them to be disconnected and mothers don’t want them to be absent — physically or emotionally. But we have patterns of how we raise our children which keep fathers distant, cost them emotionally, cause pain in their relationships, making boys more violent and girls accepting of misogyny.”

JOE KELLY
Executive director of Dads and Daughters, Kelly said today: “Fathers are key in their children’s lives — we know this already. But fathers have a unique influence (for the bad or the good) in a girl’s life. A dad is in a powerful position to help his daughter resist the media and cultural pressure to worry exclusively about appearance and sex. Plus, dads are in powerful positions to make our communities and world better for girls, working for greater opportunities for girls which helps to also bring about greater opportunities for sons. This Father’s Day, we should give our kids the gift of talking with them about media messages for girls and boys. Kids are bombarded with ads and shows and products and attitudes that tell them things like: ‘How a girl looks is more important than who she is. Inner beauty only goes so far.’ And, ‘Boys are tough and show no feelings. They are only interested in titillation and violence.’ These messages are manipulative, corrosive — and blatantly false. We need to help our kids understand this — and, as responsible fathers, we need to stand up and protest these messages, too.”
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DAVID SADKER
Professor of education at American University and author of Failing at Fairness, which documents gender bias in schools, Sadker said today: “Father’s Day should be an important marker, reminding fathers that they are educational advocates for their children. Fathers should work with schools to make sure that their children are not shortchanged by gender bias. Their daughters are likely to be given less attention in the classroom, ask fewer questions and be praised less; girls quickly learn that being silent and conforming results in higher report card grades, but results in a loss of initiative. Their sons in school too often get disciplined out of proportion to their behavior and too often learn to demean girls. Fathers should provide a caring bridge to their sons, teaching them to respect girls and women. Fathers should help their daughters to develop a public voice and their sons to develop a public ear.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy: Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

The following analysts are available for interviews about the U.S. visit by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat scheduled to begin on Wednesday:

NASEER ARURI
Professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, former board member of Amnesty International and author of The Obstruction of Peace: The U.S., Israel, and the Palestinians, Aruri said today: \”The approach of Syria\’s Hafez Assad toward Israel was based on equality, land for peace, an international framework, and normalization with Israel after it fully withdraws from occupied territory. By contrast, Arafat\’s approach — despite lip service to the contrary — is open-ended. It would bypass the international framework; it involves the creation of a state without sovereignty or contiguity, legitimizing apartheid, no return for the refugees and no sharing of Jerusalem. With Assad\’s passing, the U.S. and Israel feel that it will be easier to nudge Arafat towards even more concessions. However, this falls short of the consensus of the 7.7 million Palestinians in the world who are likely to consider such a settlement to be illegitimate and non-binding. Arafat\’s disregard for Palestinian opinion is also reflected by his trampling of the rule of law — for example, his jailing people for signing petitions talking about the corruption of his regime.\”
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NED HANAUER
Executive director of Justice and Equality in Palestine/Israel, Hanauer said today: \”A viable, just peace must be based on international law, human rights and relevant UN resolutions. On each of the major issues — settlements, refugees, borders, Jerusalem, land and water — the Palestinian position is based on these laws, resolutions and rights. Rather than giving billions of taxpayer dollars yearly to Israel, the U.S. needs to lead international pressure on Israel to abide by international law, human rights and UN resolutions which would achieve total Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories, equitable sharing of Jerusalem, the abolishment of most, if not all, illegal Israeli settlements and the internationally recognized right of return for 3 or 4 million Palestinian refugees who have been denied their rights for 50 years by Israel. In the short run, Israel should stop house demolitions, confiscation of Palestinian land and denial of water resources.\”

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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy: Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

Brookings Leads; Left-of-Center Think Tanks Decrease

WASHINGTON — A study released today found that conservative think tanks and the centrist Brookings Institution dominated much of the national media debate last year.

Of the 25 leading think tanks studied, Brookings had the most citations (2,883), twice as many media mentions as the next-ranked conservative/libertarian Cato Institute (1,428 cites). The conservative Heritage Foundation, which had rivaled Brookings in prominence a few years ago, has fallen to third place (1,419 cites), while the conservative American Enterprise Institute (1,263 cites) is the fourth most cited think tank in the U.S. media. These four think tanks accounted for 40 percent of the media cites.

The joint study — conducted by sociologist Michael Dolny for Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) and the Institute for Public Accuracy (IPA) — found that in 1999, right-leaning and conservative think tanks accounted for 46 percent of media citations, while centrist think tanks accounted for 45 percent and progressive or left-leaning ones received only 9 percent. In comparison, in 1997, Dolny found that conservative or right-leaning think tanks received 53 percent of all citations, while 16 percent of the citations went to progressive or left-leaning think tanks. While conservative think tanks have seen a drop in percentage since 1997, their overall number of media citations has increased. Meanwhile, progressive think tanks had a decrease not only in their percentage but also in their actual number of citations.

The most cited progressive or left-leaning think tanks in 1999 were the Urban Institute (712 cites) and the Economic Policy Institute (506 cites), which came in ninth and tenth.

The study, published in the current issue of FAIR\’s magazine Extra!, used the Nexis database of major newspapers and transcripts of radio and TV programs.

The following analysts are available for interviews regarding the results of the study:

MICHAEL DOLNY
Dolny is an assistant professor of sociology at Montclair State University in New Jersey. He has conducted several studies of think tanks in the media.

JIM NAURECKAS
Naureckas is editor of Extra!, the magazine of the media watch group FAIR.
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy: Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

CORRECTION:

IPA\’s June 9 news release mistakenly presented numbers of think-tank citations in news media that were tabulated slightly differently for different years. This overstated the extent to which citations of left-leaning and right-leaning think tanks have decreased since 1997. Coded consistently, the numbers are:

1997:
Right-leaning/conservative: 53%
Center: 32%
Left-leaning/progressive: 16%

1998:
Right-leaning/conservative: 53%
Center: 36%
Left-leaning/progressive: 11%

1999:
Right-leaning/conservative: 51%
Center: 35%
Left-leaning/progressive: 13%

The following analysts are available to comment on the Microsoft decision:

NORMAN HAWKER
Hawker is a law professor at Western Michigan University specializing in antitrust issues.

JUDY SLOAN
Sloan is a professor at Southwestern University Law School in Los Angeles.

ROBERT LANDE
Lande is senior research scholar at the American Antitrust Institute and professor of law at the University of Baltimore.
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy: Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

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MARTIN A. LEE
Author of The Beast Reawakens, a book on neofascism, Lee said today: “President Clinton’s visit to Germany comes at a time when that country is mired in a major political scandal, involving secret slush funds and illegal influence-peddling by big business. The scandal has resulted in the fall from grace of former Chancellor Helmut Kohl and several other leaders of the Christian Democratic Union, now the main opposition party in Germany. Thus far, U.S. officials have yet to acknowledge the role that the U.S. government played in setting the stage for this scandal. For years, Washington turned a blind eye to political corruption in West Germany in the interests of fighting Communism. Obsessed with turning West Germany into a bulwark against the Soviet Union, U.S. officials sanctioned the restoration of numerous Nazis and Third Reich veterans to positions of power in West Germany during the Cold War. Among those who benefitted from this policy were Fritz Ries, a wealthy industrialist who made a fortune from expropriating ‘Aryanized’ Jewish property and from slave labor in factories near Auschwitz. Not only was Ries never punished for his crimes, he went on to become Helmut Kohl’s principal patron within the German business community. Therein lay the roots of the current political scandal, which has been described as Germany’s version of Watergate.”

DAVID JOHNSON
Senior fellow at the Center for Defense Information, Johnson edits a daily email newsletter on Russia. He said today: “At the beginning of the 1990s, Russians were very pro-American. But the U.S.’s role as an enthusiastic supporter of Yeltsin has made Russians associate the U.S. with the failures of economic reform and the corrupt privatization program that was implemented with American advice and financing. A third of the population now lives in crushing poverty and most others face a daily struggle to make ends meet. There has been a massive deterioration of the social infrastructure. While elections have become an accepted feature of political life, power has been centralized in a corrupt elite who control the country’s major economic assets and much of its media. Compounding the disillusionment has been the expansion of the NATO military alliance and occasions such as the war in Yugoslavia in 1999. The brutal war in Chechnya has been President Vladimir Putin’s main focus since Yeltsin appointed him prime minister in August 1999…. The dominant and enduring U.S. interest in Russia has been to help secure and remove the huge arsenal of nuclear weapons and nuclear materials that Russia inherited from the Soviet Union. But Russia’s continuing economic catastrophe threatens to undermine attempts to address the nuclear issue.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy: Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020 or (202) 332-5055; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

WILLIAM HARTUNG
Senior research fellow at the World Policy Institute and co-author of the recent report “Tangled Web: The Marketing of Missile Defense, 1994-2000,” Hartung said today: “In its ongoing effort to ‘triangulate’ by co-opting Republican issues, the Clinton administration has met right-wing missile defense boosters more than half way. Meanwhile, Republicans have stepped up their calls for an elaborate, multi-tiered system akin to Ronald Reagan’s ill-fated Star Wars scheme. The nation’s four major missile contractors — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon and TRW — are looking to missile defense to revive them from mismanagement and technical problems that have slashed their stock prices and reduced their profit margins. They have given $2 million to the 25 hard-core National Missile Defense boosters in the Senate….These companies also spent $34 million on lobbying during 1997-98. In addition, the three largest missile contractors have provided major financial support to Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy, which serves as the de facto center for the Star Wars lobby.”
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KARL GROSSMAN
Author of The Wrong Stuff: The Space Program’s Nuclear Threat to Our Planet and professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury, Grossman said today: “Missile defense? In context, what the U.S. military appears to want is in large part not defense but offense. U.S. plans for missile defense should be seen in the overall context of U.S. military plans for space warfare. That is why the Chinese are so much against this program; they fully understand U.S. ambitions to dominate from the ‘high ground.’ National Missile Defense paves the way for space-based weapons. The U.S. Space Command explicitly lays out its plans for the militarization of space, for example in its ‘Vision For 2020′ report. The cover of the report depicts a laser weapon from space zapping a target below and proclaims: ‘U.S. Space Command — dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect U.S. interests and investment.’ It compares the U.S. effort to control space and the Earth below to how centuries ago ‘nations built navies to protect and enhance their commercial interests’ by ruling the seas.”
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STEPHEN YOUNG
Deputy director of the Coalition to Reduce Nuclear Dangers, Young is the principal author of the recent report “Pushing the Limits: The Decision on National Missile Defense.” He said today: “Clinton’s proposal to offer missile defense to ‘civilized’ nations is futile pandering to attempt to gain support of U.S. allies. The Europeans are concerned that if the U.S. pushes ahead on missile defense, then Russia could, for example, increase its reliance on tactical short-range nuclear weapons. The U.S. has already spent $120 billion on theater and national missile defense, without fielding a single effective system. The threat is tremendously overblown; the oft-cited new ‘threat’ is from North Korea, which has frozen its missile test program and is clearly seeking better relations with South Korea and the West.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy: Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

United Airlines said today it intends to buy U.S. Airways. The following analysts are available for interviews:

PAUL HUDSON
Executive director of the Aviation Consumer Action Project, Hudson said today: \”If this merger is approved without major divesting of routes and other restrictions, the \’Big Six\’ will quickly become the \’Big Three\’ and U.S. airline passengers will be the major losers. No airline should control more than 25 percent to 30 percent of the nation\’s airline seats or over 40 percent of seats in a particular region. This merger would give United dominant control of most routes in the Northeast and Midwest.\”

ALBERT FOER
President of the American Antitrust Institute, Foer said today: \”The proposed swallowing up of one of its few competitors by United Airlines comes in a context that makes it unlikely to be in the public\’s interest…. To allow this merger to occur, with the likelihood that it will not only raise concentration but induce further consolidations in reaction, would be inconsistent with the Justice Department\’s efforts and contrary to the anti-merger provisions of the Clayton Act.\”
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CURTIS GRIMM
Chair of Logistics and Transportation Department at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, Grimm said today: \”This merger raises real questions that need to be examined. It could lead to dominance in some markets, and there will have to be divestitures on a market-by-market basis. In addition, an airline so large creates general competitive problems and will likely prompt rivals to spawn their own mergers. We\’ve seen mergers come in waves in different industries.\”

ED FABERMAN
Executive director of the Air Carriers Association, which represents new entrants in the airline industry, Faberman said today: \”This is another step in the consolidation of this industry into a few carriers. If this merger takes place and the Northwest-Continental merger is allowed to proceed, two companies will control about 50 percent of the market. The government has allowed almost every merger to take place. Steps have to be taken to ensure that competition will survive.\”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy: Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167