The White House vs. CBS

A report by Bill Moyers is attacked as "below the belt"

One of Ronald Reagan's favorite rhetorical devices is the vivid example--a "welfare queen" ripping off the system, a school lunch program providing meals to affluent children--that purports to exemplify a pervasive national problem. Such anecdotage, critics claim, tends to oversimplify and distort complex situations. But the device was turned against the Administration last week when CBS News used emotion-charged tales to make the case that some of the nation's truly needy are falling through the social safety net. "Hunger in America is back," said CBS Commentator Bill Moyers in his introduction to the hour-long report People Like Us. "In the great outcry about spending, some helpless people are getting hurt."

"Below the belt!" protested White House Spokesman David Gergen in a heated 45-minute briefing the following day. "To lay all of the problems that have been with this country for a long time on Ronald Reagan's doorstep, we think, is not fair," he added. Gergen sent two sharp missives to CBS News President Van Gordon Sauter requesting, "out of fairness," that the Administration be given a half-hour of prime time to respond. Replied Sauter: "In light of the extensive coverage which CBS has and will continue to provide to Administration viewpoints, we do not believe that a special rebuttal broadcast to this documentary is called for."

Moyers, a Texas-bred liberal who was President Johnson's press secretary, insisted his documentary was not meant as an attack on the Administration. Said he: "It simply told a few real stories about people falling through the safety net." The result was nonetheless a devastating but unbalanced indictment of Reagan's social policies. People Like Us, wrote Washington Post Television Critic Tom Shales, with inappropriate glee, "could mark a turning point in American public opinion toward the Reagan Administration and its cavalier treatment of the poor."

The documentary consisted of four portraits. One showed an unskilled former bakery worker from Ohio, who left his job suffering from cerebral palsy, puzzling over a letter informing him that he is being cut from the Social Security disability rolls. His wife and four children, aged eight to twelve, have no food for the weekend. Another told of a New Jersey woman who has found night-shift work at a factory and consequently loses her Medicaid benefits. Since her son critically needs an operation, she is reluctantly forced to quit her job and go back on welfare.

Reagan, who watched the show at the White House, ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to look into the cases cited and prepare a response. Assistant HHS Secretary Robert Rubin argued, for example, that the case of the Ohio man who had lost his Social Security disability benefits was not presented fairly. The man had been informed in November 1981 that his benefits were being terminated, but he waited until April 1982, too late to protect his status, to make his appeal. CBS promptly rebutted this rebuttal, saying that the Ohio man and his lawyer had appealed the cutoff notice by phone and letter beginning in November.

A few days before the broadcast, the Administration, fearing a hatchet job, asked to screen the program and to be given air time to respond. CBS turned down this unprecedented and highly intrusive request. The Administration's fears about the show stem from growing White House concern that Reagan is viewed as insensitive to the poor. That view is likely to be strengthened by a Congressional Budget Office report saying that the proposed budget cuts for fiscal 1983, like the ones enacted this year, will fall heavily on those who make $10,000 a year or less.

In lashing out at Moyers' one-sided presentation, however, the Administration might have shot itself in the foot. The show captured only a 17% share of the audience throughout the country. By making a fuss, the White House called attention not only to the documentary but to its own worrisome record on social issues.

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