Lowell Ponte
Thursday, June 15, 2006

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MSNBC last week, by "mutual agreement," said goodbye to its president, Rick Kaplan. His arrival more than two years ago marked a sharp left turn for the third-place cable news network. Does Kaplan's departure six months before his contract was due to expire signal that the network's owner NBC might be inching back toward the political center?

Kaplan, 58, was seen by many critics as a poster boy for liberal media bias. A huge, energetic bear of a man, Kaplan as an adolescent aspired to become a liberal political activist but instead entered journalism. Ever since, say critics, he has tried to twist his jobs as a broadcast news producer and executive to influence the politics he covered. Kaplan, who rumors say might soon become producer of ABC's "Good Morning America," tarnished the reputations of broadcast network news departments from ABC to CNN and, for the past two and a half years, MSNBC.

"Kaplan was born in the Rogers Park section of Chicago," wrote David Margolick in a January 1998 Vanity Fair profile. "His childhood was filled with friends and Democratic politics; Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley and John F. Kennedy were icons in his home.

"He envisioned a life of political activism," Margolick continued, "and joined the 1968 presidential campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy as an advance man. A week later, when Bobby Kennedy won the California primary, Kaplan prepared to switch sides, and headed to Kennedy's hotel to meet him. He ended up that night alone on a Santa Monica beach, watching the waves, listening to radio reports about Kennedy's slow death. He contemplated a radically altered future outside politics."

Turning instead to broadcast journalism, Rick Kaplan was a producer for Walter Cronkite in 1977 when Susan Thomases introduced him to the obscure attorney general of Arkansas named Bill Clinton.

"Both gregarious, both personable, both deeply interested in politics, both news junkies, both charmers, both voracious eaters (their first encounter, appropriately enough, was in a restaurant), they hit it off instantly," wrote Margolick. "'I just remember he was a terrific guy,' Kaplan said. ‘Fun.'"

"If anything," wrote Margolick, "Kaplan was at least as close to Hillary, who shares his Chicago roots; he even hired her to work on coverage of the 1980 Democratic convention.

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During the 1980s Kaplan helped talk Bill Clinton out of giving up politics to take a million-dollar job on Wall Street. After Clinton's much-ridiculed speech at the 1988 Democratic convention in Atlanta, writes Margolick, "it was Kaplan's shoulder Clinton cried on, over Chinese takeout…" and Kaplan who persuaded Clinton that his political career was not over. Clinton's droning speech became such a national joke that he was invited by Democrat Johnny Carson to appear and play his saxophone on the "Tonight" show, which turned the Arkansas governor into a star.

After a stint during the 1980s as executive producer of ABC's "Nightline," Kaplan was promoted to executive producer of ABC's "PrimeTime Live." In 1992 he dispatched reporters to work undercover as employees at the supermarket chain Food Lion, then a target of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) trying to put the company out of business. The ABC reporters got Food Lion jobs by using credentials and references ABC faked with the help of the UFCW.

The resulting expose, aired by ABC around election time that year, depicted Food Lion as an unethical seller of outdated and contaminated foods. Food Lion sued, and a jury that saw the 45 hours of video from which Kaplan and ABC distilled a 10-minute hit piece awarded Food Lion $5.5 million in punitive damages for fraud committed by Capital Cities-ABC against the company.

Such a judgement is extremely rare because it requires clear evidence not only of wrong and false information but also of malice, a calculated and knowing use of falsehood by journalists to cause damage to an innocent party. These damages were greatly reduced by subsequent liberal judges, and a jury fine of $35,000 against Kaplan himself was overturned by a judge.

What the unaired videotape revealed was that in several instances the wrongdoing ascribed to Food Lion was actually committed by or at the direction of these ABC producer fake employees. In one instance, when a genuine Food Lion employee noticed and cleaned a dirty meat slicer that ABC was preparing to film as evidence, one of the ABC producers could be heard "muttering obscenities." It was evident that ABC was covering the story with a pro-union, anti-company agenda and was stacking the deck to produce the propaganda it wanted to air. The man in charge of this Leftist smear piece was Executive Producer Rick Kaplan.

But by 1992 Kaplan had left any pretense of journalistic ethics or fairness behind. "Kaplan," wrote Tim Graham of the Media Research Center, "has been the prime example of a TV news producer who did not just blur, but demolished the wall between reporting on liberal politicians and openly helping them."

With Clinton at risk of extinction in the 1992 New Hampshire primary, Kaplan reportedly influenced ABC News to delay reporting for three crucial days its discovery of the 1969 Clinton letter to Col. Eugene Holmes. This is the notorious letter, as described by Accuracy in Media, in which "Clinton confessed to having tricked Col. Holmes, getting him to violate federal law to get him ROTC deferment" and in which Clinton "said he loathed the military." The delay gave Clinton time to prepare damage control to blunt the letter's impact.

While executive producer of ABC's "PrimeTime Live," Kaplan in 1992 advised Clinton how to deal with the Gennifer Flowers affair issue, recommended that the Clintons appear on rival CBS program "60 Minutes," and advised the Clintons on how to handle that orchestrated interview.

In his 1994 book, "Strange Bedfellows," a study of press coverage of the 1992 campaign, Los Angeles Times reporter Tom Rosentiel described, in Margolick's words, "a frantic evening when Clinton called Kaplan repeatedly, baring his soul and seeking strategic advice."

"Weeks later," reported Graham, "when Clinton's campaign struggled in the New York primary, Kaplan rode to the rescue again, getting Clinton booked on the Don Imus radio show. Kaplan not only arranged the interview, he prepared him for it –- and ABC cameras taped both ends of the conversation for airing on ‘Nightline.' Later, Kaplan did not deny a Spy magazine report that he boasted of attending Clinton campaign staff meetings and helped set up the campaign's press office."

On the eve of the 1992 election ABC reporter Sam Donaldson had taped interviews with both President George H.W. Bush and Clinton. Kaplan ordered Donaldson to do a tag line to his Clinton interview "to make it clear that you don't hate Clinton." This tag, of course, weakened Donaldson's credibility and the power of his questions, leaving an impression that the reporter was somehow biased and that the interview therefore should be taken with a grain of salt. The effect was to tilt the two interviews more in Clinton's favor.

Kaplan "played golf with Bill shortly before the inauguration," according to the liberal magazine the New Republic, "and watched movies with both Clintons at the governor's mansion."

In 1993 Kaplan spent the first of his nights in the Lincoln Bedroom in the Clinton White House. He was among those thus rewarded for services to the Clintons at least as valuable as the $100,000 they would charge mere political donors for a single night's stay in this public property.

In late October 1994, "Kaplan killed [ABC reporter] Jim Wooten's exclusive interview with an Arkansas state trooper who claimed a Clinton aide had tried to muzzle him," reported Margolick. "After that, Wooten refused to do any more pieces on Whitewater." Another ABC News producer told Margolick that "the bar kept getting higher" for such investigations into Clinton dealings with Whitewater.

By 1997, after Kaplan moved to Cable News Network as one of its chieftains, with evidence of campaign fund raising improprieties threatening to submerge Clinton, CNN unleashed a Kaplan-produced special. U.S. News & World Report found that Kaplan had ordered CNN reporters to "limit the use of the word ‘scandal' in reporting on Clinton's campaign fund raising." The message to CNN reporters was clear: Go easy on the boss's friends in the White House.

As the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke in 1998, wrote Graham, "Kaplan leapt into action at CNN with two-hour specials attacking any and all Clinton critics. The programs included ‘Media Madness,' which asked ‘What the hell are you people doing' probing Bill Clinton's sex life?; and ‘Investigating the Investigator,' which described Ken Starr as ‘suspect' over his ‘religious and Republican roots.' In May, Kaplan devoted an hour to demonizing Rep. Dan Burton, who was compared by reporter Bruce Morton to English despot Oliver Cromwell."

Kaplan saw to it that CNN gave softball coverage to the Clintons and threw hardballs at their enemies. Under his watch, CNN came to be known as the Clinton News Network for its pro-Bill & Hill bias. According to Bill O'Reilly of rival Fox News Channel, "financial reporter Lou Dobbs quit CNN because Kaplan was cutting into ‘Moneyline' to give Mr. Clinton some marginal coverage."

CNN also came to be called the "Castro News Network" for its coverage unwaveringly favorable to the Cuban dictator. Kaplan and Castro have been good friends since at least 1978, Margolick reported, and during a Castro United Nations visit to New York while they were dining together, Kaplan invited Castro to come with him to a private dinner with President Clinton, Deputy White House Chief of Staff Harold Ickes, and Susan Thomases. "Castro paused, for what seemed like an hour, before declining," wrote Margolick. "He didn't want to embarrass Clinton, he explained."

In 1998 CNN President Kaplan also oversaw production of the first documentary for his new show "NewsStand." The documentary called "Tailwind," narrated by hyper-leftist journalist Peter Arnett, alleged that during the Vietnam War the United States had used poison gas against women and children in Laos. Challenged for proof by other journalists and the Pentagon, CNN's documentary fell apart like the tissue of lies it was. But that did not stop its use around the world as a tool of Marxist anti-American propaganda.

Kaplan's Leftist love did not end with the Clintons. "The November 20, 2000, Newsweek reported Kaplan had helped Al Gore prepare for a debate against Bill Bradley," wrote Graham. "At a rehearsal for a California debate on March 1, Kaplan joked, ‘Let's do the debate now.'" But as Graham notes, Kaplan "was still CNN president in March," while acting openly as a Gore partisan and enabler.

"I keep looking for what I should be ashamed of, long and hard," Kaplan told Margolick of those who question his Clinton sycophancy and lack of journalistic distance from those he covers, "and I just can't find anything."

Kaplan dismisses his critics such as Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media and Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center as "liars."

This was the man NBC hired to control MSNBC's programming. From the day he was named, a leftward shift in its shows could be seen. Its token conservative show "Scarborough Country," hosted by former Florida Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough, soon featured a steadily increasing proportion of left-liberal guests and of host remarks critical of Republicans. On my national radio show, Scarborough has said that Kaplan did nothing to influence his statements or choice of guests. Kaplan added another "conservative" show by Tucker Carlson, son of a former FCC Commissioner, whose eccentric libertarian politics do not easily fit the right-left spectrum and who is outspokenly critical of the war in Iraq.

MSNBC's taunting liberal Keith Olbermann, a former sports reporter, devotes several minutes each week to rants insulting his Fox time slot rival O'Reilly. On June 14, New York Daily News correspondent Lloyd Grove reported that Olbermann had described MSNBC's tabloid liberal host Rita Cosby as "dumber than a suitcase of rocks."

Kaplan likewise gave free reign to Democratic partisan and former congressional operative Lawrence O'Donnell, who retained his title as "MSNBC Political Analyst" even after co-hosting an October 2004 interview in which he called an interviewee one or another variant of "liar" 39 times. O'Donnell's victim was John O'Neill, co-author of the book Unfit for Command about Democratic presidential nominee, Massachusetts Senator John F. Kerry.

Host of MSNBC's "Hardball" and another veteran Democratic congressional operative Chris Matthews launched a similarly vicious, belittling personal attack against conservative columnist Michelle Malkin after she, in response to his unexpected question, defended O'Neill and 264 fellow Swift Boat veterans criticisms of their former comrade Kerry.

With Kaplan at the helm of MSNBC, Matthews, Olbermann and O'Donnell (who also wrote for NBC's defunct "The West Wing" and now co-stars on HBO's pro-polygamy sitcom "Big Love") frequently hurled epithets and hate-filled insults at Republicans and conservatives. In the O'Neill interview, O'Donnell was allowed to do this days before the 2004 presidential election in an apparent attempt to discredit one of the Democratic candidate's most effective critics.

Under Kaplan MSNBC continued to attract at most only about a third of million viewers worldwide, seldom more than half as many viewers as rival Cable News Network (CNN), which in turn on average has only half as many viewers as cable's leading Fox News Network.

Will MSNBC now become more moderate and centrist following Rick Kaplan's departure? NBC named its nine-year veteran legal correspondent and host Dan Abrams, son of famed First Amendment attorney and scholar Floyd Abrams, as MSNBC's General Manager to replace Kaplan. Abrams in his reporting has generally exhibited fairness and balance, but he will be under direction from NBC News' new Senior Vice President Phil Griffin. Abrams has not been named MSNBC President as Kaplan was.

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