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FLASHBACK: The Media’s Rabid Reaction to Gingrich-Era Budget Cuts
According to the Peterson Foundation, the U.S. national debt has now surpassed $36 trillion, with interest costs exceeding $1.8 billion per day. Conservatives are hopeful that incoming President Donald Trump’s new “Department of Government Efficiency,” aka “DOGE,” will find ways to cut bloated government spending, freeing up scarce resources for better uses and reducing the massive federal budget deficits that threaten America’s future prosperity.
But if history is a reliable guide, today’s budget-cutters should expect a massive media counterattack. It was 30 years ago this month when a new Republican Congress took office after decades of Democratic rule. One of their goals was to curtail the reckless growth of government spending, but liberal journalists greeted the effort with hysterical headlines about “cruelty,” “suffering,” and a “jihad against the poor” that would hurt children the most.
The onslaught began even before the Republicans took over. The cover of the December 19 edition of Time bore a cartoon image of Gingrich as a combination of Uncle Sam and the infamous Ebenezer Scrooge: “Uncle Scrooge: ’Tis the season to bash the poor. But is Newt Gingrich’s America really that heartless?”
“From the bottom of the income ladder, the prospect of the Republican revolution is chilling, especially because the gap between the rich and the poor has already widened significantly,” insisted Washington reporters James Risen and Elizabeth Shogren in a December 18, 1994 Los Angeles Times news story.
“Advocates worry that if Republicans make good on their threatened budget cuts, whatever safety net exists for America’s needy, won’t exist anymore,” CBS’s Randall Pinkston warned the next day on the Evening News.
As the new Congress was sworn in, NBC’s Bryant Gumbel handed the microphone to the defeated Democrats: “You called Gingrich and his ilk, your words, ‘trickle-down terrorists who base their agenda on division, exclusion and fear,’” he prompted to House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt on the January 4, 1995 Today show. “Do you think middle-class Americans are in need of protection from that group?”
The idea of curtailing government spending drove liberal journalists to fits of outrageous hyperbole. “From the pronunciamentos out of Washington, you’d think the new Congress were a slash-and-burn Khmer Rouge, determined to rid Phnom Penh of every member of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, every painter who every got a dime out of the National Endowment for the Arts, every child who was ever difficult, and other inconvenient co-dependents who ought instead to be growing rice and eating fishpaste in the boondocks,” seethed CBS Sunday Morning TV critic John Leonard on January 8.
“It sure is exciting to think about that balanced budget everyone wants,” former NBC News President Michael Gartner argued in his January 17 USA Today column. “It’s exciting — until you wonder how it will affect you and your family and your neighbors and your town. Then, it’s scary. For that big government that everyone is complaining about finances an awful lot of important things....Without it, a lot of poor children wouldn’t have breakfasts. A lot of professors wouldn’t have grants. A lot of needy people wouldn’t have medical care — or food.”
ABC suggested citizens would soon regret any cutback. World News Tonight’s Linda Patillo on February 3 noted that if “the people of Seattle and King County [Washington]....want to send less money to Washington, they may have to give up some of what they get back. Bridges or babies, shipyards or small business loans, transportation or tourist development, benefits no one here is offering to give up.”
Quickly, journalists zeroed in programs that would elicit the greatest public sympathy. “The fate of the school lunch program is still unclear,” CNN’s Eugenia Halsey targeted on February 23, adding “the GOP must battle the perception that the Contract with America is a contract against children.”
“The Republican jihad against the poor, the young and the helpless rolls on. So far no legislative assault has been too cruel, no budget cut too loathsome for the party that took control of Congress at the beginning of the year and has spent all its time since then stomping on the last dying embers of idealism and compassion in government,” former NBC News reporter Bob Herbert foamed in his February 25 New York Times column. “This is the coldest crew to come down the pike since the Ice Age.”
Three days later, CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather was in full spin mode: “There was no doubt Republicans in the House had enough votes tonight to pass another key item in their agenda to rip up or rewrite government programs going back to the Franklin Roosevelt era. It is a bill making it harder, much harder, to protect health, safety, and the environment.”
On March 4, World News Saturday anchor Barry Serafin warned: “Budget cutting fever inspired by Speaker Gingrich and the new Republican Congress has infected government at all levels.” Reporter Ned Potter targeted New York state cutbacks: “At this church food bank, organizers worry they will be overwhelmed with hungry people if government programs die.”
Time senior writer Elizabeth Gleick pushed back against GOP plans to save money on school lunches. “The flaws in the [Republican] proposal, children’s advocates insist, are many and terrifying,” she wrote in the magazine’s March 6 edition.
“Across the nation there are an estimated 20,000 homeless families. And social workers worry the crisis will only worsen if the new Congress keeps its promise and makes deep cuts in bedrock social programs and especially in public housing,” NBC’s Giselle Fernandez worried on the March 12 Nightly News.
On March 16, CBS’s Rather was back with another not-so-objective framing of the spending battle: “The new Republican majority in Congress took a big step today on its legislative agenda to demolish or damage government aid programs, many of them designed to help children and the poor.”
“March madness has begun on Capitol Hill, and almost as predictable as a B horror film, the slashing has begun,” CNN’s Judy Woodruff claimed that same night on Inside Politics. “House Republicans have made a small down payment on their plan to make massive budget cuts.”
“This is some of the greatest redistribution of income I’ve ever seen, from have-nots to the haves,” seethed the Wall Street Journal’s Al Hunt on CNN’s Capital Gang on March 18. “This is enough to put Robin Hood to shame.”
“When NBC Nightly News continues: in Washington, if they cut food stamps, who doesn’t eat?” anchor Tom Brokaw tendentiously teased on March 22.
“The most drastic measures are not expected to survive in the Senate,” ABC World News Saturday anchor Catherine Crier noted before a March 25 story, “but congressional tinkering with welfare is creating fear all across America.”
Journalists cast the budget cutters as self-interested villains, rather than as elected officials with a landslide mandate to bring government under control. “House Republicans denied any impropriety when they approved federal budget reductions of $17 billion and outlined $190 billion more, slashing programs that largely benefit women, children, and the poor, to pay for that ‘pouting sex kitten’ mistress of their dreams — tax cuts,” U.S. News & World Report senior writer Gerald Parshall alleged in the magazine’s March 27 edition.
“When you look at the reality of cutting people off, of saying you can’t have more benefits if you have children while you are on welfare, you’re talking about putting children on the street who are hungry and naked, and that’s a sin,” the Washington Post’s Juan Williams charged on the March 25 Capital Gang.
“The Republicans have pushed it too far,” Bob Herbert asserted on the March 27 Today show. “You have measures that are actually cruel, that are going to cause some suffering for young people, for children, for women, for the elderly, for the homeless, for AIDS victims and that sort of thing....They are moving resources, financial resources, from the poor and middle class up to the rich and the big business community, and I just don’t think that’s the right thing to do.”
Despite all of the media’s histrionics, spending by the federal government actually rose in 1995 and 1996 from where it had been prior to the Republican takeover of Congress, just not by as much as liberals wished. Total federal spending in fiscal year 1994 was $1.462 trillion ($3.087 trillion in today’s dollars); that rose to $1.515 trillion in FY1995 and $1.560 trillion in FY1996 ($3.114 trillion and $3.111 trillion in today’s dollars, respectively).
This year, the DOGE budget mechanics will discover that federal spending, adjusted for inflation, is more than twice as high ($6.752 trillion in the just-concluded FY2024, with an historic budget deficit of $1.833 trillion) than that confronted by the Gingrich Congress 30 years ago.
Given the media’s theatrical response to the Republican effort to merely curtail the rate of growth back in 1995, it’s a fair bet that DOGE’s biggest obstacle will be the liberal media and liberal interest groups joining forces to misrepresent even the slightest reductions in spending as heartless attacks on America’s children.
For more examples from our flashback series, which we call the NewsBusters Time Machine, go here.
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