Thursday
July 21 2005
WHAT WOULD MICHAEL KELLY SAY?: Michael Kelly was one
of the best writers of his generation and an extraordinarily gifted
observer of politics and culture. Despite having grown up in Washington
to become a member of the media elite, Kelly was also one of the
few writers willing to turn a scathingly critical eye at the press
itself.
I've often
wondered what Kelly's reaction would be to the atmosphere in Washington
these days; what he might have written about the coverage of the
war and, more recently, how he would have viewed the flap over
Karl Rove and the CIA leak investigation. As it turns out, we
don't have to wonder too much about the latter.
In 1993 Kelly
wrote a lengthy essay for the New York Times Magazine
titled "Master of the Game." The piece focuses somewhat
unflatteringly on David Gergen's pioneering role in developing
what we've come to know as the art of political spin: the sound-bytes,
the photo ops, the leaks, message discipline, war rooms, etc.
But Kelly's true lament was over a Washington press corps that
had grown insular, lazy and enamored with spin - and he included
himself among this group.
Marvel at
how relevant Kelly's words - now twelve years since they were
printed on the page - are today:
Washington
has become a strange and debased place, the true heart of a
national culture in which the distinction between reality and
fantasy has been lost, a culture that has produced Oliver Stone
as a historian, Joe McGinniss as a biographer, Geraldo Rivera
as a journalist, Leonard Jeffries as a geneticist, and Barbara
Streisand as an authority on national policy. The rare governmental
privilege of speaking under the cloak of anonymity, traditionally
granted only to presidents, secretaries of state and generals
in time of war, has become an accepted practice for midlevel
White House aides explaining routine policy matters to large
roomfuls of reporters. Movie stars show up with their press
agents and their bodyguards to "testify" before Congress.
Politicians and reporters make cameo appearances as movie stars,
playing themselves in fictional scenes about politics and reporting.
Political
operatives call themselves journalists and journalists behave
like political operatives, giving private advice to their politician
friends - and this practice is so widely accepted as to be uncommented
on....
The
press pack has become both obese and incestuous. There are 1,700
accredited White House reporters, and most of them keep in promiscuous
electronic touch - through Nexis and the Federal News Service
and the Associated Press and Reuters and CNN and PBs and C-Span
- with one another's work and with the vast bloviation of words
and pictures that Washington produces every day. Overwhelmed
by size and undermined by excessive intimacy, the pack has lost
its howling way. It has become as faddish as a teenager, vacillating
in its attitudes toward the powers that be, going from bubbling
enthusiasm to hysterical anger, from cheering all that the president
says to denouncing all that the president does. It is so thoroughly
conformist that it celebrates group-think as (conventional)
wisdom.
Obsessed
with the appearances of things, the pack is perpetually susceptible
to the machinations of the image makers. It rewards, with glowing
praise, triumphs of form over content: medium-well-turned phrases,
smart photo ops, effective PR stunts.
Unhappily
aware that much of what government officials say and do in public
is a charade, unknowing of much that occurs behind closed doors
and unwilling to admit ignorance, reporters fashion reality
out of perceptions. A New York Times article in February reports
that the president's advisers are worried about "the perception
thus wrought" by his rocky beginning, and says the administration
is working "to refocus its image as a government of broad,
middle-class interests." A Times report in May finds "a
perception that the president," who won office as a political
centrist, "has come to look very much like the same old
- liberal - thing."
These
bits of fatuousness are unexceptional in contemporary Washington
journalism; they stand out in my mind only because I wrote them
myself.
The Rove
affair is the perfect embodiment of Kelly's criticisms of Washington;
the anonymous sources; the incestuous relationships of the players
involved (elite reporter Cooper married to Dem political operative
Grunwald, "covert" CIA operative married to active Dem
political supporter Wilson, etc); the lies, half-truths and misstatements
told behind the scenes and then on the op-ed page to try and damage
a president politically; and the subsequent sharing of information
between between the adminstration and the press in an effort to
knock down a damaging story and influence the shape of the news
- something that may or may not have resulted in a crime being
committed.
Meanwhile
as Patrick Fitzgerald does his job, the rest of the press corps,
who are in Kelly's words "unknowing of much that occurs
behind closed doors and unwilling to admit ignorance,"
continue to bloviate and speculate endlessly to their own satisfaction
while the world outside the beltway churns on.
I don't know
what Michael Kelly might have written about this entire episode.
I only know that I miss having the chance to open up the paper
in the morning and find out.
FIGHTING
FAIR?: Howard Kurtz runs an
arresting quote from New York Times editor Bill Keller
commenting on the promotion of Dean Baquet to editor of the Los
Angeles Times:
New
York Times editor Bill Keller said: "Dean's a prince --
a world-class investigator, an inspiring editor and a barrel
of fun." But Keller said he hoped Baquet would start "fighting
fair" in luring staffers: "He has this habit of telling
recruits there's something in the New York water that makes
your penis fall off."
If Keller
is losing people to the LA Times over this pitch, he's in bigger
trouble than I thought. - T. Bevan 9:55 am Link
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Wednesday
July 20, 2005
THE SHOW MUST GO ON: Barring some revelation on John
Roberts that has been missed in the previous 5
FBI background checks and the 2003 confirmation hearings,
this nomination is almost certainly a done deal.
You can get
a feel for just how smoothly things might go by watching Ted
Kennedy's appearance this morning on the Today show. Kennedy's
effort was so weak it gave off the impression of a man simply
going through the motions:
"what
these hearings are about are really the question and the challenge
to make sure that we’re going have someone who stands
on the side of working families, the middle class, of ordinary
people, when you get right down to it.
The
American people during this process want to know is he [Roberts]
going to be on the side of the major corporate interests or
is he going to be on the (side of the) consumers’ interest?
Will he be on the side of the polluters or will he be on the
side of those that believe that the Congress had the right to
pass important legislation on the environment? And will he be
on the side of workers, or is he going to be on the side of
the bosses? Those are the issues..."
This type
of Bork-light populist attack falls absolutely flat in the face
of Roberts' qualifications and his reputation for being a even-tempered,
independent-minded thinker.
As John
said last night on Hugh's show, this nomination will almost
certainly split the Democrats' caucus leaving Kennedy, Schumer,
and Durbin in the impossible position of trying to sell the notion
of Roberts as an unacceptable extremist while watching members
of their own party confirm otherwise by not joining the attack.
Still, in
the end the liberal interest groups must be satisfied with the
show, and so the show must go on.
THE
CREDIBILITY QUIZ: What's a fast way to lose credibility
as a scholar, commentator, and/or pundit? One way is to make outrageous
statements like this:
"George
W. Bush's nomination of John Roberts, Jr. is a setback for American
women, just has his policies in Iraq have produced a setback
for women's rights in the Arab world. Indeed, Bush has been
bad for women all around the globe."
Of course,
another way of losing credibility is to misstate
basic historical facts, to get caught deleting those mistakes
without mentioning them, then to serve up a lame excuse which
you also subsequently delete, and finally to launch a vicious
personal attack on the person who caught you fudging.
- T. Bevan 11:35 am Link
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Tuesday
July 19, 2005
AND THE NOMINEE IS... Rumors
are swirling
it's Edith
Brown Clement from the 5th
Circuit. Looks like we may know as early as today.
A
TERRORIST GOES FREE?: From the
Daily Telegraph:
Europe's
war against terrorism suffered a setback yesterday when Germany's
highest court refused to allow the extradition to Spain of an
al-Qa'eda suspect, ruling that the EU's new arrest warrant is
invalid under German law.
Mamoun Darkazanli
is a German citizen of Syrian descent who was friendly with at
least two of the 9/11 plotters and is also suspected to have aided
the Madrid bombers.
It almost
goes without saying that at some point the patience of the civilized
world is going to run short with cases like this and with laws
that allow people suspected of engaging in terrorist activities
to walk free.
BIG
GOVERNMENT = BAD GOVERNMENT: No less certain than the
sun rising in the east is the fact that big, bloated government
programs - even those designed with the best intentions - will
result in massive fraud and waste. So
it is, and so it always shall be.
McCAIN'S
VICTORY: Via Drudge, I see John McCain has won the battle
over the "boob-raunch fest" controversy by delivering
the
ultimate crowd-pleasing one liner: "In Washington, I
work with boobs every day."
Thus has
McCain turned a rather embarrassing case of hypocrisy into a humorous
expression of the public's enmity toward Congress and a perfect
extension of his image as a maverick. Touché. -
T. Bevan 9:35 am Link
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