I Cogitate

Political Animal
Whither Liars?
Brian Morton
BALTIMORE CITY PAPER
5/2/2007

One of the great mysteries about the mainstream press in the last six years is its seeming inability to use one particular word: "liar."

At the end of the Clinton administration, the word was bandied about at regular intervals. After the former president's "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" statement, the floodgates opened and full permission was granted to drop the word "liar" in at any opportunity.

But with the Bush administration, despite a six-year record of flat-out statements in total contradiction to the truth, nobody in the press wants to use the word. Anybody can tell a lie, but at what point does enough lies qualify one to be called a "liar" in the mainstream press? Especially when one is in high elective office?

Take, for instance, Vice President Dick Cheney (please). By nearly any account, Cheney has been saying things that are completely and demonstrably at odds with the truth for more than four years now. In September 2003, on NBC's Meet the Press, Cheney talked about "major success, major progress" in Iraq, declared that the country is "stable and quiet," and that Americans are seen as "liberators."

One of the few, and early, media outlets--and by no means a mainstream one--to tarnish the president and vice-president with the L-word was the liberal magazine The American Prospect. In May 2003, authors Drake Bennett and Heidi Pauken wrote, "More distressing even than the president's lies, though, is the public's apparent passivity. Bush just seems to get away with it. The post-September 11 effect and the Iraq war distract attention, but there's more to it. Are we finally paying the price for three decades of steadily eroding democracy? Is Bush benefiting from the echo chamber of a right-wing press that repeats the White House line until it starts sounding like the truth? Or does the complicity of the press help to lull the public and reinforce the president's lies?"

How the Mainstream Media Got Off-Track
John McQuaid
The Huffington Post
5.11.2007

Another day, another MSM-new media showdown. Am I wrong, but is this getting old? The attacks are repetitive, the defenses (and defensiveness) tiresome. If I read one more blogger attack on Joe Klein, and then the Klein response, and then the counterattack, and then the counter-response, I'm gonna run screaming from my laptop.

Still, these dustups keep happening, and they do reveal something about the way the media conversation is changing.

I am an old media person by training. But I'm fed up with the old media too in a lot of ways. Frankly, a lot of what Glenn Greenwald (for example - he's just one of a chorus) says about the MSM makes sense. He is a polemicist, and thus overreaches at times. But he's got his finger on something that MSM types would be wise to listen to, especially after the big media failures of the past few years.

Most in the media establishment were slow to pick up on the biggest story of the 2000s, the radical nature of the Bush administration. The MSM has now begun to catch on, thanks to Iraq, to the information now being knocked loose by Congressional investigators, and to the sheer political dead weight of all those months President Bush has polled in the low 30s.

I think the basic lesson to be learned here is, sometimes profound political changes occur. And institutions don't recognize the profundity of the change until way after it's already occurred. Sometimes they never recognize it.

Tim Rutten, the 'Regarding Media' columnist for the Los Angeles Times, gave a presentation to a room full of mostly aspiring journalists in the University Student Union's Balboa Room on Tuesday.

L.A. Times columnist encourages 'radical journalism'
John Manalang
5/10/07

Los Angeles Times media columnist Tim Rutten discussed the importance of "radical" journalism in the media with students in a forum last Tuesday at the University Student Union's Balboa Room.

The forum was part of the Kenneth S. Devol First Amendment Forum Speakers Series, which is sponsored by the Department of Journalism in conjunction with CSUN's student chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

"Radical journalism is apart from politics, acquiring a critical mind set in the service of humane values," Rutten said. Many journalists do not practice it today, he said.

"The muckraking era started by many radical journalists helped usher a new revolution in the media," Rutten said.

Rutten, who is also an author and a documentary filmmaker, has been working with the L.A. Times for more than 30 years, occupying various editorial positions. He also took part in the publication's Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the 1993 L.A. riots and the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

His presentation was greatly influenced by his early career connection with journalist I.F. Stone, who is considered to be one of America's most respected journalists and someone who influenced radical journalism.

Journalists are not a royal class in America
Will Bunch
May 8, 2007

...Last night, there was an elaborate white-tie state dinner at the White House in honor of Queen Elizaveth II and Prince Philip.The menu featured spring pea soup with U.S. caviar, Dover sole almondine, spring lamb with chanterelle sauce and local vegetables, and an arugula, mustard greens and romaine salad. For a little light after-dinner entertainment, they brought in a violinist -- Itzhak Perlman, have you heard of him?

There were 134 people at the dinner. Have you ever been invited to a state dinner at the White House? Probably not. The guests are superstars from the world of sports -- Arnold Palmer and Peyton Manning, last night -- and entertainment -- Elizabeth Hasselbeck of ABC's "The View" --as well as billionaires like Philadelphia's Leonore Annenberg and Sid Bass and oilman Boone Pickens and the usual prominent political leaders.

The kind of people you won't find on a list like this are everyday Americans, plumbers and accountants and bus drivers and secretaries, the folks who pay the taxes and raise the young men and women who are fighting and dying to support the U.S. (and British) gambit in Iraq. Those who do attend these affairs, on the other hand, are the closest that America comes to producing its own royalty.

That said, why in the name of God are four working journalists among those attending this state dinner -- not as reporters with a notebook or a camera but as guests munching on Dover sole and dancing into the night with America's own brand of dukes and earls?

They are Richard Wolffe of Newsweek; Robin Roberts of ABC; David Gregory of NBC News; and Steven Holland, a Reuters reporter. Wolffe, Gregory and Holland are White House correspondents, while Roberts is co-anchor of the news program "Good Morning America." I single them out because they were guests last night -- but dozens of other Beltway journalists have attended these swank White House affairs in the past, dating back into prior administrations.

PressThink, by Jay Rosen
Retreat from Empiricism: On Ron Suskind's Scoop
December 18, 2006

Even realism has an obligation to be realistic - ­ George Packer.

The only piece of political journalism ever to make me cry was Ron Suskind’s article, Without a Doubt, published in the New York Times Magazine shortly before the 2004 election. It was in that article that the famous passage appeared quoting a senior administration official on the myopia of the “reality-based community” when it came to understanding the government of George W. Bush.

Lately I have been thinking a lot about that article because the “realist” school in foreign policy is thought to be back in charge. The release of the Iraq Study Group’s report on December 6th and the re-emergence of James Baker, famous for being pragmatist, a realist, and a fixer, were the triggers for this observation. The Guardian’s report was typical: “This is a return to the realist policy of Mr. Bush’s father...”

...In Without a Doubt (subtitled “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush”) Suskind was not talking about an age old conflict between realists and idealists, the sort of story line that can be re-cycled for every administration. It wasn’t the ideologues against the pragmatists, either. He was telling us that reality-based policy-making­and the mechanisms for it­had gotten dumped. A different pattern had appeared under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. The normal checks and balances had been overcome, so that executive power could flow more freely. Reduced deliberation, oversight, fact-finding, and field reporting were different elements of an emerging political style. Suskind, I felt, got to the essence of it with his phrase, the “retreat from empiricism...”

"...It could have tried to cover Dick Cheney. Instead, Cheney is by common agreement in the press the most powerful and least scrutinized Vice President in modern American history. Much of the time the press does not know where he is or who he’s meeting with. His is almost a stealth office. Yet he helped engineer the overawing of all reality checks as part of his effort to reclaim “lost” powers for the executive branch. It would have taken a monumental effort to scrutinize Cheney because he was determined to operate without scrutiny. In any event it never happened.

It could have covered the entire retreat from empiricism, which took place across the government, and not just in war-making. There have been thousands of conflicts between the Bush political machine and every variety of reality check known to modern government. Reporters could have connected those dots.

The press could have gone to the old-fashioned empiricists in the Republican Party and asked them if they were worried. (As with this famous piece.) To this day it remains a mystery why supporters of the Bush Agenda saw no threat to its success in the President’s concave habits. (Bush in 2003: “The best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what’s happening in the world.”)
It could have followed up on Suskind’s intellectual scoop by, for example, asking how the military dealt with the shift away from a reality-based command. The alarms must have gone off somewhere.

It could have defined Bush not as a conservative or a traditional Republican but as an innovator. For example, Suskind told Salon: “When I was at the White House in 2002, I had a variety of discussions with them about their newfangled message control machine, and their prized discipline. They made a clear decision: We will ignore as best we can the mainstream press and let’s see if there’s any penalty for doing that.” He said the view of Karen Hughes, Bush’s former chief communications advisor, was, “‘We’re not concerned; we don’t see there being any penalty from the voters for ignoring the mainstream press.” That’s innovation.

Why didn’t the press do these things? Part of it is the reluctance to appear partisan. Of course if Suskind’s reporting was correct, the people to whom this news would matter most were reality-based Republicans, members of the military who cannot afford to have any other “base” but reality, and intellectually honest conservatives who believed in Bush and wanted to see him succeed. There’s a lot of truth in what Atrios says about Washington pundits, “They’d rather be wrong than agree with the dirty fucking hippies...”

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