I Cogitate

David Halberstam on today's American press
Though U.S. media stars will undoubtedly rush to heap praise on Halberstam, his views on the proper role of journalism could not be any farther from what they do.
Glenn Greenwald
www.salon.com

Apr. 24, 2007 | David Halberstam's death yesterday is certain to prompt all sorts of homage from our media stars describing Halberstam as a superior journalist, someone who embodied what journalism ought to be. And it is true that he was exactly that.

But modern American journalists -- as Halberstam himself repeatedly emphasized -- have become the precise antithesis of those values. The functions Halberstam and the best journalists of his generation fulfilled are exactly those that have been so fundamentally abandoned, repudiated and scorned by our nation's most prominent and influential media stars. And most legitimate media criticisms today are grounded in exactly that gaping discrepancy.

In several of the posts below, I have posted just a few excerpts from what I think are among the best essays and interviews from Halberstam over the past several years. But let us begin with his understanding of the intended role of political journalism and contrast that with how our current press functions:

On the adversarial relationship between journalists and political officials

David Halberstam, Speech to the Columbia School of Journalism, May 18, 2005:

One of the things I learned, the easiest of lessons, was that the better you do your job, often going against conventional mores, the less popular you are likely to be. (So, if you seek popularity, this is probably not the profession for you.) . . . .

There are a few things I would like to pass on to you as I come near to the end of my career.

One: It's not about fame. By and large, the more famous you are, the less of a journalist you are. Besides, fame does not last. At its best, it is about being paid to learn. For fifty years, I have been paid to go out and ask questions. What a great privilege to be a free reporter in a free society, to be someone whose job is a search for knowledge. What a rare chance to grow as a person. . . .

I want to leave you today with one bit of advice: never, never, never, let them intimidate you. People are always going to try in all kinds of ways. Sheriffs, generals, presidents of universities, presidents of countries, secretaries of defense. Don't let them do it...

"Media Matters"; by Jamison Foser
The "best of the best"?

Washington Post reporter and columnist David Broder is widely known as the "dean" of political journalists. He is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, has been named "Best Newspaper Political Reporter" by the Washington Journalism Review, and ranked as "Washington's most highly regarded columnist" by editorial page editors and by members of Congress in a Washingtonian magazine survey.

According to his Washington Week biography, Broder "has been called 'the high priest of political journalism' by author Timothy Crouse, 'the unchallenged "dean" of what many political reporters like to think is their "priesthood" ' by U.S. News, and 'probably the most respected and influential political journalist in the country' by columnist Richard Reeves. Esquire said Broder 'has few challengers as the most influential political journalist in the country,' and media critic Ron Powers on CBS-TV said 'Broder is not famous like Peter Jennings, he's not glamorous like Tom Brokaw, but underneath that brown suit there is a superman.'"

The accolades for Broder have shown no sign of slowing down in recent years: his colleagues routinely speak of him in the hushed, awed tone they typically reserve for John McCain and Joe Lieberman. NBC's Tim Russert -- himself often described as the nation's most influential journalist -- calls Broder "the most objective and respected reporter I know in this town." In 2005, Russert praised Broder's "superb" analysis and noted that he had appeared more often on Meet the Press than any other guest -- nearly 400 times in all. Just this week, the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza placed Broder alongside the late David Halberstam as "titans of journalism." Conservative pundit Bill Kristol says things like "I disagree with David Broder on this, which means I'm probably wrong..." While still working at The Washington Post, Politico executive editor Jim VandeHei wrote "Broder is the best of the best. His columns are fair and illuminating."

It is clear what political journalists say about Broder. But what does Broder's exalted position atop the media food chain say about the state of political journalism?

Interview with Charlie Savage
The reporter who just won a Pulitzer for his articles on the Bush administration's abuse of "signing statements" discusses executive power, blogs and the national press, and principles of good journalism.
Glenn Greenwald

Apr. 26, 2007 | Last week, Charlie Savage of The Boston Globe was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his series of articles on the Bush administration's unprecedented abuse of "signing statements" as an instrument for evading the law. This week, I conducted the following interview with him via e-mail:

Q - What prompted you originally to focus on President Bush's signing statements as a news story?

A - I had been covering both the McCain torture ban and the Patriot Act reauthorization fights in Congress as part of my regular beat, which is legal matters -- especially those with a connection to 9/11. Both of those fights ended with a provocative signing statement by Bush. After those two stories, it made sense to go back and look at all the other signing statements, including those unrelated to national security, to see what other laws Bush had declared himself free to bypass.

Q - Why did you find the story significant?

A - In his signing statements, Bush was asserting that the president, as commander-in-chief and head of the "unitary" executive branch, has the power to set aside laws in which Congress has sought to restrict his power or to regulate the federal government. This view seemed to have momentous implications for the constitutional system of checks and balances. Moreover, it was coming to light in the wake of then-recent revelations about the warrantless wiretapping program, which circumvented a 1978 statute. The NSA program showed that the Bush administration was willing to act on its aggressive theory of executive power.

Q - What was the reaction of the national press to your stories? Did your initial articles prompt much attention from other national media outlets?

A - There were initially very few news stories in the rest of the national print media that followed up on the Globe's articles about the Bush administration signing statements, although many editorial boards and opinion columnists in those same publications did write about them. One exception: a few days the Globe's initial story about the torture ban signing statement, the Knight-Ridder/McClatchy Washington Bureau did a very good story on the same topic. And by May, the signing-statements story had also been picked up by a number of radio shows, MSNBC, numerous bloggers and online columnists -- and Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report."

Q - We hate to give this away but we just had to print the last question-and-answer:

A - In general, do you believe that American media has done a sufficient job in reporting on the Bush administration's expansion of presidential power? What have they done well, if anything, and what has been missing?

I believe that the Bush administration's systematic effort to expand presidential power is among the most interesting and defining themes of this era in Washington -- one that unites and explains many different policy controversies which are too often discussed in isolation from one another or without reference to the larger pattern.

How McClatchy Reporter Cracked 'AttorneyGate' Scandal
Her experience, and contacts, outside the Beltway helped Marisa Taylor break some of the key early stories in the still-evolving scandal involving the firing of eight U.S. attorneys.

By Greg Mitchell

(April 10, 2007) -- The current scandal swirling around the firing of eight U.S. attorneys first reached the mainstream media in a major way via a report from McClatchy Newspapers' Washington, D.C., bureau. That scoop had been fed by items that had appeared for weeks on political blogs. How is it that the resource-rich Washington Post and New York Times did not break the "AttorneyGate" story above ground?

One reason was that McClatchy's Marisa Taylor had only worked inside the Beltway for less than a year and had brought with her years of experience covering federal courts in distant parts of the country.

"It helped still being an outsider here," Taylor, 37, told me, with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales facing the possible loss of his own job. "And as a bureau we are underdogs in terms of resources, and that can sometimes help us. It encourages us to maybe look outside the Beltway. We were willing to believe the Justice Department if it provided evidence that this was not political, but also willing to look at other explanations. We were willing to be a watchdog."

This sounded exactly like what Knight Ridder's Washington bureau ­ before it combined with McClatchy's office ­ did in taking an unusually skeptical view of the administration's claims on Iraqi WMDs in the run-up to the war.

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