A Post Mortem for the Fourth Estate

To Disassemble/Dissemble Language and Meaning – A Post Mortem for the Fourth Estate. June 5, 2005

Here are a couple of items of note from last week’s news

“But the thing that really bothered me the most, which the 9-11 Commission said also wasn't true, is the insinuation that the president continues to make to this day that Osama bin Laden(sic) had something to do with supporting terrorists that attacked the United States. That is false. The 9-11 Commission, chaired by a Republican, said it was false. Is it wrong to send people to war without telling them the truth. And the truth was Osama bin Laden (sic) was a very bad person who was doing terrible things, but that Iraq was never a threat to the United States. That was the truth. It was underlined by the 9-11 Commission, headed, again, by a Republican, a well-respected group of people.”

Howard Dean - May 29, 2005 Meet the Press

"I'm aware of the Amnesty International report, and it's absurd. The United States is a country that promotes freedom around the world [We have] investigated every single complaint against [sic] the detainees It seemed like [Amnesty International] based some of their decisions on the word and allegations by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people had been trained in some instances to disassemble (1) [sic]  that means not tell the truth. And so it was an absurd report. It just is."

President George W. Bush, press conference, May 31, 2005

I want to comment first on the Howard Dean interview with Tim Russert on Meet the Press.  I usually have an almost constant apprehension when watching the good doctor on television.  It seems that he possesses some sort of curse that he appears unable to shake.  Have you ever been in the middle of a conversation when you suddenly find you have drifted off into some sort of mental daydream, suddenly to awaken to the realization that you have completely lost the last thirty seconds of the conversation?  Have you ever experienced suddenly going into autopilot while talking?  Watching Howard Dean in his dealings with the hostile mainstream press, I sometimes have the feeling that his mind is somewhere else.  He often seems preoccupied and noticeably uncomfortable.  During the primaries, I was moved with his presence, his clarity and his ability to articulate complex lines of reasoning on his feet.  I don’t know if his present malady was the result of the traumatic post-Iowa caucus Dean scream hype (2), or the later attempts to marginalize him on the part of the Democrats, the Republicans and the press.

I still recall the days of President Gerald Ford (remember him?) when absolutely everyone was glued to the tube waiting for him to do a Chevy Chase: stumble onto the tarmac while deplaning or falling down the White House steps.  It became a national joke and a blight he was never able to shake.

Similarly with Dr. Dean.  What makes matters even worse, is the way the press amplifies and celebrates even his most innocuous flops.  After the obvious mistakes on Meet the Press, in which Dean twice mentioned Osama Bin Laden, when he clearly meant Saddam Hussein, Tim Russert went right on with the interview without a follow up question such as “Sir, I presume you meant Saddam Hussein, not Osama Bin Laden. Didn’t you?” Even a cub reporter would ask such a question, as a basic act of courtesy to even the most imposing personage (3).  I saw the show.  Russert went right on with the next question without missing a beat and without asking Dean to correct an obvious mistake.  There are only two excuses for such behavior on the part of an interviewer.  The first is, he did so in a malicious attempt to further propagate the right-wing myth of Howard Dean as a man who is stupid, out of control and, in short, a bumbling idiot.  The second is that Russert didn’t catch it.  While I know Russert is not above malicious intent - he has tried to trip Dean up on previous occasions - I am inclined to favor the second explanation. This is just one of many maddening examples where Russert seems to be focusing on the next question so much that he is not even listening to the answer to the last question. It’s like he is some sort of blue-collar wage slave, with one eye on the clock so he can punch out exactly at five and head for the pub.  The worst case was during the Cheney interviews when he left lie after lie after lie go by, completely unchallenged. The second worst case was his celebrated interview with Bush.{mosgoogle right}

The White House press corps is often euphemistically referred to as the Official Presidential Stenographic Pool.  The above quote from the Bush press conference is another case in point that illustrates the complete absence of even an elementary press scrutiny of the content they are supposed to transmit, and possibly challenge.  Two things I find interesting in the way the media has been behaving in relation to Bush in this supposed new 9/11 world view, are - first, the almost total lack of jokes about the president’s inability to make it through a single paragraph of copy without an abundant application of (sic)s to the transcript.  Second is the, far more serious, lack of any challenge of his misrepresentation of the facts either in the form of follow up questions, or later when the story is reported on the air or in print.  I realize that the press has, for some unfathomable reason, allowed itself to be saddled with the unprecedented Bush rule of no serious follow up questions at his press conferences.  But why is there no questioning of these pronouncements during the later broadcast news segments or in print?

I heard a rather interesting comment on a local journalists’ panel discussion on the radio last week.  A University of Missouri alum commented that there is a strong emphasis in journalism classes these days on learning how to write for the market, impressing the managing editor and not disturbing the readers or rocking the corporate owner’s boat.  I’m not sure if she was intending her comments to apply to her prestigious Alma Mater, the Missouri School of Journalism, or not.  In short, young journalists today are apparently taught they should do everything possible to make the transition from journalist to stenographer as smooth as possible.

I have dealt here with two prominent manifestations of the last remaining vestige of journalism in this country: Tim Russert, the hard-boiled interviewer and the imbedded “beat” reporter covering the White House.  There is yet another type of reporter, Larry King, the celebrity, entertainment-news, puff piece interviewer. This fawning sycophant, I think, could interview Adolph Hitler and fail to mention the Holocaust.  His is the configuration of the future press-personality and his is the only format that will ultimately prevail.  It will, no doubt, find its final metamorphosis well before the twenty third century in a character not unlike DJ, Ruby Rhod!! as interpreted by Chris Tucker in the movie “the Fifth Element.”

"For Amnesty International to suggest that somehow the United States is a violator of human rights, I frankly just don't take them seriously. Frankly, I was offended by it. I think the fact of the matter is, the United States has done more to advance the cause of freedom, has liberated more people from tyranny over the course of the 20th century and up to the present day than any other nation in the history of the world [I]f you trace [abuse allegations] back, in nearly every case, it turns out to come from somebody who has been inside and been released to their home country and now are peddling lies about how they were treated."