Snow Storm
I had the misfortune of catching Tony Snow's final White House press briefing (transcript here) yesterday and let me count the ways I found it so depressingly sad.
Sad because, as disagreeable and abhorrent as Snow might be, I couldn't help but feel deep sympathy for a fellow human being in such troubled straits. His gaunt figure, his thinning hair, his weird complexion, the changed timber of his familiar voice -- all probable symptoms of chemotherapy-- are but stark reminders of our shared and frail mortality.
Sad because of the way the ailing Snow continued, nevertheless, to prevaricate, lie, obfuscate and sneer right up to and through the final minute of his final briefing on planet earth. The disdain and disrespect he evidences for transparent government and a watchdog press are truly staggering in their naked dimensions.
Sad because many of the reporters in that room were so clearly frustrated by the storm of hubris, arrogance and deceit he was showering upon them and yet we know how so very little of that clarifying and righteous press skepticism and outright anger will actually make into today's published and broadcast news stories. Peter Baker of the WaPo certainly hints at it in a sprightly column this morning. But you have to read through the full transcript linked above to get the full flavor of the confrontation.
The press, in that briefing room, is often as combative as it was yesterday. They are not simply a pack of lapdogs who blindly munch on official hand-outs. But then some sort of magical, transformative process does too often take place between the time they leave the room and their reports appear, a process that often terminates in such a bland, insipid product. And just what are the ingredients used to extract the pungent bite? As I've noted before (rather repeatedly) it's not a simple directive from the corporate boards who own the media; it's not a quiet conspiracy of biased editors; it's not just a question of class and social bias among the reporters. It's much, much more and something much more diffuse. It's an entire engrained, entrenched media sub-culture which has taken decades to mature and ossify and which -- fortunately-- is now in a state of flux and decomposition (though not nearly as accelerated as one might hope).
The posting I placed the other day that linked to Jay Rosen on this subject turned out to be most the most looked-at and commented-upon piece of the last few weeks on this blog. And now Jay is back with a related piece derived, in turn, from a posting by Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage. Together these pieces address head-on what a more with-it press corps could have and should have achieved, pushing the paradigm beyond the conventional horse-race mode of covering politics and finding, instead, the master narrative that much better explains the trajectory of the Bush White House. Savage provides the example. Rosen unfolds its broader implications.
I'd be interested in reading responses that transcend our own sort of facile "horse-race" view of the media; something other than The Liberal Media Liars on the one hand or Media Right-Wing Poodles on the other. Can we try?
September 13th, 2007 at 6:00 am
Marc, did you know that “Argument #1 is not an array?” My keen eyes picked that up.
September 13th, 2007 at 7:33 am
To try to respond to Marc’s plea ….
I find it interesting that the Washington Post writer’s last name was Baker. Some of the best criticism of modern journalism has been by Russell Baker, who has written wonderful pieces in The New York Review of Books after being forced to retire from The New York Times, which apparently preferred the more substantial Maureen Dowd (sigh).
Baker made the point a few years ago in reviewing Paul Krugman’s collection of columns and in a subsequent interview that the media today are so much better paid than his generation, and reporters have grown up in a time of relative prosperity, that they feel more of an affinity with the wealthy people they cover. Thus, they understand the financial sacrifice made by good ol’ Tony Snow, who can’t make it on $168k annually, and now will go back to making big right-wing paychecks (and I think Marc beautifully stated the sadness in seeing him ill and the disgust in seeing him lie).
This ties in neatly with two Sally Quinn articles for The Washington Post, written 20 years apart, critical of the Carter and Clinton people for not being proper members of the DC Establishment–or as David Broder, once a journalist who once deserved respect for his reporting ability, said, the Clintons trashed the place and it’s not their place. Well, it’s his. And while I don’t think this should degenerate into an attack on the MSM, there is a degree of coziness that is utterly ridiculous.
Another key point about Tony Snow is that he was the first real media star to be press secretary. Previous presidents had hired well-known reporters, but not someone who had been simply a media ideologue to walk in each day and explain what was going on. I think of Mike McCurry talking about how he wanted to be careful in briefing the media during the Lewinsky silliness not to say something that would come back to haunt him later–in other words, not to just lie. Snow has no such compunctions. And that distinguishes him even from Ron Ziegler, famed for his briefings on Watergate, who simply did as he was told.
September 13th, 2007 at 8:04 am
This is a good piece, but I don’t think it fundamentally leads to a conclusion other than that the media are overwhelmingly cautious, establishment-oriented and bend toward the most simplistic frame for their stories. In that respect, Rosen’s view of the media hardly differs from Atrios’ – to reference a non-scholarly, blogosphere critic of wholesale media tilt toward narratives that serve the political interests of the right more than liberals.
Atrios – or Alterman – doesn’t argue that David Gregories are ideological conservatives who have infiltrated the media to bend “facts” in his direction – which would have to be the argument if your supposition that the “left” and “right” critiques of the media argument are mirror images. In fact, they concede that a David Gregory is probably more or less what would be considered liberal in many of his personal attitudes. They argue that the David Gregories are overwhelmingly lazy, access-oriented, easily-to-roll, terrified of being labeled “too liberal” and stuck in some overtly simplistic “horse-race” political narratives, as Rosen points out, that rarely serve the interest of bringing the public up-to-speed on essential information or the kind of critical analysis Charlie Savage exhibited. The Right argues that the problem with the media is that its full of liberal ideologues who are pushing a liberal political agenda and serially bashing Republicans. Big difference.
Another difference it that occasionally the key proponents of the Right argument, like Bill Kristol, have admitted that their whole proposition has been mostly a political tactic to bend the media in their ideological direction.
September 13th, 2007 at 8:14 am
Another point that the “left” makes, which is undeniably true, is that the media in general and the FOX wing in particular show a “tolerance” of truly toxic right-wing crazies that would never be shown to, say, an overtly “left” critic with respectable credentials like Noam Chomsky. (See Sean Hannity’s public defense of his “friend” Todd Rundgren who displayed an automatic weapon on stage, cried out that Obama should “suck on it”, and the “bitch” Hillary should “take a ride on it”, nutty Glenn Beck as a CNN “star”, Ann Coulter’s serial appearances and praise by the host on MSNBC’s Hardball, etc. etc. Hannity said he’d continure to have Todd Rundgren on because he’s also host to folks from “the other side” like Democratic political consultant Bob Beckel. This is a display of a totally insane, politically perverse notion of “balance” that is closer to the norm than not.)
September 13th, 2007 at 8:16 am
Oh Christ…apologies to Todd Rundgren. I meant Ted Nugent. I always get rock guys I’ve listened to mixed up.
September 13th, 2007 at 8:23 am
reg: respectable credentials like Noam Chomsky
Osama bin Laden: (Noam Chomsky is)among one of the most capable of those from your own side
Figures. They both supported John Kerry, too.
- -
Regarding the topic, who is one journalist to criticize another and what makes his credentials better than the first? Aren’t these people going to the same journalism schools?
September 13th, 2007 at 8:23 am
Another quicky – in defense of my case that the “left” and “right” critiques aren’t mirrors of each other, Atrios has a criticism of Gail Collins this morning for channeling Maureen Dowd in her doing a piece critical of Fred Thompson that centers on the “aesthetics”. There’s clearly more to this admitted partisan’s disdain for the media than that they are a bunch of right-wing partisans trying to bamboozle America. If there’s more to the “right” critique than an inversion of that reductive notion, I’ve missed it.
September 13th, 2007 at 8:25 am
Osama bin Laden: “We don’t believe in taxes.”
Sound familiar ?
September 13th, 2007 at 8:31 am
I might only add that the metrics used to determine political views of those in media (e.g. party affiliation) are really poor indicators as to how someone may report the news.
As I mentioned before, Bob Novak is a registered Democrat.
Tim Russert worked on Mario Cuomo’s 1984 campaign, but seems to be more interested in straddling the middle. Brit Hume cut his teeth with Jack Anderson, including breaking the story on the Nixon administration ties to ITT, but is clearly a right-wing reporter.
It’s always best to dig a little deeper.
September 13th, 2007 at 8:31 am
“I always get rock guys I’ve listened to mixed up.”
Ooops…that was supposed to be “NEVER listened to”
September 13th, 2007 at 12:32 pm
mediamatters.org/items/200705300006
“The Clintonisates will never forgive Gerth for his articles on Whitewater, but who cares?” -Marc Cooper
So, what are you supposed to say? Yes, we know that the National Media follows, in fact creates, a narrative and sticks to it. Yes, we know that Republicans behave as if they will always have their President in power (they did this in ratioanizing Watergate as well); and that the Tony Snows will see these issues compleatly differently should said Media let down it’s guard enough to let allow the Democrates to win. Or have one of these tasty examples won’t you? They’re so easy, you just pop them into the microwave. O.k., how would the national media and the Tony Snows have reacted if Bill Clinton had issued blanket instructions to his White House that they were to ignore the supenas of The House of Representatives?
So the question becomes, are the Republicans wise in feeling that way? Somehow I think when and if a Dem is elected in 2008, the likes of Woody will reach into that dusty junk drawer; reach past the NASCAR Cards and paper clips, and yank out a copy of something called The U.S. Constitution. I don’t think he’ll have any trouble finding newly liberated voices in the Washington Press Corp to carry his water. Then, I think, the idea of a President signing bills and winking that he didn’t have to actually FOLLOW the law will be a lot less tolerated.
To an extent, such are the checks and balances that are supposed to make the system work. Or they would be, if we were not living in a country were one party’s President is hamstrung by the country’s most powerful newspaper for things the President didn’t do 11 years before; and one party’s president can smirk off questions about it’s catastrophes seven years down the line.
September 13th, 2007 at 12:40 pm
I do believe Savage jumped the shark during the sea change while responding to a paradigm shift. That sentence would be nonsensical, except how can Savage best himself from here? Savage takes the identify-discriminate-associate chain prize. What is a thing? What is it not? And, what is it related to? Pattern recognition indeed. The building blocks of “knowing.†We all have ‘em, it’s just some of us can do more with what we have than others. The thing (Maximal Executive) was actually hidden in plain view. It wasn’t Bush-Cheney-Rove. It was Bush-Cheney-Addington. Rove was a nice convenient decoy; the bird that leads a casual walker away from the nest in the reeds. And, Rosen and Savage are right; you’d never see it from a construct in which a reporter’s job is to see, analyze, and report specific incidents. You’d only see it if you strung those incidents together and recognized, although the incidents were different/isolated from one another, they shared some common element. In this case, one of the common elements was the method (signing statements), and it would have been easy enough to simply stop there. Most did. But, the critical unifying element was what motivated them. The answer to, “Tell me how this ends (Petraeus).†It’s not like the individual pieces weren’t reported. It’s not like the unique implications weren’t recognized. It’s not like the specific consequences weren’t plain to see. Couldn’t see the forest for the trees. Oldest form of blindness there is. Couple of questions, Marc. Does not the competing nature of the daily news set this up, or at least, contribute to it? With its emphasis on getting the “scoop,†or not being “scooped,†doesn’t that sense of urgency to get the (singular) story predispose reporters to put a period at the end of an incomplete sentence? At the risk of beating every metaphorical horse in the universe to death, does this not suggest a need for a meta-reporter? Who would serve that function?
September 13th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
At the risk of beating a dead horse (Oh go ahead, my conscience is telling me, you will do it anyway) let me make two points:
1. Reporters have editors. What they edit is what gets in.
2. It does not pay, literally, to stray off the reservation. See Mark Danner and Robert Perry. Both paid a stiff price for their reports from Central America that went against the official line the Reagan Adm. was giving out. If you’re a family man and work for a major oulet like the NYT or NEWSWEEK with a good paycheck and excellent benefits (medical, dental, retirement etc.) you’ll think long and hard about what you’ll write.
I discussed the phenomenon of the Pundicoracy of DC behaving, as Digby says, like Junior HS Heathers. How else to explain Quinn, Broder, and their ilk determining who is “In” and who isn’t in “their” town. Frankly their moans about the “dirty Hippies” in the blogispher has much to do with snottu new kids challenging their turf. And, apparentley winning.
September 13th, 2007 at 1:56 pm
Marc writes
“Sad because of the way the ailing Snow continued, nevertheless, to prevaricate, lie, obfuscate and sneer right up to and through the final minute of his final briefing on planet earth.”
+++++++++++++++++
Why does this surprise you, coming from a guy who was a regular guest host for The Rush Limbaugh Show and ocassional host for The O’Reilly Factor before moving to Fox?
September 13th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
A bit off-topic, but Matt Yglesias has identified some major bullshit – I’d call it deliberate disinformation and false causality – usiing Petraeus and Jones own data points on reductions of sectarian violence in Baghdad. Rather than my clumsily summariziing it, check this out –
http://tinyurl.com/2ht3vc
September 13th, 2007 at 6:42 pm
I don’t know, Richard. Maybe you’re right. But, for the sake of argument, I’ll include this snippet from the email exchange I had with someone at the WaPo:
That got me. I decided I needed to pay closer attention, and try to be more alert to what was done well. Credit where credit is due, and all.
If I take a caution-at-all-costs view, then I guess I’d have to say that: Harold Meyerson, Dan Froomkin, Anne Hull and Dana Priest (Walter Reed and VA; WaPo), Barton Gellman and Jo Becker (Cheney; WaPo), NY Times deputy editor David Shipley who published “The War as We Saw It” (I think), Paul Krugman, and Janye Mayer The Black Sites: CIA’s secret interrogation program (New Yorker) are all aberrations. I’m sure someone else could extend the list; this is just what came to mind.
Whether those folks are sufficient to offset the likes of: Thomas Friedman, David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, Michael Gordon, etc. I have no clue. But that email exchange shamed me into trying to be a little more alert, and recognize that some of the reporting I thought so highly of were done by very skilled folks, who still have their sense of ethics clutched firmly in their hands, and often wrote the kinds of stories that likely took weeks, if not months, to put together. And, somewhere, there was an editor behind all of that, too. Memo to self: don’t toss the baby with the bathwater.
September 13th, 2007 at 7:25 pm
There is no question that a lot of good reporting is to be found in the NYT and WaPo but that’s not the point. If you go back and look at those twopapers at the time of the invasion in 2002 – 2003 they, and their news papges were cheerleaders for the war. Look at Micahel Gordon and Judith Miller. Look at Jim Hoagland. Look at the guy who wrote FIASCO. Well he was gung-ho at the start.
No there were souces questioning the whole idea but Knight-Ridder (now McClatchy) has been the best from the start but they are not in the first tier whan it comes to influence. And broadcast and cable news? Dare I ask? Maybe if Peter Arnett were still around.
Look, read the last speech that the late, great David Halberstam gave. I think Glenn Greenwald links to it on a column of his last week. I think he explains it all.
And don’t knock the influence of all those columnists and pundits. They set the tone of what is acceptible and what is not. The assignment editors read them and then shape stories to fit the “Narrative.” Once upon a time that narrative had Shrub as Prince Hal and Rummy and Colin as exalted grown-ups and weren’t we lucky to have them in charge!
Well all that has changed. But even the dense ones who fault Bush haven’t admitted their role. And aside from Miller, whose downfall came for other reasons, who has paid a price for being so spectacularly, catastrophically, wrong?
Not Broder
Not Freidman
Not Ignatius
Not Hoagland
You get the idea.
September 13th, 2007 at 8:07 pm
I get the idea. Thanks.
September 13th, 2007 at 8:23 pm
For anyone else who might be interested:
David Halberstam’s speech
Columbia Journalism Award – May 18, 2005 http://tinyurl.com/25fxy7
September 13th, 2007 at 8:32 pm
And, just because I’m pathologically compulsive about documenting paper, er electronic trails, the link to Glenn Greenwald’s post.
Glenn Greenwald
Tuesday April 24, 2007 08:25 EST
David Halberstam on today’s American press
http://tinyurl.com/ywnrts
September 13th, 2007 at 8:47 pm
One more reference to round out what I understand to be Richard’s premise:
The New Yorker
Mark Halperin and the transformation of the Washington establishment.
by David Grann
October 25, 2004
September 13th, 2007 at 8:51 pm
*Sigh*
Forgot the URL to The New Yorker piece above. http://tinyurl.com/2h2dsw
September 13th, 2007 at 9:15 pm
A newspaper has to attract readers to survive.
As it happens, more Americans like to read about “horse race” politics than like to read about policy analysis.
This is why the NY Post has more readers than the New York Time, which has more readers than The New Yorker, which has more readers than The Nation.
The comments above tha point to the laziness/coziness/fecklessness of Washington mediocre media scribes are certainly valid, but they do nothing at all to explain WHY that is or HOW to correct it.
The problem is our consumerist culture and the way entertainment permeates all media.
The cultural and political paradigms that led us inexorably into the Iraq war are far more a product of Hollywood than it is of the Columbia School of Journalism.
Almost every supporter of the war I’ve ever heard from seems to think it’s a movie, not somthing that’s actually happening. They view it first and foremost as a psychodrama in which the key to victory is scaring the bad guys really really bad.
The NY Times works long and hard to push up against this cultural paradigm, but at the end of the day, it remains within it, as it must if it seeks to avoid the fate of The Nation, The Progressive and so on and so forth, i.e. the dozens of very good publications crammed with in-depth, insight and analysis of what’s going on in our world.
Shifting the cultural paradigm is a huge project and journalism is kind of at the ass end of of it really, not the forefront.
September 13th, 2007 at 9:20 pm
Journalism (in this case, newspaper publishing) is a business, like selling cheeseburgers with fries or making and selling phillips head screws or t-shirts. Anyone who cooks cheeseburgers or works in the hardware or garment industries will frankly tell you that they work at the sufference of ownership and managment and beyond a point, do what they are told.
However, if you spend any time hanging around journalists, (which I strongly reccomend against, because as a group they are not noticeably more intelligent then people in the garment or reatuarant business and, on balance, are far less fun,) you hear, over and over again, the idea that they are brave independant scholars and intellectuals who have free reign to say what they will. The fact that they all say the same things at the same times isn’t even acknowledged to be a coincidence. Instead, it is offered as proof that journalists are remarkably professional and sage.
This is why you can always open a paper or magazine and read about awards journalists give other journalists, or click on the TV and watch a journalist interviewing a juornalist.
And that is why you never read articles by journalists about why they have to write as opposed to what they want to write. Working journalists are just like fry-cooks at MacDonalds: they can’t say anything they want about their employer, without getting fired.
After that, mainstream journalists are reactionaries who live in the 19th century.
The idea that you need to cover the White House by attending a Presidential speech is a pretty good one, so long as the date of the speech is before 1880.
Any journalist who is actually smart and capable and is actually able to report and comment now has a web presence, and thus readers. Goodbye “Journalism,” and good riddance.
September 13th, 2007 at 10:14 pm
“And that is why you never read articles by journalists about why they have to write as opposed to what they want to write.”
Don’t hold back, Sammy. Let it all drool out…
September 14th, 2007 at 12:29 am
I am really sorry (in both senses of the word) because I can’t even remember the Gentleman’s name.
Their was a guy six years ago who had been doing a regular op ed in the L.A. Times. He was a Nam and Desert Storm Vet.
On the eve of the invasion, he wrote that he was supporting Bush; and believing the stated reasons for going to war. Not because he found them convincing; but because the alturnative… to accept that after Vietnam our leaders could get away with bullshiting the country into a corner once again was just too awful to accept.
I wrote the guy some pointed e-mails; which he wrote very gracious responeses too. Not long after that; as you can imagine, his collum stopped appearing.
The failed link I had posted to Media Matters delt with the New York Times. After a tacky, factualy empty hit piece on Clinton years ago; the Times issued a very pissy and actually inadaquate retraction. To this day, however, if you review the matter on Nexus, you still get the incorrected version of the facts.
Why are we in Iraq?
September 14th, 2007 at 10:55 am
Here’s another reason to question the Media. The curious case of Dabat and ABC:
http://www.attytood.com/2007/09/the_neocon_link_to_the_ABC_new.html
September 15th, 2007 at 12:58 am
It makes sense to me that Savage doesn’t want to look at this assumption of power as a partisan issue because it doesn’t have to be one, but currently it is. There are certainly some very conservative people who have come out against the Cheney power grab, as Rosen mentions, and there are plenty of elected Democrats who prefer not to directly challenge the president with risky votes, but by and large this issue falls along partisan lines. The few congressional Republicans who have vocalized reservations about the executive power grab are roundly derided as RINOs. And while elected Democrats lack courage, the entire centrist to far-left political commentariat strongly dislikes this concentration of executive power. Like Savage, I’d prefer if this wasn’t a partisan issue, but until more Republicans start to realize and openly argue that an all powerful executive isn’t a good idea, it’s a partisan matter.
September 15th, 2007 at 12:14 pm
Is there a way to resolve the partisan vs meta-narrative arguments? Ie, is there any way to synthesize them?
It sure doesn’t look hopeful. This piece by Media Matters, Manufacturing consent, stifling dissent by Jamison Foser http://tinyurl.com/23oxje coupled with Glenn Greenwald’s dissections sure argues against it. Seems like there is this overwhelming accumulation of evidence to suggest the partisan argument takes precedence.
I still can’t help but sense that each argument operates on a slightly different level than the other. It’s not just a directional difference, but maybe a dimensional difference as well. But I also sure can’t articulate how that might work.