In yesterday’s New York Times, Mark Leibovich explored the proud tradition, so evidently on display during practically every speech delivered at the RNC last week, of politicians bemoaning, belittling, and otherwise bedeviling the media.
Ms. Palin capped off a succession of speakers — Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee — who took turns pummeling their favorite target, the news media, which in turn gave the news media the chance to talk about its favorite subject all week (the news media).
We have played this video game before. Indeed, the Republican tradition of media-bashing goes back decades, at least to the convention of 1964 when former President Dwight D. Eisenhower called out “sensation-seeking columnists and commentators,” and the Cow Palace in San Francisco burst into jeers and catcalls at the reporters there. The sentiment was immortalized in Richard Nixon’s vice president Spiro Agnew who memorably charged that many in the press corps were mere “nattering nabobs of negativism” — and for good measure — “an effete corps of impudent snobs.”
As far as politics goes, the strategy Leibovich describes—assassinating the character of the media—is generally as effective as it is transparent: Discredit the people framing the story about politics, and discredit anything negative they may say about you. They’re biased/petty/snobby/entitled. So nothing they say is reliable.
I’d like to defend the media against the accusations hurled at them. Generally speaking, those accusations are incredibly unfair. But after eight days spent in the twin whirligigs of the Pepsi and Xcel Energy Centers, it’s hard to find the words to do it. The biggest impression that remains in the residue of the whole thing—one that isn’t new, I realize, but worth reiterating regardless—is that of the utter disconnect between the highly fortified bubbles of the convention centers themselves and the areas immediately outside, and between those bubbles and the areas less immediately outside: those expansive and diverse areas often shorthanded as, you know, “the real world.”
Part of the former disconnect is logistical in nature. The security at both conventions—on overdrive in Denver, and full-on paranoid in St. Paul—was more than a (semi-)permeable membrane protecting the centers’ interior organelles. While walls keep things out, of course, they also keep things in. And the rabid security (credentials were checked in no fewer than five locations at each convention, and the TSA-like screening lines often took nearly an hour to move through) made osmosis nearly impossible. “I wanted to go out and cover the riots,” one reporter told me, as we walked through the Xcel Center, “but, if I did, I wouldn’t be able to get back in time for the speeches.”
As a partial result of this, the nucleus of the conventions’ media coverage was contained inside the conventions’ security-designated perimeters. Inside those walls, reporters, sequestered away from the madding crowds—sequestered away, in fact, from crowds of most kinds, save for those comprised of other reporters—analyzed speeches, described “the mood on the convention floors,” gathered sound bites from delegates, and otherwise Served Our Democracy. They relaxed from their labors at corporate-sponsored “media lounges,” defined areas in which the storied scribes of the first draft of history could: swig free beer; swig free booze; swig free smoothies; down free jalapeno poppers; down free chicken fingers; down free Swedish meatballs; down free chips and salsa; down free chips and guac; get free chair massages; get free hand massages; get free facials; get free yoga instruction; get free swag; inhale flavored, colored oxygen at a free oxygen bar; play games, for free, on a Wii; or some combination thereof.
A local reporter I met in St. Paul deemed the whole thing “masturbatory,” which is about as good a summation as I’ve heard of the whole thing. “Orgiastic,” as long as we’re going there, was a close runner-up, convention-summation-wise. The excess of it all was, both appropriately and frustratingly, excessive.
Why are you there? Isn't the answer so awful you can't rightly say it?
I like to think of journalism as investigatory, as exposing unrevealed truth. Not big philosophical truths, but small to large factual truths.
That's why sports journalism, and covering political speeches, isn't "journalism." The sports stars and politicians stand there waiting for you to cover them.
Now, it is true that there is a role for journalists to take notes when politicians speak, so, some years down the road, one can compare the claims with the reality. For example, how many times did the Bush administration claim that they'd cut the budget deficit in half "in five years?" Isn't that a cop out? McCain (and probably Obama) is making election promises that won't be completed until nearly a decade after 2016.
The journalists were welcomed there because both a) the pols wanted their words reported, and b) there was nothing unscripted, and very little a journalist could rebut.
That said, some of the claims by the pols seemed false. None of the knowledgeable TV journalists reported this at the time, and the public stays blissfully ignorant.
Oh, just for balance, you could report on how nationalistic and self-serving the foreign press is, to make it look like you aren't just hating America by reporting the truth. I watched Russia Today most of all day, every day, during the South Ossetia crisis. I never thought Fox News would look fair and balanced... but by comparison...
Posted by Josh SN on Tue 9 Sep 2008 at 11:28 AM