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Media 2005: Highlights of the Low Points
All told, the press had much to be proud of in 2005. From Plamegate to Coingate, and from the Big Easy to the Beltway, journalists uncovered scandals large and small, and held public officials to account with a vigor seldom seen since 9/11. Of course, the year was not without its low points, which CJR recognizes here in its second annual year-end review of the moments some would rather forget.
BIGGEST LIBERAL MEDIA FANTASY
Fitzgerald indicts Cheney. (Sure. And have you heard, Bush is back on the sauce!)
BIGGEST CONSERVATIVE MEDIA FANTASY
Everyone had the same prewar intelligence on Iraq. (Right, and the Veep just has a thing for the baked chicken at the Langley cafeteria.)
META-META AWARD
Mark Felt’s daughter’s publicist/lawyer, John D. O’Connor, outs Felt as Deep Throat in Vanity Fair, where Carl Bernstein is a contributing editor.
BEST ON-AIR UPRISING
Shepard Smith, reporting for Fox News on how New Orleans’s left-for-dead were not allowed to cross a bridge out of town, hears Sean Hannity say from the news studio that the situation needs “perspective.” Smith snaps, “This is the perspective!”
THE ‘ASS OUT OF YOU AND ME’ AWARD
Mitch Albom. The columnist/radio host/author had this to say after filing a story on a Friday about an event that happened the following day: “We — the editors and I — got caught in an assumption.”
MOST DUBIOUS NEW YORK TIMES TREND STORY
In THE MAN DATE, Jennifer 8. Lee reveals that heterosexual men occasionally have dinner together.
THE BETTER BALANCE AWARD
Kenneth Tomlinson. Laws, schmaws. The soul of the nation is at stake!
VISIONARY LEADERSHIP AWARD
Les Moonves. Now that the Big Three are gone, the CBS chairman wants to spice things up on the nightly newscast. New this fall: Barbara Bush — naked, of course — reports on the simple pleasures of the working poor.
BEST ON-AIR SCRAP
Winner: NBC’s David Gregory and White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan. First there was the Rumble over Rove, then the Blame Game. Prediction: Defending Helen Thomas’s honor, Gregory challenges McClellan to a duel in ’06.
Runner-up: Bob Novak and James Carville. All that swearing and Carville didn’t even mention Novak’s side gig hawking confidential sessions with Washington’s power elite for only $595 a pop.
IN-DEPTH REPORTING AWARD
NBC’s Michelle Kosinski appears in a live shot on the Today show paddling a canoe to demonstrate the extent of flooding in New Jersey. Then two men trudge across the frame, showing the water to be only ankle-deep. Okay, so they were really tall men. In platform shoes.
THE ‘KEEP MOVING, FOLKS’ AWARD
Fresh from his awkward two-step with Judith Miller, Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. goes on Charlie Rose and manages to frustrate the perpetually prostrate host.
FIRST AMENDMENT AWARD
The York Daily Record. The paper’s proposed employee contract prohibited such activities as “disparagement” of the company, on or off the job. And while you’re at it, tread lightly on the publisher’s pals, too.
THE BOTTOM LINE AWARD
After cutting his salary by two-thirds and publishing him less frequently, the Tribune Company gave Jules Witcover — a legendary Baltimore Sun political reporter — one final kick in the teeth: a one-sentence, overnighted termination letter thanking the seventy-eight-year-old for his service. Journalism’s future is indeed bright.
MOST AMAZINGLY HUMBLE JOURNALIST AWARD
Male: Anderson Cooper. This plain-speakin’ Yalie son of privilege and power insists he’s just a normal guy with normal-guy problems. But how many glamour shots must he endure to dispel his erotic appeal?
Female: Maureen Dowd. Just ’cause she dated John Tierney and Howell Raines doesn’t mean she flirted with them! Gawd! That kind of male chauvinism is downright insulting, baby.
THE STRAIGHT FACE AWARD
Winner: Scott McClellan declares that Newsweek’s (barely) erroneous story about a Koran being flushed at Gitmo had “damaged” the image of the U.S. abroad — undoing, in one treasonous stroke, all the painstaking work by his boss to ensure that the world loves and respects us.
Runners-up: Chuck Colson and G. Gordon Liddy. With Deep Throat unmasked, these two ex-cons declared Mark Felt’s White House whistleblowing less than honorable. Vowing to trample your own grandmother to get Nixon reelected and plotting to off a reporter, now that’s honorable.
When P.C. Is B.S.
“Why are Asian people quiet? Is it okay to go ‘commando’? Why do black men look good in purple suits, but white men look like dorks?” These politically incorrect questions might occur to some, but few would think to vocalize them, let alone make them the basis of a column — unless of course you’re Phillip Milano of the Florida Times-Union and your column is called “Dare to Ask.” The weekly column, launched in January 2005, is a forum for readers to ask and answer potentially indelicate questions, to which Milano adds advice from experts aimed at lending some wisdom to the dialogue. Claire Calzonetti, CJR intern, spoke with Milano in September.
What’s the point of your column?
I’m trying to change the ground rules for how people talk about race, religion, and cultural differences in this country. I’m trying to tell people that it’s okay if they have these questions. It’s kind of a warning shot to the rest of the newspaper industry to start having a discourse about these things, because these differences come up in everything. Even with Katrina, race, religion, etc. they are so woven into the fabric of so many different issues. We can’t really have a discussion on larger issues such as affirmative action or gay issues if we’re wondering about the people we’re talking about. I’m more interested in providing an accurate representation of what people are really thinking.
Where do you draw the line between what’s offensive and what’s healthy?
I guess I draw the line between the edges of hate and hostility. To me, hate is somebody who is saying something nasty, and they really don’t care about what you think as opposed to somebody who is asking a somewhat hostile question, but they still want to hear what you’ve got to say. I think there’s a distinction there.
Who are your biggest critics?
I’ve had my share of criticism over the years. I’ve been compared to Adolf Hitler and Isaac Newton. I’ve had people complain, the Anti-Defamation League for one. I’ve got to tell you, I’ve often had more openness to this whole idea and concept from conservatives than necessarily from liberals. The conservatives seem to say, “Yeah, let’s have this conversation.” Some liberals may think they’re above it or they don’t want to offend anyone. Conservatives like it because of the politically incorrect stuff; liberals like it because everyone is getting their say.
Sound Bite
“P.S. Thanks for talking Mr. Bush out of bombing our offices!”
— Excerpt from a note to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain posted on Don’t Bomb Us, a blog created by Al-Jazeera after it was reported that in April 2004 President Bush advocated bombing the pan-Arab network’s Qatar headquarters, but was dissuaded from doing so by Blair. (It has been suggested that if Bush made such a comment, it was made in jest.)
Language Corner: Magnificent Possession
What to do about situations like “China and South Korea’s rise to challenge Japan’s position . . .”?
That’s how it was printed, and that’s one solution: with a string of possessive nouns, attach the apostrophe and the “s” only to the last one and assume the reader will read the earlier ones as possessive, too. But with anything more complicated than “Dick and Jane’s house,” that approach is hardly a bull’s-eye. It’s marginally acceptable at best, and can be quite tough to follow, as in “Dr. Hwang and his team’s production of stem cells . . . was considered . . .”
Another approach to the general problem: “. . . Mr. Abramoff’s and Mr. Scanlon’s Indian clients.”
But that’s a bit cluttered, and with a longer series would be more than a bit.
The optimum solution is to get the possessive notion out of the way first: “The rise of China and South Korea . . .”; “The production of stem cells by Dr. Hwang and his team . . .”; “The Indian clients of Mr. Abramoff and Mr. Scanlon.”
Much closer to a bull’s-eye.
— Evan Jenkins
A lot more about writing is in Language Corner at CJR’s Web site, www.cjr.org, under “Journalism Tools.”
Hard Numbers
2,100: Minimum number of U.S. newspaper jobs (from all departments) cut in 2005.
20.5 cents: Average amount on the dollar that publicly held newspaper companies earned in 2004.
11.4 cents: Average amount on the dollar that blue-chip companies in Standard & Poor’s 500 Index earned that year.
551,000: Time, in years, that U.S. workers spent reading blogs on the job in 2005.
$16.7 million: Amount of a Pentagon contract awarded to the Rendon Group after 9/11 to monitor Islamic media, including “the location and use of Al-Jazeera news bureaus, reporters, and stringers.”
12: Minimum number of Iraqi newspapers that a p.r. firm, working on behalf of the U.S. military, has paid to run propaganda.
124, 30: Lashes that Iranian courts sentenced bloggers Omid Sheikhan and Ahmad Seyyed Saraj to receive, respectively, for “morals” violations and “offending the authorities.”
100: Misspelled names that appeared in the Portland Oregonian in 2005.
30: Percent that spelling has improved there since 2004.
$13,998.55: Amount Fox News compensated Tom DeLay for round-trip travel between Sugar Land, Texas, and Washington, D.C., so the recently indicted congressman could appear on Fox News Sunday.
Sources: E&P, AP, Ad Age, Times of London, Oregonian, NYT, PoliticalMoneyLine
To read the articles in the January/February 2006 issue, click here.
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