Hendrik Hertzberg gives us an autopsy of Gannongate in this week’s New Yorker. It’s mostly a recap of the Bush administration’s side deals with members of the press, starting with Armstrong Williams and culminating with Jeff/Jim Gannon/Guckert (a.k.a. JGJG). If you’re up to speed on all this, specifically on Gannongate, then skip to the end where Hertzberg offers this insight:
A better name for it, though, would be “Nothinggate,” because nothing is what is likely to come of it. What all the memorable scandals of the past thirty years — real and fake alike, from Watergate to the Clinton impeachment — have had in common is that the opposition party controlled at least one house of Congress, which gave it the power to hold hearings and issue subpoenas. If Bush ends up having an easier time of it in his second term than any of his two-term predecessors since FDR, it won’t be because the scandals aren’t there. It’ll be because the tools to excavate them are under lock and key.
More blog-fueled controversy from the American Prospect‘s Robert Reich, who narrates his role in the saga of Fox News’ misquotation of FDR. Earlier this month, Reich appeared with John Gibson on Fox’s “The Big Story,” where he was asked to answer a question about FDR’s anticipation of private accounts. Gibson told Reich that in 1935 FDR said that Social Security “ought ultimately to be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans.” In fact, Reich says, Roosevelt was talking about “how to pay for the Social Security benefits of those who were then too old to contribute payroll taxes and thereby qualify. Roosevelt proposed that the state and federal governments pick up the tab until the system was fully up and running. At that point, the government contributions would be ‘supplanted’ by a ‘self-supporting’ Social Security system.”
Gibson, Reich adds, was not the only one to distort the words of the architect of Social Security. Fox News’ anchors ran amok with the idea that FDR would have supported private accounts.
Reich reaches alarmist mode in his conclusion:
This is just one example of how the Republican propaganda machine is lying to the American people about Bush’s plan for Social Security, just as it has lied about so much else. Fox News’ many distortions are mirrored on other yell-television cable networks, on right-wing radio, and on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal. It’s a formidable machine.
In the background of all the recent journalism scandals sit Time‘s Matthew Cooper and the New York Time‘s Judith Miller, who could head to the slammer for refusing to disclose confidential sources to a grand jury investigating who leaked the identity of the covert CIA officer, Valerie Plame.
This week’s issue of Time includes a kind of/sort of editorial explaining how Cooper got into this mess. In four paragraphs we are treated to a recap of the events and a couple of quotes from Cooper and Miller about the importance of confidential sources. Oddly though, other than stating that Time will appeal the case to the Supreme Court, if necessary, the magazine chooses not to aggressively defend its reporter, who, one presumes, was doing what he was hired to do. Instead, the magazine hopes that “Soon, [the Supreme Court] may get a second chance” to overturn its 1972 ruling that, as Time puts it, “requires reporters to put subpoenas above sources.”
(Side note: The first and perhaps last time that Time ran a signed editorial was in 1974, when editor Henry Grunwald broke with 45 years of tradition by calling for Richard Nixon’s resignation, a full eight months before it came to pass.)
Newsweek‘s Jonathan Alter takes a more drastic tone than Time, perhaps because his employer doesn’t have a dog in this hunt. He writes, “Something strange is going on in the relationship between the media and the criminal justice system. With the mainstream media less popular than HMO administrators, frustrated prosecutors in federal cases are increasingly shooting the messengers … This is scary stuff.”
For Alter, the fate of the individual reporters facing jail time is secondary to his concern “for the citizens of Providence [R.I.], who aren’t likely to catch a glimpse of their local officials taking envelopes of cash again any time soon; the baseball fans who wouldn’t have known which players were juiced on steroids if the San Francisco Chronicle had not published grand jury testimony [obtained by Chronicle reporters now also being threatened by prosecutors], and the broader American public, which may be entering an era where our news consists of press releases, spin and nothing much that the government does not want us to know.”
It all comes down to getting the news, Alter says, and “[t]he bottom line is that while reporters overuse anonymous quotes, their relationships with confidential sources are often the only way to get real news. This isn’t a partisan issue.”
One place you can get news is National Public Radio, writes Andrew Ferguson in this week’s Weekly Standard. Just don’t go looking for your fill of classical music. Disguised as an obituary for classical music radio, which has died on more than 50 public radio stations over the past several years, Ferguson’s essay calls for stripping the now mostly-news NPR of federal funding. He writes, “In the coming months, congressmen will be sifting through the government’s books in search of outlays that have outlived their usefulness. The $80-plus million now being spent to build a federally subsidized news organization, under the auspices of National Public Radio, would be a good place to start.”
“Public broadcasting needed to exist because its programming wasn’t terribly popular,” Ferguson contends. Now that NPR has built itself a “hugely successful brand, aimed straight at the nation’s most affluent demographic cohort” it’s time for the subsidy to disappear, just like the classical music.
–Thomas Lang
Thomas Lang was a writer at CJR Daily.