Thursday's instantly infamous New York Times piece exhausted a great bit of willpower in me. It was all the rage that morning, though I first heard of it Wednesday evening as "Breaking News" on Keith Olbermann's "Countdown." Normally there's some news in news that "breaks," yet the more I heard of it, and then the more I read and reread the story itself, the more it took on a burlesque of the old "Saturday Night Live" news flashes: "Franco is still dead."
Nevertheless the temptation to immediately pile on -- in either defense or prosecution of the Times, not to mention its target, John McCain -- was damn near irresistible. The story had swallowed up all manner of news and discussion outlets, from television networks to print to the blogosphere, and had nearly approached the intense excitability level of the Cuban Missile Crisis. But resist I did, because to me the story had the smell of 24-hour decay, 36 tops. It seemed, that is, to be going nowhere, fast.
And sure enough, by Friday evening the story was pretty much history. That's not to say it won't be debated for years to come in journalism schools as an extraordinary test case of journalistic (in)judiciousness, or that the GOP won't milk it for all it's worth in right-wing fundraising value for the next eight months. For academics and reactionary moneygrubbers, it was truly a gift of lasting utility. But the story itself swiftly became history because it was, at bottom, history itself.
Would I have run the story as written had I been its executive editor, Bill Keller? I can't say with absolute certainty that I would have, principally because if I couldn't get my reporters to get their sources on the record, with respect to the journalistically distasteful effort to tie some vague, unprovable romantic involvement to legislative favors, then the coming and consequent cries of foul would likely not have seemed worth it -- especially not for a paper with the New York Times' reputation for avoiding the sexually scandalous.
Nonetheless Keller's was a valid judgment call; he was the one deepest inside the story and it was his professional ass on the line and not mine. I give him an A+ for guts, if nothing else. And the subsequent, manufactured outrage by the right was more than worth any journalistic stink. I just love it when it gets angry. Naturally had a similar piece centered on the likes of, say, Barack Obama, the legendary right-wing noise machine would had plastered the airwaves with hosannas about the Times' occasional fairness, objectivity and journalistic integrity.
What I do not understand, however, is why the Times, Keller, Jim Rutenberg et al did not make stupendously clear in the story's text that the story itself was part of the paper's in-depth series on presidential candidates, "The Long Run." Which is to say, they did not make clear it was merely another piece on another candidate's past -- nothing of breathtaking revelation here, folks, just another delving into the historical contours of a particular candidate. We've done the same for -- to -- others, dozens of time, quite literally, and you can read them all, right here in the archives.
The Times slapped "The Long Run" in smaller and light gray type above the original headline, but it seems astonishingly clear in this case that some pointed, textual caveat was in order, given the partial subject material's sensitivity and the rather stretched anonymity of sources behind it. We are, gentle readers, simply letting you know what we've learned, or rather what we think we've learned. And we're making the call that you have the right to know what it is.
But, as we do know, this the Times did not do. Instead, it waited to explain all this after the brouhaha fact.
For a year or so, in addition to pieces on issues, candidate interviews, investigations of their business dealings, polling and reporting from the campaign trail, we have been running this series called "The Long Run." It is a kind of serial biography of the candidates. We pick key events or themes or questions [my emphasis] about a candidate's life that reflect on his or her character and qualifications.... The point of this "Long Run" installment was that, according to people who know him well, this man who prizes his honor above all things and who appreciates the importance of appearances also has a history of being sometimes careless about the appearance of impropriety, about his reputation.
If only someone had thought -- or fought -- to include this in the original story, the Times' landing would have been so much softer, and McCain's, perhaps, bumpier. Indeed, the historical "questions" themselves would have taken on more prominence, while the Times would have protected itself somewhat by confessing to subordinating provable fact to journalistic speculation.
But it didn't. And if there was one salient boneheaded play in its original coverage, I'd say that was it.
As for McCain's contemporary history of figuratively bedding down with come-hither lobbyists, you can read this morning's Washington Post and rightfully draw your own conclusions, as readers could have more easily done with the Times piece, had it done it right.
This story shows how much the media has decayed since they were taken over by corporatists. They have lost their ability to even know what news is, much less what to do with it and how to present it. Being off their game for so long has made their muckraking muscles flabby, and there's no quick fix for it.
There are newer and more agile competitors to the traditional newspapers and their offspring in the radio and television fields emerging out there. They don't need multi-million dollar presses or transmitters - just access to the Internet. They heard Jello Biafra's call issued while addressing a Kent State audience not to fear the media, but instead to be the media, and they will run rings around the dinosaurs they will quickly supplant.
Posted by: Realist | February 23, 2008 at 08:51 AM
It's impossible not to notice that McCain expects everybody involved to change their story to conform to his latest megillah.
When they won't, or can't (those damn intertubes!) do that, he blows his stack.
And the real scandal is how little sex it takes to wrap McCain around your finger:
She: Oh Mr. McCain, you don't look a day over 60!
McCain: Did you need something from the FCC?
Posted by: Mooser | February 23, 2008 at 12:57 PM
I'm thinking this stuff about McCain and the female lobbyist may be a clever Rove move: put the story out now, everyone focuses on the non-story that has absolutely no proof behind it - just allegation - that he had an affair with her - who cares? But it can be dismissed and forgotten - taking with it the critically important part - McCain is DIRTY with lobbyist money - has lobbyists working right from his campaign bus...that's the story that will go away and never be mentioned again (if it works - like duhduh's cocaine bust...disappeared - poof!)
Posted by: Angelina MaldeTesta | February 24, 2008 at 03:04 AM
Great commentary, PM. Although I disagree a tad with "Realist's" assertion that the media had "decayed since taken over by corporatist." Yes, we did have a high level of excellent reporting and investigative journalism in the late 1960s and early '70, for example Walter Cronkite's reporting from Vietnam and Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate reporting.... but that great reporting ONLY came after the deaths of tens of thousands of American troops, volunteers AND DRAFTEES, in the Vietnam war. As a "for example," the American media SWALLOWED the "Gulf of Tonkin incident" hook, line and sinker in 1964... reflecting the American national attitude that we wanted to kick some Commie insurgent ass in Saigon and Vietnam. (The 1960s saw a blossoming of thousands of other important small-d democratic and anti-business, anti-establishment issues as well, but like the meat packing scandals of Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" of 1906,
http://www.capitalcentury.com/1906.html
so many of these issues were crying for attention, and were LONG OVERDUE - partly because the media had neglected them for so long. As another example, for almost 100 years, Americans had _IGNORED_ the 15th Amendment, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude" when anyone with an IQ over 12 understood that the vote most certainly WAS DENIED and ABRIDGED for almost 100 years in segregated states, until Johnson finally forced the Voting Rights and Civil Rights bills through a stubborn Congress (and media) in 1964 and 1965, and that success would have been quite impossible without the "Camelot" image of the martyrdom of President John F. Kennedy for "freedom and democracy" being used to confront the segregationists.)
Please excuse my digression, but the above is only a historical preamble to my main comment: that PM hits the nail on the head of an important issue, that "conservatives" may protest that they doth dislike John McCain much (for this issue or that issue), but this is mostly sound and fury narcissism, like Rush Limbaugh's career bashing of those convicted of even minor drug crimes, while he was sending his maid out to buy Oxycontin "hill-billy heroin" on the street in what would get most Americans convicted for conspiracy to deal in controlled drugs.
In the main, being a Bush-Cheney "conservative" means HATING, EXPLOITING, and DEMAGOGING SOME GROUPS for the economic and social benefit of the entrenched elite, and that "Conservative" REJECTION of McCain would spin around to SUPPORT for McCain, as soon as he rose to the nomination, and he more finally tuned his campaign to match the high-powered lobbyist who swarm the senate at all times in the first place.
PM's other major point, that the Times could UNDERCUT an otherwise good report by a few semantic issues - in this case, failing to declare that the in-depth investigation into McCain's history was part of a parcel of in-depth investigations into all the other candidates - just points out what we already know, that the public often responds to style OVER SUBSTANCE.
(For example, the world-class BS notion that George Bush is a "compassionate conservative" or that his administration has even remotely made America more secure or safer.)
Posted by: Lj | February 25, 2008 at 06:43 AM