Dear Dan:
Will you marry me? At a minimum, can I have your baby?**
Love,
Lilith
Hmm . . . what’s that? Oh. Why? One small example:
Former Time reporter Matthew Cooper writes in his new magazine about his own personal travails as a witness in the Scooter Libby case.
He evidently sees himself as quite the martyr. (At one point, describing his thinking about the possibility of going to jail to protect sources Libby and Rove, he writes: "I could do the full Mandela.")
Cooper describes all sorts of tensions involved in being a celebrity reporter for a corporate behemoth, caught between a special prosecutor and promises of confidentiality to top presidential aides.
But he doesn’t seem to have been the least bit troubled by his failure to do his job — if you consider the job of a journalist to inform the public, or at the very least not willfully misinform the public.
There is no sense in this piece that Cooper ever felt the urge to report his way out of his bind — and find some way to tell the public what really happened. By contrast, in this October 2003 story, for instance, his magazine reported: "White House spokesman Scott McClellan said accusations of Rove’s peddling information are ‘ridiculous.’ Says McClellan: ‘There is simply no truth to that suggestion.’"
Cooper (along with at least two of his fellow contributors to that story) knew that to be an utter falsehood. But they printed it anyway, without any context or — as far as I know — any qualms.
For more, see the last item in my February 8, 2006 column, and also the liberal Media Matters Web site. [Emphasis added.]
Any reporter willing to write those lines in the Official Beltway Rag deserves to have his DNA propagated far and wide.
Another small example, also from today’s column, Dan dissects Jim Rutenberg’s NYT piece about Rich Little headlining the WH Correspondents’ Dinner. Rutenberg actually bothers to get a quote from Evil Overlord Kos, and then expends much energy and effort in associated anti-[liberal]-blogger whining from the press. Clear-headed as usual, Dan cuts straight through the bullshit:
Rutenberg complains that the blogosphere "is populated by people who ‘feel that the press was run over, and kind of told itself some story to avoid confrontation and lapsed into a phony kind of balance,’ said Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University.
"It is enough to make some reporters bristle. ‘Some of them seem to want us to hate the people we cover,’ said Ken Herman, a White House correspondent for Cox Newspapers and an association board member. ‘They don’t seem to understand that you can have a professional relationship with them where you don’t hate them, and you can sometimes talk to them, and maybe have dinner with them.’"
But Rutenberg creates a false conflict. Rosen and Herman are both largely correct. The press has been played by this White House — but that doesn’t mean reporters have to be jerks. They just need to be tougher, more aggressive journalists.
The White House Correspondents dinner is not the problem in and of itself. But the pandering selection of Rich Little this year makes the occasion a particularly potent metaphor for a relationship that in recent years has not served the public as well as it could.
Yeah, baby!
* Note to Interested Party: Yes, I’m kidding.
** Second note to IP: Yes, I’m still kidding.
