Here at Salon, we’re used to having our arguments ripped out of context and turned into fodder for the right-wing media machine, but the feeding frenzy of distortion and lies surrounding the selective quotation from Gary Kamiya’s “Liberation Day” op-ed over the past few days set a new standard for disingenuousness.
You can read more about it in this Salon editorial.
I just haven’t had it in me to go bonkers posting war links — links wondering about whether that was Saddam or a double, links wondering why shock and awe hasn’t started yet, shocked and awed links now that it has, and so on. Mostly I’m pitching in with my colleagues here, where we keep asking ourselves what stories should be covered that others haven’t already over-covered.
During times like this the onslaught of pure informational noise is so overwhelming that one feels reluctant to contribute to it.
TV is the worst. On the one hand, I feel obligated to tune in, because these are the images the whole nation is taking in as representations of this conflict, and I better know them. On the other, I could only bear about a half hour of CNN this afternoon before having to turn it off.
A correspondent had cornered the leader of a bomber sortie on the deck of an aircraft carrier; the flier had just landed, we were told, just gotten out of his plane, and here was CNN’s embeddee, buttonholing him with a microphone. Oh, he was game, smiling, still soaring on adrenaline, no doubt thrilled to be back and alive and with all of his men. But — and I say this as a charge against the medium, not against the man in uniform, who I’m sure if he had a choice in the matter would not have picked Mr. CNN as his first stop out of the cockpit — there was something obscene about the whole thing. Nothing in that carrier-deck exchange acknowledged the gravity of the moment, the fact that this man had just returned from dropping massive explosives on the ground, weapons that had quite possibly left people — enemy soldiers, civilians; human beings — dead.
War kills people. Whether you feel that this war is justified or not, whether you agree with Bush’s decision to invade or not, you cannot truly “support our soldiers” without acknowledging the skull beneath the skin of battle — without staying conscious of the fact that everyone involved, on both sides, is in mortal jeopardy as long as this war proceeds.
For all the whizzbang 3D maps and crawling newsblip texts and live satellite feeds and pyrotechnic skyline shots, the hyperactive screens of the cable news channels have no room for this one truth. And to me that makes the whole medium feel like a lie.
Readers of the letters page on Jim Romenesko’s media news blog were treated this week to a remarkable admission about how the White House news operation cooks quotes — and how the press plays along. (Scroll down on the linked page to find the letter; the Poynter site will probably keep changing the link, given how its letters page is organized.) Washington Post economics correspondent Jonathan Weisman told the sorry tale, in detail that makes any conscientious reporter cringe. Weisman wanted to interview a particular administration economist; the White House press office insisted not only that the interview be considered off the record, but also that all quotes from the interview be run by the press office before publication. (I’m finding this confusing already since I’ve always understood “off the record” to mean no quotes at all — “Not for attribution” is when you’re okay with being quoted but don’t want your names on the quote.)
Weisman’s source actually said, “This is probably the most academic proposal ever to come out of an administration,” but upon reviewing his quote, the press office said, the official wanted it to read, instead, “This is probably the purest, most far reaching economic proposal ever to come out of an administration.” Gee, I wonder why?
Weisman assented to this whole process but later had second thoughts: “The notion that reporters are routinely submitting quotations for approval, and allowing those quotes to be manipulated to get that approval, strikes me as a step beyond business as usual.”
Uh, yeah. It’s more than a step beyond business as usual. It’s insane, outrageous, unconscionable. This is Journalism 101; it’s basic. You don’t let people review their quotes after they talk to you because they always have second thoughts about the most revealing things that they say. In the situation Weisman describes, of course, we don’t even know whether it was the original speaker who had second thoughts, or whether the quote-doctoring was being stage-managed by a press office enforcing a party line.
I empathize with the reporter whose tough assignment is to write stories about any White House — particularly one, like Bush’s, that is determined to close ranks and let no truth trickle out to the press. If your job is to get quotes from the White House and the White House says you don’t get quotes unless you play by our rules, maybe you have no choice.
What you do have a choice about is what you reveal about the process by which you got your quotes. And so, while I’m grateful that Weisman chose to blow the whistle via his letter to Romenesko, the place he should have done this was in his story. Just as a good newspaper will alert its readers to the fact that a report from the front has been reviewed by military censors, a quote from the White House that the White House got to doctor should come with, in essence, a consumer warning.
What I’d really love to know, now that Weisman has opened the door on this abuse a crack, is just how widespread it is. Weisman says it’s “fairly standard.” If newspaper editors told their reporters to tell readers every time a quote had been pre-reviewed by the White House, how frequently would the columns of the Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the other pillars of our journalistic establishment have to stop to note such a betrayal of their own ethics? And how soon would the insidious practice end?
Cory Doctorow lays out what a lot of good journalists have long known: E-mail is a wonderful tool, and great for checking a fact. But most “e-mail interviews” suck.
The Raven defends philosophy.
The Bachworker’s attention is drawn to the “Scroll Lock” key.
Real Live Preacher on Fred Rogers: “Integrity combined with faithfulness is a powerful force and worthy of great respect.”
Mark Hoback is celebrating six months on Salon Blogs — and, I daresay, nearly that long publishing his Virtual Occoquan as a digest of Salon Blog writing. He’s also keeping a list of active Salon blogs.
Some of us bloggers use our blogs as total grab bags. I love watching how others use a blog in a more structured way — to focus a project. So we have Julie/Julia doing her Long March through the bible of French cooking; and we have Morgan Sandquist reading and commenting his way through Montaigne.
James Grimmelmann has posted an extremely lengthy and thoughtful piece on LawMeme about the whole Laurie Garrett e-mail brouhaha. (This is the saga of a well-known Pulitzer-garlanded science journalist who attended the Davos conference this year, sent a bunch of her friends a sizable e-mail describing her experiences, and then became outraged when she discovered that somehow one of those friends had forwarded it beyond her circle, and it wound up all over the Net.)
Grimmelmann examines the controversy from so many different angles that I’m surprised he misses the one that seems most obvious to me.
I’m sure it was upsetting to Garrett to find that words she intended for a small group got broadcast online. I don’t envy her. But I think what irked a lot of people on the Net was the feeling they got that the story she told her friends was very different from the one she was likely to tell readers of her “official” work.
Rightly or wrongly, a lot of people feel that reporters know a lot more than what they actually put in their stories — that the “real story” of our times is the one that reporters tell each other over beers, and in for-private-distribution-only e-mails, rather than the one they tell in their formal stories.
The Garrett episode seemed to confirm that. Here was a journalist returning from “hobnobbing” with the global elite and announcing that “the world isn’t run by a clever cabal. It’s run by about 5,000 bickering, sometimes charming, usually arrogant, mostly male people who are accustomed to living in either phenomenal wealth, or great personal power.”
Her e-mail is a casual, unvarnished and sometimes blunt assessment of the poor state of the world (“The global economy is in very very very very bad shape”). With a little editing, it could have turned into a good magazine column. For all I know, that was Garrett’s intention. But her reaction of outrage and violation at the viral-like spread of the e-mail suggests otherwise — and reinforces readers’ hunch that they’ve just gotten a fleeting glimpse of how journalists talk to each other when they think the mike is turned off.
Which, in a roundabout way, brings us to blogs.
A lot of the energy in the weblog world is anger at old-line journalism for its sloppiness, its biases, but most of all, I think, its unresponsiveness. Many people who blog get justifiably excited at the prospect of presenting their own words without relying on an intermediary reporter.
In a post today labeled “Why Weblogs are cool,” Dave Winer explains why he prefers presenting his views on his blog to offering quotes to a News.com or N.Y. Times reporter: “People reading the article would not likely find out what I really think,” whereas on a blog, “I get to say what I want, and I can get it right.” And he’s absolutely right. No reporter can present an individual’s complex and changing views as faithfully as that individual himself — and now we have the technology for virtually anyone with a computer and a Net connection to do so.
Dave also happens to be an unusually honest, open and spontaneous writer: That’s one of the things that makes his blog special. But not everyone is so open. In fact, there are even people who don’t want the world to know “what they really think.” In my experience most politicians and business leaders fall into this group. I’m not enthusiastic about giving blogs to politicians because it seems to me they will use the format as another outlet for the same old spin. They won’t spontaneously reveal themselves. It requires persistence and effort to dig out “what they really think” — or at least what they really say and do — and tell it to the world.
The value journalists continue to provide in a “disintermediated,” Net-enabled world — when they are doing their jobs right, of course — is to continue to ask public figures the uncomfortable questions that they won’t choose to answer on their own.
I think that the people who stumbled upon Garrett’s e-mail felt that it provided them with an informative and interesting glimpse of what she really thought about Davos — which is a gathering of just the sort of leaders who are unlikely to say “what they really think” in public.
That is precisely what a lot of people in blog-land actually want from journalists. And instead, Garrett told them, sorry folks, you can’t have that, it’s for private consumption only. Too bad.
I finally got around to reading the Time magazine issue from December about “The Two Towers” — the one that contained a much-talked-about essay by Lev Grossman that tried to identify a cultural shift away from science fiction and toward fantasy.
Grossman’s idea is that the zeitgeist right now — post 9/11, war-on-terrorism-driven — is tilted towards clear conflicts of good and evil. Tolkienian fantasy fits this bill in a way that the dominant science-fiction mode of the ’90s — dystopian cyberpunk, Philip K. Dick, “The Matrix” and so on — doesn’t.
All of which seems to make sense on the surface. Except for one annoying fact: Tolkien first achieved huge popularity in the U.S. during the 1960s — the very era when American certainties about good and evil fell apart under the burden of Vietnam. Grossman tries to address this by writing: “A country drowning in the moral quicksand of Vietnam and Watergate found comfort in the moral clarity of Tolkien’s epic story of a just, clear war. Good and evil are fixed stars in the skies of Middle-earth even as they’re starting to look wobbly in ours.”
Maybe so. But now we’re having it both ways: Tolkienian good and evil are appealing in times of (ostensible) moral clarity like the present — and they’re appealing in times of moral ambiguity, too!
I think the problem here is one endemic to the kind of trend-story journalism Grossman’s piece represents — in which a writer starts from a cultural phenomenon and then tries to use it to draw wider conclusions about “the state of the culture.” The writer must assume that the cultural phenomenon is “touching a nerve” or “striking a chord.”
But sometimes the culture moves for simpler reasons. It’s probable that Tolkien’s books became popular in the ’60s because that was the first era in which they were widely available in affordable paperback editions in the U.S. If they’d been published in the ’50s or the ’70s or the ’80s, they’d have probably ended up just as popular — and we’d have writers trying to explain that popularity in terms of those decades’ zeitgeists.
Similarly, the “Lord of the Rings” movies are great film adaptations of Tolkien’s work that are popular because they are really good, and they would be popular in virtually any era you can imagine. We probably had to wait till now for the opportunity to see Tolkien on screen because the filmmaking technology had to reach a certain level — not because the culture needed to move into a state where it was receptive to Tolkien’s tales.
Tom Tomorrow features an amazing transcript of the O’Reilly show in his blog today.
I don’t watch O’Reilly’s show myself; after seeing him a couple of times I became quite convinced that he is an overbearing blowhard with whom I did not need to waste any portion of my earthly existence. But this transcript is astonishing. O’Reilly has invited one Jeremy Glick onto his show: Glick, it seems, does not think invading Iraq is a good idea. Glick’s father perished in the 9/11 attacks. O’Reilly is unable to hold these two thoughts in his head without having it explode. By the end of the transcript he is shouting “Shut up! Shut up!” at his own guest.
My radio listening habits tend toward college stations and public radio — what the Replacements celebrated as “Left of the Dial.” So my awareness of the continued degradation of the commercial part of the spectrum has been provided mainly by the dogged investigative work of Salon’s Eric Boehlert, whose exposes of the Clear Channel monopoly have justly earned him a passel of awards.
Today’s New York Times brings a new twist on Clear Channel-ism: David Gallagher reports on the remarkable process by which this radio mega-conglomerate has assembled a DJ from database parts. Basically, they’ve taken the recorded voice of Carson Daly, chopped it into little snippets and used those soundbites to re-assemble pseudo-local broadcasts — so that listeners in, say, Atlanta hear a localized “top 40” broadcast, with Daly introducing each song in the particular order that applies to that market, yet Daly never actually said those words in that order.
It’s hard to know whether to applaud the ingenuity required to create such a DJ-bot, or barf at the complete triumph of corporate homogenization that it represents. I think the gagging in my throat tells me which reaction predominates for me.
The blogoverse is abuzz with people exposing the Republican approach to “astroturfing” letters to the editor that praise the president. The funny thing is, We’ve been receiving these for months at Salon, and it’s a piece of cake to identify them, at least in e-mail. (Snail mail is no doubt a different story.) When you get dozens of e-mails from different people that all start off with “President Bush is demonstrating genuine leadership,” you get the idea pretty quickly. And in e-mail, the tip-off is that the letter comes in formal letter form, with the “to” address neatly at the top. Who writes e-mail like that? They go straight to the Trash.
Slow blogging here as we gear up some new projects for the new year at Salon.
For a side project I have just re-read Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language.” I used to read this once a year or more but have fallen out of the habit. Take ten minutes out of your week to read it if you haven’t lately. In the era of Iraq war cant it provides a good bucket of cold water to the face.
| If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse — into the dustbin, where it belongs. |
