INDC journal - "Reliable Sources" Say, "Bill's Depressed"
There are a lot of ups and downs with a story like this, but Ace sends me into a brief downer when he links to this transcript of Howard Kurtz's show. Why?
It's depressing when many of the pundits on a show that is dedicated to policing the media and ironically titled "Reliable Sources" peddle the line that a fake memo passed off to a major media outlet as a "reliable source" is just a meaningless sideshow to the underlying political story.
KURTZ: Should CBS have gone with a story about memos from a guy who has been dead for 20 years? I mean, obviously people were going to take some potshots.
E.J. DIONNE, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: Well, if the memos are real and if it turns out that these reports of flaws are not true, that they are real memos, then it's a legitimate part of the story.
I think what's curious about this debate, "Time" magazine in its new issue this week, has it right in their last sentence, "the breathless debate over typewriter fonts last week shifted the debate away from Bush's questionable record." In other words, we're arguing about a very narrow piece of the story, and I think the other problem is, in 2000, "The Boston Globe" and Walter Robinson, their reporter, did some excellent work on this. None of the rest of the media picked this up. This issue should have been dealt with in more details four years ago as opposed to the end of this campaign.
(Emphasis mine)
And still more:
KURTZ: What do people think, Gloria Borger, when they hear this kind of arcane debate? What do they think about the media?
BORGER: Well, I think it's kind of nuts to have this, you know, arcane debate about whether typewriters did a little th, you know. I mean, I think that's silly.
I think the question is, was George W. Bush another rich or privileged or well-connected kid who got out of going to Vietnam and going into the National Guard at that time because of his family connections? By the way, there's nothing wrong with that if he did. Lots of people -- lots of people did it at the time. Colin Powell wrote in his book that he didn't like that kind of behavior, but that did go on at the time, and Bush says he had no connections. So that's a legitimate question.
(Emphasis mine)
Or how about when they get mired down in an argument about how everyone is sick of Vietnam?
BORGER: Can I just say, this is why people hate politics. This is why people hate journalists and the way we cover campaigns. Because...
You don't keep your eye on the ball?
KURTZ: It's all gotcha?
BORGER: Yeah, it's gotcha. The campaign, you know, let's get over 30, 35 years ago. Let's just get over that, and let's get on to the issues of Medicare, health case, Iraq, who's better to lead the war on terror.
KURTZ: But the press doesn't want to get over Vietnam. The press loves Vietnam.
BORGER: We live at the bottom of the food chain. I always say this, and if there's a good fight going on, we're going to cover it. But...
Of course everyone is sick of Vietnam. And yes, we bloggers exhaustively analyzed the and drove the SwiftVets story the way we exhaustively analyze everything, and we certainly would have exhaustively analyzed Bush's Vietnam-era record as these new allegations were raised (and probably still will - yawn) ... but the forgeries changed the narrative.
Because beyond being sick of Vietnam, what we are even more sick about is the idea that one of the traditional pinnacles of journalistic integrity rushed a story with a fake document, the fact that almost every single human source in the story has said that they were ignored or misrepresented, and that CBS is stonewalling instead of opening the books and practicing responsible and transparent journalism. This isn't just bad for CBS, or bad for the mainstream media; it's bad for everyone. It's bad for society. Bloggers like to get smug and trumpet some sort of natural superiority over BIG Media, but the reality is that we need BIG Media. Our system of government and society as a whole need the mainstream media to act as a reasonably honest broker in the basic function of our civilization. And if these forgeries and irresponsible practices are true, easy, relatively common and can be committed without any consequence, I honestly fear that our society is in trouble.
Do sources burn you? Yes. Can forgeries get passed off on honest journalists? Sure. Do journalists make mistakes? Definitely. But when I was a journalism student at a pretty good J school, I learned that there's a standard, appropriate method for dealing with the ominpresent possibility that your source turns on you or hands you false information:
Openness and a willingness to look into the matter and report the results.
So why isn't Howard Kurtz (one of my favorite columnists on the media) beating down the door on this angle of the story?
Why are the panelists on a show called "Reliable Sources" getting bogged down in the debate over the public perception over the political attack angle instead of discussing CBS's failure to embrace accountability? Where is the outrage? Let's review their mission statement:
ABOUT THE SHOW
CNN's "Reliable Sources" continues its successful run as one of television's few weekly programs to examine the performance of the media.
Like I told you, depressing.
UPDATE: Largely unrelated, but I think that most of this is a fantastically true statement:
We bloggers tend to think on "internet time," which is psychotically accelerated. This story, the forgery story, only started on Thursday. Four days! What if it takes another four days to get resolved? For one thing, many of us will have strokes and be unemployed. But very shortly, it will all shake out.
It's the part about "it will all shake out" that I'm unsure of. Resolution now!
Posted by Bill
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