'Big Russ' and who?
A senior editor of one Washington magazine has had his fill of TV "journalists" -- Katie Couric, Tim Russert and Dan Rather among them -- who have either "stolen" the work of others and called it their own, or else leave it to network producers and ghostwriters to accomplish their "craft."
Andrew Ferguson, senior editor of the Weekly Standard, published under editor William Kristol and executive editor Fred Barnes, begins his complaints with "Katie Couric's Notebook," supposedly the CBS News anchor's daily one-minute commentary.
Mr. Ferguson writes of one recent "Notebook" about which, according to a CBS spokeswoman, "Katie 'was horrified' to discover that the words that had come out of her mouth and had been published under her name were in fact the work of someone else" -- in this case Jeffrey Zaslow, whose column on the same subject appeared earlier in the Wall Street Journal.
As for Mrs. Couric being "horrified," the magazine editor says that's difficult to imagine.
"When she spoke and published the words, Katie had to know they weren't her own," he says. "When the words came out of her mouth, she thought they were the work of someone she had hired to put them there. In TV, this someone is called a 'producer,' and several of them ... work at writing the commentaries that Katie presents as her 'Notebook.' "
The "usual answer" Mr. Ferguson says he often hears is "journalists like Katie are simply too busy to write."
"Dan Rather," he notes, "who used to be as busy as Katie, would often go on and on about how television was a 'writer's medium' and how 'good writing' was essential to his 'craft,' and he put his money where his mouth was by hiring a bunch of writers to do his good writing for him."
As for Mr. Russert, moderator of NBC's "Meet the Press"?
"The TV journalist Tim Russert is not only enormously busy, he's a sentimental old poop," Mr. Ferguson opines in the Weekly Standard's April 23 issue. "His love for his dad is so impossible to contain that he was moved to hire a ghostwriter -- an expensive one, too, William Novak, author of the seminal 'Iacocca' -- to write about how much he loves his dad. I mean how much he, Tim, loves his dad.
"The first-person account was titled 'Big Russ and Me.' Again, the Me in the title was supposed to be Tim, not Novak." |
