They are getting so anti-American that even the Editor of E&P notices.
Reporters, Stop Being Too Cool For The Room: Stand for The Anthem!
To get some respect, MSMers, show some respect. A good start: Stand up for the national anthem.
By Mark Fitzgerald
CHICAGO (August 25, 2008) -- There's no cheering in the press box, Jerome Holtzman, the recently deceased dean of Chicago sportswriters, famously, and wisely, decreed in his classic oral history.
He needn't have bothered, though. Reporters are hard-wired to sit, arms crossed and poker-faced, while the rest of the room cheers a politician or a pitcher. If we rise with the crowd's standing ovation, it's only to crane around the necks of the people in front for fear of missing something.
On those all-too-frequent occasions when we meet to bestow upon each other the parchments and gee-gaws that guarantee no American journalist will ever go to his grave without the adjective "award-winning" appearing in his obituary, reporters and editors never look so socially clumsy -- knowing that this moment it's OK to applaud in public, but still feeling we're doing something untoward.
But there are one or two important exceptions to this rule, I think, and the mainstream press especially now -- with its reputation so low and its agenda-setting power noticeably ebbing -- ignores them at their peril.
One exception occurs every four years at the political conventions -- and every four years the too-cool-for-the-room press corps embarrasses itself by ignoring it.
I'm talking about the press corps' irritating habit of remaining seated during the playing of "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the start of each night's session.
I've only covered a couple of conventions from the inside of the hall, but inevitably, the vast majority of reporters in the press boxes remained seated as the national anthem is played. I cringed every time I saw this dopey tradition followed. I can't be sure, but it seemed to me the few journalists standing were not Americans, but visitors showing respect to their host's anthem.
Meanwhile, the U.S. reporters busily wail away at their keyboard as if they are reporting real news. Or they check messages or leaf through the local daily. The national anthem might just as well be Muzak in a Safeway supermarket.
I'm not entirely sure what accounts for this rude behavior, this pretense that being a journalist somehow exempts us from acting as Americans when for this brief ritual.
I don't believe for a minute that it reflects any lack of patriotism in the press. Instead, it's likely yet another manifestation of pack journalism, the herd instinct that can transform otherwise independent, even prickly, reporters into lemmings. They seem to be obedient to some unspoken, and wholly unexamined, code of conduct.
What they may not realize is that slouching in their seats and texting during the national anthem is not some demonstration of singular devotion to dispassionate reporting -- but just plain boorishness.
And it's not like the press does not at the same time scrupulously observe other patriotic rituals.
Journalists, after all, dutifully rise to their feet when the president strides into a room.
If we can rise for the likes of the past three Occupants in Chief, who each in his way sorely tested the respect due the presidency, then surely we can stand for the flag of our fathers and "The Star-Spangled Banner."
Surprise America, ye mainstream media. Stand up with your fellow citizens in Denver and St. Paul.
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