It’s disgraceful for a man seeking highest office, I think, to talk utter rubbish. And that is utter rubbish. It’s electoral propaganda. It is simply not true. No one in his right mind who has been to Baghdad believes that story.
That’s Allen Pizzey, CBS correspondent, talking about John McCain. He may be right. But why do we care what Allen Pizzey thinks? There are three possible reasons. You may have already thought about two of them. The one I am going to raise is probably so taken for granted that perhaps we have missed it.
Now, I am not going to make the point Glenn Reynolds made during the brief John Ware flair-up earlier this week — a point which, despite the subsequent correction of the record indicating that Ware did not heckle McCain at a press conference, is still a valid one for discussion:
“Heckling at a press conference is very rude, and wouldn’t be acceptable even from an opinion journalist (I wouldn’t dream of laughing in Nancy Pelosi’s face during a press conference). That said, isn’t it better when guys like Ware let their biases hang out, rather than embedding them in reports that are ostensibly objective?”Wouldn’t it be better still if they just did an honest job of doing, you know, their jobs?
Perhaps, though I grant that there is something to be said for letting it hang out, as Fox does, rather than pretending that CNN is not Fox’s mirror image. No, that is not my observation here. Neither is this, which I have already observed, but let’s quote Neo:
John McCain was once a media darling. The last time he ran for President, long ago and far away in 2000, the press couldn’t restrain itself from slobbering over him. . . .
So, what’s happened to the budding romance? To be blunt, McCain–once so bright-eyed and cuddly–is past his pull date.
Seven subsequent years of sloshing around in DC have meant that, if elected, he’d be the oldest President to ever win. And the years have not aged him like a fine wine (kicking around in Congress rarely does). Some of his pet projects–such as the McCain-Feingold bill–have turned out rather disastrously. And now, to top it all off, he’s saddled by being perceived as a sort of Bush Lite on the war in Iraq. It must be galling to him, since there didn’t used to be that much love lost between McCain and Bush.
So as much as there is to learn from John McCain’s media woes this week, I don’t mean to pile on and suggest (a) it’s terrible that journalists aren’t objective and (b) it’s really terrible when that lack of objectivity is its own mirror-image of the love once lavished on a favorite. So what is my point? It’s this: Why do we interview, profile and even listen to… reporters… in the first place? (This would not apply to the War dustup, of course.)
The opening quote is from Allen Pizzey. He’s a reporter. Yes, as Glenn says, he and the rest should just do his job. But evidently part of his job is to be interviewed by the guy who works at the next desk over, in this case CBS’s Brian Montopoli. Pizzey got an MBA from Sir George Williams University — uh, no, not exactly Harvard Business School — in Montreal. (This was in 1969, back when, the mainstream media tells us, all the people of principle were going wild in the streets.)
Thus we see that Pizzey has no special training in international affairs, military science, political science, or even police science, but he does have a lot of experience as a reporter. That experience, however — until recent times — was supposed to be capital that was drawn upon only for purposes of enhancing the credibility and enriching the quality of his reporting. Today, however, modern self-styled “professional” journalists, the self-described Fifth Estate and, yes, if you haven’t gotten the hint, Most Narcissistic Generation, consider it appropriate to turn reporters into “analysts” — plainly writing front-page opinion columns under the guise of “deep” news writing — or just plain interview subjects, i.e., “news’ themselves. Read the rest of this entry »
