July 1, 2007

By Harry T. Cook
I’m entitled to despise the press because it’s self-criticism. I have been a member of the press corps off and on for most of my adult life – all the way from writing for a small-town weekly, to stringing for this editor and that, to editing the monthly tabloid of an Episcopal diocese, to being religion reporter for what was once a respectable, big-city daily newspaper, to being one of its editors and columnists for a decade and, finally, the writer of this blog known as http://www.harrytcook.com

I count among my best and most respected friends persons who have worked or are still working in journalism, many of whom have observed that what we knew of the business is almost non-existent as newspapers are increasingly parts of corporate enterprises for which profit and stock value are all that matter.

It’s hard to say which it is: Did the standards for reporting and editing start to slide before the bright-eyed 22-year-old accountants took over or after? Did the latter development contribute to the former, or was the former in some ways inevitable, and is the latter merely the result of the media becoming so overwhelmingly a corporate culture?

Either way, the process of collecting and disseminating useful information has been seriously diminished. The nervous-news departments of local television stations with their instant trumpeting of apocalyptic weather events, high-speed car chases and, my favorite, the barricaded gunman have cowed newspapers – that are, perforce, several hours behind the wave – into trying to appear and operate like their facile electronic cousins.

The result makes the old Hearst-like tabloid journalism of the last century look respectable by comparison.

Here’s the kind of thing that passes for journalism today: In the same room are reporters and several candidates for President of the United States, one of whom is Hillary Rodham Clinton. The country is losing its bearings abroad with a catastrophically awful, unprovoked war. Health care insurance is a huge national problem pleading for serious discussion and prompt solution. The U.S. Justice Department has become a fetid nest of reptilian politicians. And what was the first question put to the Democratic front-runner, Ms. Rodham Clinton?

Did you ever sleep with Vincent Foster?

If you’ve forgotten, Vincent Foster was a Clinton insider who basically got pushed off the edge by the murderous politics of Washington and shot himself to death. The Clinton Hater Machine made bales and bales of hay out of that and obviously still won’t let it go.

Here’s what Ms. Rodham Clinton might have said in response but didn’t:

No, I did not sleep with Vince Foster. But I slept with Dwight D. Eisenhower when I was very young, yes, and with Strom Thurmond, too. I slept with my furry panda bear until I left for Wellesley, but I decided to leave him home with Mom and Dad because I wanted to acquire that bitchy, hell-bent for leather persona you all associate with me. I’ll have my press secretary check my diaries to see who else I might have slept with over the years. But I can tell you that I never slept with any reporters. What would have been the point?

Can you imagine the sound of lower jaws hitting the breastbones of the journalists present? Not even the late David Halberstam, had be been there, could have mustered a response on the spot. Rodham Clinton would have carried the day and have gone down in history as the presidential candidate who told the press to stick it. Even her most inveterate haters would have had to suppress grins over someone finally causing the press to be hoist on its own petard.

It would have been a great and deservedly long-lasting laugh against yellow journalism and would have endeared an otherwise not very endearing person to the voters. It might have taught the press a lesson about what’s important and what’s not.

A Los Angeles Times story of June 17 reporting that even those who wanted a Democrat for President in 2008 said if Rodham Clinton were the Democratic nominee, they would vote for her Republican opponent was given prominent placement in one Detroit newspaper. I counted up the number of persons the reporter interviewed to arrive at that conclusion: 1. The other interviewee said that even though he really wants to vote for a Democrat, he would have to vote Republican if John Edwards were to be the nominee because “I just think he’s a slick character.” The hair cut, you know.

The press should just cover Rodham Clinton and report what she says of substance rather than suck its thumb over whether or not she’s electable (an election would actually determine that). The press should quit smacking its lips over Edward’s $400 haircut and Mitt Romney’s sculpted coif and really dig into their respective proposals for governance.

Of course, none of that can be tossed off with a too-clever-by-half headline or sound bite. The reporting and editing I’m talking about costs time and money. It requires really professional journalists who can think, investigate, report and write substantive articles containing actual information. All that costs money – money news corporations would rather not spend so as to push up profits and stock values to keep their investors and themselves fat and happy.

This past week, the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a telling blow to First Amendment civil liberties by declaring that ordinary taxpayers cannot challenge the Bush Administration’s faith-based initiatives that have the effect of enriching religious institutions at the expense of the public treasury. You can bet that in most newspapers and on most news telecasts it will be the murder of the pregnant woman in Ohio, the latest antic of Paris Hilton or the D.C. judge’s missing pants that will grab the headlines.

Thus has journalism become complicit in the old “bread-and-circuses” ploy to keep the public titillated with fluff but ignorant of the facts. That’s why on some days I can’t help despising the press – an institution I once loved because it understood its business to be finding out and printing the truth that sets a people free.

 © Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.