Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode XXIV

Dorothy Rabinowitz makes some observations at OpinionJournal, yesterday, on media coverage of the president's Thanksgiving Day trip to Baghdad:

.... But the reality of the audience and the condition of their minds is a matter wholly foreign to the concerns of most of the correspondents — a truth most Americans have long understood and accepted. Somewhere along the way, they realized that occasions like this (short on dark aspects and close to a purely moving event) pose a problem in that universe inhabited by a good part of the press — a place where journalists toil and compete, disconnected from the realities governing the rest of the world.

There were, generally speaking, two kinds of reporting on this event, so imbued with emotion. One type offered the occasion as it had unfolded and let the facts and pictures — the footage capturing the roars of joy from the weary troops when they spied their commander in chief, there with them so unexpectedly — tell the story.

For an exemplar of the other sort we had the commentary of CNN's Walter Rodgers, a sturdy on-the-scene journalist for the most part, though on this occasion he was not among the reporters at that mess hall. Minutes after the news broke, his report focused on one central point: He didn't want to be a spoiler, he let it be known, but it was clear that, whether deliberately "or unconsciously," the president's trip had been timed as a way of upstaging Sen. Hillary Clinton's visit to the region the next day. Mr. Rodgers delivered this point several times more, his tone suggesting bountiful gratitude for the powers that had led him to unearth this insight — Thanksgiving comes but once a year.

To someone imbibing the ethers of the aforementioned hothouse journalistic world, it must have seemed perfectly reasonable to conclude — however bizarre the proposition sounded to anyone out there in the real world — that all the months of secret planning that had gone into this venture had been undertaken for the sole purpose of deflecting attention from Mrs. Clinton's trip. Not only reasonable but important enough to repeat several times. And it offered plenty of inoculation against any charge that this veteran reporter had failed to cut through the joyful nature of this story to discern its dark underside.

Departing from the subject of the president's unconscious, Mr. Rodgers turned to historical parallels to announce that Lyndon Johnson had gone to Vietnam — and that that trip hadn't changed the outcome of the war.

The next day, we were to hear from Tom Rosenstiel, the head of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, an institution that could only in times like ours be regarded as a light unto the press. Well known for emissions of the highest purity as regards press standards, Mr. Rosenstiel told the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz that the secrecy of the trip was "just not kosher," that reporters are in the business of telling the truth and that they couldn't decide it was OK to lie sometimes because it serves a "higher truth or good." ....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Wed. 12/03/03 07:43:13 AM
Categorized as Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode & Political.