Two Sides of the Same Coin
Helen Thomas, whom I saw yesterday, is the epitome of a hard nosed journalist. She's fierce and feisty. She's been called cranky, an "Old Arab" (by the bigoted Ann Coulter) and I'm sure the "B" word has been tossed around more than a few times. But the Dean of the White House Press Corps is also known as the First Lady of Journalism for her dedication to the craft.
Frank Rich, on the other hand, is a former culture and arts columnist for the NYTimes, where he was known as the Butcher of Broadway, who has turned political writer. He approaches politics in the same way he did the theater, bruising but entertaining. He's a bit like Thomas with a bit of wit thrown in.
There may be a substantial contrast in styles, but they say the same thing, each in his or her own way. I noticed this in reading Rich's scathing, but entertaining column, Throw the Truthiness Bums Out. Commenting on the mid-term election season, Rich compares and contrasts his brethren in the press to Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart. Rich's description of the media's reaction to the John Kerry joke was biting, but brilliant:
Whatever lame joke or snide remark the senator was trying to impart, it was no more relevant to the reality unfolding in Iraq than the sex scenes in Jim Webb’s novels. But as the White House ingeniously inflated a molehill by a noncandidate into a mountain of fake news, real news from Iraq was often downplayed or ignored entirely. It was a chilling example of how even now a skit ginned up by the administration screenwriters can dwarf and obliterate reality in our media culture.On the same day Mr. Kerry blundered, the United States suffered a palpable and major defeat in Iraq. The Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, once again doing the bidding of the anti-American leader Moktada al-Sadr, somehow coerced American forces into dismantling their cordon of Sadr City, where they were searching for a kidnapped soldier. As the melodramatic debates over how much Mr. Kerry should apologize dragged on longer, still more real news got short shrift: the October death toll for Americans in Iraq was the highest in nearly two years. Some 90 percent of the dead were enlisted men and nearly a third were on extended tours of duty or their second or third tours. Their average age was 24.
When the premises for war were being sold four years ago, you could turn to the fake news of Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” to find the skepticism that might poke holes in the propaganda. Four years later, the press is much chastened by its failure to do its job back then, but not all of the press. While both Mr. Stewart and Mr. Colbert made sport of the media’s overkill on the Kerry story, their counterparts in “real” television news, especially but not exclusively on cable, flogged it incessantly. Only after The New York Times uncovered a classified Pentagon chart documenting Iraq’s rapid descent into chaos did reality begin to intrude on the contrived contretemps posed by another tone-deaf flub from a former presidential candidate not even on the ballot.
In retrospect, the defining moment of the 2006 campaign may well have been back in April, when Mr. Colbert appeared at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Call it a cultural primary. His performance was judged a bomb by the Washington press corps, which yukked it up instead for a Bush impersonator who joined the president in a benign sketch commissioned by the White House. But millions of Americans watching C-Span and the Web did get Mr. Colbert’s routine. They recognized that the Beltway establishment sitting stone-faced in his audience was the butt of his jokes, especially the very news media that had parroted Bush administration fictions leading America into the quagmire of Iraq.
Thomas, of course, was much blunter in her assessment of the press in the run up to Iraq. Referring to Lap Dogs of the Press, she chastised the "obsequious press during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. They lapped up everything the Pentagon and White House could dish out--no questions asked."
(Rich's article is also available at: The Unknown Candidate)
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