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No week can get started on the right track without a new exposé on the CBS scandal. This week New York magazine has the honors.
David Blum starts in with a lengthy piece ripping apart the independent investigation that the network commissioned and the firings that followed. Based on a series of anonymous interviews with network insiders, Blum comes to the rescue of the fall guys (and gals), specifically defending executive producer of “60 Minutes Wednesday” Josh Howard because in a “gutsy email” he proposed “a public admission of a possible mistake less than 48 hours after the story aired.”
Blum challenges CBS Chairman Les Moonves at every point of the story’s chronology, from the investigation to the firings, and finally for the uncertainty of CBS’s future. In the end he chastises Moonves for failing to heed the Greek proverb that instructs, “The fish stinks from the head.” (Think Rather … or CBS News President Andrew Hayward … or, what the heck, even Moonves himself.)
For a quickie refresher on the much-repeated boast that intrepid bloggers brought down Rather we turned to Mark Gimein’s “Two Brothers and a Slingshot: The twentysomethings who laid CBS News low.” Alas, we don’t actually learn anything about how, or whether, the two brothers (Matthew and Greg Sheffield of RatherBiased.com) finally brought Rather to his knees. But we do learn that the brothers allegedly receive 70,000-200,000 hits a day — a number that rivals Salon.com’s traffic. And we learn that with Rather’s coming departure as anchor of CBS Evening News, the Sheffield duo will be launching a new unnamed, non-partisan website. (How about BrianWilliamsBiased.com? He’s new, and no one has picked on him yet.)
Moving from one lightning rod to another, The Economist, Time, and The New Republic all ponder Hillary Clinton’s recent comments about abortion, which have set off a media buzz that she is “moving to the center” in preparation for a White House run in 2008.
The Economist‘s Lexington column notes that the “lioness of liberalism” faces an uphill battle if she wants to reposition the Democratic party. While the religious right seems like a vulnerable “balloon waiting to be pricked,” Democrats are still too fractured to easily make over the party’s stance on abortion.
While Lexington anoints Hillary as the lead beautician in charge of said makeover, Time‘s Perry Bacon Jr. writes that “Clinton is not a lonely voice in her party.” Specifically, everyone from linguist George Lakoff to evangelical author Jim Wallis (whom Lexington also mentions) are urging Dems “to talk about how their faith informs their politics, from peace to environmental stewardship, to economic justice.” The biggest risk, Bacon says, is that the party may “come off as insincere. Religious voters might like the music, but they’re unlikely to be seduced as long as Democrats stick to their core positions.”
Andrew Sullivan, writing in The New Republic, thinks that Hillary is on to something. “In a free society, the ability of a woman to control what happens to her own body will always and should always be weighed in the balance against the right of an unborn child to life itself. And, if [Hillary] and the Democrats can move the debate away from the question of abortion’s legality toward abortion’s immorality, then they stand a chance of winning that debate in the coming years.”
Newsweek‘s Jonathan Alter rounds out the group with a column handicapping the state of journalism in light of the recent White House payola scandals. For Alter, the payola scandals are the tawdry culmination of a movement away from the traditional sense of a media “independent” not only of its own sources but also of an ax to grind. Alter writes:
Abe Rosenthal, the legendary former editor of the New York Times, once said that if you screw the elephants, you can’t cover the circus. Rosenthal wasn’t just talking about reporters having sex with their sources (and he wasn’t using the word “screw”). He was making the point that getting too close to the subject of a story was a firing offense. Every journalist knew that this stricture contained ethical gray areas, but getting paid to write by those you were covering (especially by the government) was plenty black and white. Notice how I put that last sentence in the past tense. Today, it’s not even clear what a “journalist” is, or what “covering” something means. Worse, there’s a scary paradox at the heart of the otherwise exciting media revolution now underway: the most trusted news (by those who consume it) is often the most biased.
Alter’s conclusion involves yet more snappy bestiality references:
The larger issue is what happens in a society in which facts are no longer “stubborn things,” as John Adams called them, but plastic toys that can be stretched and shaped for any purpose. Readers and viewers then trust those “facts” because they are delivered by people who clearly agree with them and reinforce their prejudices, on the right and left. Journalism should not be a closed shop, accessible only by the credentialed. Anyone — even Armstrong Williams — can hang out a shingle on a Web page or play a reporter on TV. But with that right come certain obligations, enforceable only through public ridicule: respect facts, even inconvenient ones; say something critical of the “good guys” once in a while, if only to prove your independence, and refrain from sex or commerce with elephants or donkeys, unless you don’t plan to cover them.
–Thomas Lang
Thomas Lang was a writer at CJR Daily.