Quote of the Day (Tom Wicker, on Exploiting Unhappiness for ‘The Amusement or Titillation of Others’)

“When I dragged myself into the [Sandhill] Citizen office about noon the next day, I had a visitor — a worn-out looking woman with a ZaSu Pitts voice, but whose once-haggard eyes were blazing, whose fluttering hands were clenched into fists, and whose graying hair…was that of a woman not too many years older than I, who not too long before probably had been considered a peach by the boys in her high-school class. ‘Mr. Wicker,’ she said without preamble, ‘why did you think you had the right to make fun out of me in your paper?’ I have never forgotten that question — and I still can't answer it…. I remember thinking I had not bargained for such awful moments when I had landed my first reporter’s job a few months before. Accurate though my story had been, and based on a public record, it nevertheless exploited human unhappiness for the amusement or titillation of others. I had made the woman in my office something less than what she was — a human being possessed, despite her misfortunes, of real dignity. Seeing that, I saw too that I had not only done her an injury but missed the story I should have written. This is one of the besetting sins of journalism—sensationalism at the expense of the dignity and truth of the common human experience. I have been fortunate to have worked mostly for publishers and editors who sought to avoid that sin — not always successfully. And reading some of the more lurid journals, I've often thought that sensationalism and gossip columns tend to be techniques employed mostly by big-circulation publications for an anonymous audience. Not many editors and reporters would be callous or unseeing enough to engage in them if they had to face the victims the next morning over a battered desk in an office not much bigger than a closet. On the other hand, in small cities and towns, where the overwhelming majority of American newspapers are published, circulating to millions more readers than The New York Times or The Washington Post ever reach, newspaper publishers and editors have difficulty looking at their communities objectively and serving them dispassionately.”—American journalist and novelist Tom Wicker (1926-2011), On Press (1978)

When I read On Press, it was halfway through the quarter century stint as a liberal New York Times columnist by Tom Wicker, born a century ago today in Hamlet, N.C. It also came during the heroic period of American journalism, flush with its newly extended freedoms from the 1971 Pentagon Papers decision by the Supreme Court and muckraking coverage of Watergate that brought down Richard Nixon.

Wicker’s sharp criticisms led to a long-secret FBI investigation under J. Edgar Hoover (exposed not long after the columnist’s death in 2011 in this Politico piece) and placement on Nixon’s “enemies list” that was revealed during the latter’s Presidency.

How quaint that list seems now! That “master list” totaled some 220 people or organizations—a number probably exceeded in only two or three overnight tweet storms by Donald Trump against press “enemies of the people” and “traitors.”

Predictability constitutes an occupational hazard for anyone presenting their opinions to the public several times a week. For the longest time, in Wicker’s case, I thought that a reader could almost unerringly anticipate his conclusions even before starting one of his articles.

To his credit, Wicker acknowledged such dangers, telling attendees at a 1978 American Enterprise Institute Public Policy Forum, “I felt, almost from the beginning, that I was preaching to the converted. If people agree with me, they read my articles with enormous enjoyment. If not, they sit there and fume. I do not think it has much effect on what people do.”

I don’t think I was the only reader how, long after Wicker clashed with Nixon over Watergate and Vietnam, he gave the ex-President a more respectful assessment in One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream, going so far as to praise a number of his domestic initiatives (including, surprisingly, for this candidate who implemented a “southern strategy” for wooing conservative Democrats, desegregation of the South). 

In fact, by barely considering Watergate, I felt that this analysis was a bit too respectful, losing sight of abuses of power that contributed to what historian Arthur M. Schlesinger called “the imperial Presidency.”

The humility that Wicker exhibited in my opening quote was kept in a delicate balance with a professional detachment that the journalist found necessary for press independence.

“Questions and criticism, though often inconvenient and sometimes embarrassing, are necessary in a democracy and part of the responsibility of a free press,” he wrote in a March 1985 column that took Senator Jesse Helms and Reagan Administration officials for questioning the patriotism of the media.

Such “questions and criticism” of Presidents, increasingly undermined within the federal bureaucracy and abdicated by Congress and the Supreme Court, have become even more the province of the media. They won’t make reporters more popular but will make them more crucial for the maintenance of the American republic.

Media Blowing Smoke About Papal White Smoke

“It is a familiar saying around the Vatican that ‘he who goes into a conclave a pope comes out a cardinal.’ It is considered bad form to openly promote a papal candidate, even worse to appear to be campaigning for the job. Traditionally, to be considered a front-runner is almost a guarantee of failure. Yet that has never stopped Vatican observers from compiling lists of papabili—cardinals considered to be ‘popeable.’ The current lists are heavily dominated by Italians.

“No Americans are among the papabile. Modern popes generally have come from countries with little political or military power. If an American were elected, says [Jesuit priest and author Thomas] Reese, ‘people would think the election was fixed by Wall Street or the CIA.’”— Jeffery L. Sheler and Eleni Dimmler, “The Next Pope,” US News and World Report, May 11, 1998

As I’ve gotten older, I have increasingly delighted in coming across past analytical journalism to see how well they predict what will come to pass. For all the hours these scribes devoted to their beats, you’d be surprised how many flunk this basic test.

This US News and World Report article from a quarter-century ago is a good case in point. It took another seven years after its publication before Pope John Paul II died. In that time, he appointed several dozen cardinals. Just as important, several were of such an advanced age that they were no longer considered papabile by the end of his pontificate. Some were even too old even to vote by this time.

Few fields lend themselves less to such thumb-sucking exercises as papabili prognostication. Reporters look at the Roman Catholic Church, see an institution whose dogma has changed little, all things considered, over the centuries, and believe that they can scope out which cardinal will ascend the throne of St. Peter.

As far as I’m concerned, they’ve been blowing smoke about the white smoke at the end of these conclaves for years. Somehow, though, it feels worse with the one that will start on May 7 to replace Pope Francis.

I chuckled when I read the line in the above quote about how the trail of unsuccessful front-runners “has never stopped Vatican observers from compiling lists of papabile.” Precisely—the US News and World Report piece was doing just that!

My question: have Vatican insiders been compiling these to guide their personal selections for the next pope—or to amuse themselves as they take languid lunches with journalists desperate to please their bosses back home?

In many respects, I part company with the neoconservative author George Weigel and his brand of ultra-traditional Catholicism. He notes, for instance, that notwithstanding efforts by Francis to broaden Church governance, he was “the most autocratic pontiff in centuries.” Really? While Weigel might not be guilty of heresy, he certainly is of hyperbole—so much so that you couldn’t even get a devil’s advocate to argue his case convincingly.

Even so, I must agree with three points he makes in his Wall Street Journal analysis from a week ago about the upcoming conclave:

*“The cardinal-electors don't really know each other”;

*Popes, even with their appointment of many cardinals, can’t control the election of their successors;

* “Every conclave is a unique micro-environment, psychologically and spiritually.”

Considering these three points, why are so many people foolhardy enough to think they’ll know what will happen?

The speculation about the winner at the conclave has become ridiculous. A combined $17 million have changed hands on the prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi, according to Alexander Osipovich’s article in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal.

Complicating all of this even further is the misleading lens through which the media interprets the factions within the Church in general and the conclave in particular. Whatever divisions exist in the hierarchy—and they are real—they don’t neatly align with Democratic and Republican policies.

For all their orthodoxy on sexual issues, for instance, Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI were largely indistinguishable from Pope Francis on matters of war and peace and their deep skepticism of unrestrained capitalism.

So there is a strong possibility that whoever is selected at the end of this process will fulfill neither the greatest hopes nor worst fears of those watching the proceedings with burning interest.

I hope—no, I pray—that the cardinals conclude their deliberations swiftly. I just don’t think I can take much more of this ill-informed silly season.

New York’s ‘Hometown Newspaper’ on Death Watch

“Th’ newspaper does ivrything f’r us. It runs th’ polis foorce an’ the banks, commands the milishy, conthrols the ligislachure, baptizes th’ young, marries th’ foolish, comforts th’ afflicted afflicts th’ comfortable, buries th’ dead an’ roasts thim afterward.   They ain’t annythihng it don’t turn its hand to fr’m explainin’ th’ docthrine iv thransubstantiation to composin’ saleratus biskit.”—American humorist (and journalist) Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936), Observations by Mr. Dooley (1902)

I came across this quote in a letter to the New York Times in May 20165 from Miranda Dunne, granddaughter of Finley Peter Dunne, the Chicago columnist who created Irish immigrant bartender "Mr. Dooley." But I happened upon it on a singularly awful day in the recent history of the tabloid press: the announcement that the New York Daily News was laying off half its newsroom staff. 

The paper that long carried the motto "New York's Hometown Newspaper" was one of the two newspapers bought by my blue-collar immigrant family when I was a kid. The years haven’t been kind to The Daily News or the other paper we habitually read, The Bergen Record.  (These days, the latter—sold over a year ago by the North Jersey Media Group, the umbrella organization long owned by the Borg family—looks like just another pallid property of its new owner, Gannett--especially so given its own draconian round of cuts.)

I never achieved my youthful ambition of writing for a newspaper, and now that I am in a job where I often have to deal with the results of news articles, I am more skeptical than I was before of the notion that reporters and editors try to exclude any preconceptions from affecting their coverage.

But I continue to read newspapers every day, in the form I always read it—newsprint—and I can’t imagine living without them. Their outright disappearance would amount to a total eclipse of American freedom, as far as I'm concerned, since no trained cadre would be around to mind the vast chicken coop that constitutes the American political system.

Its glory was epitomized by Jim Bishop, who practically swooned at the tactile atmosphere when he became a copy boy at the paper, imbibing the press room in all its glory: 

“Silence,” he recalled in his memoir, A Bishop’s Confession. “The sound of dust settling…I waited. It came—the dull tentative growl of presses. It was slow. It gathered confidence. The hollow sound, like a train approaching a tunnel, hit its stride, and the floor, the walls, the ceiling trembled as though in fear of the news they spawned.” (Bishop would move on to the New York Mirror before becoming a columnist and the author of books on the deaths of major historical figures like Lincoln, Christ, JFK, and Martin Luther King Jr.)

Nearly 30 years ago, in a continuing ed writing class, our instructor, Paula, a onetime reporter for the News, asked us to judge six different sets of unnamed leads for the same story—one from the News and the other from the New York Times. The winner in each case turned out to be the Daily News. 

Though Paula might have been forgiven for rooting for her old employer, I think she had something more elevated in mind. She wanted to remind us not to let a reputation for global or national coverage, no matter how well-deserved, color our judgment of what constituted good or bad writing—particularly at the local level, which The Good Gray Lady has never really made a priority.

The tone of the leads chosen by Paula was punchy. It was the scrappy voice of the working class that the News carved out as a niche—and not only against the Times: For the past 40 years, it has been the centrist-to-liberal counterweight to Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing New York Post.

Founded in 1919, the News, as the first American tabloid, basked in the supernova energy of the city in the 1920s. You didn’t go to the News for stock-market stats or news—most of its readers were lucky to rub two nickels together, let alone invest them. It wasn’t trying to influence national leaders, either. Its staff writers, especially at the start, weren’t college boys, let alone Ivy Leaguers. 

But its readers were happy with a formula that might best be described as S+S=S(quared)—in other words, Sex plus Sensationalism equals Success. The particular variations in it helped continue the tradition: comic strips, columns, gossips, sports, and the latest ax murder.

Most of all, there were those headlines. Some must have made its inventors double over in laughter (e.g., when Long Island Auto Mechanic-Turned-Lothario Joey Buttafuoco got his hand caught in the cookie jar yet again, this time for soliciting sex from an undercover policewoman: “SO JOEY, HOW’S TRICKS?”). At least one has been credited with helping ensure that a GOP incumbent President would lose in the next fall election ("FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD")

The paper’s moment of truth has been coming for a while—many would say since the 114-day 1962-63 newspaper strike, which helped kill four other papers. Automation was the point of dispute then, and now another technological factor—the Internet—has come into play.

Nearly 25 years ago, when the paper also looked on life support following the financial machinations of its owner at the time, Robert Maxwell, a former co-worker at my company recounted his onetime News colleagues’ determination: “They were all saying, ‘Just try to kill us.’” I can only hope that this same never-say-die spirit gets today’s staffers through their own current crisis.

Quote of the Day (Edgar Lee Masters, on Media That “Glory in Demoniac Power”)

“To scratch dirt over scandal for money,
And exhume it to the winds for revenge,
Or to sell papers,
Crushing reputations, or bodies, if need be,
To win at any cost, save your own life.
To glory in demoniac power, ditching civilization,
As a paranoiac boy puts a log on the track
And derails the express train.
To be an editor, as I was.
Then to lie here close by the river over the place
Where the sewage flows from the village,
And the empty cans and garbage are dumped,
And abortions are hidden.”—Edgar Lee Masters, “Editor Whedon,” in Spoon River Anthology (1915)

Last year, I missed the chance to write about the 95th anniversary of the classic by Edgar Lee Masters. Then, last weekend, I came across this New York Times article about an adaptation of the book mounted in, of all places, Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, running through Sunday, June 26. The opportunity to write about one of the great narrative poems was too good for me to pass up.

Together with contemporaries Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost, Masters—a Midwestern law partner of Clarence Darrow who eventually took up the literary life—wrote about an America still well within the small-town/rural tradition. All three poets often wrote the kind of dramatic monologues that Robert Browning had made his own particular province.

The major difference among the trio is that Robinson’s and Frost’s work in this form was more diffuse—and their achievements more extended—whereas Master’s was concentrated like a hard diamond into the 246 free-form poems that made Spoon River Anthology, in effect, a novel in verse, a portrait of a community collectively liberated by death to reveal what Thoreau called “lives of quiet desperation.”

This particular poem is among the most savage of the entire collection. We learn from other poems here that Whedon has conspired with the town’s richest man to ruin opponents of their schemes. As the now-dead editor addresses the reader, he narrates his sins with the same note of objectivity as a journalist is supposed to have. There’s a quiet hint of irony in the line, “To win at any cost, save your own life.” He also acknowledges his irresponsible stewardship of his paper with the metaphor of the boy derailing the train.

But it’s in the last few lines that the poem picks up its awesome power. Whedon has to come to grips with more than just the fact that his work is infinitely perishable. He also understands that his physical remains, like the scandalmongering campaigns he conducted in life, belong now, quite literally, with the garbage, the detritus of a life better forgotten. That last line—“And abortions are hidden”—hints both at the kind of secret he didn’t mind exposing in his paper and the sense of shame that will now afflict him through eternity.

To me, part of the savagery of this poem derives from its small-town setting. For much of the 20th (and 21st century), “to scratch dirt over scandal for money” has been heavily associated with big cities and their institutions, where mass media hold the potential for mass profits and mass damage.

But Masters, like Robinson (and, in fiction within less than a half-dozen years, Sinclair Lewis) locates this desire to destroy even in the most micro of settings. It doesn’t take the corrupt promise of mass media to help surface this latent instinct. It lies in the Midwest of Abraham Lincoln (whose early love, Ann Rutledge, is among the voices of the dead), even in the dream of the uncorrupted provincial life cherished by Thomas Jefferson. Most disturbingly, Masters suggests, it lies at the heart of our American Eden.

Flashback, April 1976: “All the President’s Men” Inaugurates Romantic Age of Journalism

If Ingrid Bergman could do it for nuns, there was no reason why Robert Redford could not for reporters. 

When the matinee idol’s latest star vehicle, All the President’s Men, premiered at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on April 4 thirty-five years ago, the ostensible reason for the occasion—a benefit for a fund for investigative journalism—was entirely superfluous.

The blond actor, portraying Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, together with co-star Dustin Hoffman (taking on Carl Bernstein), had inadvertently glamorized an ink-stained profession, just as Bergman became the despair of American moms watching their dreams of grandchildren going down the drain as their daughters opted instead for the convent life.

(How much the big screen departed immediately from reality, for a subject based on the dogged pursuit of facts, can be seen in the stark difference in appearance and tone between dark-haired, Midwestern Woodward and the man who played him, California sun-god Redford.)

This month’s issue of Vanity Fair contains the type of article that the glossy publication, when it’s not falling over itself photographing the preposterous playgrounds of the superrich, actually does quite well: chronicle the making of a classic film. (Past examples include Thelma and Louise and The Godfather.) This time, Michael Feeley Callan's piece, "Washington Monument," looks at the frequently tumultuous making—and triumphant reception of—All the President’s Men.

I adored that film when it came out, and I suspect that, were I to see it again, my reaction would be exactly the same. But it was so magical that, in certain ways, it exerted a baleful effect on journalism.

On my college newspaper, some fellow staffers were not merely prepared to run over their grannies if it meant jobs at the New York Times or Washington Post, but would, I’d wager, part with precious bodily organs to win admittance to these citadels of journalism.

The way things have been going lately in journalism, all of this might as well have been in the days of Horace Greeley. 

The outfits that can make a profit in the digital age are few and far between, and those publications that haven’t gone under or trembled as if they might (such as Newsweek) have been shedding what one would think of as their lifeblood: reporters.

The way things used to be—the boundless youthful energy, now seen, at journey’s end, as so much waste—and the way they are now are aptly summed up by a disillusioned veteran reporter in Black and White and Dead All Over, a marvelous satiric murder mystery by now-retired New York Times journalist John Darnton:

“It was like putting money in the bank—all those canceled holidays, those late nights, those planes you jump on to fly to the latest disaster, those kids’ birthdays you miss. Then the editors who praised you move on. New ones come up. They don’t know what you’ve done. You turn around one day and the slate’s clean. The bank account’s vanished. You get older. People don’t return your phone calls so much. When you get right down to it, nobody remembers any of the good stuff—nobody but you yourself.”

How different it all seemed when Alan Pakula’s true-life thriller hailed the triumph of “Woodstein” in cracking the Watergate scandal. The movie and the book that inspired it gave these impressions to aspiring journalists:

* You could not only be a crusader in print, but even bring down a government;

* You could write on subjects filled with conflict and drama;

* You could write a bestselling book, then sell the work to Hollywood for another bundle.

All of this inflated journalists’ (and journalistic wanna-bees) self-importance and sense of invulnerability—a very dangerous combination for anyone in a profession making noises about “the public’s right to know.” As the Roman writer Juvenal wrote, “Who will guard the guardians?”

Typical of much of the hooey that too many people—including journalists—came away with after seeing the film are the following assertions by Emanuelle Levy in an online DVD review:

* Woodward and Bernstein brought down Nixon. On the contrary: If any of the following had occurred, we would have seen a full second term for Tricky Dick, and the President could have told Katherine Graham, Ben Bradlee, and the rest of the Post, like the Duke of Wellington: “Publish and be damned”: a deeply divided (instead of unanimous) Supreme Court ruling on whether Nixon had to give up the Oval Office tapes; a bonfire of said tapes on the White House front lawn that, in one stroke, would have eliminated the evidence that brought down the President; special prosecutors getting cold feet about pursuing the case to its logical conclusion; a continual flow of Mideast oil that would have given the economy some breathing room instead of miring it in inflation, convincing the public that the President could perform his job without distractions.

* The film assured victory for a Democrat, Jimmy Carter, in 1976. On the contrary: Gerald Ford fell by a whisker to the Georgian, despite facing the following deficits: a GOP still deeply divided after Ronald Reagan’s near-upset of the incumbent; a Democratic-controlled House and Senate that made Ford look ineffectual by overriding one veto after another; a disastrous gaffe about Poland that lost Ford much momentum just before the election.

* The film boosted enrollment at journalism schools by 50,000. On the contrary: Aside from the fact that this assertion is unsourced and without a date specified, the film’s role in any jump in enrollment is likely exaggerated. One 1995 study, for the Freedom Forum media foundation, attributed the increase “to a larger extent from the appeal of the field to women, who ha[d] been attending universities in record numbers. The growth also in part reflect[ed] the applied nature of the field and its link to specific job skills.”

One deeply troubling trend arising from Watergate coverage was reliance on the anonymous source. 

Leave aside, if you can, the way in which using such sources subverts a person’s right to face and answer an accuser. Use of the anonymous source also gave reporters and their often all-too-credulous editors cover for stories that were at best inaccurate or, worse, one-sided, or, worst of all, invented from whole cloth.

The most prominent publications running into such problems—the ones who fell for their own self-created myth—were, in fact, the ones that my friends and I wanted to work for: the Times and the Washington Post.

Trouble caught up first with the Post, which less than a decade after Richard Nixon’s resignation, found its editors—including, by that time, Woodward—explaining how Janet Cooke’s fabricated Pulitzer Prize-winning work ended up getting published on their watch. 

It took two decades for the Times to catch up, but eventually it, too, found itself not just embarrassed, but in downright disarray because of the Jayson Blair scandal.

All the President’s Men, then, had a deleterious effect in depicting a glamorous profession. But one shot that has stayed with me the longest is of Woodward and Bernstein poring over circulation records in the Library of Congress in search of a missing piece to their puzzle.

That single scene gives the most realistic—and, in its way, idealistic—sense of a profession that, at its best, should depend more on dogged attention to tedious detail than on the Errol Flynn-type heroics that even Bernstein fell victim to in submitting a screenplay that he and then-wife Nora Ephron wrote about the exploits of himself and his partner.

Quote of the Day (Howard K. Smith, on Media Criticism of Administrations)

“You get into trouble if you criticize big business. The roof falls in if you criticize Congress. And we’re getting increasingly cautious in criticizing the Administration. The pressures are getting worse.”—Howard K. Smith, ABC News commentator, quoted in Edith Efron, “Television: America’s Timid Giant,” TV Guide, May 1963, collected in TV Guide: The First 25 Years, compiled and edited by Jay S. Harris in association with the editors of TV Guide (1978).

How did the Obama administration get snagged into a fight it can’t win with Fox News? Partly because it fell victim to the periodic belief of Presidents that media criticisms they face are somehow worse than their predecessors'.

The one President who didn’t compare his media treatment to a prior incumbent was George Washington, because he didn’t have any predecessor in office. But in their way, the grenades launched at him might have been the worst of all.

Here, after all, was the Father of His Country, the man who saved America from all too many hours of maximum danger, forced to deal not only with the venom of the grandson of fellow patriot Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin Bache, but also with the perfidy of his own Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, who secretly funded journals that attacked the administration.

But you can look much closer to our time to counter the self-pity of Obama and every one—Democrat and Republican—of those who preceded him in office. Jack Kennedy, for instance, is regarded not just as a kind of proto-Obama in his appeal to idealism and youth, but as a master of media relations who turned press conferences into displays of witty thrusts and parries.

But, as Smith’s quote indicates, JFK was often ready to push back when he felt he was given a bad shake. (E.g., he tried to induce The New York Times to take David Halberstam off his Vietnam beat).

Obama’s aides would have been well advised to treat Fox News like a mosquito bite: If you don’t pay it any mind, it won’t irritate you. The most they should have said about the—ahem!—“fair and balanced” cable network’s stories was, “Consider the source.”

Instead, the White House amplified the importance of Rupert Murdoch.

Did the ossified Aussie’s opposition to Obama matter in the slightest during last year’s election? Not a whit. Why should it now, in a media environment where news junkies can get stories from thousands of different Web sites?

The word for the current news environment is disintermediation—i.e., cutting out the middleman, the editor who long acted as gatekeeper for what was and wasn’t news. These days, you pick the news that fits your ideology and party label, as John Harwood spelled out, in dismaying but unsurprising detail, in today’s New York Times.

I can’t say I’m in love with all aspects of the new environment (if I have to read another Obama "birther" story, I think I’m going to scream), but what’s sometimes considered the fringe in today’s political discourse becomes tomorrow’s accepted wisdom. Even many of those unimpressed by free markets on Wall Street are far more receptive to a marketplace of ideas.

Part of the problem with the administration is that they’re being advised by people whose real job title should have been “pity party consultant.” People like Representative Alan Grayson, D-FL. You know—the guy who said the GOP’s health plan is for people not to get sick, and if they do, they should “die quickly”—the Democrats’ nice, calm answer to Republican Congressman Joe “You Lie!” Wilson of South Carolina.

“Republicans were basically playing rope-a-dope with Democrats for months,” Grayson said the other day. “Now people know what’s at stake. It’s life and death.”

On the contrary, rope-a-dope, as practiced by Muhammad Ali in his fight with George Foreman (as I explained in a post from the other day), consists of a fighter being lured into pounding himself into a state of exhaustion. The situation sounds more like the administration throwing everything it has against Fox News. They ought to conserve their strength for when it counts.

If you want to know how Democrats could turn rope-a-dope against the Republicans, you get videos of all those “tea parties” and “town hall meetings”—and I’m talking about every second of it, with every speaker in full red-faced, vein-popping, pistol-packing mode—and send it to every megaplex in the U.S. with an Imax screen so Americans can see what the opposition to health care looks like in all its rational glory.

Rather than listen to the likes of Congressman Grayson, President Obama might be better advised to check out Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s essay, “The Presidency and the Press,” which appeared 38 years ago in Commentary.

The future Senator from New York noted, with typical perspicacity: “In most essential encounters between the Presidency and the press, the advantage is with the former. The President has a near limitless capacity to 'make' news which must be reported.... The President also has considerable capacity to reward friends and punish enemies in the press corps.... Finally, a President who wishes can carry off formidable deceptions.”

As Howard K. Smith implicitly recognized even in the glory days of Camelot, the relationship between press and President is adversarial. If I were Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, I’m not sure I’d be crazy about being invited to the White House to be stroked like a pair of tabbies. I think I’d prefer seeing the President bare his fangs. That way, at least, I’d know I was doing my job.

Quote of the Day (Susan Roesgen, on Notre Dame Protestors And Barack Obama)

“Can you believe that, Wolf, they’re actually praying that God will change the heart and mind of President Obama to make him pro-life?”—CNN correspondent Susan Roesgen to Wolf Blitzer, on protestors against Notre Dame’s speaking invitation to Barack Obama, on CNN’s Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, April 10, 2009

Can you believe, Susan, that a number of viewers will think that a supposedly objective journalist such as yourself can barely conceal her condescension toward the people she covers?

Fox News gets the lion’s share of blame for amping up subjective news coverage, notably through stunts such as its overkill of the “tea parties” protesting the Obama administration’s economic policies. If Bill O’Reilly is on while I’m channel-surfing, I find myself either switching faster or lamenting that I never bought earplugs.

But Roesgen’s comment has me wondering if there might not be at least one virtue to Fox: Whatever you think of their “fair and balanced” and “we report, you decide” slogans (and, for the record, I think they’re hysterical), their in-your-face lineup leaves absolutely no doubt about where they stand.

I don’t recall Ms. Roesgen expressing disbelief about a previous Presidential visit to Notre Dame, when many students wore black armbands objecting to George W. Bush’s stand position on capital punishment. (And that was before the invasion of Iraq, when many students would have even more cause to complain about his policies.)

Doubtless, many of these previous protestors prayed that he would see the light. It’s the same belief, I might add, that civil-rights activists of all faiths shared in the dark years when they hoped that an indifferent American populace—including risk-averse Presidents—would come to see that racial prejudice and the laws propping it up were deeply wrong.

No matter what their political affiliation, however, all these protestors have acted from a common belief: that a President is open enough to moral persuasion that he can be moved. What Ms. Roesgen’s comment reveals is not simply that she doesn’t share this belief—which is her right—but that such people lie outside the range of political discourse--which is not for her to decide.

Understand me: I’m not commenting here on whether or not Notre Dame should have invited President Obama to pick up an honorary degree and speak at the school. Good, decent people on both sides of this issue have made thoughtful arguments on this that should be considered.

And that’s why Roesgen’s impromptu remark is so disturbing. She has made no secret of which side she feels is wanting. As a matter of fact, her tone suggests she’s going to enroll millions of Catholics in the Flat Earth Society.

This look-what-I’ve-discovered-on-the-far-side-of-the-moon mentality is even more blatant than the comment by the late NBC anchorman John Chancellor in the 1970s about Americans with a different kind of religious experience: “Incidentally, we have checked this out. Being ‘born again’ is not a bizarre experience or the voice of God from the mountaintop. It’s a fairly common experience known to millions of Americans—particularly if you’re Baptist.”

The fact that CNN has not taken seriously complaints about Ms. Roesgen’s statement underscores the ideological blinders that can lead the cable network as well as its admirers (such as The New York Times’ Bill Carter) to believe that it’s hewing strictly to a just-the-facts approach not shared by rivals Fox and MSNBC.

This is one of the unintended consequences, I’m afraid, of newspapers and television stations shedding staff. Religion reporters have tended to be hired later than general correspondents or more established beat reporters. Therefore, they are also among the first fired when the budget ax strikes.

All this at a time when it’s more important than ever for Americans to understand other religious viewpoints besides their own.

To be sure, the mainstream media have not always made hires in this area with any discernment. After a Washington Post listing for a religion reporter several years ago said that the ideal candidate “need not be an expert in religion,” media critic Terry Mattingly noted the improbability of a similar ad for a Supreme Court reporter not being “a legal expert.”

But at least there was a chance that with regular, constant exposure to sources, a religion reporter would be aware of facts and tone. Ms. Roesgen showed no such awareness.

This is not a good time for reporting on the nuances of religion, folks. At some point, I think it would be worthwhile for me to analyze why reporting on different aspects of spirituality has failed so dismally. But right now, I think the media could go a long way toward reconnecting with their readers by acknowledging that they have gone wrong in the first place.

Consider this: Four months ago, the Indianapolis Star said it was discontinuing its 36-year-practice of printing prayers. Its editor’s rationale—“I believe that prayer is a very personal thing and that offering prayers is something for individuals and their churches”—sounds like something we all can agree with. A prayer that’s acceptable to those across all faiths tends to be pretty thin gruel, I think.

I counted myself among the skeptics, however, when I learned that the same paper would continue to run horoscopes. Star readers might be reasonably inclined to believe that the paper’s editors find a horoscope—a listing of dubious rationality—more acceptable than any expression, no matter how watered-down, of faith.

The next time that the Star editor ponders the justification for deleting God but keeping the horoscope, he might remember the continuing relevance of Shakespeare’s line in Julius Caesar: “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars but in ourselves.”

This Day in Presidential History (TR Sues for Libel)

May 26, 1913—In Marquette, Mich., in a courthouse that later served as the location for the James Stewart legal drama Anatomy of a Murder, an equally extraordinary real-life proceeding began: a libel suit by Theodore Roosevelt against an editor who had accused him of habitual drunkenness.

The suit by the ex-President against George Newitt, editor of local weekly paper Iron Ore, was unparalleled, according to Patricia O’Toole’s When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt After the White House, because it was “the first to expose a former president’s personal habits to public view, and Roosevelt was the first former president to hold a newspaper to account for the sort of calumny that might affect his place in history.”

A Tumultuous Campaign Swing—In More Ways Than One

The indefatigable T.R. thought nothing of becoming the first U.S. President to journey outside the confines of the country while in office (in this case, Panama, to inspect the construction of the canal), of shooting big game in Africa, or, soon, of exploring the unnavigated “River of Doubt” in Brazil (a trip that nearly cost him his life). Going to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, then, was cake by comparison, and Roosevelt enjoyed it so much during his life that he toured 14 of the area’s 15 counties.

The second of these trips, on October 9, 1912, in the midst of his bid for a precedent-setting third Presidential term as nominee of the Progressive or “Bull Moose” Party, was the one that led to his later court date in Marquette.

The 250-mile swing through the Upper Peninsula was greeted tumultuously, with many veterans of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders turning out along the way. Places that hardly anyone knew existed (Soo Junction and Munising Junction, anyone?) brought out at least 500 people, and often more.

One person unimpressed with the hoopla was George S. Newett, who used his bully pulpit at Iron Ore to try to keep Colonel Roosevelt from reaching his favorite one: the Oval Office. The editor’s animus was aroused for two reasons: he was a former appointee of the President’s (serving as postmaster of Ishpeming) deeply disillusioned when T.R. split with chosen successor William Howard Taft over the latter’s conservatism, and as a teetotaler he was disturbed by unpublished scuttlebutt that the ex-President was an alcoholic.

Hearing the same rumor on the campaign trail, the candidate was determine to scotch the rumor the secret it made its way into print. Three days after the Upper Peninsula trip, Newett obliged, with an editorial that put the rumor out unmistakably: “Roosevelt lies and curses in a most disgusting way. He gets drunk, too, and that not infrequently, and all his intimate friends know it.”

Put yourself in the candidate’s shoes in 1912, late in an election you still believe you can win. Do you ignore some publication that nobody’s ever heard of outside its backwater of the Midwest—or do you take the rumor on now, even if it’s in the middle of a campaign, when your attention will be diverted and you risk giving credence to a rumor?

Roosevelt didn’t hesitate for a second. Shown Newett’s editorial while he was dining in a Chicago hotel, he was as good as his initial vow: “Let’s go at him,” he told associates. Two weeks after the editorial, before voters had gone to the polls, Roosevelt’s legal team filed suit against Newett.

Anatomy of a Rumor

In preposterousness, Newett’s claim might be surpassed in modern times only by the paternity suit filed against that raging heterosexual Boy George, or by Matt Drudge’s 2004 pseudo-e-scoop that John Kerry fooled around with a young intern. (Drudge might have thought better of the mental processes that produced his quickly retracted story—i.e., A Democrat + A Female Intern=Sex Scandal—by considering a powerful countervailing bit of evidence: Kerry’s wife Teresa, who surely would have pulled a Lorena Bobbitt if she had discovered her husband philandering.)

Over the course of TR’s life, I’ve been able to turn up only two instances when he became intoxicated, both of which occurred while he was a student at Harvard: at his initiation into the Porcellian Club (according to Gore Vidal, who, characteristically, calls Roosevelt a “sissy” but is unable to document any other drunken adventure other than this); and after the death of the father he worshipped, when, he wrote in his diary, he “got tight” after receiving the news. (The ashamed young man scratched out the diary entry, but David McCullough was able to decipher the passage while researching Mornings on Horseback.)

The youngest man ever to become President and the first President to complete a full term in the 20th century, T.R. seems, in the public eye, far more than his immediate successor, Taft and Woodrow Wilson, a quintessentially modern chief executive who was, in the marvelously apt phrase of historian Henry Adams, “pure act.”

That perception disguises how much Roosevelt was a product of the mid-Victorian era, in his attitude as much as in his age. He did not smoke (indeed, he was the first President to ban smoking, by executive order, in federal buildings, because he feared the loss of historical records by fire). While praising Leo Tolstoy as “an interesting and stimulating writer,” he also judged him “an exceedingly unsafe moral adviser.” While matching fifth cousin Franklin Roosevelt in narcissism, T.R.’s never made him susceptible to attractive women.

In other words, this was a man who did not even come close to Newett’s description—and he had an entire railroad car of friends and associates who were willing to journey out to the middle of nowhere to testify on his behalf to this effect.

Given all of this, how on earth did a private investigator working for Newett’s defense team turn up 40 witnesses willing to swear they had seen Roosevelt intoxicated? “I was really unprepared for perjury on a gigantic scale, perjury scores of alleged witnesses,” Roosevelt wrote a friend.

Intoxication or Caffeination?

If political enmity played a role in these memories, as Colonel Roosevelt hinted, it might have been an instance not of inspiring a lie so much as in coloring perceptions of images that would have looked different to someone else. In an affidavit submitted at the trial, for instance, Admiral George Dewey, hero of the Battle of Manila Bay, wrote of his former civilian head at the Naval Department, that "all people at dinners, whether drink anything or not, are more or less excited. I have seen teetotalers very excited, and I have seen Mr. Roosevelt at dinners where he would be full of spirits, full of life and animation. All who knew him knew his peculiarities in this respect.”

What else might have contributed to this perception of TR as out of control? Henry Adams noted in his posthumous memoir that the President “had the reputation of being indiscreet beyond any other man of great importance in the world, except Kaiser Wilhelm and Joseph Chamberlain" (the latter British politician was the father of future appeaser Neville Chamberlain).

How could someone be so indiscreet and so impetuous? Mere acquaintances might have identified T.R.’s fault as alcohol, but I believe they missed a cause a thousand times more likely: caffeine.

Years ago, someone I knew in the business world was fond of proclaiming that he got all his ideas after he’d had coffee. What he never seemed to notice was the high percentage of these brainstorms that were insane.

Though TR’s hyperkinetic energy was usually ascribed to youth and physical fitness, I believe coffee had a lot to do with it. He loved the stuff. One of his most famous statements came when, after consuming a cup of a then-relatively-unknown brand called Maxwell’s at Andrew Jackson’s Nashville mansion, The Hermitage, he pronounced it “good to the last drop.” Anyone who drinks a gallon of coffee a day, as the President did, bids fair to becoming the most overstimulated person you’ll ever meet.

Crucial Rulings, Devastating Testimony—Then a Favorable Verdict

Perry Mason notwithstanding, lovers of courtroom drama are best advised to keep a sharp eye out for jury selection and rulings from the bench, rather than for shrewd cross-examination by legal eagles, as the best barometer to how a case will turn out.

So it proved here, with the Roosevelt legal team getting its wish for a jury comprised of workingmen (four miners, three teamsters, two farmers, one blacksmith, one locomotive foreman, and one lumberjack). Moreover, local trial judge Richard Flannigan ruled that Newett could not introduce statements from other newspapermen that it was generally reported that T.R. was frequently drunk.

That last point in particular is important. The anything-goes ethos of the Internet means that print journalists can now sneak out reports of candidates’ infidelities and other assorted peccadilloes as media stories (e.g., “Isn’t it awful how Reporter So-and-So says that Candidate X is a philanderer?”) rather than actual statements of fact (“Candidate X met with Prostitute Y for the umpteenth time in Washington”).

Were he alive today, Newett could simply have claimed the rumors existed and he was simply bringing them out into the open. In addition, one of the conditions imposed on plaintiffs by the Supreme Court in its landmark ruling New York Times v. Sullivan -- that they needed to prove that defendants knew their statements were false or in “reckless disregard of their truth or falsity”—would have made it immeasurably harder for Roosevelt to file his suit.

Things became quickly worse for Newett, starting with Roosevelt’s testimony. Once again, the President revealed his talent for the dramatic when, upon being asked by his attorney if he’d ever been wounded, the ex-Rough Rider rolled up his cuff, displaying an ugly gash on his forearm that he'd received in his famous charge up San Juan Hill (really Kettle Hill)—something that, uncharacteristically, the publicity-hungry politician had never divulged to the public. (“I wasn’t officially wounded,” he explained on the stand. “I never went to an aid station. Somebody wrapped a bandage around my arm and I went on.”)

The final straw was the collective parade of famous witnesses who testified that Roosevelt had never become intoxicated—former Cabinet members, ambassadors, judges, department heads, and newspaper owners. He stayed away from heavy beer and wine, stopping at the occasional glass of wine with meals, they agreed.

Once the ex-President’s legal team finished this devastating testimony, Newett took the stand and conceded that he could not prove the charges, for all of the witnesses he had relied on were unwilling to swear to their statements. He was now willing to admit he had made a mistake, with his only defense being that he had not written the editorial with malice.

The Roosevelt defense team desired $10,000 in damages, but he immediately requested Judge Flannigan to only award him nominal damages, as he had filed suit not to gain money but to disprove the rumors once and for all. Flannigan granted his wish, instructing the jury to award the plaintiff six cents—the price, it was noted, of a good newspaper. After the jury did so, the judge issued an unequivocal statement that the ex-President’s sobriety had been firmly established.

T.R. had fought many bruising battles with Irish Catholics who formed the base of the Tammany Hall political machine. But in Flannigan, an ex-Democrat who left that party because of William Jennings Bryan’s free-silver policies, Roosevelt surely found one to his liking.

Aside from the Midwest jurist’s favorable rulings during the five-day trial, his personal characteristics, as described by longtime associates nearly 15 years after the trial, would have appealed to the energetic, impetuous—but personally abstemious—master politico: “hard working, straightforward, blunt, yet intensely human.”

Annals of the Media: Disgracing Themselves Once Again

Theatergoers at Dublin's Abbey Theatre didn't like what they were seeing onstage in Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars in its initial run in 1926.

Bad enough that the playwright had been even more critical of the struggle for Ireland's independence than he had been in The Shadow of a Gunman and Juno and the Paycock. Now, he had compounded the indignity by including a prostitute character – a gesture that reminded many in the audience of another insult to Irish womanhood nineteen years before in John Millington Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, when one line – a reference to a woman in her "shift," or underwear – sparked a riot in the fledgling theater. Now the booing, hissing and general carrying-on were being repeated.

Rising to the stage "like an ancient Roman senator," according to one cast member, Abbey founder and Ireland's leading literary light, Nobel Prize-winning poet William Butler Yeats, peered down at the raucous audience with Olympic scorn as he pronounced judgment: "You have disgraced yourselves again."

Would that some figure with authority comparable to Yeats might talk sense to a media beast as wild in its way as the mob that roiled the Abbey more than 80 years ago. With the New Hampshire primary nearing an end, and the Iowa caucus still not far behind in the rear-view mirror, it’s time that someone call the media to account for giving two such small states not just weighty, but shamefully disproportionate influence on the way we choose our Presidents.

At least with New Hampshire there’s some reason behind the media attention. Two incumbent Presidents, Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson, thought better of their re-election bids after worse-than-expected results against a senatorial challenger (Estes Kefauver in 1952 and Eugene McCarthy sixteen years later). And at least voters’ preferences are registered directly, rather than through precinct delegates.

No such luck with Iowa. In her column last week, The New York Times' Gail Collins describes what the Democrats’ 1,781 local caucuses are like: "Past history suggests that a few of these gatherings may not draw any attendees whatsoever and that several others will consist entirely of a guy named Carl. Attendances has no effect on the number of delegates involves, and we hardly need mention that the whole things is weighted to give rural residents an advantage. Iowans in politically active neighborhoods where 100 people show up may find their vote is worth only 1 percent as much as, say, Carl's."

At least Republicans use a head count. (That’s the last kind thing I’ll say about that largely pathetic bunch.) The Democrats' system works like this: They don't report straight numbers, but use a mathematical formula to determine support for a candidate in percentages. A candidate must have the support of 15 percent of those present at any meeting, precinct caucuses through the state convention, to remain ``viable.''

And that doesn't even finish it. Delegates chosen at the caucuses go to the county convention later in the year. There, the field is winnowed and delegates are chosen for the district convention. This happens again at district meetings and again at the state convention, where delegates are named to attend the party's national convention.

Forget about all those hanging chads that everybody screamed about in 2000. Whatever happened to something more elemental, like one man, one vote? Does this strike anyone as democratic with a small "c", never mind a large one?

Why does this insanity persist? Go back to 1976, when Jimmy Carter’s campaign strategists spun his unexpectedly strong performance into a triumph for the former-governor-turned-peanut farmer-turned-wannabe-President. But the real winner that night? “Uncommitted,” which outpulled the Georgian 37% to 28%.

Iowa is hardly representative of the nation’s largest demographic or commercial trends. It ranks 30th in population – perhaps not “the lowest of the low,” as Bush I famously described Arkansas under Bill Clinton, but below the median – and its combined black-Hispanic population is less than 6%.

Or consider the following facts:

* In 2004, just 6% of the state's eligible voters attended a caucus. (So what if this year’s turnout doubled the 2004 numbers – it was already working with a terribly small base.)
* The only non-incumbents ever to win an Iowa Caucus in a race without a President were Jimmy Carter and, in 2000, George W. Bush (who might as well have been an incumbent, given the brand recognition and party network he inherited from daddy).
* According to Iowa economist Harvey Siegelman, the 2004 caucus brought in between $50 million and $60 million (bringing unexpected meaning to the term "high on the hog").

I haven’t decided whom to vote for this year. But I would love Rudy Guiliani to win at least one primary contest to underscore his wisdom in bypassing this unrepresentative, undemocratic state. I want him to dispose of its central role in Presidential politics the way Rasputin’s assassins took care of the mad monk: poison it, shoot it, pummel it, and throw it off a bridge into the watery, midwinter grave it deserves.

Internal editor: “Oh, come on. The state can’t be all THAT bad. Surely there’s something good to say about it.” MT: “Yeah? Let’s hear it.” (Squaring his shoulders and looking directly at the camera, like Robert Conrad in a mid-‘70s TV commercial): “Go ahead. I dare you!”