Speaking of really important stuff on PBS, everyone should be sure to watch or tape this tomorrow (Wednesday) night. Yes, honkies too. Especially honkies.
Chuckle chuckle. "Honkies." It's funny because it's ironic!
Did you read the whole Fallows article? Thoughts on it?
it's basically 15 pages worth of chris rock's joke about columbine ("it's good for clinton").
That Fallows article really is great, though IMO no such story is quite complete without including the warping pressures of the "liberal media" myth. The sheer cluelessness and lack of self-awareness in the "welcoming committee" ad he describes prefigures a lot of what we see today.
I haven't read the Atlantic article yet, but the American Prospect article Yglesias links to has an odd conclusion: the press will get better because the people who didn't do a good job covering the Lewinsky scandal are old.
I wasn't sure about the connection between the long, gripping anecdote at the beginning, and the other points in the next five pages.
Anecdote seemed to say: journalists have an exaggerated sense of their own importance; they are ethically shallow and possibly immoral; and even Newt Gingrich gets something right now and then, esp. when he is slamming the press.
Body of the article seemed to say: journalists fail to cover issues, only cover horse-races, and don't educate themselves about how to understand issues ("Horse race" includes not only endless obsession with political optics, but also the making of vacuous predictions).
These are all good points (except maybe the one about Newt), but I didn't get the sense that the charge that occupied the second two-thirds of the piece (horse-race political coverage), was very closely connected to the charge that occupied the first part (journos so obsessed w/ story that they are immoral).
Connection? Beyond: journalists are bad, and out of touch with American values?
on the other hand, we could just discuss how fallows' article is likely to affect the next election. did fallows project a sense of strong leadership?
I wasn't sure about the connection between the long, gripping anecdote at the beginning, and the other points in the next five pages.
This is exactly right. It has no connection with the rest of the article, but it allows Fallows to score a cheap, populist anti-media point.
It's no coincidence that Wallace's career was marked by some extraordinary journalism while Jennings was a mediocrity.
Yes, yes, I agree that Wallace came up with the wrong answer in this extreme scenario, but it's telling that Fallows excoriates Wallace for failing to explore the ethical conundrum, and yet Fallows fails to explore it too.
Chris Wallace wouldn't have had any trouble coming up with the answer that Fallows regards as "right" here.
Free Republic has something on the new McDonald's logo, which consists of four stars and a big crescent moon. Four small stars and a big star are on the Chinese flag, whereas the crescent is often a Muslim signal. One of the small Chinese stars represents Chinese Muslims (Uighurs and Hui), so the McDonalds' logo represents Muslim dominance of China?
Obviously the CIA, which controls McDonalds, is looking beyond the present conflict with Muslims and preparing for the next conflict, which will be with China. So during the next two years you can expect a "Bush goes to Mecca" event.
You heard it here first.
11: The media never reports the real stories.
I'm very, very dubious about the supposed profundity of the Jennings/Wallace ambush hypothetical. There are a lot of issues and arguments raised by that hypothetical that would be hard for even Mike Wallace to cover in a concise rountable answer. I don't have time to watch the whole program, but it reeks of American exceptionalism that Ogletree (the interviewer) apparently didn't turn the question around for the officers: If you had a news crew from a hostile country (or perhaps a neutral one, e.g. Al Jazeera -- which didn't exist back then, of course) embedded with your platoon, and they successfully warned the objects of your ambush, what would you do to them, and would you consider their actions "honorable"?
It's ridiculous to even talk about "journalism" at this point of course. The gossip-mongering and power-toadying practiced by the corporate media is just paid advertising at this point. Even the tiniest move towards "objectivity" is met with calls of "treason!" For if it prospers...
15--
okay, so let's toss the first third of the article.
that's okay--i believe that matt y. and nicholas b. and others have been praising it primarily for the last two-thirds.
rountable (stet) -- it's a word I made up to describe the situation experienced by TV reporters surrounded by soldiers
15: I don't have time to watch the whole program, but it reeks of American exceptionalism
Perhaps so, but part of the power of the program is that they actually showed this kind of thing on TV back then. And that they don't now.
18: I remember that series in real-time - not just the Wallace-Jennings thing, but several other episodes. Very compelling, and yeah, not even PBS does this sort of thing any more.
Isn't the point of the exchange (for Fallows) that journalists aren't very reflective about their goals and their ethical obligations?
20--
sounds right. your "not very reflective" = my "shallow" in 8.
still--however apt those charges may be, they seem distinct from the charges raised in the later parts of the article.
it's not a huge point, i just wondered if there was an argumentative connection i was missing, or is it just 'and another thing i hate about journos is:"
20: If so, then it merely demonstrates that Fallows is a journalist. After all, he doesn't articulate why Mike Wallace is wrong, and he chooses to highlight a test that a notoriously unreflective journalist like Chris Wallace wouldn't have trouble acing.
Interestingly, he cites Absence of Malice and Broadcast News as examples of how journalists are portrayed negatively (and presumably accurately) in the movies. But both of those movies involved journalists who spent a lot of time reflecting sincerely on their proper roles.
OK, just finished. Fucking awesome tv. Further analysis will follow after digestion.
Maybe my moral compass is off, but the PBS exchange doesn't seem as contentious as Fallows makes it out to be. I suppose it's partly a matter of how you interpret body language. I sort of wish he hadn't included that section, because it makes me less inclined to trust him as a reporter; meanwhile I pretty much agree with the rest of the piece.
I dunno, eb, the "I feel utter contempt" part was genuinely intense.
And I think you're being too hard on Fallows, PF. The reason Jennings and Wallace look bad isn't that they don't have a great answer to what they'd do in case of an ambush, but that they both unhesitatingly said that they'd join the North Kosanese unit, but then when presented with a not-exactly-unforeseeable consequence of doing so, they were all "huh, that's a toughie, ain't it?" Unreflective.
The utter contempt part is certainly intense, but only from one guy (and both Jennings and Wallace say it's a fair response). Fallows makes it stand for the whole exchange, downplaying both Wallace's reluctance to say what he would do in that situation and Jennings' backtracking on his backtracking.
they both unhesitatingly said that they'd join the North Kosanese unit, but then when presented with a not-exactly-unforeseeable consequence of doing so, they were all "huh, that's a toughie, ain't it?" Unreflective.
Jennings actually begins his answer by saying it's a decision that you'd have to make before joining the North Kosanese. And Jennings, not Ogletree, brings up the possibility of Americans being in the ambush - Ogletree originally has only the South Kosanese in the hypothetical. He also points out that reporters - not Americans - did do similar things in North Vietnam, but no one follows up to ask what kinds of decisions they made.
by "did do similar things" I mean reported from North Vietnam; I don't know if ambush situations ever came up.
Yeah, fair enough, but Jennings, for the talk about making the decision first, doesn't hesitate to say he'd go behind enemy lines, and then waffles about what he'd do when he got there. Fallows point was just that the military guys had clearly thought about analogous situations so often that they had thoughtful answers, whereas the journalists were playing it by ear as the questions came up.
Wallace, when Maj Whast'shisface was talking about rescuing American journalists, should have interjected. He should have said, "Insofar as we entered a combat zone as neutral non-combatants, we expected to be treated as such, and would not expect any protection not granted to every civilian." But he didn't. Which lends force to both the Major's implicit charge of moral hypocrisy and ogged's analysis.
I read the book that sprang from the article relatively recently. I was disappointed. Fallows is a genuinely smart guy, and I've found that the articles of his which I've read have almost always been worth reading. But the book is a litany of sins and sinners, with some procedural pieties to pray towards.
29: Mike Royko, I think, came up with the best answer on this sort of thing in talking about the Janet Cooke scandal. (Janet Cooke was a Washington Post reporter who won a Pullitzer writing about a junkie who, among other things, was shooting up a kid with heroin. Turns out she made the stories up.)
She was able to get away with it in part because she promised confidentiality to the subjects of her stories. And confidentiality is a key professional value for journalists.
Royko's response to this was: When she came back to the editor with that story, the editor should've demanded the identity of the junkie, and called the cops.
That's the right answer. But it's hard in any profession to distinguish between professional ethics and plain-old ethics when the two conflict.
Also, funny how Lt. Torturer is treated as an extreme. In describing his position, the lieutenant is uncomfortable dealing with specifics: this is a modesty that is sorely missed. Throughout the course of the program, agreement with Lt. Torturer is treated as a reductio ad absurdium. The form and the content of this video depress the hell out of me. Thank you, ogged.
I'm just working my way through this video now and I think Scowcroft gets it right when he equates the moral oversimplification of Lt. Torturer (Downs) with Wallace's oversimplification.
But, in fact, unlike Downs, Wallace and Jennings both agonize over this. Jennings comes around to Wallace's view, and Wallace comes close to reversing himself.
And when the military fellow says they don't deserve military protection, they agree. Jennings and Wallace take their professional obligation as neutral observers very seriously, and they seem pretty reflective about it, and to mostly understand the implications.
I've seen a few others from this series. It really is bewildering to see what's become of public conversation in a very short time.
I read the Fallows book on the press back in college. I don't really trust my judgment from then to be what I'd think today, but I remember it being how Tim describes it in 31.
35:I watched many of these programs in real time too. I remember Barney Frank smashing Henry Hyde on abortion to this day.
As far as the decline in public discourse, IIRC, they were Sunday Afternoon stuff, with less than an American Idol audience intended or achieved. I remember my youth in the Midwest watching Vidal & Mailer & Galbraith & Muggeridge; you can still get such programming on C-Span 3, and the audience size is probably a little larger than it was then.
"If you show the philosopher-pundits, the public will watch them." No, they won't.
Not in this life.
Why, Tim?
It's because you're racist, isn't it?
It's funny because it's ironic!
It's not like rain on your wedding day, no, but sure, I guess it's ironic.
Speaking of old tv, I came across a couple of clips from the Kennedy Nixon debates yesterday. The full debates are here but I don't know if there's video.