Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse – that race relations in America couldn’t sink lower than the naked dichotomies revealed by Hurricane Katrina – it gets worse. We have William Bennett to thank for the latest nadir in the racial dynamic. Bennett, the former secretary of education with a presumably former gambling jones, was on talk radio Friday. With one ridiculous and monstrously damaging utterance, Bennett has probably done more to galvanize the African American vote against the Republicans – after having made slight inroads in the 2004 election – than any five of the likely Democratic contenders for the presidency in 2008.
Bennett, on his call-in radio show, “Morning in America,” was answering a caller’s question when he took issue with the recently-published idea that one reason the national crime rate is in decline is that abortions have increased in frequency.
“But I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down,” said Bennett, whose 1993 book, “The Book of Virtues,” reached #1,777 in sales on the amazon.com sales list the day after the comments.
Bennett went on to call that “an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.”
Check my previous word usage: What Bennett said wasn’t an utterance; the word “utterance” suggests something truly off the cuff, a brief spastic mumbling, a genuine conversational misstep. Bennett’s statement was a Statement, fully articulated, partially redacted and then repeated, with all the deliberation of an expression of one’s deeply-held values. He really believes this shit!
It of course goes without saying that Bennett’s immediate defense was the reflexive claim of being taken out of context, which begs the question of what context such a poisonous statement -- a perverse endorsement of the notion of the "criminal type" -- could possibly be taken in. As the days unfold this week, we can count on Bennett doing some kind of Mea Culpa Tour of the TV talk shows and interviews in newspapers – probably even a return to talk radio to, um, better explain himself. In spite of his constitutional antipathy to contrition, he’ll be singing “Kum Ba Yah” in some public place, sooner or later. You watch.
But there’s still no escaping the damage that Bennett’s folly has done to the Republican party’s bid to broaden its ethnic reach. African American voters turned out for the GOP in dramatically greater numbers in 2004. Even though much of that increase was due to an evangelical expression of revulsion at the rise of gay rights and the prospect of same-sex marriages, it was the kind of thing Republicans could point to as indicative of a change in the old animosities of the political past.
Now? Not so fast. It’s probable, all but certain that many African American voters were incensed by the slow federal reaction to the suffering after Hurricane Katrina; their perception of how the federal government responded ran counter to some of those same traditional, protect-the-least-among-us Christian values the GOP relied on in 2004. Bennett’s utero-genocidal commentary, and his elder statesman/rabid dog reputation within the Republican party, is the kind of disaster of perceptions that could help put the African American vote in play – certainly by the midterm elections next year.
The wild card is this emerging fiascette is the administration itself. Bennett has long been a champion of various conservative initatives, serving as education secretary in the Reagan administration and director of drug control policy under Bush the Elder. So people were understandably waiting for the official White House response to Bennett’s comments, since (1) there had to be one FAST and (2) the White House knew it. This was a gut check for the Bushies, if not a reality check (one of several over the past four years).
The administration responded with very weak tea on Friday. “The president believes the comments were not appropriate,” White House press secretary Scott McClellan said.
With those two words, the White House again demonstrates a lack of connection with the true gravity of events swirling around them. GOP strategists angling for the African American vote in 2006, and again two years later, have heroic work cut out for them. The phrase “damage control” doesn’t begin to express what’s necessary.
One would hope for some kind of amplification or enlargement of the tepid White House response. That reaction alone to Bennett’s comments will be perceived, right or wrong, as another barometer of the deeper Republican feelings about race in this country; it will say a lot about how big that hypothetical “big tent” of Republican inclusion really is.
And as sure as any Republican candidate running in 2006 will be seen as a proxy for the White House, the White House reaction to Bennett’s venom will be among the factors that may make or break the candidacies of any number of GOP hopefuls running for Congress next year.
Saturday, October 1, 2005
Friday, September 30, 2005
American Tsunami IV
After Jayson Blair and Jack Kelley, after Memogate and Dan Rather, after any number of missteps over the past three years, the American press came face to face with a new challenge to its primacy and pertinence to the American people. When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast one month ago yesterday, it unleashed a tide of young, eager journalists flooding the zone with the best of intentions, or at least the most uniformly competitive of intentions.
What’s emerged since then has occasioned a healthy clash of opinions on what worked right and what didn’t. As stories of this scale often do, they tell as much or more about the storyteller than they do about the subject of the story.
One of the better debates on how well the press handled the Katrina catastrophe was on the “News Hour With Jim Lehrer” this evening. Two of the participants synthesized both sides of an eager, aggressive press knee-deep in the kind of story that awakens their instinct for the fatalistic, the merciful and the bureaucratic. Their comments also illustrated the maddening Rashomon aspect of the press trying to comprehensively get its arms around a story literally exploding in real time as they reported it, an immediacy that yielded sadly astonishing errors that, again, said more about the teller of the tale than the tale being told.
Keith Woods, an editor with the New Orleans Times-Picayune and director of the Poynter Institute, said the blanket coverage of the Katrina disaster and its inescapable human tragedy revealed “a sense of passion, a sense of empathy, a sense of understanding that they were not telling an ordinary story – any more than the Sept. 11 attacks were an ordinary story.
“I like the fact that journalism understood the size of this story from the very beginning,” Woods said.
That was one part of the elephant. Hugh Hewitt, however, would have none of it. Hewitt, the founder of hughhewitt.com, a high-profile Web site of commentary, lit into Woods’ argument, and revealed another equally compelling side to the issue.
Hewitt lamented big media’s seeming inability “to dispel the lurid, the hysterical, the salaciousness of the reporting.” And in a smart repudiation of much of the media’s self-congratulations, Hewitt said the Katrina mess revealed “a wholesale collapse of the media’s own levees. They let in all the rumors, all the innuendo, all the first-person stories because they were caught up in their own emotionalism.”
And Hewitt – despite having what feels like the same predisposition toward punitive impulses for the press that’s common among social conservatives today – made maybe the telling point in the debate: journalists’ willingness to suspend the willingness to suspend disbelief.
“They reported panic-inducing, fear-inducing, hysteria-inducing mass-casualty events … the most squalid journalism you could imagine. …”
“People have to ask, why was the media so eager and willing to circulate these stories? Is it because [they] were dealing with the urban underclass, largely black, largely a community with which the elite media does not often deal, and as a result they were willing to believe stories about this community that they might not have given credence to, if it were a different situation?”
One suspects that the truth lies somewhere in the two not-quite extremes of their positions. It’s inescapable that the press, presented in just hours with the story of the year, a vast human drama, tried to hit the ground running on Katrina, saturating the region with reporters covering every vantage point, from the obligatory weather reporter leaning against Category 3 winds to the Gulf Coast embeds who hunkered down for days or weeks to look for the human dimension in depth.
Their zeal for getting the story, though, ran up against the need to get the story right. Stories from Katrina survivors took on a life of their own; gossip became exaggerations became rumors became statements from the mayor himself. The tales that emerged from the Superdome in New Orleans in the desperate hours of the evacuation began to sound like the stuff of a Brueghel painting, armies of the dead consuming the living, entrails aflame, blood running in the exits.
That the reality turned out to be far less apocalyptic raises the question of how such a disconnect between journalistic responsibility and journalists’ actions could happen. That’s the deeper question for reporters and editors going forward: Why report fictional drama, or at least drama you couldn’t verify with your own eyes, as the truth? Since when did journalists take anyone’s word for anything?
There were challenges to covering the Katrina story, a real-time news extravaganza if there ever was one. At one level American media got it: they understood intuitively that what was unfolding on the Gulf Coast was a national story of rare scale and perhaps unprecedented impact. But the media also overplayed its hand, milking a real drama by adding ninth-circle-of-hell innuendo that was unnecessary, and often a case of sloppy reporting that capitalized on the emotions of the moment.
It’s an object lesson for the next time. And there will be a next time.
What’s emerged since then has occasioned a healthy clash of opinions on what worked right and what didn’t. As stories of this scale often do, they tell as much or more about the storyteller than they do about the subject of the story.
One of the better debates on how well the press handled the Katrina catastrophe was on the “News Hour With Jim Lehrer” this evening. Two of the participants synthesized both sides of an eager, aggressive press knee-deep in the kind of story that awakens their instinct for the fatalistic, the merciful and the bureaucratic. Their comments also illustrated the maddening Rashomon aspect of the press trying to comprehensively get its arms around a story literally exploding in real time as they reported it, an immediacy that yielded sadly astonishing errors that, again, said more about the teller of the tale than the tale being told.
Keith Woods, an editor with the New Orleans Times-Picayune and director of the Poynter Institute, said the blanket coverage of the Katrina disaster and its inescapable human tragedy revealed “a sense of passion, a sense of empathy, a sense of understanding that they were not telling an ordinary story – any more than the Sept. 11 attacks were an ordinary story.
“I like the fact that journalism understood the size of this story from the very beginning,” Woods said.
That was one part of the elephant. Hugh Hewitt, however, would have none of it. Hewitt, the founder of hughhewitt.com, a high-profile Web site of commentary, lit into Woods’ argument, and revealed another equally compelling side to the issue.
Hewitt lamented big media’s seeming inability “to dispel the lurid, the hysterical, the salaciousness of the reporting.” And in a smart repudiation of much of the media’s self-congratulations, Hewitt said the Katrina mess revealed “a wholesale collapse of the media’s own levees. They let in all the rumors, all the innuendo, all the first-person stories because they were caught up in their own emotionalism.”
And Hewitt – despite having what feels like the same predisposition toward punitive impulses for the press that’s common among social conservatives today – made maybe the telling point in the debate: journalists’ willingness to suspend the willingness to suspend disbelief.
“They reported panic-inducing, fear-inducing, hysteria-inducing mass-casualty events … the most squalid journalism you could imagine. …”
“People have to ask, why was the media so eager and willing to circulate these stories? Is it because [they] were dealing with the urban underclass, largely black, largely a community with which the elite media does not often deal, and as a result they were willing to believe stories about this community that they might not have given credence to, if it were a different situation?”
One suspects that the truth lies somewhere in the two not-quite extremes of their positions. It’s inescapable that the press, presented in just hours with the story of the year, a vast human drama, tried to hit the ground running on Katrina, saturating the region with reporters covering every vantage point, from the obligatory weather reporter leaning against Category 3 winds to the Gulf Coast embeds who hunkered down for days or weeks to look for the human dimension in depth.
Their zeal for getting the story, though, ran up against the need to get the story right. Stories from Katrina survivors took on a life of their own; gossip became exaggerations became rumors became statements from the mayor himself. The tales that emerged from the Superdome in New Orleans in the desperate hours of the evacuation began to sound like the stuff of a Brueghel painting, armies of the dead consuming the living, entrails aflame, blood running in the exits.
That the reality turned out to be far less apocalyptic raises the question of how such a disconnect between journalistic responsibility and journalists’ actions could happen. That’s the deeper question for reporters and editors going forward: Why report fictional drama, or at least drama you couldn’t verify with your own eyes, as the truth? Since when did journalists take anyone’s word for anything?
There were challenges to covering the Katrina story, a real-time news extravaganza if there ever was one. At one level American media got it: they understood intuitively that what was unfolding on the Gulf Coast was a national story of rare scale and perhaps unprecedented impact. But the media also overplayed its hand, milking a real drama by adding ninth-circle-of-hell innuendo that was unnecessary, and often a case of sloppy reporting that capitalized on the emotions of the moment.
It’s an object lesson for the next time. And there will be a next time.
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
The great unraveling
Comes now the news that the word schadenfreude was invented for (at least if you work in Washington): Tom DeLay, House Majority Leader, lightning rod for the conservatives on Capitol Hill and a political in-fighter with the charm of a raw pit bull, was indicted today by a Texas grand jury on a charge of conspiring to violate political fundraising laws. He is the highest-ranking member of Congress to ever face criminal prosecution.
As such, and according to the GOP’s own rules in the House, DeLay was forced to resign his leadership position, at least temporarily. House Speaker Dennis Hastert named Missouri Rep. Roy Blount to take DeLay’s position.
In one swift move, the Republican ascendancy in American politics may be said to be about over; the party reveals itself to be in the disarray some have suspected for months; the Bush second-term agenda is in tatters, forced to address long-term projects like the War in Iraq as well as sudden distracting emergencies at home; and George Bush himself, weathering more storms than anyone in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, is seen for what he truly is: a lame duck with more than three years left in his presidency.
In an analysis today in The Washington Post, Dan Balz reports that the indictment "adds to the gathering headwind that now threatens the Republicans as they look toward the 2006 elections. Whether this becomes the perfect storm that eventually swamps the GOP is far from clear a year out. But Republican strategists were nearly unanimous in their private assessments yesterday that the party must brace for setbacks next year."
You can add the DeLay debacle to the growing list of Republican targets of opportunity. Last week, it was reported that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, long the picture of soft-spoken rectitude, was under investigation for selling stock in Hospital Corporation of America, a company started by his father, two weeks before the stock went south. The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced its intention to upgrade the Frist inquiry from an informal status to one with more teeth (like subpoena powers). Frist is said to be in talks with Martha Stewart on damage control.
Combining these two fresh disasters with the still-unresolved issue of possible administration involvement in the leak involving CIA agent Valerie Plame, and it’s obvious why the high-minded objectives of the president’s agenda for the second term – Social Security, extending the tax cuts, more aggressive prosecution of the war on terrorism – may well go begging until early next year.
To some extent, we’ve seen this before; this is part of the raucous but historically formalized kabuki on the Potomac, accusation and denial, charge and countercharge. The only curious development in all of this is why we’ve heard so little from the Democrats. Perhaps it was a matter of not wanting to go on the air shrieking with glee, but none of the Democratic leadership within the House or outside it – Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Russ Feingold – had anything to say when the indictment came down.
Maybe it’s just a matter of pacing themselves: there’s no telling how long this investigation of DeLay could last – almost certainly through the holidays, and no one’s paying attention to anything but the holidays then. It may be the Democrats are keeping their powder dry waiting for the spring, letting the Republicans twist in the wind until then.
The Bush administration may well try to pull a rabbit out of a hat, throwing the media spotlight off DeLay and Frist with a well-timed announcement of Bush’s pick #2 for the Supremes, maybe by the end of this week or early next. But with DeLay & Frist, Katrina & Rita, the Social Security drive stuck in neutral at best, gas prices climbing on a daily basis, the war grinding on and on in Iraq with no clear exit strategy, and some generals rejecting previously hopeful scenarios of a withdrawal early next year, what’s taking shape seems to be a great unraveling of the Republican fabric, a rise of scandal, arrogance, ineptitude and miscalculation leading to what’s likely to be a winter of serious discontent.
As such, and according to the GOP’s own rules in the House, DeLay was forced to resign his leadership position, at least temporarily. House Speaker Dennis Hastert named Missouri Rep. Roy Blount to take DeLay’s position.
In one swift move, the Republican ascendancy in American politics may be said to be about over; the party reveals itself to be in the disarray some have suspected for months; the Bush second-term agenda is in tatters, forced to address long-term projects like the War in Iraq as well as sudden distracting emergencies at home; and George Bush himself, weathering more storms than anyone in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, is seen for what he truly is: a lame duck with more than three years left in his presidency.
In an analysis today in The Washington Post, Dan Balz reports that the indictment "adds to the gathering headwind that now threatens the Republicans as they look toward the 2006 elections. Whether this becomes the perfect storm that eventually swamps the GOP is far from clear a year out. But Republican strategists were nearly unanimous in their private assessments yesterday that the party must brace for setbacks next year."
You can add the DeLay debacle to the growing list of Republican targets of opportunity. Last week, it was reported that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, long the picture of soft-spoken rectitude, was under investigation for selling stock in Hospital Corporation of America, a company started by his father, two weeks before the stock went south. The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced its intention to upgrade the Frist inquiry from an informal status to one with more teeth (like subpoena powers). Frist is said to be in talks with Martha Stewart on damage control.
Combining these two fresh disasters with the still-unresolved issue of possible administration involvement in the leak involving CIA agent Valerie Plame, and it’s obvious why the high-minded objectives of the president’s agenda for the second term – Social Security, extending the tax cuts, more aggressive prosecution of the war on terrorism – may well go begging until early next year.
To some extent, we’ve seen this before; this is part of the raucous but historically formalized kabuki on the Potomac, accusation and denial, charge and countercharge. The only curious development in all of this is why we’ve heard so little from the Democrats. Perhaps it was a matter of not wanting to go on the air shrieking with glee, but none of the Democratic leadership within the House or outside it – Harry Reid, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Russ Feingold – had anything to say when the indictment came down.
Maybe it’s just a matter of pacing themselves: there’s no telling how long this investigation of DeLay could last – almost certainly through the holidays, and no one’s paying attention to anything but the holidays then. It may be the Democrats are keeping their powder dry waiting for the spring, letting the Republicans twist in the wind until then.
The Bush administration may well try to pull a rabbit out of a hat, throwing the media spotlight off DeLay and Frist with a well-timed announcement of Bush’s pick #2 for the Supremes, maybe by the end of this week or early next. But with DeLay & Frist, Katrina & Rita, the Social Security drive stuck in neutral at best, gas prices climbing on a daily basis, the war grinding on and on in Iraq with no clear exit strategy, and some generals rejecting previously hopeful scenarios of a withdrawal early next year, what’s taking shape seems to be a great unraveling of the Republican fabric, a rise of scandal, arrogance, ineptitude and miscalculation leading to what’s likely to be a winter of serious discontent.
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Absence of identity
Faithful watchers of the network evening newscasts can't have escaped that feeling lately of being in a petri dish, as the object of scrutiny borne of an indulgence in the experimental. Things are hardly settled at the anchor desks of two of the traditional Big Three networks and, even with the increasing stratification of television viewers, that strikes a chord with many of those viewers, to say nothing of those advertisers hoping to occupy the eyeballs of those viewers for sixty seconds.
It had been in decliing health for years thanks to the multiplicity of choices available to television users in the new millennium; now, the end of the Three Wise Men format of broadcast news supremacy came with stunning swiftness. First, Dan Rather of CBS exited the stage, bruised by the "60 Minutes" scandal of the year before. Tom Brokaw of NBC News departed, avuncular and teary-eyed, shortly after Rather. And Peter Jennings, the elegant, affable, fallible, durable mainstay of ABC News for more than 20 years, died of lung cancer.
Thanks to a firm succession plan that was set in motion years ago, NBC News was well-prepared for Brokaw's official departure. Brian Williams had long been waiting in the wings, Brokaw's heir apparent. When Brokaw finally passed the baton, the peacock's transition proceeded without a hitch. But the other two networks are forced to deal with identity dramas central to television news in an increasingly competitive environment. Both ABC and CBS are to some extent victims of circumstances beyond their control; both are grappling with the ephemeral packaging and marketing of a face and identity that will resonate with viewers -- or not -- for years to come.
Jennings' long goodbye gave the network only months to plan for a successor, but it didn't lessen the apparently genuine shock when it happened. Jennings had given scrappy ABC an international flavor, a global panache that endured for a generation of TV journalism's defining moments. Now, it seemed, ABC was rudderless. A succession of pinch-hitters -- Charles Gibson, Elizabeth Vargas -- who had filled in for Jennings have continued to do so after his death.
ABC's absence of identity at the anchor desk is compounded by rumblings elsewhere at the network. Ted Koppel is engaging in his own craggy, scrapbook-style valedictory, as he prepares to step down as host of "Nightline" late this year. Most nights Koppel is in command, now as always. But lately -- and in strangely sudden ways -- "Nightline" morphs into something different. The network is testing different versions of the show, actually broadcasting them under the "Nightline" name. The "Nightline" formula has been tweaked by such guest hosts as Terry Moran and Chris Cuomo, and with edgier reporting from Jake Tapper, who joined ABC after a stint with Salon.
It's a risky strategy for as celebrated TV franchise; people like the familiar, they like being able to count on something. With no clear sense of the purpose for the "Nightline" experiment beyond field testing prototypes, and absolutely no sense of ABC's timetable settling on one or the other, the public might just turn and walk away. Jimmy Kimmel's not all that, you know.
CBS News' dilemma is something else again. Bob Schieffer, a veteran reporter for the network for more than 40 years, finally scrabbled his way to the top of the network news heap, with CBS naming him the anchor pro tem for CBS News after Rather's departure. By all estimations, Schieffer has more than earned a stint in the big chair; as reporter, "Face the Nation" host and symbol for folksy, dogged, accurate journalism, Schieffer deserved the anchor spot as the crowning touch on a stellar career.
But CBS has to balance the emotional with the practical; for all Schieffer's talents, it's fair to say (and he certainly would) that there's a lot more in the rear-view mirrror of his career than there is in front of him. CBS brass will do right by Schieffer; one might guess they'll give him the anchor post until the spring of '06; maybe, just maybe let him ride herd through the midterm elections in November, then gently usher him out, into perdition and "Special Reports" with a fat check in his hand. Just like Rather.
One way or another, it's all about the future. CBS is exploring various options. The new multi-intro format at the opening of the "CBS Evening News" gives viewers a flavor of who's doing what where and firmly reinforces the identity of the correspondents in the field. But the big question is: Who's the next anchor? Let the handicapping begin.
Culchavox's money, meager as it is, says that John Roberts is the true heir apparent. He's effectively acted as Dan Rather's deputy holding down the fort in New York while Rather was on assignment or on vacation. He's in the sweet spot for age, just gray enough to make advertisers comfortable without scaring off the younger demographic those advertisers are drooling for. John Roberts has been in the trenches as a reporter, as anyone who's seen him in verbal First Amendment fisticuffs in news conferences with Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan will attest. He's telegenic, well-spoken, physical, animal. It's Roberts' to lose.
Other names have circulated for some years. There's Scott Pelley, solid enough as a journalist, we suppose, but someone we can't look at without subconsciously thinking of Niles Crane on "Frasier." Harry Smith, another CBSer who's toiled at many stations of the cross. Ed Bradley, a veteran of "60 Minutes" and various correspondent roles over the years, has also been mentioned (but one suspects it's done out of deference to a long and impressive career rather than because anyone believes the suits at 30 Rock would really anoint Bradley as the first sole black news anchor of a television network that's not BET).
We'll see. Nature abhors a vacuum, and there are few vacuums like a network news program without a face. The absence of identity runs counter to people's perception of television as ordered, sensible if not logical, identifiable if not memorable. The sound you hear between now and, oh, say, February 2006 will be the sound of second shoes dropping, as two of the three broadcast network news divisions decide what they're going to be and who they're speaking to.
To invoke the medium's reigning cliche: Stay tuned.
----
Image credits: Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings: Public domain.
It had been in decliing health for years thanks to the multiplicity of choices available to television users in the new millennium; now, the end of the Three Wise Men format of broadcast news supremacy came with stunning swiftness. First, Dan Rather of CBS exited the stage, bruised by the "60 Minutes" scandal of the year before. Tom Brokaw of NBC News departed, avuncular and teary-eyed, shortly after Rather. And Peter Jennings, the elegant, affable, fallible, durable mainstay of ABC News for more than 20 years, died of lung cancer.
Thanks to a firm succession plan that was set in motion years ago, NBC News was well-prepared for Brokaw's official departure. Brian Williams had long been waiting in the wings, Brokaw's heir apparent. When Brokaw finally passed the baton, the peacock's transition proceeded without a hitch. But the other two networks are forced to deal with identity dramas central to television news in an increasingly competitive environment. Both ABC and CBS are to some extent victims of circumstances beyond their control; both are grappling with the ephemeral packaging and marketing of a face and identity that will resonate with viewers -- or not -- for years to come.Jennings' long goodbye gave the network only months to plan for a successor, but it didn't lessen the apparently genuine shock when it happened. Jennings had given scrappy ABC an international flavor, a global panache that endured for a generation of TV journalism's defining moments. Now, it seemed, ABC was rudderless. A succession of pinch-hitters -- Charles Gibson, Elizabeth Vargas -- who had filled in for Jennings have continued to do so after his death.
ABC's absence of identity at the anchor desk is compounded by rumblings elsewhere at the network. Ted Koppel is engaging in his own craggy, scrapbook-style valedictory, as he prepares to step down as host of "Nightline" late this year. Most nights Koppel is in command, now as always. But lately -- and in strangely sudden ways -- "Nightline" morphs into something different. The network is testing different versions of the show, actually broadcasting them under the "Nightline" name. The "Nightline" formula has been tweaked by such guest hosts as Terry Moran and Chris Cuomo, and with edgier reporting from Jake Tapper, who joined ABC after a stint with Salon. It's a risky strategy for as celebrated TV franchise; people like the familiar, they like being able to count on something. With no clear sense of the purpose for the "Nightline" experiment beyond field testing prototypes, and absolutely no sense of ABC's timetable settling on one or the other, the public might just turn and walk away. Jimmy Kimmel's not all that, you know.
CBS News' dilemma is something else again. Bob Schieffer, a veteran reporter for the network for more than 40 years, finally scrabbled his way to the top of the network news heap, with CBS naming him the anchor pro tem for CBS News after Rather's departure. By all estimations, Schieffer has more than earned a stint in the big chair; as reporter, "Face the Nation" host and symbol for folksy, dogged, accurate journalism, Schieffer deserved the anchor spot as the crowning touch on a stellar career.
But CBS has to balance the emotional with the practical; for all Schieffer's talents, it's fair to say (and he certainly would) that there's a lot more in the rear-view mirrror of his career than there is in front of him. CBS brass will do right by Schieffer; one might guess they'll give him the anchor post until the spring of '06; maybe, just maybe let him ride herd through the midterm elections in November, then gently usher him out, into perdition and "Special Reports" with a fat check in his hand. Just like Rather.
One way or another, it's all about the future. CBS is exploring various options. The new multi-intro format at the opening of the "CBS Evening News" gives viewers a flavor of who's doing what where and firmly reinforces the identity of the correspondents in the field. But the big question is: Who's the next anchor? Let the handicapping begin.
Culchavox's money, meager as it is, says that John Roberts is the true heir apparent. He's effectively acted as Dan Rather's deputy holding down the fort in New York while Rather was on assignment or on vacation. He's in the sweet spot for age, just gray enough to make advertisers comfortable without scaring off the younger demographic those advertisers are drooling for. John Roberts has been in the trenches as a reporter, as anyone who's seen him in verbal First Amendment fisticuffs in news conferences with Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan will attest. He's telegenic, well-spoken, physical, animal. It's Roberts' to lose.
Other names have circulated for some years. There's Scott Pelley, solid enough as a journalist, we suppose, but someone we can't look at without subconsciously thinking of Niles Crane on "Frasier." Harry Smith, another CBSer who's toiled at many stations of the cross. Ed Bradley, a veteran of "60 Minutes" and various correspondent roles over the years, has also been mentioned (but one suspects it's done out of deference to a long and impressive career rather than because anyone believes the suits at 30 Rock would really anoint Bradley as the first sole black news anchor of a television network that's not BET).
We'll see. Nature abhors a vacuum, and there are few vacuums like a network news program without a face. The absence of identity runs counter to people's perception of television as ordered, sensible if not logical, identifiable if not memorable. The sound you hear between now and, oh, say, February 2006 will be the sound of second shoes dropping, as two of the three broadcast network news divisions decide what they're going to be and who they're speaking to.
To invoke the medium's reigning cliche: Stay tuned.
----
Image credits: Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings: Public domain.
Thursday, September 22, 2005
American Tsunami III
What the country and the Gulf Coast have grown to fear over the past three weeks now seems to be less than a day from actually happening. Tropical Storm Rita has completed its transformation into a full-blown hurricane -- it's been wobbling between Category 4 and Category 5 for the last twenty-four hours -- and is now veering toward landfall at some point between the coastlines of eastern Texas and western Louisiana. Within the last few hours, in fact, unlovely Rita has taken a turn to the northeast, and as of now may well be tacking back toward New Orleans, sodden, beleaguered New Orleans. ...
Some are beginning to call the situation in the gulf “the Katrita phenomenon,” a conflation of hurricane names that’s more than just a cute way to describe the impact from two storms three weeks apart. Both Katrina and Rita, likely to be this hurricane season’s most cataclysmic one-two punch, will have a huge and resonant impact not just on the region but on the country as a whole.
You have to consider the human tragedy of the first hurricane; it's been all but impossible to come up with a firm body watch from that one, and a second storm maybe just as bad or worse is on its way. The suffering in the Gulf Coast is starting to take on the worst aspects of a new and tragic continuum in American life, a fabric of suffering so total and smothering we can't be sure where the pain of one event ends and another begins.
Then there's the financial cost. The analyst wags on Wall Street are already talking audibly about gas at upwards of $4 a gallon by Halloween – trick or treat! – and commodities brokers have gone on the air with dire forecasts about higher costs for everything from orange juice to coffee to any number of goods brought into the port of New Orleans, the city at the mouth of the Mississippi, the national carotid artery for commerce.
The Katrita effect may have created yet another casualty. The National Enquirer, that fount of journalistic integrity, has reported that the President of the United States and heretofore teetotaler-in-chief is said to be drinking again. The Enquirer, citing family sources that are unnamed for a damn good reason, reports that in the wake of the Katrina catastrophe and the still-chaotic situation in Iraq, President Bush recently downed a Texas-sized tumbler of whiskey.
One unnamed insider told the Enquirer it was something of an open secret that Bush had been indulging before he was caught by first lady Laura Bush, who yelled “stop, George!” as the commander-in-chief put one down the hatch. "The sad fact," one source said, "is that he has been sneaking drinks for weeks now. Laura may have only just caught him, but the word is his drinking has been going on for a while in the capital. He's been in a pressure cooker for months."
Another source, ominously, told the Enquirer that a family member "told me they fear George is 'falling apart.'"
One hopes the bad-Hamlet history of Richard Nixon doesn’t repeat. We want to believe this won’t lead to W rattling around the White House a la Tricky, strolling the halls at midnight, sloshing Glenlivet on the carpet, jabbering at the portraits on the walls of the Lincoln Bedroom. But we’ll see. At a press conference earlier this week, the president looked a mite green around the gills, unusually unhealthy for a man obsessed with workouts and fitness. There were probably other reasons as well.
This was the week that the fatality count for Americans in Iraq hit another of those numerical milestones. Nineteen hundred killed in uniform. For George Bush, a man said to take every American combat death almost personally, that bloody benchmark of the war was probably bad enough.
We shouldn't wonder at his surrender to temptation in the wake of Katrina; the president may have discovered the ways in which the separate and discrete come together, reveal their interconnectedness, in ways you didn't see coming. It took something the magnitude of an apocalyptic event, and its aftermath, to renew the debate about the war in Iraq and its human and financial cost. In an instant, all the abstract talk about homeland security took on another dimension. Katrina's impact wasn't terrorism per se, despite the similarity of effect when you watched the news: the flattened landscapes, the military's frantic dispersal of goods and presence; the eyes of locals in three states, vacant of hope.
But the Homeland Security Department, the agency created to at least oversee a reaction to such disasters -- having ingested the Federal Emergency Management Agency, that body directly responsible for the federal response -- was slow to react. And people, certainly some in the three states affected so far and more around the country, wondered how much better, how much more uniform and immediate the response to Katrina might have been if such a large percentage of America's citizen soldiers weren't half a world away doing another country's business, but not their own.
Some are beginning to call the situation in the gulf “the Katrita phenomenon,” a conflation of hurricane names that’s more than just a cute way to describe the impact from two storms three weeks apart. Both Katrina and Rita, likely to be this hurricane season’s most cataclysmic one-two punch, will have a huge and resonant impact not just on the region but on the country as a whole.
You have to consider the human tragedy of the first hurricane; it's been all but impossible to come up with a firm body watch from that one, and a second storm maybe just as bad or worse is on its way. The suffering in the Gulf Coast is starting to take on the worst aspects of a new and tragic continuum in American life, a fabric of suffering so total and smothering we can't be sure where the pain of one event ends and another begins.
Then there's the financial cost. The analyst wags on Wall Street are already talking audibly about gas at upwards of $4 a gallon by Halloween – trick or treat! – and commodities brokers have gone on the air with dire forecasts about higher costs for everything from orange juice to coffee to any number of goods brought into the port of New Orleans, the city at the mouth of the Mississippi, the national carotid artery for commerce.
The Katrita effect may have created yet another casualty. The National Enquirer, that fount of journalistic integrity, has reported that the President of the United States and heretofore teetotaler-in-chief is said to be drinking again. The Enquirer, citing family sources that are unnamed for a damn good reason, reports that in the wake of the Katrina catastrophe and the still-chaotic situation in Iraq, President Bush recently downed a Texas-sized tumbler of whiskey.
One unnamed insider told the Enquirer it was something of an open secret that Bush had been indulging before he was caught by first lady Laura Bush, who yelled “stop, George!” as the commander-in-chief put one down the hatch. "The sad fact," one source said, "is that he has been sneaking drinks for weeks now. Laura may have only just caught him, but the word is his drinking has been going on for a while in the capital. He's been in a pressure cooker for months."
Another source, ominously, told the Enquirer that a family member "told me they fear George is 'falling apart.'"
One hopes the bad-Hamlet history of Richard Nixon doesn’t repeat. We want to believe this won’t lead to W rattling around the White House a la Tricky, strolling the halls at midnight, sloshing Glenlivet on the carpet, jabbering at the portraits on the walls of the Lincoln Bedroom. But we’ll see. At a press conference earlier this week, the president looked a mite green around the gills, unusually unhealthy for a man obsessed with workouts and fitness. There were probably other reasons as well.
This was the week that the fatality count for Americans in Iraq hit another of those numerical milestones. Nineteen hundred killed in uniform. For George Bush, a man said to take every American combat death almost personally, that bloody benchmark of the war was probably bad enough.
We shouldn't wonder at his surrender to temptation in the wake of Katrina; the president may have discovered the ways in which the separate and discrete come together, reveal their interconnectedness, in ways you didn't see coming. It took something the magnitude of an apocalyptic event, and its aftermath, to renew the debate about the war in Iraq and its human and financial cost. In an instant, all the abstract talk about homeland security took on another dimension. Katrina's impact wasn't terrorism per se, despite the similarity of effect when you watched the news: the flattened landscapes, the military's frantic dispersal of goods and presence; the eyes of locals in three states, vacant of hope.
But the Homeland Security Department, the agency created to at least oversee a reaction to such disasters -- having ingested the Federal Emergency Management Agency, that body directly responsible for the federal response -- was slow to react. And people, certainly some in the three states affected so far and more around the country, wondered how much better, how much more uniform and immediate the response to Katrina might have been if such a large percentage of America's citizen soldiers weren't half a world away doing another country's business, but not their own.
Monday, September 19, 2005
American Tsunami II
On Thursday night, George Bush began the most concerted, most aggressive, most politically necessary exercise in damage control in the five years of his presidency. In full shirtsleeves mode, the president damn near marched across a verdant patch of Jackson Square in the sodden, saddened city of New Orleans and announced the start of as close to a Marshall Plan as we are likely to see in the recovery of the Gulf Coast.
The president spoke in broad strokes and general principles; he was late to take up his role as national clarifier, but by all accounts it was an effective speech, even, in some ways, a departure from the usual scripted blather. A president ill at ease with disciplining others fell on his sword Thursday night, accepting the responsibility for the disastrously haphazard initial response to the Katrina catastrophe. He went on, drilling down to get to the kernel of grand initiatives about to be unleashed: a Gulf Opportunity Zone spanning the three most affected states: Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi; and an Urban Homestead Act, by which tracts of federal land would be ceded to the survivors of Katrina free of charge, under condition of their building new homes on the sites.
The president had already committed upwards of $60 billion in immediate relief, with billions more certainly on the way. Somehow, from somewhere, the figure of $200 billion began to make the rounds of the media in the days after Bush's address. John Snow, the treasury secretary, dismissed that amount as errant, presumptious conjecture in an interview aired Saturday on Bloomberg News. And who could say for sure, with things unfolding on the ground on a daily basis -- and the hurricane season only half over?
But such ambitious ventures have foundered on the rocks of reality before, more often than not about something related to where the money goes and how widely the money gets to where it needs to go. The Sept. 12 Wall Street Journal Online reported that the Bush administration "is importing many of the contracting practices blamed for spending abuses in Iraq" to the Gulf Coast rebuilding effort, likely to be the biggest rebuilding effort in U.S. history.
"The first large-scale contracts related to Hurricane Katrina, as in Iraq, were awarded without competitive bidding, and using so-called cost-plus provisions that guarantee contractors a certain profit regardless of how much they spend," the Journal reported. With heavy hitters like Fluor and Bechtel aboard, can Halliburton be far behind? Probably not.
The administration's response to Hurricane Katrina, and the prospect for more damage if and when Tropical Storm Rita metastasizes into a full-blown hurricane itself, has led to more sharp reaction (read: piling on). The AP reported that Sens. John Kerry and John Edwards, the failed tandem of the 2004 presidential election, weighed in.
Kerry took aim with remarks he delivered at an address at Brown University. He said former FEMA Director and political suicide Michael Brown was to Hurricane Katrina “what Paul Bremer is to peace in Iraq; what George Tenet is to slam dunk intelligence ... what George Bush is to 'Mission Accomplished’ and 'Wanted Dead or Alive.’ ... The bottom line is simple: The 'we’ll do whatever it takes’ administration doesn’t have what it takes to get the job done.”
Edwards said Katrina and its aftermath made it clear that poverty is not a past-tense issue. “If the Great Depression brought forth Hoovervilles, these trailer towns may someday be known as Bushvilles,” Edwards told an audience at the Center for American Progress, a liberal D.C. think tank.
Kerry and Edwards' comments can't just be dismissed as the reflexive complaints of the guys who lost the election. At this point, their mistakes during the campaign pale in comparison with the Bushies' errors of judgment. Kerry and Edwards are in the slow process of regaining their bona fides; Sen. Hillary Clinton is in the process of slowly, quietly cultivating her own.
And one of the recovery efforts soon to be fully under way is that for the Republicans, the party with the most political damage to rebound from, and the most to lose in the midterm elections about thirteen-odd months from now.
No amount of effort from the spin merchants on the Potomac is liekly to change the popular perception -- present since Sept. 11 and recently confirmed in several opinion polls -- that the Bush administration and its proxies were asleep at the switch, again.
The American tsunami is proving to have all the characteristics of an artichoke, with the situation getting more and more serious, and more complex, as the layers of the initial tragedy fall away to reveal something heavier and scarier underneath. Tropical Storm Rita is brewing just outside the Gulf of Mexico, loitering with intent around the Florida Keys. It's frightening already to think about the worst that could happen on two fronts: from a storm that caught people unawares, and a governmental bureaucracy sporadically able to cope with the unexpected.
The president spoke in broad strokes and general principles; he was late to take up his role as national clarifier, but by all accounts it was an effective speech, even, in some ways, a departure from the usual scripted blather. A president ill at ease with disciplining others fell on his sword Thursday night, accepting the responsibility for the disastrously haphazard initial response to the Katrina catastrophe. He went on, drilling down to get to the kernel of grand initiatives about to be unleashed: a Gulf Opportunity Zone spanning the three most affected states: Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi; and an Urban Homestead Act, by which tracts of federal land would be ceded to the survivors of Katrina free of charge, under condition of their building new homes on the sites.
The president had already committed upwards of $60 billion in immediate relief, with billions more certainly on the way. Somehow, from somewhere, the figure of $200 billion began to make the rounds of the media in the days after Bush's address. John Snow, the treasury secretary, dismissed that amount as errant, presumptious conjecture in an interview aired Saturday on Bloomberg News. And who could say for sure, with things unfolding on the ground on a daily basis -- and the hurricane season only half over?
But such ambitious ventures have foundered on the rocks of reality before, more often than not about something related to where the money goes and how widely the money gets to where it needs to go. The Sept. 12 Wall Street Journal Online reported that the Bush administration "is importing many of the contracting practices blamed for spending abuses in Iraq" to the Gulf Coast rebuilding effort, likely to be the biggest rebuilding effort in U.S. history.
"The first large-scale contracts related to Hurricane Katrina, as in Iraq, were awarded without competitive bidding, and using so-called cost-plus provisions that guarantee contractors a certain profit regardless of how much they spend," the Journal reported. With heavy hitters like Fluor and Bechtel aboard, can Halliburton be far behind? Probably not.
The administration's response to Hurricane Katrina, and the prospect for more damage if and when Tropical Storm Rita metastasizes into a full-blown hurricane itself, has led to more sharp reaction (read: piling on). The AP reported that Sens. John Kerry and John Edwards, the failed tandem of the 2004 presidential election, weighed in.
Kerry took aim with remarks he delivered at an address at Brown University. He said former FEMA Director and political suicide Michael Brown was to Hurricane Katrina “what Paul Bremer is to peace in Iraq; what George Tenet is to slam dunk intelligence ... what George Bush is to 'Mission Accomplished’ and 'Wanted Dead or Alive.’ ... The bottom line is simple: The 'we’ll do whatever it takes’ administration doesn’t have what it takes to get the job done.”
Edwards said Katrina and its aftermath made it clear that poverty is not a past-tense issue. “If the Great Depression brought forth Hoovervilles, these trailer towns may someday be known as Bushvilles,” Edwards told an audience at the Center for American Progress, a liberal D.C. think tank.
Kerry and Edwards' comments can't just be dismissed as the reflexive complaints of the guys who lost the election. At this point, their mistakes during the campaign pale in comparison with the Bushies' errors of judgment. Kerry and Edwards are in the slow process of regaining their bona fides; Sen. Hillary Clinton is in the process of slowly, quietly cultivating her own.
And one of the recovery efforts soon to be fully under way is that for the Republicans, the party with the most political damage to rebound from, and the most to lose in the midterm elections about thirteen-odd months from now.
No amount of effort from the spin merchants on the Potomac is liekly to change the popular perception -- present since Sept. 11 and recently confirmed in several opinion polls -- that the Bush administration and its proxies were asleep at the switch, again.
The American tsunami is proving to have all the characteristics of an artichoke, with the situation getting more and more serious, and more complex, as the layers of the initial tragedy fall away to reveal something heavier and scarier underneath. Tropical Storm Rita is brewing just outside the Gulf of Mexico, loitering with intent around the Florida Keys. It's frightening already to think about the worst that could happen on two fronts: from a storm that caught people unawares, and a governmental bureaucracy sporadically able to cope with the unexpected.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
