Bookends
"Can you imagine us years from today, sharing a park bench quietly? How terribly strange to be seventy."
Paul Simon employed the name "Bookends" for a terrific album that asked a lot of questions about the state of America back in the sixties. I suspect I am not alone in having many short and long quotes from that album ever-present between the ears, e.g.:
Maybe you recall the album? No question that it deserved the many awards it won.
I'm working on a different sort of "bookends" here though.
On the dark bookend side there is this Russert-character, pretending at journalism though he's rarely if ever done anything resembling proper journalism and was fully-exposed with no underwear in the Plame-Libby affair. If he's lucky, his role as premiere sycophant for the Bush administration will be forgotten when his headstone is carved:
Last month, near the end of the Democratic presidential debate in New Hampshire, moderator Tim Russert -- known as "Washington's toughest interviewer" and perhaps the most influential journalist in America -- had one last chance to pin the candidates down with his legendary common sense, persistence, and no-bull style.
This is what he asked, first to Barack Obama: "There's been a lot of discussion about the Democrats and the issue of faith and values. I want to ask you a simple question. Senator Obama, what is your favorite Bible verse?"
When Obama finished his answer, Russert said to the other candidates, "I want to give everyone a chance in this. You just take 10 seconds."
Predictable banality ensued. A foreign visitor unfamiliar with our presidential campaigns might have scratched her head and said, "This is how you decide who will lead your country?"
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Russert is of course the definition of banal. He does nothing in the way of reporting or journalism. His job is entirely a "schtick," involving sucking up to power, taking care of the needs of those with the power, and beyond any other goals never-ever risking the chance of posing a threatening question to a person-in-power.
"Poseur" would be the kindest possible description for Tiny Tim.
The other end of the bookcase, where be folks who are actually capable of being admired, involves tonight one Walter Lippmann. I ran across this terrific Blumenthal post commemorating the re-publication of a classic Lippmann book dissecting the desecration of American journalism. Try this Lippmann on for size:
"For in an exact sense the present crisis of western democracy is a crisis of journalism."
No shit, Sherlock!
Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) was the most influential American journalist of the 20th century. Born into one of the German-Jewish "Our Crowd" families of New York City, he began his career as a cub reporter for Lincoln Steffens, the crusading investigative journalist, then became one of the original editors of the New Republic, and was recruited to write speeches for President Woodrow Wilson and help formulate his plan to make the world "safe for democracy," the Fourteen Points. In the 1920s, Lippmann became editorial director of the New York World, then a major daily newspaper with a Democratic orientation. When it folded, the New York Herald Tribune offered him a column, which, with the Washington Post, served as his journalistic base for almost 50 years.
Lippmann wrote books on philosophy, politics, foreign policy and economics. In one of them, "The Cold War," he early defined the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union while offering penetrating criticism of U.S. policy as a "strategic monstrosity" that would lead to "recruiting, subsidizing and supporting a heterogeneous array of satellites, clients, dependents and puppets," inevitably forcing poor choices of having to either "disown our puppets, which would be tantamount to appeasement and defeat and the loss of face," or else back them "at an incalculable cost on an unintended, unforeseen and perhaps undesirable issue." Lippmann's prophetic warning was realized in the Vietnam War, which he opposed at considerable cost to his personal and political relationships. (Anyone interested in Lippmann, or American politics, should read Ronald Steel's magisterial biography, "Walter Lippmann and the American Century.")
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The standards of objective journalism Lippmann painstakingly advocated in the early twentieth century, and which were adopted as ideal goals by major news organizations in midcentury, have long since been traduced, trampled, and trashed. The journalistic world before the Vietnam War was, to be sure, hardly a golden age. The pliability of much of the national press in the face of Senator Joseph McCarthy's red-baiting smear campaigns occurred in the middle of those happy days. Golden ages glitter only in retrospect as viewed from the junkyard of the present. Nonetheless, there has been a steady degeneration of the press over the past few decades, involving both the willful self-destruction of hard-won credibility and the rationalization of dull incomprehension as invulnerable self-importance. The gap between Lippmann's ideals and present realities is one of the major reasons why Liberty and the News remains so pertinent -- and so troubling -- nearly ninety years after its publication.
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Paul Simon employed the name "Bookends" for a terrific album that asked a lot of questions about the state of America back in the sixties. I suspect I am not alone in having many short and long quotes from that album ever-present between the ears, e.g.:
save the life of my child!
it took me four days to hitchhike from Saginawsomething tells me it's all happening at the zoo
why do we keep fooling ourselves, the game is overwe smoked the last one an hour ago
monkeys stand for honesty, giraffes are insincere, and the elephants are kindly but they're dumbno good times, no bad times, just the New York Times
and the sky is a hazy shade of yellow
Maybe you recall the album? No question that it deserved the many awards it won.
I'm working on a different sort of "bookends" here though.
On the dark bookend side there is this Russert-character, pretending at journalism though he's rarely if ever done anything resembling proper journalism and was fully-exposed with no underwear in the Plame-Libby affair. If he's lucky, his role as premiere sycophant for the Bush administration will be forgotten when his headstone is carved:
Last month, near the end of the Democratic presidential debate in New Hampshire, moderator Tim Russert -- known as "Washington's toughest interviewer" and perhaps the most influential journalist in America -- had one last chance to pin the candidates down with his legendary common sense, persistence, and no-bull style.
This is what he asked, first to Barack Obama: "There's been a lot of discussion about the Democrats and the issue of faith and values. I want to ask you a simple question. Senator Obama, what is your favorite Bible verse?"
When Obama finished his answer, Russert said to the other candidates, "I want to give everyone a chance in this. You just take 10 seconds."
Predictable banality ensued. A foreign visitor unfamiliar with our presidential campaigns might have scratched her head and said, "This is how you decide who will lead your country?"
-clip-
Russert is of course the definition of banal. He does nothing in the way of reporting or journalism. His job is entirely a "schtick," involving sucking up to power, taking care of the needs of those with the power, and beyond any other goals never-ever risking the chance of posing a threatening question to a person-in-power.
"Poseur" would be the kindest possible description for Tiny Tim.
The other end of the bookcase, where be folks who are actually capable of being admired, involves tonight one Walter Lippmann. I ran across this terrific Blumenthal post commemorating the re-publication of a classic Lippmann book dissecting the desecration of American journalism. Try this Lippmann on for size:
"For in an exact sense the present crisis of western democracy is a crisis of journalism."
No shit, Sherlock!
Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) was the most influential American journalist of the 20th century. Born into one of the German-Jewish "Our Crowd" families of New York City, he began his career as a cub reporter for Lincoln Steffens, the crusading investigative journalist, then became one of the original editors of the New Republic, and was recruited to write speeches for President Woodrow Wilson and help formulate his plan to make the world "safe for democracy," the Fourteen Points. In the 1920s, Lippmann became editorial director of the New York World, then a major daily newspaper with a Democratic orientation. When it folded, the New York Herald Tribune offered him a column, which, with the Washington Post, served as his journalistic base for almost 50 years.
Lippmann wrote books on philosophy, politics, foreign policy and economics. In one of them, "The Cold War," he early defined the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union while offering penetrating criticism of U.S. policy as a "strategic monstrosity" that would lead to "recruiting, subsidizing and supporting a heterogeneous array of satellites, clients, dependents and puppets," inevitably forcing poor choices of having to either "disown our puppets, which would be tantamount to appeasement and defeat and the loss of face," or else back them "at an incalculable cost on an unintended, unforeseen and perhaps undesirable issue." Lippmann's prophetic warning was realized in the Vietnam War, which he opposed at considerable cost to his personal and political relationships. (Anyone interested in Lippmann, or American politics, should read Ronald Steel's magisterial biography, "Walter Lippmann and the American Century.")
-clip-
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The standards of objective journalism Lippmann painstakingly advocated in the early twentieth century, and which were adopted as ideal goals by major news organizations in midcentury, have long since been traduced, trampled, and trashed. The journalistic world before the Vietnam War was, to be sure, hardly a golden age. The pliability of much of the national press in the face of Senator Joseph McCarthy's red-baiting smear campaigns occurred in the middle of those happy days. Golden ages glitter only in retrospect as viewed from the junkyard of the present. Nonetheless, there has been a steady degeneration of the press over the past few decades, involving both the willful self-destruction of hard-won credibility and the rationalization of dull incomprehension as invulnerable self-importance. The gap between Lippmann's ideals and present realities is one of the major reasons why Liberty and the News remains so pertinent -- and so troubling -- nearly ninety years after its publication.
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posted by Sir Gumbo at 10:15 PM
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