Likelihood of Success

Talking heads on talking heads

Apr 5, 2007 Americana, Medialites

It’s disgraceful for a man seeking highest office, I think, to talk utter rubbish. And that is utter rubbish. It’s electoral propaganda. It is simply not true. No one in his right mind who has been to Baghdad believes that story.

That’s Allen Pizzey, CBS correspondent, talking about John McCain. He may be right. But why do we care what Allen Pizzey thinks? There are three possible reasons. You may have already thought about two of them. The one I am going to raise is probably so taken for granted that perhaps we have missed it.

Now, I am not going to make the point Glenn Reynolds made during the brief John Ware flair-up earlier this week — a point which, despite the subsequent correction of the record indicating that Ware did not heckle McCain at a press conference, is still a valid one for discussion:

“Heckling at a press conference is very rude, and wouldn’t be acceptable even from an opinion journalist (I wouldn’t dream of laughing in Nancy Pelosi’s face during a press conference). That said, isn’t it better when guys like Ware let their biases hang out, rather than embedding them in reports that are ostensibly objective?”Wouldn’t it be better still if they just did an honest job of doing, you know, their jobs?

Perhaps, though I grant that there is something to be said for letting it hang out, as Fox does, rather than pretending that CNN is not Fox’s mirror image. No, that is not my observation here. Neither is this, which I have already observed, but let’s quote Neo:

John McCain was once a media darling. The last time he ran for President, long ago and far away in 2000, the press couldn’t restrain itself from slobbering over him. . . .

So, what’s happened to the budding romance? To be blunt, McCain–once so bright-eyed and cuddly–is past his pull date.

Seven subsequent years of sloshing around in DC have meant that, if elected, he’d be the oldest President to ever win. And the years have not aged him like a fine wine (kicking around in Congress rarely does). Some of his pet projects–such as the McCain-Feingold bill–have turned out rather disastrously. And now, to top it all off, he’s saddled by being perceived as a sort of Bush Lite on the war in Iraq. It must be galling to him, since there didn’t used to be that much love lost between McCain and Bush.

So as much as there is to learn from John McCain’s media woes this week, I don’t mean to pile on and suggest (a) it’s terrible that journalists aren’t objective and (b) it’s really terrible when that lack of objectivity is its own mirror-image of the love once lavished on a favorite. So what is my point? It’s this: Why do we interview, profile and even listen to… reporters… in the first place? (This would not apply to the War dustup, of course.)

The opening quote is from Allen Pizzey. He’s a reporter. Yes, as Glenn says, he and the rest should just do his job. But evidently part of his job is to be interviewed by the guy who works at the next desk over, in this case CBS’s Brian Montopoli. Pizzey got an MBA from Sir George Williams University — uh, no, not exactly Harvard Business School — in Montreal. (This was in 1969, back when, the mainstream media tells us, all the people of principle were going wild in the streets.)

Thus we see that Pizzey has no special training in international affairs, military science, political science, or even police science, but he does have a lot of experience as a reporter. That experience, however — until recent times — was supposed to be capital that was drawn upon only for purposes of enhancing the credibility and enriching the quality of his reporting. Today, however, modern self-styled “professional” journalists, the self-described Fifth Estate and, yes, if you haven’t gotten the hint, Most Narcissistic Generation, consider it appropriate to turn reporters into “analysts” — plainly writing front-page opinion columns under the guise of “deep” news writing — or just plain interview subjects, i.e., “news’ themselves.

This phenomenon began with the evolution of “talking heads” programs from the basic format of old-time journy shows such as Meet the Press — where an actual personage or public figure met the press on a Sunday morning — to the shoutathons pioneered (to my recollection) by The McLaughlin Group Agronsky & Company, in which five or so columnists or reporters fairly distributed across the ideological spectrum gave competing opinions about fast-moving issues in the news. Though there was no “there” there, this format had the advantage of balance.

The novelty, however, of presenting the views of reporters as substantive news was profound. In the ensuing decades, we have seen a complete shift to the interviewing of reporters — originally an occasional colloquy between an anchorman and a field reporter — to the status of actual news and content.

Nowhere is this more intellectually dishonest, as a general rule, than on the sometimes amusing, but generally stomach-turning, Imus in the Morning program, where a former coke-sniffing, goofball Top 40 DJ has remade himself into a political sage and éminence grise in the Beltway by virtue of his early morning mutual sniffs with various Democrats in Congress, Clinton White House alumni plus the odd moderate Republican such as McCain or other anti-war maverick such as Patrick Buchanan — but mainly liberal news media personalities such as Tom Brokaw, David Gregory, Chris Matthews and Tim Russert, the last of whom Imus has elevated to the status of living saint of journalism. These are in some cases very thoughtful people, but Imus interviews them as if they were policymakers, experts or true insiders.

This concept of talking heads talking to talking heads has not only made a generation of preposterously pampered journalism (or, I suppose, business) school graduates into shapers of the message and would-be molders of policy and public discourse, but it has conveniently provided untold hours of news and information “content” to a media world largely watered down by expansion and always “on” whether or not anything is happening.

How marvelous it would be, however, if Tim Russert, Dan Rather, Allen Pizzey — and yes, Chris Wallace — would go back to being the reporter, not the interview subject. They could maintain the patina of journalistic objectivity, which of course is fraudulent but on which they still insist. Pizzey, after all, ended his interview by saying:

Now, no reporter is as objective as we’d like to be. Objectivity is a principle to which we strive to adhere, but we all have our own little biases – our upbringing, our personal political beliefs, whatever touches us in a human way. All of that affects our reporting. But I don’t think that we have a particular administration bias. I don’t care one way or another. I’m not even American. I just happen to work for Americans. I just do my job.

Which means nothing at all, but fine; if that is his job, let him do it, but must we hear about it as well as hear it? We would be better off if reporters reported on actual people doing actual things — perhaps not at the highest levels, because those people are hard to get when you’re doing news and information 24/7; but in fact the real news is not the prepared statements and lubricated spin of high-level politicians (and in this Pizzey was, of course, correct as it applies to the McCain visit to Baghdad). It is the doers, not the sayers.

And for that reason let the sayers go back to doing, especially when it comes to their own “takes” and “analyses.” The doing is the application of their expertise to find those real people making real news, to present real news cogently to the limit of their own version of objectivity, and to keep their frank opinions for the dinner table.

And the ones interviewing them in the first place? They should go back to celebrity journalism or, in the case of Don Imus, more stories about their adorable children and charitable works — or at least, in his case, interview his famous newsmaker friends, which sometimes pays off (and sometimes not) (UPDATE — and then some!) and not his famous news friends. They probably don’t really kick in big time to the ranch, anyway. Perhaps if politically influential entertainers such as Imus would ease out of these on-air luncheons we would see fwer journo-on-journo interviews — and maintain more reason to actually believe journalists when they really are trying to do their jobs.