Play Nice With The Repugs?

I’m going to piggyback on an Atrios post all over the place here, but I have to provide my take on this.

(Here are a couple of notes. First, I link to other sites where they toss around “F” bombs and other profanity with no hesitation. Personally, I think that language should only be used in the most extreme circumstances, and I know it turns off people who aren’t regular readers of a particular site. That’s as it should be. However, I also believe that other people’s content shouldn’t be censored on that basis because they may have something quite important and/or interesting to say. Second, there’s a lot of “blogger shorthand” out there referring to people by name or commenters in general. As nearly as I can tell, “Tweety” is Chris Matthews of MSNBC, and “Pumpkinhead” and “Less Than Large Russ” is Tim Russert of “Meet The Press.” This information will help as you read the “First Draft” post.)

A journalism professor at the University of Maine named Michael Socolow wrote a column for the Boston Globe about how the “conflict” between Bushco and the MSM press corps is supposedly turning off viewers. In a related vein, Marty Kaplan of The Huffington Post authored this great piece yesterday about the fire that Dan Froomkin, the ombudsman for The Washington Post, is taking for trying to hold Dubya to the same measure of accountability as the one to which his predecessors were held.

As the blogger at First Draft stated so brilliantly (you can link to Socolow' column from that post), the problem isn’t the supposed conflict between Bushco and the press. The problem is the exact opposite of what Socolow describes.

I also want to point out that I was fortunate to be taught by some great journalism instructors at Temple University. One was a former Philadelphia police office who was severely wounded in a gun battle, recovered, went back to school and got his degree in the business, and became an accomplished reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer who recently retired. Another was a reporter and editor who won a Pulitzer prize for his coverage of the Attica prison riot in 1971. These guys saw more conflict than anything that could be imagined by our dear MSM cousins; I can assure you that they never retreated when it came to reporting about it, and they rightly expected their students to do the same thing.

With that in mind, let’s recall some moments of T.V. journalism where there was courageous reporting of one type or another. Listing them all could make this post ridiculously long, but there are two that come to mind immediately.

One was a little dustup between President Richard Nixon and Dan Rather. As noted in a Wikipedia article on Rather:

During the presidency of Richard Nixon critics accused Rather of being unfair in his coverage. At a Houston, Texas news conference in 1974, Nixon fielded a question from Rather, still CBS's White House correspondent: "Thank you, Mr. President. Dan Rather, of CBS News. Mr. President..." The room filled with jeers and applause, prompting Nixon to joke "Are you running for something?" Rather replied "No, sir, Mr. President. Are you?"

CBS apparently considered firing Rather and its news president met with administration official John Ehrlichman to discuss the situation. According to NBC's Tom Brokaw, the network considered hiring him as its White House correspondent to replace Rather. But CBS' plans to do so were scrapped after word was leaked to the press.

I can remember another occasion with Nixon where he wandered off, so to speak, in response to a reporter's question (these days, a "handler" would have chided him for going "off message," but that's assuming anyone could have "handled" Nixon), and ended up making what came to be known as his "I Am Not A Crook" speech. What was sad was that there was a lot of truth in what he said, but sadder still was the fact that he was truly oblivious concerning the context in which he was making his remarks. It was funny to watch the quizzical looks on the faces of the reporters also. It ended up being an illuminating moment of a sort for Nixon, it was great theater for TV, and it probably got good ratings also.

I can also recall a moment on “60 Minutes” where Mike Wallace interviewed former president Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalyn after Carter’s loss in the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan. During the interview with Rosalyn, Wallace noted to her that she wasn’t saying much in response to his questions and acted angry at him. Wallace asked her about it and she said curtly that she had been taught not to say anything at all about someone if there was nothing good to be said. The anger she directed at Wallace through her facial expressions and body language was palpable, causing Wallace to exclaim, “oh my.”

This is how reporters are supposed to do their jobs. As First Draft noted so well, they are supposed to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” to quote John Kenneth Galbraith.

Also, concerning Mike Wallace, I couldn’t help but note the response of his son Chris to Wallace’s rebuke of Dubya recently. That apple has certainly fallen miles from that tree, hasn’t it?