Karl Rove, Wes Clark and "swiftboating"

I was skeptical from the minute I heard Wesley Clark dissed John McCain’s service record.
Sure enough. Another case of media quoting out of context.
These political days, you have to stay in skeptic mode 24-7.
The columnist Paul Krugman wants to blame Karl Rove, the man who surgically removed the civil tongue from the body politic.
It’s tempting. The Roveblitz career started with screwing up Alabama politics, especially in the state judiciary. Then the smear, innuendo and truth twists gave us an All America era that will require two more eras for un-spinning.
You can’t resume civility with the speed of a swiftboat.
Krugman lays out the connection between that dirty political operation of four years ago and how the McCain GOP presidential camp used the Wes Clark interview for a fake scandal. It’s a good column on the dirty dealing. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/04/opinion/04krugman.html?ex=1372910400&en=0e1bedcbb66a5840&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
But these tricks wouldn’t work if the hair trigger media didn’t rush to Web or air or print with the latest phony tittle-tattle. The emphasis is on gotcha and quicky.
The Rovian world is brought to you by its sponsor, shoddy journalism.
Those of us who teach the old fashioned brand of balanced reporting sometimes worry whether jobs will await our graduating students. Actually we ought to figure out a way to get practicing journalists back into our schools for refresher courses.
What General Clark, the hero of Kosovo as NATO commander and the West Point valedictorian and the Rhodes Scholar and the wounded Silver Star soldier of valor in Vietnam, actually said of John McCain’s also heroic military service was that it didn’t necessarily prepare him for the presidency.
McCain believes the totality of his lifetime in public service, including time in Navy jets and as a Hanoi POW, does prepare him. And that’s what the voters will decide in the contest against the Democrat, Barrack Obama. Since Obama didn’t serve at all in the military, the better comparison may be over judgment rather than uniform.
Quick trigger journalists and the pols who load their guns want to impact the outcome. It is the judgment of the Republicans and of McCain to use those rapid fire techniques.
The best way in the old school of press and politics would be to squeeze off a round of truth after checking the safety for facts rather than to fire from the hip with a jerk of the finger at the first glimpse of a target.
Context is everything. Clark was talking about strategic foreign policy thinking vs. Top Gun fingers on a joy stick.
I read one of his books, Waging Modern War. Impressive, thoughtful, prophetic. He also wrote Winning Modern Wars.
I interviewed Clark on the speaking tour he took in 2000 to position himself for a Democratic presidential run, which he has tried without success.
He’s an engaging, bright, even brilliant person who takes care with words and actions. Clark modeled the mantle of intelligent military statesman most people now view wrapped around the also talented frame of General David H. Petraeus, our best bet for getting out of Iraq with at least a small amount of honor.
So if one of those guys isn’t qualified to talk about strategic qualifications as better preparation than tactical assignment, no one is.
Now the sad thing is reporters will always throw the non-incident incident about Clark and McCain into “background” like a repeating rifle. That will be a pity if it costs future American public service the mind and talent of this strategic thinker, Wesley Clark.
Bad journalism is the gift that never quits giving.

The view of freedom from where it wasn't

Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...
from the First Amendment to the United States Constitution

Ex-patriot journalists can get very patriotic. They can see no reason to hide it for someone else's imagined allegiance to objectivity over allegiance to country. Try teaching the tenets of western journalism to students from throughout Eastern Europe and Asia, their countries still thawing out from the Cold War and the frigid embrace of Stalinism. Look at the faces of Kosovo refugees, of Albanians worried about home and family, of ethnic minorities in a time of ethnic cleansing.The American University in Bulgaria held classes in an old communist headquarters. The idea was to spread free thinking where none had been allowed. Yet the region was not very much advanced from the time of the gulag. Bulgaria had still locked political rebels away in secret places even after Russia had stopped. American journalists-turned-teachers built a distressing reputation for themselves when first allowed into Eastern European classrooms. Students had them pegged as preachers of do-as-we-do, who would go back home after giving no real, pragmatic advice for coping with governments that had no sense of our First Amendment. There can be no American-style press without basic press freedom. So it's useless to tell new journalists to copy us. That reality travelled with me to American University as a Fulbright professor in the secondary city of Blagoevgrad, named for the founder of the Bulgarian communist movement. I looked out on my multi-ethnic, multi-national class in a setting that made 1958 look modern. And I said to the students' relief, "All right, let's figure out how you can do the best journalism you can without getting killed. Even if you merely get thrown into jail, you're still not going to be able to publish the closest approximation to truth all journalists seek." The students loved my American practicality. And I had a renewed appreciation for the press freedom they lacked and we take for granted in the United States. The final exam consisted of 9/11, which occurred during my Bulgarian semester, 2001. Weeping Muslim and Christian and the pro-American and the nominally anti-American students and people embraced my family and me. My students in particular felt an evil blow fell on a people who understood freedom better than any. An ex-pat looking homeward at a time of tragedy from a vantage of the freedom-deprived can see patriotism quite clearly. It's a foolish journalist who pretends not to be affected by feelings for country, whose Constitution makes our profession possible.

The summer of the apprentice

My favorite newspaper intern was an Indiana University coed. She was so good, she gave our journeyman reporters a run for their money.
We mainstreamed our apprentices at every paper where I had a say. No hazing or sending for coffee or demeaning with assignments. At the end of her summer run, I asked the IU intern if she would consider applying for a reporting job after her upcoming senior year. Clearly she could do the work already.
Thanks, she smiled. She enjoyed the opportunity. But now that she had seen the inside of journalism, she planned to change her major to chemical engineering.
I laughed and still maintain that was a successful experience. She found direction.
Most interns stay in the profession after the first stepping stone.
The Dow Jones Newspaper Fund is in its 50th year of recruiting and placing interns. I was one of its recruits in, shall we say, the first half of its history.
The Chips Quinn Scholars program of the Freedom Forum is another valuable portal, especially for minority interns.
My own multicultural Knight Fellowship in Community Journalism includes an intern segment. That’s to ensure our master’s degree Fellows polish their practical skills before they graduate.
So I totally disagree with The New Republic article by Adelle Waldman, “Why internships in journalism are bad for young people and bad for the industry.” She writes about magazine as well as newspaper opportunities.
Her image is grunt work for slave wages by the privileged young on a career track. The internship culture works against diversity, merit and talent, to believe her.
Not in my experience. Not in my observation. Not in best practices.
TNR’s writer is correct that internships are a rite of passage in media. I don’t know of a profession without entry portals and practices.
I spent my long ago internship writing all the obits in east Arkansas, west Tennessee and north Mississippi. The state editor insisted I verify every detail in every death with a call to the survivors.
Grunt I did. But I came away with entry level respect for accuracy and fact-checks, missing even in some practiced journalists.
My experience also was directional, like the IU coed’s.
Sure am glad I didn’t go into chemical engineering, though.

Press agentry is the rough among the diamonds

Never trust anyone who uses “paradigm” in a sentence -- the instant sign of a phony.
So I agree with that one piece of advice from Sally Stewart, a communications consultant who wrote Media Training 101. She also gives eight rules to “Ace a Press Interview” in a Wired magazine how-to.
Talk from notes, know your interviewer, know you’re on the spot, know you’re talking to an enemy who hopes you trip up, expect pressure and so forth.
Odd. I don’t see anywhere in Sally’s list where you should tell the truth. The plain, simple, statement of fact made with knowledge and sincerity would be a thing of uncommon beauty in press interviews.
Public relations is the fork in the road not taken by journalism. PR seeks a persuasive goal. Reporters quest ever onward for the elusive approximation of truth.
The late R. W. Apple, extraordinary raconteur and remarkable reporter for The New York Times, once told a teaching colleague of mine they were not in the same business. The professor taught public relations.
Would that it were so, Johnny! The relationship is more like parallel universes. They often merge, because press agents and The Press often find they need each other to do their separate jobs.
Departments of media relations can make necessary connections between reporters and principals, usually hoping for a desired slant. In worst cases the press spokesman is treated as the ultimate source, guaranteeing the spin gets out there.
In my world of journalism, truth is the best defense. Veracity may be the unavoidable last refuge of scoundrels in PR.
A former State Department spokesman and normally no scoundrel at all, told me he never lied to reporters. He simply made sure he had no knowledge on hot, sensitive subjects. He felt “clean.” I felt uncomfortable with his strategically planned ignorance, an avoidance of hard truth.
I suppose the truth, like a gemstone, shouldn’t come to the surface easily. Candor, authenticity, fact would all lose value.
In the long wait for truth certain, we examine its substitute with skepticism.
That’s how I view Sally Stewart’s advice to the interviewed.
Then again, if she had advised them to be truthful, she'd have to call her recommendation a paradigm in public relations.
Automatically we couldn’t trust what she said.