Not too fond a farewell for Helen and Larry

Am I the only one in America who thinks it's perfectly okay for Larry King to sit at home instead of sitting on his set at CNN?

I have nothing against the gentleman.

But I have nothing especially for him either.

He's not a journalist. He's a habit.

And let's don't confuse the status of endurance with national icon. Larry King is no Cronkite or even a Brokaw.

He simply spent a long time in TV. He talked with a lot of people. Isn't that nice?

Nancy Reagan called him on the air to say she'd miss him. Sweet. They threw on-air kisses to each other.

At least he's going out on his own terms, although with declining popularity.

That's better for him than Helen Thomas's hasty retirement amid catcalls for something she said.

It's hard to imagine Larry King saying anything that could offend in that degree. But I almost wish he would go out in rage rather than smoochiness with any former First Lady.

Oh, I'm not saying a journalist is not a journalist unless he or she is a contrarian. That didn't work for Ms. Thomas, the fixture at the White House.

But I am saying journalism and journalists ought to reinvent themselves several times before we let them get away from us.

Fifty years in a Executive Branch briefing chair with your name on it and 50,000 broadcast interviews are exercises in longevity, not in themselves evidence of journalistic contribution.

Goodbye, Helen! Goodbye, Larry!

It was nice to know you.

Yet not so nice we can't let you slip away so the innovators can take your places.

Ever on Sunday: Talk shows are not immune from the expectation of good journalism

It is simply good journalism to give viewers relevant 

background about a news source before awarding 

that talking head access to the national ear.

Sunday is the day of rest. But if you're gonna do journalism, you darn well can stir yourself to do it right. That means background, perspective, needed information to parse what those guest talking heads are saying on the talk shows.

First it was NBC's Meet the Press with Tom Brokaw as host. Then it was CBS's Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer. Finally it was a replay by CNN's Wolf Blitzer with "the last word in Sunday talk."

All brought U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., onto their languid, day-of-rest airtime to oppose a bailout for the Big 3 automakers in Detroit. None of the talk show hosts apparently did their homework about the ax-grinding Mr. Shelby. 

Maybe the senator is right. Maybe he's wrong. It's an important national debate regardless.

So is knowing that Sen. Shelby represents the state that calls itself the "New Detroit" with a foreign accent thicker than his Southern drawl.

Shelby's home base is Tuscaloosa, Ala. –– just up the road a piece from the new Mercedes M Class plant. 

Follow Interstate 20 east past Birmingham, and you come upon the Honda plant for Odyssey and its other vehicles manufactured in Lincoln, Ala.

Or turn south onto Interstate 65 to see the new Hyundai plant outside Montgomery.

Cruise those Interstate corridors for the supply firms, the sub-contractors and enhanced dealer showrooms that complete the Dixie-Detroit manufacturing base that would benefit from a decline in the economic prospects of the original car-building capital.

Alabama achieved its status by opposing union work forces with Right to Work Laws and providing generous financial bonuses to the overseas carmakers for locating inside its borders.  

Is Sen. Shelby so parochial as to adopt a position just to protect, enhance and extend his own state's economy? Well, let's save that discussion for a day when we also want to decide whether the pope is a Roman Catholic.

But I'll do what the network journalists did not: I will divulge in fairness that Shelby is being consistent with his opposition to bailouts generally and voted against the original $700 billion legislation to come to the aid of Wall Street.

I am not, however, debating his consistency. 

I am declaring it is simply good journalism to give viewers relevant background about a news source before awarding that talking head access to the national ear.

At stake is the franchise for the whole Sunday morning talk phenomenon.

 

 

A license to dance

Sophisticated dancers who glide in smooth, fluid syncopation vs. the jerky helter-skelter of pelvic thrusts and flaunted attitude by the newcomers and outliers.

The First Amendment makes a lovely invitation to the journalism ball.

Ask any dancer in the professional news business.
Trouble is, that same person can be a positive busybody about anyone else’s call to be a self-styled journalist.
I’m a constitutional purist about free expression, declared retired Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie last week. He said government shouldn’t license journalists.
But it was no more than a few minutes later in his speech at the Nieman Foundation for Journalists at Harvard. Downie said Lou Dobbs shouldn’t be allowed to broadcast his CNN news program because of his notorious stand against immigration.
Time and again prominent news executives do this two-step. No one can tell them how to behave journalistically. But they would deny symbolic licenses to other practitioners.
Hypocrisy trips merrily at a faster pace in the current splintering of the information industry. Print, cable, online and broadcast standards dance to different sheet music in which a main step is finger pointing at the professional practices of other dancers on the floor.
The boogie beat of citizen journalism especially drives the foxtrot crowd of mainstream media into digital harrumph.
Look, it’s like this: Journalism is either free of interference or it isn’t.
I prefer free.
If you enforce standards of practice for the street dancers, you have to do the same in the ornate ballrooms of news too.
It happens that quite a few amateurs trip themselves up in their own private Roselands. That stumblebum effect is supposed to lower the public’s opinion of all journalists. Such bad ethics shouldn’t be allowed, sniff the slow-dancers.
Yes, well, their disdain takes for granted public opinion of journalism could get much lower.
It’s just as likely the public will award the trophy to seasoned, sophisticated dancers who glide in smooth, fluid syncopation vs. the jerky helter-skelter of pelvic thrusts and flaunted attitude by the newcomers and outliers.
The marketplace of public opinion is licenser enough.
Regardless, it doesn’t matter. Not when you play the constitutional music of the law of the land.
You’ve got to open the floor to the trip-foot amateur and the rowdy intruder if they want to go dancing with the stars.

The winds of GOP politics

I'D HATE TO BE London, matching Beijing’s show at the Olympics.
I’d hate to be the Republican National Convention, matching the DNC in Denver.
I’d hate to be John McCain, matching Barack Obama’s acceptance speech. That’s like swimming against Michael Phelps.
* * *
THEN THERE'S the George Bush problem. Let us count all the ways and degrees of dislike between the President and Sen. McCain who will be the RNC nominee to succeed him.
Yet somehow they have to share the convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul.
When you read Peter Baker’s NYT Magazine piece “His Final Days,” you feel like McCain should stay in one of the Twin Cities and Bush in the other. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/magazine/31bush-t.html?ex=1377835200&en=5c7509e2226dd6cc&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
(It’s curious: The online New York Times changes the headline to “The Final Days,” as though a fastidious copy editor thought better of hinting at the president’s physical mortality and not merely his political demise. That’s a squeamish sensitivity, if so).
McCain doesn’t like wearing the failed Bush presidency around his neck while campaigning against Obama. Bush worries the senator will lose anyway, failing to validate his two terms in office for history.
Baker, who is writing a book on the Bush years, says McCain wonders if the president, who defeated him cruelly in South Carolina for nomination eight years ago, will beat him again due to that legacy.
* * *
BUT WAIT! HERE comes Gustaf.
He’s a terrifying hurricane, landing in a terrorized Gulf Region still crippled by Katrina and the recovery, one of President Bush’s notable failures.
So Bush will stay at his post and perhaps miss the convention where he was expected to make an opening night speech.
Let us not be cynical and say it’s a convenient way for the McCain convention to avoid the Bush problem. And for Bush to avoid his McCain problem.
Willing suspension of disbelief in politics – as in theater – lets us think the president really is needed at the head of relief efforts.
Never mind this is no detail president, that he merely signs disaster declarations with near ceremonial routine and that national concerns never got in the way of his Texas vacations.
* * *
FOR THAT MATTER the whole Republican conclave may be truncated or rewritten around Gustav. Can’t appear to be throwing a party when people are climbing out of the rubble.
A shorty convention might even spare Sen. McCain the comparison between the GOP production and the Beijing style production values of the Democrats.
Chief among the items of disequilibrium will be his choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as vice-presidential candidate vs. Sen. Obama’s widely hailed selection of Sen. Joe Biden.
If you squint real hard at the governor, you can see her maybe as a possible nominee for Secretary of the Interior. She has natural resources, Native Americans and national parks in her state although only two years in office.
Biden endured the full scrutiny of his own presidential candidacy and a national and foreign policy experience larger than Gov. Palin’s largest state in the Union.
Still, she seemed to be getting a pass from commentators on the first NBC Meet the Press after McCain named her as running mate. The exception was not strictly speaking a journalist but the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.
(That show sure does miss its late moderator, Tim Russert).
Ms. Goodwin sees the dice throw as dangerous for the ticket, since we look at McCain’s age and wonder if he has picked a successor in office we would pick to be our president.
The media might well ask on behalf of us all if we want a president who shoots craps in the first place.
But the roundtable graciousness on Meet the Press suggests the Republicans may be treated to a journalistic easy ride. Toughness, move over for equanimity.
* * *
SO MAYBE THE Gustaf interlude will cover sins of omission by the Press too.
CNN anchor Anderson Cooper announced he would choose the Gulf over the Twin Cities, when the hurricane hits the region so close to its third anniversary after Katrina.
If an entourage of the Press deserts St. Paul for Gustafland, political reporters will get a similar pass the GOP will enjoy for a scaled down convention.
They won’t have to display the same scrutiny of Gov. Palin as the near hostility shown for instance to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton until she acquitted herself so well at the Democrat’s convention.
And they won’t have to display the same skepticism of Sen. McCain they used for Sen. Obama until he gave a soaring acceptance speech watched by more people than watched the opening of the The Games in Beijing.
The Londontown of politics may get a windbreak for everyone concerned.

Who's in control of the political story?

Media are so embarrassingly easy to manipulate.
Barrack Obama did it just by saying he would announce his veep pick by text message.
He immediately set up anticipation – the key ingredient in sex and politics.
The chase ensued.
An somewhat important announcement took on even greater weight, simply because reporters fell for the old “hard to get” act.
When some outlets – notably CNN – ferreted out the name of Joe Biden in the first hours of Sunday morning, the rooster crowing sounded like sexual conquest.
Why should Sen. Obama care? His campaign collected all those text message addresses and got a little hype over the VP process as a bonus.
Sen. John McCain lost his title of maverick when he got plain old grumpy instead of being the fun old curmudgeon. But his campaign can still draw media attention away from the opposition just by having something cute to say.
So the new Obama press kit tool, according to media columnist David Carr in The New York Times, is to go over the heads of reporters. The Web gives the Democratic campaign direct access, filtering out the press.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/25/business/media/25carr.html?ex=1377316800&en=6c2039e448c46775&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
There’s an easy remedy: Reporters could start reporting the substance of the electorate’s concerns. That would be jobs, inflation, world peace – you know, everything that gets passed over while political types dance around the fringes of campaign process, rumor and twitter.
Then Obama and McCain both would have to meet the press on the media’s home field advantage.
The press would reclaim its truer role in politics.
And the public wouldn’t see the media at their most embarrassing.

What media mean by Olympian glory and what that says about war and politics

Russia picked a fitting time for her little national aggression against Georgia – the Olympics.
What two better examples of nationalism run amok can you name than war and The Games?
When the media do their hype of combat to increase patriotic audiences, we call it “yellow journalism.”
Track and field and swim frenzy by reporters and editors and producers deserves as much scorn.
USA Today started the patriotic frenzy with banner headline worry over the “gold mining” on opening day.
CNN closed The Games two weeks later by fretting the USA merely had a higher overall medal count. China won more gold.
No less a legendary sports writer than Grantland Rice reminded us The Great Scorer will come not to write who won or lost but how we played the game.
Nowadays we are derided if we merely admire the lithe, smooth bodies of dedicated athletes doing their best in the global glare to make their athletic mark, any mark.
Nope. Gotta bring home the gold. Or don’t bother
Dorothy Rabinowitz, the Pulitzer Prize winning columnist in The Wall Street Journal, condemned those of us mesmerized by the Olympics for their own value and not for “the national interest.”
She labeled as “Olympics-babble” the view that humanity has a higher standing than nationalism.
That WSJ scold especially chided actor Morgan Freeman for his warmly human Visa ad. Freeman called on us to root for athletes – not for the flag on their backs but “simply because they are human and we are human and that when they succeed, we succeed.”
Only the prophet Isaiah said it better when he pronounced we will study war no more.
The value of the Olympics is to glorify youth in peace instead of deadly conflict. Sports jingoism by the press cheapens The Games into a way to bide time until a real war comes along.
Armed conflict will come soon enough, as Russia proved. One reason is nationalism in the media.
Would I prefer a lack of patriotism? No. I’d prefer real national pride that doesn’t have to prove itself as Russia felt pushed to do in the Caucasus or as USA Today and CNN and Dorothy Rabinowitz measured for us by medals slung around Americans necks.
Now we’re leaving China for the national conventions in our domestic politics, another free fire zone. Politicians and some members of the press in that arena play on our patriotic fear at election time.
Unworthy anxiety forms the real basis for nationalism, not healthy self assurance.
Sen. Barack Obama – the Democrats’ great hope – recognizes our cultural weakness in his autobiographical Dreams from My Father: “Nationalism provided that history, an unambiguous morality tale that was easily communicated and easily grasped.”
We don’t have to think when we operate out of national fervor, only feel. We let the animal out of ourselves.
I’d prefer the media call us to live life gloriously, not revel in human failing by an enemy either at war or at The Games.