92,000 government secrets aren't secret any longer

Something there is that doesn't like secrecy in government.
Democracy. That's what.
Journalism in its moments of freedom can be the strong right arm of government by the people, for the people and of the people.
The other strong arm is a standing army under civilian control.
The result: Conflict, thy name is warrior vs. journalist.
Soldiers have a fundamental right of secrecy to protect their own lives from disclosure of troop movements, tactical strikes before they happen and critical knowledge that would give aid and comfort to an enemy.
Reporters have a fundamental need and right to transmit a broad picture of the battlefield so people will know what their citizen-soldiers are up to and up against.
The proper balance between the competing values of a warring democracy seems intact after a huge test disclosing government secrets from the interminable war in Afghanistan. 
We are hearing the predictable screams about lack of patriotism by leakers of secrets.
When values of military good order and the citizen right to know collide, however, you can make a case that it's honorable to publish -- as long as no one gets hurt.  
The publication of  -- how many? -- 92,000 low-level classified documents from the war in Afghanistan makes me feel better about our balanced freedoms.
The same act must set teeth on edge in the Pentagon.
The price of democracy is bruxism by the generals.
The military-political complex responded to the document disclosure by WikiLeaks in the predictable, quaint way of the past.
"Nothing new...old stuff...threat to national security...could endanger soldiers."
Yeah, well, if the information is obsolete, how can it endanger anyone?
Disclosure provides the Taliban an enemies list, officials say.
Pardon?
You mean to tell me the enemy needs our help to list victims for ambush and assassination and roadside bombs all on its own?
WikiLeaks withheld 15,000 documents until it could redact names of individuals whose lives really could be endangered. 
Critics also said the information didn't advance the public debate abut the war. Their point is the benefit didn't outweigh the danger of disclosing stolen secrets.
Actually, we've never had as good a look at the war and the rationale for or against prolonging it still further. That's partly because disclosure coincided with a congressional vote on continued war funding. The leaked secrets proved their worth by that timing alone.
The reporting lacked credibility, another complaint goes, because official sources didn't approve the release of information.
Yeah, well, government never was going to reveal what the leakers did. And Washington itself doesn't enjoy credibility with the people. Too many secrets!
The New York Times, which along with The Guardian in England and Der Spiegel in Germany had a head start on parsing over the secrecy archive, verified information in the trove with its own reporting for the sake of credibility.
Still, a whistle-blowing competitor labeled WikiLeaks an "information vandal."
That's a really nice phrase someone manufactured there. But "information rebel" seems more to the point.
If we're to make our way democratically in this time of information revolution, we'll need more data patriots to do their jobs.
"All governments can benefit from increased scrutiny by the world community, as well as their own people," The Times quotes the WikiLeaks.org website.
"We believe this scrutiny requires information."
War ordinarily demands secrecy.
But Afghanistan  is our longest conflict ever without solid purpose, goals or resolution.
We've waged it with both of our good, democratic arms tied behind our back: It's not the people's war they know enough to understand or to support, and their military mightily labors against treacherous allies who aid the furtive enemy on uncertain moral and geophysical terrain. 
We've been climbing the Hindu Kush with a backpack full of dead weight and an ammo pouch filled with rocks.
The transparency WikiLeaks and the cooperating news media strive for should actually help the cause by opening the eyes of Americans. Their involvement then could aid the prosecution of the war or hasten withdrawal.
Resolution at last! One way or another.
Quit grinding your teeth, generals. The armed forces are better off either way. 
Oh, it's irksome to government for documents to be compromised -- possibly by a PFC under suspicion. A private first class? Really!
Logic inquires who bears the greater blame -- the leaker or the officials who preside over such a readily compromised treasury of secrets.
The degree of official pique over the publication is a measure of Washington's distance from its own democratic roots.
We have a need to know, we the people do. And government has a need for our informed consent of its wars, if conflicts are to be won.
"Beware the fury of an aroused democracy," Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower warned the Nazis in 1942. Ike presided over the secrecy of D-Day to our great joy and success in World War II. But he knew enough to cultivate media so the home front would fall in step behind the military push.
Freedom feeds on disclosure. Oddly, so does war when waged by a people aroused by information.
The equation of secrecy and disclosure balances itself out in a healthy democracy.

Privacy in Wonderland: We all wonder where it went

Shirley Sherrod could bring a libel suit against her tormentor.
She suffered loss of reputation. She suffered job loss. She suffered.
The African-American civil servant in the Georgia office of the U.S. Agriculture Department started a perfectly ordinary week in wonderful anonymity.
But she tumbled into the blogosphere as innocently as Alice assailed by a Mad Hatter and the madding crowd of the right wing wonderland.
Then she emerged with an apology from President Obama, a better job offer from Ag Secretary Vilsack and vilification as racist turned on its head into stoic civil-sainthood. She was never the person portrayed by a blogger.
No wonder there's talk of libel.
The whole case presents itself as a study in the politics of vilification abetted by the digital speed of the modern communication mode measured more by moments than calm reason.
Too many tick-tock white rabbits running down too many media holes.
No wonder lawyer talk is out and about.
A defamation court, however, would have to deal with the fact Ms. Sherrod fell into a Georgia privy but emerged sweet-smelling and clutching the reward of a better job offer and notoriety transformed into celebrity. Where is the damage now? A judge must ask.
How much better for her and for us if she were to bring a privacy suit for being dragged unwilling into false light.
The invasion of her right to keep to herself, do her job and control her own destiny suffered permanent harm. She forever will endure indignity as victim-symbol of quick-trigger misinformation.
Tremble, all you who enter the new world of communication. (That's all of us, if you wonder.)
FOX news and its imitators -- collectively a causative factor in the media climate raining rabid cats and mad dogs all over Shirley Sherrod -- long ago cost us any expectation of fairness and accuracy in public affairs reporting.
Truth is no longer an expectation.
The one comfort any of us might retreat into had been the expectation of privacy: If we were not a public person, "they" couldn't get to us.
The experience of a no-longer-private person in government service shows any of us could suffer the same loss of a basic right.   
"They" can get to a nameless, faceless bureaucrat. "They" can get to any of us.
And who is "they?" Anyone with an Internet connection and a story to bait media attention.
A judicial ruling to counter privacy invasion would do our New Media society far more good than libel damages, if any.
We are all Alice, tip-toeing through the  media mind-field of sinkholes leading to anguish, not tea parties. 

Get camera. Make documentary. Be a journalist.

Documentary film is in.
Reality storytelling is all over HBO, Hulu, Netflix and Redbox.
(What wonderful names we have for our new-style movie distributors! Makes you wonder what would happen if newspapers had catchy names more with the present media age!)
Sundance and filmfests that wish they were Sundance feature documentaries alongside fictional films. The corollary is book publishing where houses are saying new taste turns to non-fiction over fiction.
Narrative non-fiction in book length is some of the best journalism around.
Documentarians who use film to produce journalism deserve the same respect.
Michael Moore, the polemicist filmmaker, doesn't always get a lot of respect because of his ambush interview technique. He gets called names by the executive class of companies and government. They consider themselves his victim more than subject. In truth they make themselves into Moore's camera fodder.
A lot of people chafe under the treatment they get from CBS-TV's "60 Minutes" too. But no denies Morley Safer and Mike Wallace are journalists.
Ken Burns may look like a history documentarian. But his topics -- civil rights, baseball, the national parks -- have an edginess that comes with a point to be made by a journalist. 
One weird way to be sure if a media producer is a journalist is to look in federal court.
Joe Berlinger thinks he won a First Amendment ruling on outtakes to his film, "Crude."
Chevron wanted all his unused footage from the documentary about that company's legal fight with Ecuadoreans who allege an oilfield contaminated their water.
Berlinger will have to give up some but not all his film Chevron originally sought from his cutting-room floor. He'll have to meet the legal standard all journalists can face of surrendering material necessary to administer justice in a court of law.
The court by extension established this documentary filmmaker is an investigative journalist as surely as one employed by a newspaper or network in old media days.
Berlinger won the courtroom concession to stand in journalism's ranks by the way he partially won and partially lost the case over what journalists want to think are sacred but are not necessarily -- their notes.  
The media industry likes to say it's hard to tell exactly who is a journalist in these new media days. People who believe they control or at least speak for the industry want to control who can be in it.
Like an over-controlling parent, naturally, they are losing control.
With an implied journalism license issued by central-control figures such as media execs and narrow minded journalism practitioners, perhaps not everyone deserves the benefit of the First Amendment, goes that unfortunate logic.
But every citizen does deserve the protection of freedom of expression.
This digital age makes any person with a camera and a computer into a citizen journalist with equal opportunity to be discovered on YouTube if not HBO, Hulu, Netflix and Redbox via Sundance and all the rest.
We all may become documentarians in this ComRev as I call the communication revolution.
In that case we will all be journalists with the same right of free of expression some would reserve only to themselves.
The whole concept sounds as though it would make a good documentary film.
Documentaries are in, you know.

Bias behind the gusher in the Gulf is the people's call

Look out for the language. The spoken tongue ends in a sharp point.
Listen to what we call the environmental catastrophe of our time.
We might have had "The Gulf Oil Spill."
Or we could have named it "The Deepwater Horizon Spill."
I'm wistful about "The Dick Cheney Oil De-reg Spill."
Based on a recent book, there's the "Why We Hate Oil Companies Spill."
But the judge-and-jury vernacular favors "The BP Oil Spill" over alternative, generalized, non-directed names.
Why raise the issue? Because with the name goes the liability. All of it.
Other terms recede. Increasingly the company that bears the blame also bears the label like a smear of crude.
You can't merely and evenhandedly suggest BP "may" be the responsible party, because British Petroleum lends its name to reckless ir-responsibility. That pointedly is as mild as descriptions get.
So "BP Oil Spill" pronounces accusation like an indictment from a grand jury composed of the whole country.
Lawyers will coat those waters like a five-state oil slick the BP Spill has become.
Court cases aplenty will try to escape spending the last farthing on clean-up.
PR image manipulators will try to convince reporters to find an alternative to the virtual trademark with its informal corporate logo, the oil-covered pelican.
Media will profess lack of bias.
But there is a prejudice, undeniably. The public made up its mind and rendered a verdict journalism conveys in what we call this disaster: "The BP Oil Spill."
It's not merely a plain and simple accident. Not an industry mishap. Not a failure by the consortium at the wellhead. Not the fault of negligent regulators -- although ironically it's all those things too.
 "The BP Oil Spill." That's what it is.
The people speak.

Excuse me! I seem to have misplaced my guillotine.

Remember the media panic when this communication revolution began?
The bloggers are coming! The bloggers are coming!
Well, it turned out to be less of a quick-hit rebellion and more of an extended Reign of Terror for conventional publishers.
Eat any cake lately, Marie?
Now the first wave of attack is fading.
Nielsen and others report a significant decline in blog traffic, according to The Economist.
Twitter and Facebook are up substantially, however. So don't harbor any wistful dreams of a return to legacy media.
Thank you BTW for coming to my own blog for this information and commentary. Better than bakery goods, I say, Your Highness!
Look here, the rebels' underlying cause remains the same: People and especially the youth demographic prefer to publish information and exchange comments at little if any expense, at a time of their own choosing and in a manner of their personal convenience such as with a cell phone.
Maybe the iPad will grandly unify the multimedia experience. More likely, we're going to experiment quite a bit more for quite a while longer.
The Economist points out the geopolitical significance of the Internet in real civil unrest such as Iran's.
There's more to going online than sex texting.
So we're not going back. The com-revolt is real. It's here to stay.
And the biggest evidence is the evolution to new forms and their globalization of ideas about freedom.
That's exactly what happens in a revolution

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 incurious rush to save mortgages

Journalism grows slack when it fails to ask questions. . .Its curiosity is like sex – use it or lose it.

What’s the point of journalism, if not to ask questions?
The Media delved into Gov. Sarah Palin’s Alaskan past. Her Republican presidential running mate complained about the background check. And that political tactic now seems stronger than journalistic curiosity.
The reportage wanes as the Palin phenomenon waxes stronger.
Reporters also seem to have used up their quota of inquiry on politics just when we need answers about economic issues..
They need to ask if Americans really want Uncle Sam as a landlord.
The case for Treasury takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac sure seems compelling.
The Federal National Mortgage Association and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation are a mess. Heads had to roll along with any other cliché that would clean up the government-sponsored secondary home mortgage market.
We don’t yet know for sure if the debacle in the total pubic and private securitized loan market will bring down the American economy.
So the government had to reform the two federally backed agencies that own half the mortgages in the nation.
But insuring the market is different from owning it.
We have just socialized mortgages in this country.
And the Press is asking fewer questions than about The Bridge to Nowhere that connects falsehood with Gov. Palin’s claim to reform public works.
For decades we’ve resisted socialized medicine.
Even now Sen. John McCain, the GOP presidential candidate, campaigns against letting a federal bureaucrat stand between my doctor and me.
So why would I want a government clerk overseeing where I lay me down to sleep?
That’s neither a conservative nor a liberal question. It’s something sensible for The Press to ask as surrogate for ordinary, everyday folk.
Yes. Something had to be done about Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac. And quick.
The swift and sure government action, however, has the look of forever about it.
Why isn’t there a sunset provision built into the takeover? Then the government could fix the problem and get out of the mortgage business, returning it to private or quasi-private enterprise.
But the business pages and Wall Street programs on TV aren’t asking that question.
Journalism grows slack when it fails to ask questions.
Its curiosity is like sex – use it or lose it.

There's a simple way to shape political coverage on Oval Office qualifications

Reporting on and analyzing the skill sets of the two presidential candidates and the two vice-presidential candidates wouldn’t be that hard. First, we’d need journalism to work as smart as politics.

The President ought to be as smart as the cabinet.
Now that’s a proposition The Press could use to focus election year coverage.
No more teen mother angst or fighter pilot claim to superiority or community organizing theory or Delaware do-righteousness.
The person who appoints the heads of our governmental departments should be on a par with them.
Besides selecting the best and the brightest, the Chief Executive then has to monitor and manage and motivate them.
Oh, the President doesn’t have to out-lawyer the Attorney General. But a feel for the Constitution and the rule of law would be nice.
Contrary to GOP candidate John McCain’s emphasis, there’s more to the presidency that serving as commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces.
So it’s not necessary to hold a driver’s license for an aircraft carrier or a permit to carry a howitzer or a flight plan for a stealth bomber.
Sufficient unto the day is the sure and certain knowledge that it’s the duty of every soldier to kill the enemy. The how can be left up to the Secretary of Defense.
What the president needs is the judgment to know when to unleash those dogs of war.
And it’s pretty important to have the analytical ability to maintain our tradition of civilian control of the military.
The Secretary of Agriculture may know a lot about crops and markets. But to carry on a conversation about farmers, the President needs to grasp the nuances. For instance we don’t have food stamps merely to feed the poor. The program is foremost an Ag subsidy program.
The Treasury is not a place we keep money. It’s the control room for keeping the dollar sound despite our debtor nation status.
Interior is not about raping the land but extracting its resources soundly.
Education isn’t about enforcing ideology but planting our seed corn for the smart nation we must be to compete in the world.
Commerce isn’t all census and weights and measures – not when we’re killing off our fisheries and can’t get trade policy to work right.
Labor is about fair pay for fair work instead of this seesaw between the rights of unions vs. the prerogatives of corporations.
And what does the President need to know about the State Department to monitor that Secretary?
This: State is the sum of all the other Departments, because we make our way in the world by projecting our good name with justice, intelligence, respect for full bellies and sound minds, caution against bullies and confidence in a Yankee sensibility about trade and money.
Barack Obama has a good idea about appointing a technology chief for the government. There’s a better claim for making that a Cabinet job compared with Veteran Affairs, which could be folded into the Pentagon.
How alienating toward the future and futurists – every person on the Internet – when McCain patronizingly said he doesn't do computers. His implication was we who appreciate the digital world are eccentric.
Technology actually is a way of making science work for us…of causing the future to happen now…of compensating America in the global prosperity race where others enjoy advantages over us.
That sort of thinking and a keenly organized mind would make the President an equal with any Cabinet.
Reporting on and analyzing the skill sets of the two presidential candidates and the two vice-presidential candidates wouldn’t be that hard.
First, we’d need journalism to work as smart as politics.
It’s always intelligent to elevate the national conversation and to focus.

Political platforms and weather shelters are OK but we need foreign affairs coverage too

It’s like taking Gov. Sarah Palin at her word that she is Alaska’s Snow White gift to the nation instead of really being as politically pure as the driven slush upon revelation by reporter scrutiny.

The Press should be more like the Pentagon. Russia shows why.
World peace depends just as much on understanding international conflict as shooting the globe up.
Military planners classically prepare to wage two American wars at once with enough assets left to meet a third emergency.
It’s the attention span as much as anything. But our Information Industry can’t meet the same standard.
Well, come to think of it, neither can the admirals and generals. But they at least try in theory.
Media are concentrating on politics. ’Tis the season.
With some effort they also are monitoring the machine gun-like rat-a-tat of ferocious storms strafing from the weather-Atlantic air war.
Yet for a long time journalism has lost sight of the shooting war that never quits giving hell between Israel and the Palestinian people.
Lebanon lies abandoned between bombings.
Iraq may be a success story. But we haven’t looked at it with the critical consideration of what happens to a corner crime scene when the beat cop moves on.
Iran was the subject of much Press speculation about our possible invasion. Too little real reporting is going on now that our government hasn’t pulled that trigger.
Military Intelligence – that cliché of an oxymoron – lacks analysts who can speak Farsi. Media lack sufficient folks who even know adequately the difference between the Persian culture of Iran vs. the Arab rest of the Middle East.
Food, fuel and water shortages portend more resource wars, especially in Africa.
North Korea seems to have backslid – as the preacher would say – on nuclear disarmament. But just try to find a coherent news story explaining independently the American role.
The news consumer is thrown on too much dependence of our own self-serving government for explanations of worldviews, especially in the gaze toward Russia.
That’s the same Administration reinventing the Cold War.
Missiles in Poland, NATO expansion in Eastern Europe, patronizing attitudes toward Russian self-esteem – all got fashioned into a new containment policy.
But the bear doesn’t want to go into that cage. It even got restive, invading Georgian territory that leans toward Moscow anyway.
Now we have Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, and his oddly subordinate president of Russia, looking at the real prize, The Ukraine.
The new czars can cut off gas and oil to Europe on whim as a strategic weapon. That potential is akin to terrorists or rogue states shutting down the flow of Middle Eastern oil through the Straits of Hormuz – a crippling but real potential.
President Bush has made bear trainer threats he can’t enforce, because he has our diplomatic and economic and military assets stretched too thin.
Vice President Cheney castigated Russia from a Tbilisi pulpit on an aid trip as though he were a two-bit Ronald Reagan saying, “Mr. Gorbachev, bring down that wall.”
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice cut her academic teeth on the Cold War. She quaintly denounced the Russian moves as unacceptable in the 21st Century. Yet it’s her Administration’s leadership that fails to move out of the Reagan era into realistic foreign affairs of this time.
Without intense, systematic, independent reporting and analysis on front page and prime time, those government pronouncements stand unchallenged by the benefits of journalism.
It’s like taking Gov. Sarah Palin at her word that she is Alaska’s Snow White gift to the nation instead of really being as politically pure as the driven slush upon revelation by reporter scrutiny.
Or it’s like depending on the National Weather service as the sole source of hurricane coverage instead of the animated maps, on-scene reports and progress updates by the energized Media.
American foreign affairs deteriorate badly and rapidly while The Media deploy their assets to other stories. The winning presidential candidate is going to have a greater problem than the drain of jobs, housing and affordable fuel.
We’re in for shock about world affairs.
And all because self-imposed cutbacks of resources and interest prevent The Media from providing the independent information democracy needs as much as it needs political platforms and weather shelters.

Wasn't it Ronald Reagan who so famously said, 'There you go again'?

You can tell when Republicans enter campaign mode.
They make war on The Media.
And they polarize the nation.
The national conversation ought to be about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan…about the economy, including our oil dependency…and about making us all reverse our feeling the country is headed in the wrong direction.
The rapid response solution is to move assets from Iraq to Afghanistan…stimulate markets for alternative energy…and elect a peace and prosperity government.
But this is a democracy. So let’s talk.
It’s just that it’s hard to talk sensibly when Republicans get on their high horse.
I’d like to be bipartisan with this criticism. But the Karl Rove playbook does put the GOP in a class of its own.
So the national chitchat turned to one teen’s pregnancy, a governor’s tabloid family story and whether it’s okay to talk about an official of either gender taking the kids to High Office.
Simple questions from The Press on behalf of The Voter to understand better Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska brought down the wrath of the RNC.
Turns out the running mate choice by Sen. John McCain is perfectly capable of fighting for herself.
Her line about lipstick as the only difference between a pit-bull and a hockey mom will go down in the books.
But look what’s not among the serious talking points – our two wars, our greasy economy and the national confidence. Gov. Palin’s personal chutzpa isn’t enough to carry the needed political conversation.
And why did the minions of presidential nominee McCain get bellicose with the Press as a shield against a perfectly natural curiosity about his unusual choice of Gov. Palin?
Because the tactic works.
Network anchors and some other natterers were making nice, singing praises, backing off – after her acceptance speech.
So here we go again, polarized and under threat of a McCain permanent media war instead of doing journalism.

* * *

Any City Hall reporter knows a country club lunch and golf game with the mayor compromises credibility.

Network anchors celebrated a pleasurable birthday over French cuisine in a Manhattan restaurant with John McCain some time back and generally enjoyed the Media Elites' cozy relationship with the senator who would be president.

Jim Rutenberg captured the coziness when he reported in the NYT how dismayed the journalists were by McCain's media attack at the Republicans' convention.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/04/us/politics/04media.html?ex=1378267200&en=96c863317b4350bb&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

So it was dismaying to to the rest of us to hear Tom Brokaw – NBC-TV's senior pontificator – lavish praise on the presidential nominee's performance moments after McCain's acceptance speech.

Club and tee time can't be far off.

* * *

The Times is getting the political story right.

And sometimes a chart tells it all. One on the front page the day after the GOP convention compared the number of times certain terms were used per 25,000 words there and in the Democratic convention.

Democrats uttered "change" 89 times compared to 33 for Republicans; they said "economy" 32 times vs. the GOP 14; "taxes" was heard 26 times in Denver compared with 46 times in St. Paul; and "reform tripped off Democratic tongues 6 times as opposed to 25 times from Republican mouths.

* * *

Sen. McCain vows to end "partisan rancor."

Well, maybe not.

He wants to reach the moderates that way.

Yet the hard core of his own party lives for Karl Rovian invective.

The running mate being called "Sarah Barricuda" and Rush Limbaugh will do a lot of standing in and mouthing off for the candidate.

But he's inevitably going to have to energize his base on his own.

Post-election, should McCain win, we'll have greater political division and soreness between his White House and an increasingly Democratic Congress.

End rancor? That's a campaign promise for The Press to monitor.

They serve popcorn in the movies. . .So, what would they serve in the Oval Office?

The movie Juno delights across generational lines: A family copes humorously but seriously when an unwed teen goes through with pregnancy.
Hollywood follows. It doesn’t lead. The film reflects changing social attitudes.
Now life imitates art, imitating life.
The daughter of the Republican pick for vice president is 17 and preggers. She plans to marry the young father but hasn’t yet.
Media and politics alike can leave that script alone.
Fairer game is the selection process Sen. John McCain uses for big decisions such as choosing his running mate – Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the teenager’s mom.
The governor enjoys an ultra short but messy resume with the pending investigation of an official firing wrapped around a lurid family problem, her sister’s divorce.
The more limited question is how well the would-be President McCain researched Gov. Palin’s background: Did he simply fall for a fellow political contrarian?
The larger issue is how the man makes all his decisions: Would he be such a dice-thrower in the Oval office?
His autobiography is the self-portrait of a devil-may-care jetfighter pilot, flying on the edge and taking chances without too much attention to rules.
The most dramatic moment of his long, legendary life struck like a surface-to-air missile over Hanoi – literally. His radar and his training both said, “Get outta there,” when a North Vietnam rocket locked onto his aircraft.
McCain gambled he could still drop his payload. He lost, spending the next five years in tortuous captivity.
The story bears a sacred stamp. No one can criticize the split-second decision nor the sacrifice made for flag and country.
But in the longer view of the man, what recurs again and again as a maverick, counter-to-convention thought process does merit scrutiny by The Media as the designated stand-in for The Voter.
Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin live the lives of a Hollywood script.
Now The Press must help us decide if we want to elect a credible president and vice president. Or do we want to spend the next four years inside someone else’s movie.

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.

Media generations: MTV and the AARP crowds can set government right again

MTV may save the republic
Ladies Home Journal and the Crown Forum book How to Raise an American and even The AARP Magazine will help.
’Bout time someone did something. Really. It’s all about time or at least age. The issue is how to motivate the youth vote, and those media are onto something.
The big news is Viacom’s countercultural music broadcaster announcing it will now take political ads.
It’s for the money of course. When Sen. Barrack Obama passed up public funding of his Democratic presidential campaign, he put a monster ad budget in play with a youth orientation.
But an ad is information, too, not just a commercial. If campaign advertising weren't suddenly cool, MTV wouldn’t break its 27-year ban against marketing candidates.
This is watershed stuff. Potentially, anyway.
Just a few years ago David T. Z. Mindich wrote Tuned Out, explaining why Americans under 40 don’t follow the news. He said political process alienated the young who found it immoral, unresponsive to the people and irrelevant along with the news media that covered politics.
Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam broke that ground with his landmark study of civic disengagement.
And journalist E. J. Dionne, Jr., decried the exchange between politicians and the governed as “unintelligent” in his book, Why Americans Hate Politics.
For the smart set, the young set, the MTV set to tune back in as both the Iowa caucuses and the Obama millennials indicate is big for the future of self-government.
A letter to Reader's Digest calls this "The Facebook Election." But ultimately, the writer said, two things will have to happen:

• These young activists will have to run for office;
• And leadership in both major parties will have to step aside to "let younger, more open minds take over."

Too soon to say if the information industry and especially newspapers will reverse their own downward spiral related to civic malaise.
Mindich anticipated some rise from the ashes, because “despite their disengagement with news, young people are as thoughtful and passionate and self-reflective as they have ever been, ready to interact with news if we just provide the right conditions for them to do so.”
One condition could be for parents and grandparents to be civic-minded and to model participatory government for the generations to come of voting age.
Myrna Blyth, former editor of Ladies’ Home Journal, started Take Your Kids 2 Vote, promoting the idea of adults taking their children into polling places with them. She remembered it when she was a kid.
She and cofounder Chriss Winston researched Election Day involvement and wrote How to Raise an American.
Naturally http://www.takeyourkids2vote.org/ is their Web site. Emphasis is on recollection and narrative.
“Sharing your memories of voting makes kids realize their family is part of the American experience,” Blyth said to writer Nick Kolakowski of AARP http://www.aarpmagazine.org/.
And that’s cool too. For the self-described “World’s Largest Circulation Magazine” to publicize civic lessons across the generations really does link MTV’s ad policy news with shoring up the Republic’s future.
Rap that tune.

Stars Fell on Barack Obama

I will go to Korea, Ike said. He campaigned during an unpopular Asian war.
And America elected Dwight David Eisenhower as president.
I will go to Iraq, Barack Obama said, campaigning during the latest unpopular war.
Now the star system in American journalism is burning, burning bright to light up the Democrat’s presidential campaign.
If the candidate doesn’t make a major foreign policy goof, the media celestials will brightly backlight his election profile. They’re going too.
You get the impression of a royal progress by an oriental potentate. Newspaper poobahs and magazine satraps and TV sultanas will climb aboard decorated dromedaries to form the entourage. The U.S. military will assist the Secret Service in Janissary duty.
Headliners from national newspapers and magazines are going.
So are all three network news anchors – Charles Gibson of ABC, Katie Couric of CBS and Brian Williams of NBC. They’ll be doing primetime interviews with the candidate.
Clang the cymbals. Blow the trumpets. Beat the tabla. The cavalcade comes.
Obama couldn’t buy this kind of publicity.
Neither could Republican opponent John McCain. Coverage of his international trips fit into the routine category.
The old hat McCain is getting the “also running” treatment stingingly felt by Hillary Rodham Clinton in her party nomination campaign against Obama.
“He’s the new guy, though,” rationalize media executives to Jim Rutenberg in The New York Times. The reporter documents the ongoing imbalance of TV coverage in favor of Obama. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/us/politics/17anchors.html?ex=1374033600&en=00fc706cfaedd8e9&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
My own political reporting for The Courier-Journal years ago had to measure up – literally – to the standards of the Louisville managing editor, a stickler for fairness and ethics. He used a yardstick to make sure every candidate got exactly the same number of column inches.
The M.E. also said you have to rise above your ethics sometimes. So he would excuse a lack of balanced coverage for news reasons.
Barack Obama traveling to get his foreign policy ticket punched does not excuse blatant unfairness.
Neither does the “new guy” argument after a long “rock star” campaign by the now familiar candidate.
Nor does the Ike analogy. This isn’t history. It’s politics. And the star system.
Media celebrities recognize a fellow luminary when they see one in politics. So they give chase like Magi going to Bethlehem.
Stardom is an addiction constantly to be fed. Journalism egos are not too big but too little, too insecure, too threatened not to conform with the pack. They can’t stand the idea of being left behind when the court travels abroad.
And network newscasts look enviously at ratings by cable outlets for political coverage. So on caravan they will go.
They’ll need a little music.
Here’s my parody on a Mitchell Parish, Frank Perkins lyric familiar to Alabama:

We lived our little drama, we kissed in a field of white.
And stars fell upon Obama last night.
I can’t forget the glamour, your eyes held a tender light.
And stars fell upon Obama last night.

I never planned in my imagination, a situation so heavenly
A fairy land that no one else could enter
And in the center, just you and me, dear
My heart beat like a hammer, my arms wound around you tight
And stars fell upon Obama last night.

Sen. Gramm’s Ph.D. economy goof while 'helping out' Sen. McCain proves public, press, politicians need a common language

Let’s drop the word “economics” in favor of “quality of life.”
Public, politicians and media might get it right then.
Sen. John McCain’s Republican quest to be president is but the latest to foul up. He did it through a stand-in, former Sen. Phil Gramm.
We’re but a “nation of whiners,” said that Ph.D. in economics. Gramm claimed we’re only in a “mental recession.”
Insert funny comment here: Maybe it’s the professor who has the receding mind…he taught at Texas A&M, so maybe this is an aggie joke gone bad…or as Barack Obama, leader of the Democratic presidential camp commented, “America already has one Dr. Phil.”
We don’t need a shrink to know we can’t buy or sell houses, afford fuel and food, meet the hidden tax of rising college tuition, find a job in some cases or get a raise in others.
John McCain still thinks trickle down works, corporations will save us out of the goodness of their hearts and oil policy means greasing the palms of petro execs yet again.
He’s a goose egg on money matters. So he uses Gramm to tell him what to think. But no one told Gramm how to speak.
To be fair we lack a common language about finances. An egghead looks at the numbers, the institutions, the science of capitalism and sees the engine running right along.
The people see only the result and feel the engine running them down.
Reporters don’t translate between the two opposites, which is why God invented journalism – so media would communicate.
When the Gramm-McCain gaffe broke, that’s all the story was. Media treated it as yet another misstep in the political pasture full of language cow patties.
In journalism we call this a daily process story, because it lacks context.
An enterprising reporter covering Gramm-McCain could have, might have, should have included news of the whole day: \

• The federal government is stepping up to support the two mortgage holders that account for half the nation’s mortgages, which add up to $12 trillion.
• Banks are in the tank.
• Gas isn’t, because of costs, which won’t quit with President Bush drawing a military bead on Iran.
• Food expense is tied to fuel.
• Goalposts for retirement keep moving because of all of above.

We’re not whining, Dr. Gramm. We’re living life and enjoying it less. We’re also reading the papers.
We’re just not reading the right story. It would put two and two together, linking screwy political views, the public’s disconnect from brainy economists and daily living.
No more petty political items. No more campaign gotchas. No more disconnects.
Media need to change the language: It’s not the economy, stupid. It’s the quality of life.
Then we would no longer be a nation joined asunder by so many misunderstandings about the meaning of money.
That’s one thing we all have in common, money, but commonly not enough.

Revive us again! Clay Felker and a hallelujah for the magazine business!

Magazines are slick, sometimes sophisticated plays for reader attention, subscriber loyalty. And I love them.
Their circ departments must know I’m a mark. They’re always sending me their “professional rate” discount offers. So I take more than I need as a sampler.
Those markdowns suggest churn to me. Subscribers get super savings so publishers can try to stay even with their declining customer lists.
Maybe its time for another magazine revival. There is a certain sameness about all that pass in front of me.
Clay Felker built the model 40 years ago as New York. The glossy challenged even The New Yorker, the one legendary journalist Harrison Salisbury famously called “perhaps the best magazine ever.”
Everywhere you looked editors imitated New York’s graphic design by Milton Glaser, the narrative writing style by the likes of Tom Wolfe or Jimmy Breslin and the sassy service information.
When I became a newspaper features editor, our tribe was still trying to borrow as much of the tone as we could get away with.
Felker came out of The New York Herald Tribune tradition. It was said The Trib’s editors went out for sex at lunchtime, while The New York Times editors merely went for a drink.
Sexiness was and is a main ingredient to compete with other media, especially when TV does more show and tell than even movies once thought they could get away with.
New York’s groundbreaking editor invented a formula without being formulaic.
“American Journalism would not be what it is today without Clay Felker,” said the magazine’s current editor, Adam Moss. The Times quotes his statement in an appropriately generous obit. Felker died at age 82 in his Manhattan home. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/business/media/02felker.html?ex=1372737600&en=20a30abd0cea6d55&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
He was middle-aged and I was starting out when he taught me editors could be full of themselves. And how!
Felker and his friends Ben Bradlee, executive editor of The Washington Post, and Tom Winship, editor of The Boston Globe, spoke like a trio of mythological Graces, or maybe it was Titans, to our graduate journalism class at Columbia University.
Honestly, those egos sucked the oxygen right out of the classroom.
Humility has its place in editing. But so does chutzpah, the creative life of Clay Felker shows.
In the reinvention of modern media on all print and broadcast and digital platforms, journalism will need a revivalist of his style.

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 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.