Presswatch: Signing Off
Corry, John
P R E S S W A T C H by John Corry Signing Off I t was only a fleeting embarrassment, but there was no denying it happened. When the New York Times reported last March that George W. Bush had been...
...Also, I grew up in the Times newsroom, Some "serious" thoughts about a reporter's profession...
...Then she mentioned "the sedate din and the tinkling of glasses," and "the pretty women in country-clubdinner dresses, laughing appreciatively at the bon mots of their table partners...
...Just be sure to allow six weeks for your change to take effect...
...things are what they are in newsrooms (and in Pulitzer Prize committees, too) and once in a while Dowd at least would be funny...
...Apparently the opinionated sentence—the Times could not bring itself to quote it— had been "sent as a message between editors after the article was written, and the reporters were never aware of it...
...Time has a picture on its cover of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, andthey seem to be naked...
...It has always been the best job in journalism, and if you have done it once and liked it, you always want to do it again...
...Chocolate meeting mouth with metronomic regularity...
...Conservative lawyers and the dirty old men had conspired...
...It's an interesting place, and if I can't find a good story there I have no business being a reporter...
...That is just the way things are, too...
...she's entitled, and usually, even if not this time, the newsroom culture is hospitable to prominent literary intellectuals...
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...This may be my last "Presswatch" column (I will explain that later) and so reflection seems in order...
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...Didion is a prominent literary intellectual, and that's how she thinks...
...They often do, of course, but JOHN CORRY is The American Spectator's senior correspondent and regular Press-watch columnist...
...48 August 1999 • The American Spectator and though I left there a decade ago I am still captive to the culture that existed way back when, and know about how it has changed...
...But analysis and commentary are now very big, and self-expression is prized...
...But now I want to go back to writing stories...
...That had nothing to do with humility, but everything to do with old rules...
...NAM% xsexal two...
...Meanwhile, as I write this I see on my desk the latest issues of Newsweek and Time...
...The Times recognized that itself...
...It seems the message between editors then found its way into print because of a computer error...
...The real story had nothing to do with Clinton but with the plot to bring him down...
...Apparently it was improper for reporters to dig up dirt on Clinton...
...It said the article about Bush's efforts to "study issues he would face...included an opinionated sentence casting doubt on his mastery of those issues...
...For example, writing in the first person, as I am doing now, has become commonplace among journalists, but it still seems to me slightly sinful...
...But also, there are serious candidates and "serious" candidates, and by their party affiliation you may know them...
...More notable than Dowd's insights, though, were her feelings, swinging between disdainful and bitchy, but never unsettling newsroom opinion: Clinton was a lout and Lewinsky a bimbo, but the dirty old men on the Republican side were unspeakable...
...And humility would be ill-suited for cocky TAS, anyway...
...There is consensus on many things...
...Maureen Dowd won a Pulitzer this year for her supposedly keen analytical insights into Clinton and Monica Lewinsky...
...Box 655, Mt, Morris, IL 61054-8084 1-800-524-3469 IMPORTANT: Allow six weeks for address change...
...Rights are good, and injustice is bad...
...Newsweek has a Roy Lichtensteinish drawing on the cover of a man who seems to be screaming...
...Patronizing Bush by putting quotes around "serious," for example, was a violation of the rules...
...Meanwhile indulge me now while I reflect on that culture...
...Four days later it cleared its throat, and ran a stiffly worded "Editors' Note...
...It allowed him to tell you what he thought rather than what he knew...
...Such a cabal, and so much intrigue...
...If you prefer that your name not be rented, please check here...
...The press, she wrote, had ignored the real impeachment story...
...Richard Mellon Scaife and Kenneth Starr apparently were not at the dinner, but they were in Didion's first paragraph, anyway...
...Meanwhile Henry Hyde "doggedly continued to spoon up his dessert, chocolate meeting mouth with metronomic regularity, his perseverance undeflected even by Bob Barr, leaning in to make a point...
...The press had been suborned by right-wingers, and that was all there was to it...
...Disparaging prominent Republicans is part of the newsroom culture, but the proprieties must be observed, and you are not supposed to do it in writing...
...The opinionated sentence introduced by the editors had soured their relationship with Bush and his people...
...1. Please write your new address in the space provided...
...The environment must be protected, and education is a fine thing, and blab blah, and so forth, and soon...
...2. Attach the mailing label from your most recent issue...
...It is just the way things are...
...But reporters, especially Washington reporters, either willfully or inadvertently— it was never clear which — ignored the conspiracy and joined instead in the plot...
...Didion's piece began with something she saw on C-SPAN: an Independent Women's Forum dinner...
...Cruise & Kid-man Like You've Never SEEN THEM," the headline says...
...Joan Didion had a go at the dirty old men in a June cover story in the New York Review of Books and was utterly humorless...
...She had penetrated the heart of darkness...
...Long ago it was understood that writing in the first person was a windbag's way out...
...The culture has its rules...
...Name: (Please Print) Address: 1 City: State: • I Zip: Date of change: 1 VCAFRM Mkt The American Spectator • August r 9 9 9 49...
...Sedate din, tinkling of glasses, and appreciative laughter for bon mots...
...You may expect to read something like that, and probably will, in a Times editorial, but this was in a news story, and news stories are not supposed to deal in opinion...
...Journalists in the old culture were supposed to be anonymous, and indeed as best I can recall, in 72 previous "Presswatch" columns I used the pronoun "I" only twice, and more or less apologized each time I did...
...It would be mean-spirited now to recall Stephen Glass and the New Republic, but I just did...
...hich is fine...
...That's all there is to it...
...When the New York Times reported last March that George W. Bush had been summoning experts to Texas to brief him on important issues for the presidential campaign, it also said: "There may never have been a 'serious' candidate who needed it more...
...The "Editors' Note" was meant to absolve them of blame, even if the Times had to admit that its editors amused themselves by sending cute notes to one another disparaging prominent Republicans...
...respectable publications have tacit rules about that, and when a news story offers an opinion, it is not supposed to do it so brazenly...
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...Presswatch," of course, has pointed that out before, and someone in this space, maybe even I, sometime may do it again...
...I really do want to go back to just being a reporter...
...O Renew my subscription for one year (twelve issues—$34.95) O Payment enclosed O Bill me later O At various times TAS rents its subscriber lists to other organizations...
...Or.f...
...Forget now whether that was liberal bias...
...I want to be a reporter...
...Didion wanted to prove her point, and no rules of evidence would bind her...
...Didion got all that from an arthritic C-SPAN camera and the usual not-so-hot sound system...
...The Times was mum about which editor wrote this particular note, although he, or she, no doubt was lectured severely...
...I will do my reporting for TAS, and assuming the planes take off and land when they're supposed to, and the roads are good, and connections are made, I will be writing in the next issue about Nigeria...
...But the "Editors' Note" was an explanation and not an apology, and most likely the Times had run it only because the two reporters whose bylines appeared over the story had complained...
...In other words, Bush was a dope, and when the time comes, we should all vote for Al Gore...
Vol. 32 • August 1999 • No. 8
