The secret of the press

...This was not surprising because it was Safire's standard line when he was supplying standard lines to crooks in the Nixon White House, most notably Spiro Agnew, the well-known household word (like "termites" and "yellow waxy build-up") and receiver of plain, unmarked envelopes containing thousanddollar bills...

...Well, in the first place, you get a political apparatchik aware well in advance—like Piranesi—that the earthquake was about to destroy his masters, Agnew and Nixon...

...The Safire theory of press response, namely that the motivation for it is never to be found in the facts being reported or the way they strike the average person of good sense but only in some personal or professional quirk of the reporter, pays off best when applied to its author...

...The men have to prove themselves to be as savage as the women...

...Safire has discovered—in Boston, for some reason—that the cause of all the talk about "a trio of turkeys" and "none of the above" is "the rise of the female television reporter.'' To many, this automatically sounds like sex envy, so Safire is careful to proclaim himself "a good feminist, like Gloria Steinem and Phyllis Schlafly," which is like calling yourself a good emancipationist like Abraham Lincoln and Simon Legree, or a good capitalist like Carnegie and Lenin...

...The Safire theory of the press, then and now, is that no reporter ever reports anything, or at least anything political, just because it happened, and never interprets anything, or at least anything political simply because that's the way it looks to him—still less because that's the way it looks to her, in the eyes of this good feminist...

...He therefore programmed Agnew to rage about the land attacking the press as full of radic-libs and badly in need of conservative balance...

...Why then would he make that equivalency...

...Why not...

...They knew that Nixon was a crook, that took care of the Republicans...

...In both cases it was because the press was composed of nattering nabobs of negativism who had to have something to be negative about twice a day...

...He would do so because he has a deep psychological need to demonstrate that although, obviously, he worked for crooks, the fact is that all presidents are crooks, therefore to work for a president is to work for a crook...

...Sir Kenneth Clark did this in his own television stand-up show, Civilisation, when he attributed the gloom and doom in Piranesi's etchings to the general effects on Europe as a whole of the Lisbon earthquake...

...It was somewhat surprising because for the last four years, all the time he's been a Nattering Nabob, Saf ire himself has been employed as a journalist, or at least as something that looks so much like a journalist that no one outside the trade would have thought him anything else...

...The logical conclusion: a plague on both your houses...

...The women have to prove themselves to be more than just pretty faces...

...FRANK GETLEIN 7 November 1980: 615...

...I'm sure there were thousands like me on that issue and others and thousands more who had the same experience with Reagan...

...It-never occurred to him then and has not occurred to him since—at least not as far as his thought is reflected in his writing—that the press reported Nixon's lies and obstructions of justice simply because Nixon was lying and obstructing justice...

...To make up for their good looks, these young women have tended to be tough on the candidates, going swiftly to the reasons for candidatural activities rather than simply turning the cameras over to the candidates themselves to say what they want to say...

...Another possible explanation of the perceived general lack of enthusiasm about the major candidates was simply that a lot of readers of the New York Times read Safire three times a week in his role of Nattering Nabob of Negativism and after four years concluded that nothing in politics was any good...

...No, reporters report what political news they report and interpreters interpret as they do because of some driving need in their professional or personal position...

...On the face of it, he is attacking himself, but then that was always one of the things the Nixonians did best, never so well as when they thought they were defending themselves against Nabobs and their Nattering...

...This aggressiveness on the part of the good-looking young women automatically, in Safire's view, brings on the same kind of behavior on the part of men reporters in competition with the women...

...He's had four years with the nearest thing to a first-rate paper we have and he still doesn't know how the press works...

...Similarly the American populace became disgusted with the choice offered them between Carter and Reagan not because they found that choice disgusting but because they knew that eventually those striving women television reporters and their defensive male colleagues would all be snidely sniping...

...The problem was that Piranesi had made the damned prints twenty years before the earthquake: obviously, as an artist, he was extraordinarily sensitive and knew the earthquake was coming...

...The two who were kept out of the slammer and under the circumstances that's a high recommendation...

...But then, they weren't buying his purple prose...

...There is, of course, a sense in which all three of the second members of those pairs can be called those things, but it is only in the Aesopian mode, and the Aesopian mode, as is well-known, is one of the languages invented by and used by the Soviet Communist Party and its dependencies outside the Union...

...Safire brought on the very condition he deplores and the uppity women seeking jobs as good as his had nothing to do with it...

...It never occurred to him then and it has not occurred to him since that reporters were reporting that Agnew was a crook simply because Agnew was a crook, certified as such by the Nixon Department of Justice...

...Thus, I suppose, we may reasonably, inescapably, conclude that Safire is a good Communist...

...The only odd thing is that he has not yet attacked Walter Mondale, who holds the job Agnew held when Safire was helping him defend his crookedness...

...Of several minds: Frank Getlein THE SECRET OF THE PRESS AND THE SECRET OF THE MEN WHO FOUND IT WILLIAM SAFIRE, the country's leading Nattering Nabob of Negativism for the last four years, took time off from nattering negatively as the campaign neared its end to explain why so many Americans took a dim view of the candidates offered in that campaign, Not surprisingly on the one hand, but somewhat surprisingly on the other, the fault was that of the press...

...Personally I dumped Carter when I found that he had lied to me about military expenditures after promising he never would...

...The Times got the message and hired Safire as the house reactionary, despite the fact that the Times did not then and does not now have a columnist who could reasonably be described as liberal or Democratic in his work as Safire can certainly be described as reactionary and Republican in his...

...Having got the job through the exercise of terrorism by proxy, Safire proceeded to natter negatively about Carter, inventing names such as Lance-gate and Billy-gate deliberately designed to place the failings of the Carter administration as equal in the scale of history to the monstrous attempts by the Nixonites to overthrow the Constitution, destroy the two-party system and institute oneparty-one-man government...

...The origin of the Safire theory goes back to his days in the White House...

...His main argument, stripped of the all-over alliteration so alluring to Agnew, is that the women hired by networks to make up for years of the non-hiring of women tend to be good-looking...

...The Safire theory could still be saved by explaining that those of us prescient enough to be disgusted with the major candidates long before they had the nominations wrapped up became so in anticipation of the the stand-up queens of both genders on the tube...

...So have at them and curst be he—or she—who first cries Hold, enough...

...There is, as far as I can see, only one trouble with that theory and that is that the populace began to be disillusioned with Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan—they didn't know about John Anderson—a long, long time before the dread women reporters and intellectual drag queens among the men began doing their stiletto stand-ups on the campaign trail...

...Safire must be presumed to be intelligent enough to know that a kid brother leeching onto an obvious target like oil-rich Libya really is not equivalent to White House burglars breaking into the headquarters of the opposition party, into psychiatrists' offices and into we don't yet know how many homes of Washington correspondents and subordinates of Henry Kissinger...

...Meanwhile, Safire is yet one more Nixonite upon whom occupational therapy has failed...

...Apply that to Safire and what do you get...

...It's an interesting theory and one entirely in line with Safire's views of the press expounded through the voice of Commonweal: 614 Spiro Agnew when Safire was living off the dictionary of alliteration in the cause of keeping crooks out of jail, a cause, it must be admitted, that was finally successful for his two principals if not for his friends and colleagues on lower levels...

...Now Safire was telling them thriceweekly that Carter was just as big a crook, he was just better at keeping his subordinates out of jail...

...The result is that all those reporters are out to do in the candidates and the result of that is that the electorate is unhappy with the candidates, although more unhappy, according to observers who are not Safire, with Carter and Reagan than with Anderson, who was chiefly deprecated because it was thought he had no chance to win...