SMALL FAVORS
Ivins, Molly
SMALL FAVORS Molly Ivins Killing the Messenger Afew years ago, Jules Feiffer drew an Everyman who offered, in serial panels, these observations about the state of the nation: 1. Truth hurts. 2....
...People don't like being roused from the rosy Reagan dream that it's morning in America, so they turn on the messenger who brings the bad news...
...Thus we see, night after night, on MacNeil/Lehrer or Nightline, people who don't know jack-shit about Iran or Nicaragua or arms control, but who are ready to tear up the pea-patch in defense of the proposition that Ronald Reagan is a Great Leader beset by comsymps...
...they are presented as a way of keeping the networks from being charged with bias by people who are themselves replete with bias and resistant to fact...
...From the beginning, President Reagan's foreign policy has been under attack...
...Turn it off...
...The nation's news organizations have lost substantial public esteem and credibility as a result of the Iran-Nicaragua affair...
...That's what we're doing now...
...To escape the hard work or the abuse, if one man says Hitler is an ogre, we instantly give you another to say Hitler is a prince...
...In the name of objectivity, we are getting fantasy-land...
...Like the Supreme Court, the press follows the election returns...
...It circumvents politics...
...Ah, shaddap...
...First it was Grenada, but that turned out to be a triumph...
...Real objectivity would require not only hard work by news people to determine which report was accurate, but also a willingness to put up with the abuse certain to follow publication of an objectively formed judgment...
...The reaction is predictable, of course, but that isn't helping the press deal with it...
...And the press, like politicians, wants to be popular...
...They would love to bring down a very popular President...
...next it was the bombing of Libya...
...Reagan's Victorianism transcends truth...
...according to a new Gallup Poll for the Times Mirror Company," said a front-page story in The New York Times on January 4. What we have really lost is popularity...
...With predictable results...
...We give you another who says they will...
...In brief, society is teeming with people who become furious if told what the score is...
...They ignore the plight of Afghanistan...
...The trouble with waking up America so rudely, after six years of letting it slumber happily in dreamland, is that we're now being greeted with all the enthusiasm reserved for a loud alarm clock that goes off much too soon...
...Russell Baker once described it: "In the classic example, a refugee from Nazi Germany who appears on television saying monstrous things are happening in his homeland must be followed by a Nazi spokesman saying Adolf Hitler is the greatest boon to humanity since pasteurized milk...
...Consider the media score: They loved Castro, hated the Shah...
...And when the going gets tough for the press in America, the press fudges, the press jellies...
...tinued: "The media are delighted that irresponsible and traitorous Congressmen are leaking top-secret information to them...
...The odd thing about these television discussions designed to "get all sides of the issue" is that they do not feature a spectrum of people with different views on reality: Rather, they frequently give us a face-off between those who see reality and those who have missed it entirely...
...The letter writer, Jean Whitman, conMolly Ivins, a columnist for the Dallas Times Herald, appears in this space every month...
...6. So when the President makes it a crime for Government workers to go public with truth, I say, "Hoorah...
...They have nothing to offer in the way of facts or insight...
...Lately, through no initiative of its own, the American press has been debunking fairy tales and once more telling depressing, pessimistic, hurtful, unhappy truth...
...a new moral, ethical, and political Victo-rianism...
...Ronald Reagan, Feiffer observed elsewhere, represented "a return to innocence...
...they champion the African National Congress, a communistic party, in South Africa...
...7. And when he bars the press from reporting our wars, I say, "About time...
...The justification for putting them on the air is that "they represent a point of view...
...9. It needs to feel better...
...8. America doesn't need any more truth...
...We are retreating to a fine old American press cop-out we like to call objectivity...
...Whitman is as serious as a stroke, and while there may not be many citizens who hold her detailed agenda of grudges, the 17 per cent drop in confidence in the television news and the 23 per cent drop in confidence in the credibility of newspapers uncovered by the Times-Mirror poll do represent a kill-the-messenger response...
...During that attack we were deluged with quotes from Pravda and TASS, but, alas, that too was a triumph for Reagan...
...This tendency has been aggravated in recent years by a noticeable trend to substitute people who speak from a right-wing ideological perspective for those who know something about a given subject...
...They so divided the country, making heroes out of the SDS and Jane Fonda, that the real heroes came home to hostility after fighting a horrible war in Vietnam...
...5. Truth has changed us from a nation of optimists to a nation of pessimists...
...Throw it at the cat...
...Thus, if the press presents the man who says Hitler is an ogre and the man who says Hitler is a prince, it believes it has done the full measure of its journalistic duty...
...The public may not learn much about these fairly sensitive matters, but neither does it get another excuse to denounce the media for unfairness and lack of objectivity...
...Here is a sample—a letter to the editor of my local paper, the Austin American-Statesman: "Like sharks circling, the news media are in a feeding frenzy...
...A man says the rockets won't work...
...4. Look how the truth fouled us up in the 1960s and the 1970s...
...2. Before truth, this was a happy country...
...3. But look what truth did to us in Vietnam...
...It gives America what it demands in a time of insoluble crisis: fairy tales...
...The American press has always had a tendency to assume that the truth must lie exactly half-way between any two opposing points of view...
...they champion the leaders in Zimbabwe and Angola, where tribal murder is now common...
Vol. 51 • March 1987 • No. 3
