The Media Game
The American media and U.S. politicians play a game among themselves. It's been going on almost since the start of professional journalism, since Civil War military correspondents for the New York and Philadelphia dailies puffed or broke generals and War Department officials in exchange for access to the D.C. telegraph wires to send dispatches from Virginia battlefields.
The media-vs.-government war has mostly been a cold war, but it's been hot since the Johnson (Lyndon) administration. By August, 1967, the Washington correspondent of the "St. Louis Post-Dispatch" reported, "the relationship between the President and the Washington press corps has settled into a pattern of chronic disbelief." It more or less stayed there through the six subsequent administrations, and now, with George W. Bush, the most effective anti-media president in modern times, ensconced in the White House, the battle is in full Götterdämmerung mode.
We who watch the wide world through this media have to squint to see what is really going on out there, because this game in which we have no stake kicks up so much dust and smoke, The two sides are so absorbed in winning that they forget why we're even here and paying attention.
The White House administration stiff-arms media it doesn't like, or brushes past them with dismissive nonsense quotes. It plants its own favorites among the press pools (which, as a tactic, is not unlike the media's old habit of cultivating leak sources in the bureaucracy). The media, for its part, will discard eight hours of crucial factual information about the Iraq War that emerges in a hearing, and only save the bit where the prominent general says something off the cuff about the insurgency that seems to contradict what the vice president said off the cuff about it a week before.
It's like watching football on TV, except the TV camera, instead of focusing on the game, is forever trying to catch a player scratching his butt or picking his teeth, and the players, while they play the game, are at the same time trying to make sure the ball never gets seen on camera. They tailor their plays to keep it out of lens-range.
You could watch a whole season of that and get pretty good at identifying players' gross habits and network camera-carriers' zoom lens skill, but I submit at the end of it you wouldn't know very much about football.
The media-vs.-government war has mostly been a cold war, but it's been hot since the Johnson (Lyndon) administration. By August, 1967, the Washington correspondent of the "St. Louis Post-Dispatch" reported, "the relationship between the President and the Washington press corps has settled into a pattern of chronic disbelief." It more or less stayed there through the six subsequent administrations, and now, with George W. Bush, the most effective anti-media president in modern times, ensconced in the White House, the battle is in full Götterdämmerung mode.
We who watch the wide world through this media have to squint to see what is really going on out there, because this game in which we have no stake kicks up so much dust and smoke, The two sides are so absorbed in winning that they forget why we're even here and paying attention.
The White House administration stiff-arms media it doesn't like, or brushes past them with dismissive nonsense quotes. It plants its own favorites among the press pools (which, as a tactic, is not unlike the media's old habit of cultivating leak sources in the bureaucracy). The media, for its part, will discard eight hours of crucial factual information about the Iraq War that emerges in a hearing, and only save the bit where the prominent general says something off the cuff about the insurgency that seems to contradict what the vice president said off the cuff about it a week before.
It's like watching football on TV, except the TV camera, instead of focusing on the game, is forever trying to catch a player scratching his butt or picking his teeth, and the players, while they play the game, are at the same time trying to make sure the ball never gets seen on camera. They tailor their plays to keep it out of lens-range.
You could watch a whole season of that and get pretty good at identifying players' gross habits and network camera-carriers' zoom lens skill, but I submit at the end of it you wouldn't know very much about football.
Labels: media
