“A lot of this has to do with the breakdown of the walls between commentary and reporting,” argues Mark Jurkowitz, the associate director of the Washington, DC–based Project for Excellence in Journalism, and a former Phoenix colleague. “The Note thrived on attitude, and insiders liked it because they felt like they were getting a voice from ABC News that the normal public never got. David Shuster is on MSNBC, where they have a range of talk shows with a nonexistent line between reporting and opining — including Olbermann, who’s become what liberals see as an antidote to Bill O’Reilly. It seems to me that it’s a function of the increasing hybridization of journalism, and that it’s been exacerbated by cable talk shows more than anything else.”
Mic check
There is, however, one more factor worth noting, and that’s the politicians themselves. Like ugly campaigning, bad behavior by our chosen leaders is nothing new. John F. Kennedy philandered; Richard Nixon taped his vulgar paranoiac fantasies; Lyndon B. Johnson forced people to meet with him while he sat on the toilet.
Today, though, the media covers this material instead of looking the other way — but the politicians either can’t or won’t adjust. So it is that, as time passes, we learn just how ugly the individuals who run our country can be — whether it’s Bill Clinton diddling Monica Lewinsky, or John McCain joking in 1998 that then-18-year-old Chelsea Clinton is ugly because her father was Janet Reno, or Dick Cheney calling the Times’ Adam Clymer a “major-league asshole.” And really: with our politicians acting like a bunch of crude, narcissistic adolescents, is it any surprise that our political commentary is following suit?
Understandable though it may be, it’s also regrettable. There are some important issues to discuss before the ’08 campaign wraps up — Iraq, global warming, imminent economic disaster, that kind of thing. But the more the press traffics in political juvenilia, the harder such discussion becomes. In addition to distracting from the stuff that matters, these self-inflicted embarrassments further diminish us in the eyes of an already-skeptical public.
We can’t go back to the era of Walter Cronkite et al., when revered newsmen delivered measured pronouncements to a worshipful public. But we can try to keep things from getting even worse. Like Cheney and his colleagues, journalists of all stripes need to remember: these days, the mic is always on.
On the Web
Adam Reilly's Media Log: //www.thephoenix.com/medialog