Excerpt: "Michael D. Shear notes that the Obama administration has convened
more than a dozen clubby confabs between carefully selected journalists and
the president since 2009. The ground rules are simple: columnists, pundits,
and opinion-makers are summoned to kick around a topic du jour. And in
exchange for the exclusive audience with the American head of state, they
agree to quote nothing on the record, and indeed to behave as if the meeting
never happened at all."
U.S. president Barack Obama speaks during an exclusive interview with White
House Correspondent Jeff Mason in the Library of the White House. (photo:
Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
All the President's Chums: Unpacking the Power-Friendly Clubs That Keep
Journalism From Being a Public Good
By Chris Lehmann, The Baffler
09 January 16
tI seems odd, after the media revolutions of the past several decades, to
behold one of the worst conventions of the old press order soldiering
blithely on: the private, off-the-record presidential briefing. In a
curiously noncommittal dispatch for the New York Times, D.C. scribe Michael
D. Shear notes that the Obama administration has convened more than a dozen
such clubby confabs since 2009. The ground rules are simple: columnists,
pundits, and opinion-makers are summoned to kick around a topic du jour-the
damnably slow economic recovery, the stalled-out effort to contain ISIS,
this or that pending trade accord, etc., and in exchange for the exclusive
audience with the American head of state, they agree to quote nothing on the
record, and indeed to behave as if the meeting never happened at all. Cue
the predictable flurry of columns smugly conversant in what the president
"appears to recognize," "clearly feels," or-should the pundit in question be
feeling especially coy about covering his tracks-what a shadowy "many in the
White House . . . believe."
Now, no one denies that a face-to-face with a sitting president is immensely
pleasing to one's journalistic vanity. (Though it does call to mind the old
saw about the pleasures of op-ed journalism being akin to pissing yourself
in a blue serge suit: it feels nice when you're doing it, but when you're
finished, no one notices.) But journalism is a public trust, if one is to
credit the sort of rhetoric its leading lights like to throw around in
awards ceremonies, anthology introductions, and scholarship applications. So
it seems reasonable to ask just what sort of public interest is served when
our leadership class conducts ex cathedra bull sessions with a handpicked
coterie of writers so as to ensure the wide and friendly circulation of a
few pet talking points.
The Oval Office's underlings, of course, offer up a smartly self-justifying
rationale for the ceremony. President Obama can ruminate more freely, and
indulge in more adventurous modes of discursive give-and-take than in the
stilted confines of a press conference or a post-speech Q & A. The confabs
are "a way for people to set aside the urgency of supplying the latest quote
from the president of the United States and sit back and listen to the
broader argument," says lead White House press flack Josh Earnest. Never
mind that these sessions, as Shear goes on to note, almost never include any
news reporters-i.e., the kind of writer who's compelled to run down the
chief executive's "latest quote." No, these are the lords of our
punditocracy-those omniscient yet infinitely patient souls who lovingly
chronicle "the broader argument," while offering their own accumulated
Beltway-branded wisdom on how it might be better conducted. That these are
the writers Obama enlists as a sympathetic audience speaks volumes about the
real aim here: not to let the broader argument run its own devil-may-care
course, but to shape it in terms singularly favorable to the Oval Office.
What's more, the White House defenders of the practice can't even offer up
an internally consistent explanation. Out of one side of her mouth, former
Obama communications director Anita Dunn echoes Earnest's lazy reasoning for
why these cozy meet-ups must always be off the record: "Once it's
attributed, it becomes an official policy. You can't really think out loud
at that point." Then, out of the other, she contends that these sessions
produce a more rounded sense of Obama's policy sagesse: "They walk away from
them with a better sense of him as a person and a policy maker."
Got that? Obama can't be held to his utterances as he holds journalistic
court because that would turn his off-the-cuff speculations into policy
pronouncements-yet these selfsame gatherings disclose elusive truths about
how Obama makes policy. Try transposing these basic terms of analysis to any
other sphere of life: You don't need to read my novel to know that I am the
second coming of Melville; We will never speak of the traumas of your
childhood, but at the end of several years of psychotherapy, you will be
miraculously cured! (Dunn now plies her trade as flack-for-hire at
SKDKnickerbocker, a "progressive" messaging shop dedicated to such worthy
policy aims as shilling for the multi-billion-dollar shakedown operation
known as "for-profit education.")
But spinners will spin. The genuinely troubling question in these
behind-the-scenes briefings is just what impels the members of the Fourth
Estate to acquiesce to them. Since they have already agreed to a White
House-mandated omerta, none of the eager sounding-boards-by-another-name who
have rallied to Obama's after-hours casting calls can proffer a good reason
to take part in them or to abide by their idiotic ground rules. However,
clubby access journalism has a long and colorful history in our centers of
power-and any cursory look back shows just how ruinous it's been.
The recent history of Shear's employer-our republic's fabled "paper of
record"-supplies ample chapter and verse on the subject. Until her
unceremonious departure in 2005, the Times's lead Middle East correspondent
Judith Miller cultivated access to power with a sort of religious fervency
(even to the point of becoming romantically involved with a congressman).
It's no exaggeration to say that her now-notorious, and bottomlessly
credulous, reporting on Saddam Hussein's mythical arsenal of weapons of mass
destruction was critical in the Bush administration's rush to invade Iraq in
2003-just as it's a matter of record that her principal source in that
reporting was Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi, a
self-interested fabulist on the question of Iraq's WMD capabilities who
worked in close concert with the Cheney-Bush White House. When Miller was
later implicated in the shady journalistic deal-making that resulted in the
outing of former CIA operative Valerie Plame-whose husband Joe Wilson, a
career diplomat, had publicly disputed the Bush White House's WMD
narrative-it was but the grace note to a long career of lip-synching the
arguments of her favorite sources.
Going further back in Times lore, the paper was so blindly in cahoots with
the Cold War liberalism of the Kennedy White House that its editor, Turner
Catledge, acceded to JFK's request in 1961 that the paper sit on news of the
pending Bay of Pigs invasion until the operation had run its course. It
turned out, of course, that the U.S. invasion failed all on its own-and if
anything, an early report of the planned Cuba putsch might have prompted
Kennedy's best and brightest to either reconsider or shelve the whole
fiasco-in-the-making. But the important thing to mark here is that the
precedent was set for American presidents to freely avail themselves of a
compliant media when pressing urgent (to them) state business. That would be
why, just a few years later, there was a decorous media conspiracy of
silence surrounding the Johnson administration's bogus account of a
non-existent North Vietnamese "second attack" on the U.S. Navy destroyer
Maddox-the mythical 1964 Gulf of Tonkin show of communist aggression that
furnished the official rationale to ratchet up the Vietnam War. And that
would also be why, forty years later, the New York Times under Bill Keller
could safely be counted on to exercise prior restraint entirely under its
own steam, when national security reporter James Risen was told to sit on
explosive revelations of illegal NSA surveillance of U.S. citizens lest they
unduly influence the outcome of the imminent 2004 presidential election-er,
I mean jeopardize the safety of the Homeland.
So much, in other words, for telling the truth and letting the chips fall
where they may. That's not how access journalism works. In fact, many of the
biggest investigative coups of the past generation were broken far afield
from the elbow-bending haunts of the D.C. power elite. The Iran-Contra
scandal came to light in 1986 courtesy of the Lebanese magazine Ash-Shiraa;
news of the S & L corruptions in the 1980s was first broken by reporters at
the tiny Northern California paper Russian River News and the trade journal
National Mortgage News; the CIA-crack connection was famously reported by
the San Jose Mercury-News (in a story that the establishment press rushed to
discredit, in deference to its pet CIA sources, and that the Merc itself
later disclaimed, under force of thuggish peer pressure). Meanwhile, even in
the more impressionistic world of opinion journalism, by far the greatest
contributors have been out-of-the-loop, principled critics, rather than
on-the-make backscratchers. For decades, mainstream papers parroted White
House lies and power plays-while widely derided cranks such as I.F. Stone
and Noam Chomsky patiently assembled an unassailable counternarrative of
imperial American excess.
Stone and Chomsky possessed almost no inside sources of their own; instead,
they adopted what for many Washington hacks was an
unthinkable-to-blasphemous methodology, contrasting the D.C.-sanctioned
accounts of history with foreign reportage. Note again that the quickest and
surest path to the truth was to point oneself away from the capital city's
vast messaging apparatus-except to note how the particular shapers of that
messaging have stood to benefit from its uncritical adoption, far and wide.
None of this is to suggest that Ezra Klein, Michael Tomasky, and the other
fellow-traveling souls who've sat down for chinwags with our commander in
chief are enablers of the American Imperium, on the scale of a Turner
Catledge or a Judy Miller. It is, however, to note that the moment you're
summoned to a Delphic sit-down with the oracles of power, you're telling a
very different story from the one that you owe to your readers.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
U.S. president Barack Obama speaks during an exclusive interview with White
House Correspondent Jeff Mason in the Library of the White House. (photo:
Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
http://thebaffler.com/blog/presidents-chumshttp://thebaffler.com/blog/presid
ents-chums
All the President's Chums: Unpacking the Power-Friendly Clubs That Keep
Journalism From Being a Public Good
By Chris Lehmann, The Baffler
09 January 16
t seems odd, after the media revolutions of the past several decades, to
behold one of the worst conventions of the old press order soldiering
blithely on: the private, off-the-record presidential briefing. In a
curiously noncommittal dispatch for the New York Times, D.C. scribe Michael
D. Shear notes that the Obama administration has convened more than a dozen
such clubby confabs since 2009. The ground rules are simple: columnists,
pundits, and opinion-makers are summoned to kick around a topic du jour-the
damnably slow economic recovery, the stalled-out effort to contain ISIS,
this or that pending trade accord, etc., and in exchange for the exclusive
audience with the American head of state, they agree to quote nothing on the
record, and indeed to behave as if the meeting never happened at all. Cue
the predictable flurry of columns smugly conversant in what the president
"appears to recognize," "clearly feels," or-should the pundit in question be
feeling especially coy about covering his tracks-what a shadowy "many in the
White House . . . believe."
Now, no one denies that a face-to-face with a sitting president is immensely
pleasing to one's journalistic vanity. (Though it does call to mind the old
saw about the pleasures of op-ed journalism being akin to pissing yourself
in a blue serge suit: it feels nice when you're doing it, but when you're
finished, no one notices.) But journalism is a public trust, if one is to
credit the sort of rhetoric its leading lights like to throw around in
awards ceremonies, anthology introductions, and scholarship applications. So
it seems reasonable to ask just what sort of public interest is served when
our leadership class conducts ex cathedra bull sessions with a handpicked
coterie of writers so as to ensure the wide and friendly circulation of a
few pet talking points.
The Oval Office's underlings, of course, offer up a smartly self-justifying
rationale for the ceremony. President Obama can ruminate more freely, and
indulge in more adventurous modes of discursive give-and-take than in the
stilted confines of a press conference or a post-speech Q & A. The confabs
are "a way for people to set aside the urgency of supplying the latest quote
from the president of the United States and sit back and listen to the
broader argument," says lead White House press flack Josh Earnest. Never
mind that these sessions, as Shear goes on to note, almost never include any
news reporters-i.e., the kind of writer who's compelled to run down the
chief executive's "latest quote." No, these are the lords of our
punditocracy-those omniscient yet infinitely patient souls who lovingly
chronicle "the broader argument," while offering their own accumulated
Beltway-branded wisdom on how it might be better conducted. That these are
the writers Obama enlists as a sympathetic audience speaks volumes about the
real aim here: not to let the broader argument run its own devil-may-care
course, but to shape it in terms singularly favorable to the Oval Office.
What's more, the White House defenders of the practice can't even offer up
an internally consistent explanation. Out of one side of her mouth, former
Obama communications director Anita Dunn echoes Earnest's lazy reasoning for
why these cozy meet-ups must always be off the record: "Once it's
attributed, it becomes an official policy. You can't really think out loud
at that point." Then, out of the other, she contends that these sessions
produce a more rounded sense of Obama's policy sagesse: "They walk away from
them with a better sense of him as a person and a policy maker."
Got that? Obama can't be held to his utterances as he holds journalistic
court because that would turn his off-the-cuff speculations into policy
pronouncements-yet these selfsame gatherings disclose elusive truths about
how Obama makes policy. Try transposing these basic terms of analysis to any
other sphere of life: You don't need to read my novel to know that I am the
second coming of Melville; We will never speak of the traumas of your
childhood, but at the end of several years of psychotherapy, you will be
miraculously cured! (Dunn now plies her trade as flack-for-hire at
SKDKnickerbocker, a "progressive" messaging shop dedicated to such worthy
policy aims as shilling for the multi-billion-dollar shakedown operation
known as "for-profit education.")
But spinners will spin. The genuinely troubling question in these
behind-the-scenes briefings is just what impels the members of the Fourth
Estate to acquiesce to them. Since they have already agreed to a White
House-mandated omerta, none of the eager sounding-boards-by-another-name who
have rallied to Obama's after-hours casting calls can proffer a good reason
to take part in them or to abide by their idiotic ground rules. However,
clubby access journalism has a long and colorful history in our centers of
power-and any cursory look back shows just how ruinous it's been.
The recent history of Shear's employer-our republic's fabled "paper of
record"-supplies ample chapter and verse on the subject. Until her
unceremonious departure in 2005, the Times's lead Middle East correspondent
Judith Miller cultivated access to power with a sort of religious fervency
(even to the point of becoming romantically involved with a congressman).
It's no exaggeration to say that her now-notorious, and bottomlessly
credulous, reporting on Saddam Hussein's mythical arsenal of weapons of mass
destruction was critical in the Bush administration's rush to invade Iraq in
2003-just as it's a matter of record that her principal source in that
reporting was Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi, a
self-interested fabulist on the question of Iraq's WMD capabilities who
worked in close concert with the Cheney-Bush White House. When Miller was
later implicated in the shady journalistic deal-making that resulted in the
outing of former CIA operative Valerie Plame-whose husband Joe Wilson, a
career diplomat, had publicly disputed the Bush White House's WMD
narrative-it was but the grace note to a long career of lip-synching the
arguments of her favorite sources.
Going further back in Times lore, the paper was so blindly in cahoots with
the Cold War liberalism of the Kennedy White House that its editor, Turner
Catledge, acceded to JFK's request in 1961 that the paper sit on news of the
pending Bay of Pigs invasion until the operation had run its course. It
turned out, of course, that the U.S. invasion failed all on its own-and if
anything, an early report of the planned Cuba putsch might have prompted
Kennedy's best and brightest to either reconsider or shelve the whole
fiasco-in-the-making. But the important thing to mark here is that the
precedent was set for American presidents to freely avail themselves of a
compliant media when pressing urgent (to them) state business. That would be
why, just a few years later, there was a decorous media conspiracy of
silence surrounding the Johnson administration's bogus account of a
non-existent North Vietnamese "second attack" on the U.S. Navy destroyer
Maddox-the mythical 1964 Gulf of Tonkin show of communist aggression that
furnished the official rationale to ratchet up the Vietnam War. And that
would also be why, forty years later, the New York Times under Bill Keller
could safely be counted on to exercise prior restraint entirely under its
own steam, when national security reporter James Risen was told to sit on
explosive revelations of illegal NSA surveillance of U.S. citizens lest they
unduly influence the outcome of the imminent 2004 presidential election-er,
I mean jeopardize the safety of the Homeland.
So much, in other words, for telling the truth and letting the chips fall
where they may. That's not how access journalism works. In fact, many of the
biggest investigative coups of the past generation were broken far afield
from the elbow-bending haunts of the D.C. power elite. The Iran-Contra
scandal came to light in 1986 courtesy of the Lebanese magazine Ash-Shiraa;
news of the S & L corruptions in the 1980s was first broken by reporters at
the tiny Northern California paper Russian River News and the trade journal
National Mortgage News; the CIA-crack connection was famously reported by
the San Jose Mercury-News (in a story that the establishment press rushed to
discredit, in deference to its pet CIA sources, and that the Merc itself
later disclaimed, under force of thuggish peer pressure). Meanwhile, even in
the more impressionistic world of opinion journalism, by far the greatest
contributors have been out-of-the-loop, principled critics, rather than
on-the-make backscratchers. For decades, mainstream papers parroted White
House lies and power plays-while widely derided cranks such as I.F. Stone
and Noam Chomsky patiently assembled an unassailable counternarrative of
imperial American excess.
Stone and Chomsky possessed almost no inside sources of their own; instead,
they adopted what for many Washington hacks was an
unthinkable-to-blasphemous methodology, contrasting the D.C.-sanctioned
accounts of history with foreign reportage. Note again that the quickest and
surest path to the truth was to point oneself away from the capital city's
vast messaging apparatus-except to note how the particular shapers of that
messaging have stood to benefit from its uncritical adoption, far and wide.
None of this is to suggest that Ezra Klein, Michael Tomasky, and the other
fellow-traveling souls who've sat down for chinwags with our commander in
chief are enablers of the American Imperium, on the scale of a Turner
Catledge or a Judy Miller. It is, however, to note that the moment you're
summoned to a Delphic sit-down with the oracles of power, you're telling a
very different story from the one that you owe to your readers.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
