Rapa Nui Daily Press Briefing
- At April 12, 2004
- By Bob Howe
- In Blog Posts
1
Stop Genuflecting and Start Reporting
Editor & Publisher reports that the press isn’t swallowing the White House’s characterization of the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing as a historical document:
Many newspapers ran Scott Lindlaw’s Associated Press wrap-up which opened this way: “President Bush was told more than a month before the Sept. 11 attacks that al-Qaida had reached America’s shores, had a support system in place for its operatives and that the FBI had detected suspicious activity that might involve a hijacking plot.”
The Shame of the Cities
Sunday’s New York Times had an excellent Editorial Observer column by Adam Cohen on the corrupting influence of business on government:
What opened the door to public corruption, Steffens concluded, was the blurring of the line between business and government. The average American “deplores our politics and lauds our business,” Steffens wrote, and therefore wants more businessmen involved in government. But this impulse ignores what business is all about: generating profits. It is folly, Steffens argued, to expect businessmen to look after any interest broader than their own.
Why do editors keep throwing “The Boondocks” off the funnies page?
The New Yorker profile of “Boondocks” creator Aaron McGruder describes the cartoonist’s difficult relations with his would-be supporters on the left:
But what McGruder saw when he looked around at his approving audience was this: a lot of old, white faces. What followed was not quite a coronation. McGruder, who rarely prepares notes or speeches for events like this, began by thanking Thurman, “the most ass-kicking woman in America.” Then he lowered the boom. He was a twenty-nine-year-old black man, he said, who got invited to such functions all the time, so you could imagine how bored he was. He proceeded to ramble, at considerable length, and in a tone, as one listener put it, of “militant cynicism,” with a recurring theme: that the folks in the room (“courageous”? Please) were a sorry lot.
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This was a great piece, but if The Shame of the Cities speaks to our times, Cohen missed the message as much as anyone. Stffens wrote that book in 1904; by the time he wrote his autobiography in the 30s he had decided all his muckraking and investigative reporting had accomplished nothing whatsoever, and that the problem was not only people of good will who took no action (“Misgovernment of the American people is misgovernment by the American people”) but that most “decent” people actively oppose any reform that might actually have a chance of changing anything. He uses Christ as an example; a radical truly trying to bring justice who was killed by the decent, sensible people of his time.
He basically came to believe that the interests of the state and the interests of big business were absolutely opposed, and that you could either follow the Soviet model of smashing the business interests altogether, or the fascist model of merging with them. He held some very naive beliefs about the possiblity of revolution, and a weird late-thirties Utopian belief that a coming Leisure Era would accomplish a redistribution of wealth in the United States, but apart from a general softening of his thinking as he got older, he found no answers to solving the corruption problem. He believed quite firmly that investigative journalism, public exposure, and the action of democracy were not only ineffective in fighting corruption, but complicit in supporting it — because it’s not only business people who act only in their own self-interest, but everyone.
So Cohen is holding up a prescription that its own author completely disavowed less than a quarter-century after writing it.