All the President's Journalists
by David Essex
All week long the location trucks had been parked in front of my office, their big dishes trained like space flowers on satellites up
there somewhere. Their little news crews and the modelesque
"reporters" idled for long hours around the statue of George Meade and his retinue of semi-naked angels, their lens-capped cameras trained on the federal courthouse. One block up
Pennsylvania Avenue, giant cranes put the last touches on the flat-slab underpinnings of the new Newsoleum.
All this prompted a bit of water cooler chat with a young co-worker, a gal who central casting or Karl Rove might pick out of a crowd and
make the WASPy promise of decent America. She laughed at the circus below us and said, "I don't watch the news, ever. I look at the web and
watch Jon Stewart." Then we had a laugh recalling The Daily Show's montage of the talking heads' CIA Leak Grand Jury Stakeout, a half dozen
reporters soberly telling those cameras, "There's still no word... no news... no news... no news," until finally there's a payoff to the non-story:
"We're told now they're... going to lunch." She walked off, still laughing and I had a moment of hope; if her generation recognizes the obvious
buffoonery of the cable clones maybe democracy has a future.
Millions of Americans have felt similar stirrings of long-dead hope recently, almost all of it inspired by the investigation run by federal
prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. His story is being shaped into something like Frank Capra would make in his upbeat mode: an incorruptible,
monk-like federal prosecutor ("Eliot Ness with a Harvard degree") is pulled off his terrorism beat to lance the corruption at the core
of Washington. That narrative is fallaciously simplistic and now, of course, a long way from fully playing out, even though Fitzgerald's
federal grand jury has indicted I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby on five felony counts. Still, there is now some cause to believe that the Bush
administration does not so effectively, as one
flunky claimed, create its "own reality." Many of these hopefuls have been,
like my co-worker, anxiously following the developments leading up to the indictments, less in the mainstream media than in the blogosphere.
The mainstream media can't really do this story justice, partly because they're dinosaurs and
partly because some their premier organs have been sucked into their own narrative vortex. All the MSM outlets, from Fox to NPR, and especially
the Washington Post and the New York Times, still genuflect before white men in suits, as if politicians and flacks had learned nothing since
the Golden Age of Murrow about how to manipulate them. They literally can't distinguish between Deep Throat and Karl Rove.
Then too, reading about the Plame case in the major newspapers and magazines is a weird exercise in tedium. The old newspaperman's adage,
"Tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you've told them," is still slavishly enacted in every big story,
as if there were myriad readers of each story who somehow do not know who Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame, Scooter Libby and Karl Rove are, and how
their fates are interconnected. (If you've been in a coma,
here's an encyclopaedic index.) The basics long since ceased being news to American readers. But Fitzgerald seems to have run a leak-free
operation and that has hampered today's reporters, who like to take dictation from authoritative sources, or get emails they can cut and paste
and so minimize their typing.
Television's treatment of the Plame outing has been milquetoast at best, and rendered nearly unintelligible by the Foxagandizing of all TV news,
by the utterly mendacious "fair and balanced" pose which assumes that the truth is arrived at by giving equal weight to any two positions.
This approach still allows millions of Americans to believe that Saddam was about to get an A-bomb, that Joe Wilson's report on the
Niger yellowcake was somehow deeply misleading, and that Valerie Plame
was no more than a desk jockey because she now works at CIA headquarters.
The weirdest thing about the Plame matter is how it all went instantly, totally meta. News in its brief modern existence has always been made
up of fairly traditional stories: some objective or invisible narrator telling us how character and conflict meshed to produced The Ending.
But the Plame affair has been a metafiction from the start. The Story itself — its variants, its spinoffs and its origins — have been the story from the beginning.
The hall-of-mirror quality, the endless, fractalizing ironies of The Story have been dizzying for anyone else
trying to follow or predict or interpret. Foremost of these, for instance, is the way that those who smeared Joseph Wilson, the whistleblower,
were for many months protected as confidential sources by key reporters, as if they themselves were whistleblowers — not propagandists —
whose immunity was essential to protecting the people from predation by government.
The Story even defies naming in the mainstream media, but on the web some of its more readable afficionados call it
Treasongate or Traitorgate.
The MSM newsies will be slow to pick up on these web locutions for some of the same reasons they can't really cover the story. It
doesn't sound objective, and if a newsperson doesn't sound objective he or she risks looking ridiculous. But colorful bloggers
can fairly and authoritatively source the umbrella term in that now-famous speech where Bush senior, former CIA director and President, anticipated
the sort of story Rove and Libby put out:
We need more human intelligence. That means we need more protection for the methods we use to gather intelligence and more protection for our
sources, particularly our human sources, people that are risking their lives for their country... Even though I'm a tranquil guy now at
this stage of my life, I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing
the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious, of traitors.
Of course the right wingers will follow Fox's lead and insist that no such treason has taken place, because Valerie Plame was not a spy. But
Patrick Fitzgerald, both in his public statements and in the indictment itself, has demolished that talking point. (Plame, it seems, worked for the Directorate of Operations, the spy wing of the CIA, not the
analyst wing.) Moreover, despite the fact that Fitzgerald pointedly refuses to tell much of what he now knows, those on the right will
have a much harder time spinning the story away from lefty bloggers' sensational
conclusions. Americans have now learned, through sworn testimony, that Rove and Libby both worked actively to blow Plame's classified
cover, and that they did so after discussions on Air Force One and Air Force Two. They have learned that Dick Cheney and George Bush must have
known this very early on, and yet, in the midst of the 2004 campaign, they insisted otherwise. Indeed, Fitzgerald may have spoonfed today's
journalists enough hard information, and given their asses enough cover, that they will finally start really working on this story, and the
larger story of the administration's reflex mendacity. But, in several senses, it's too late.
For one thing, the MSM are henceforth and forever outstripped by the bloggers. The bloggers have done an infinitely better job with Treasongate.
Many of those on the web are delightfully uninhibited by any pose of objectivity,
and yet also able to insert links to sites which cite chapter-and-verse support for their assertions; they are collegial, linking to and
encouraging (but also occasionally slagging) one another, but they seem free of the club mentality which has caused fellow newsies to give
Judith Miller et alia so much undeserved benefit of the doubt.
One blog in particular has been astonishingly fun and fascinating,
Firedoglake. The Plame-related duties there are divided between
Reddhedd, a lawyer and mother, and Jane
Hamsher, movie producer and author. Their writing on Traitorgate is excellent, partly because it almost completely
dispenses with "journo" conventions. During the run-up to the indictments they felt free to speculate, extrapolating from their own experience
and from what facts they could assemble, on what must have happened, and what must be going down in secrecy. Like fiction writers, they were
trying to build plausible narratives in personalized voices, not claiming authoritative views. Thus one got the Mouse Trap Theory of just how
Fitzgerald got Miller to roll over on Libby (he caught her in perjury) and the Empty Suit Theory of why George Bush promised to fire Rove if Rove did what he did (nobody tells Bush anything).
Many hours of office
productivity have surely been lost to the fact that assiduous web-surfers can find fresh and fascinating Treasongate material all day long,
even if it ultimately proves to be erroneous. Some made a plausible case that Fitzgerald's bill of particulars would include W and Dick as
unindicted co-conspirators. This didn't happen, but who cares if blog news is sometimes wrong? It's entertaining and free, or at least
included in the Comcast that also brings one Jon Stewart, and it's no more bullshit than the New York Times and Miller's
stovepiping
of Curveball's WMD nonsense.
Of course, another irony in The Story is that a fairly mainstream journalist, David Corn (but he's also a blogger) really got it rolling.
Three days after Robert Novak outed Valerie Plame in his syndicated column Corn, writing in The Nation, pointed out an inconvenient fact:
This is not only a possible breach of national security; it is a potential violation of law. Under the Intelligence Identities Protection
Act of 1982, it is a crime for anyone who has access to classified information to disclose intentionally information identifying a covert
agent.
Then he asked, "So where's the investigation?" And then he called Joe Wilson to make sure he knew the leak was a crime. So much for the
myth of journalistic detachment.
However useful and entertaining the blogs are, obviously we can't dispense with the mainstream media. They shape the opinions of the
electorate. At least in the movie version, we have the shining example of Watergate, where a couple of diligent reporters and one
disgruntled informant, brought the administration of Richard Nixon to an end. It wasn't really that simple
(and Nixon got off light) but Bob Woodward, once crusading Watergate investigator, now serves nicely as a symbol for the institution that
made him rich and famous. His narrative has become a cautionary tale: the young Turk in his dotage. Now he channels the thoughts, Kreskin-like,
of his subjects, and, hoping to retain access to the White House for a book about Bush's second term, goes on Larry King's show to
shill for the administration.
Woodward didn't bother to source his presumably very classified information, and alas, the next day, the Washington Post, his erstwhile
employer, differed on the point.
I take it all as infotainment now, as should we all. We should also remember one very
important point about this case: In June and July of 2003, at least two of the country's top journalists, Judith Miller of the New York Times and
Matt Cooper of Time, were witnesses to a crime and thus knew that innermost advisers at the White House would go to despicable
and even criminal lengths to smear the administration's critics. It seems this was something American voters really needed to know, but these
two reporters didn't even think about telling that story. They had their access to protect. Now it's too late for the voters to make the
informed choice that either Miller or Cooper could have facilitated. And they even allowed their lawyers to argue, unabashedly, that their sources'
confidentiality (that of Libby and Rove) was privileged, protected and predicated in the people's urgent need to know.
E-mail David Essex at djessex@earthlink.net.
