Media Anarchy
Sunday's Democratic presidential debate was absolutely atrocious, and the blame lies with moderators Dan Rather of CBS News, Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times, and Andrew Kirtzman of WCBS-TV. Robin Toner, writing the Times' in-house, postmodern coverage, called it "the most contentious Democratic debate in months," but the bulk of contention was clearly manufactured by the three questioners, whose reckless interrogation did little to help voters "make an informed decision," as Rather said they were attempting to do.
Bumiller, the Times White House correspondent, proved the most egregious offender. She effectively represented the recently-launched Bush campaign's phantom presence, inappropriately defending the president at various points in the debate. And her rude treatment of the candidates, most notably Al Sharpton, sparked much of the contention over the hour. Worst of all, while she tried repeatedly, Bumiller failed to maintain control over the proceedings. The candidates surely felt Bumiller's bullying justified their own unruliness.
Once Rather said at the outset, "There are no set rules," all bets were off. CBS and the Times chose a free-wielding format and could therefore only expect a free-wielding debate. In essence, the Times wrote the Monday political coverage for all of its competitors. The Washington Post called it "agressive," "snappish," and "sometimes chaotic." The Associated Press said John Edwards "shed his nice-guy approach." But it was Bumiller and her two colleagues who really shed their nice-guy approaches and came out aggressive and snappish to form a sometimes chaotic debate. Their "moderation" created the storyline of the debate.
The chief ailment in Bumiller's comportment Sunday appeared to be a question of medium. As a newspaper reporter, Bumiller is accustomed to private, off-camera interviews in which she controls the flow. But television is a quite different scene, one where the subject must star and the questioner must take a back seat. That by no means precludes tough questions in a televised debate, but Bumiller gets us nowhere by airing her own frustration with the candidates' answers and egaging in protracted arguments with them on live television. Bumiller even fought with her fellow moderators for airtime.
Bumiller's "contentious" style must have stemmed chiefly from her own reporting for the Times, where she has been a sometimes excellent but often too-friendly reporter in the White House press corps. Her most ridiculous line of questioning Sunday came when she turned the age-old "Are you a Communist?" query into "Are you a liberal?" Bumiller asked, "How can you hope to win with this kind of characterization in this climate?" You mean, this media climate?
Bumiller often felt like a Bush surrogate in Sunday's debate, turning each of the candidates against the president rather than each other. That's a dubious strategy unless Bumiller is convinced John Kerry has the locked up the nomination.
But, indeed, press presumptions played a strong role in the debate, with Sharpton and Dennis Kucinich effectively sidelined but for their own objections. After a discussion of Haiti which completely neglected the only man in the room who had spoken with President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Sharpton stepped in with an astute observation:
What you're trying to do is trying to decide for the voters how we go forward. The voters need to hear this morning from four candidates—or say the media is now going to select the candidates.
The Times has repeatedly editorialized against including candidates like Sharpton and Kucinich in the presidential debates, and editorial editor Gail Collins recently weighed in with her own scathing rebuke of unsuccessful—or "marginal"—candidates. In a presumptuous dismissal of Sharpton, Collins wrote:
What we have here, then, is a candidate who is not serious, who cannot afford to be serious, but whose career depends on frightening people who know he's not serious into pretending they think he is.
Taking their cue from the Times editorial board, the three moderators cut out Sharpton and Kucinich, a decision which served in part to turn the debate into a raucus affair, with the trailing candidates clamoring for a voice. And while the devolution of the debate extended far beyond the issue of allowing Sharpton and Kucinich to speak, the decision to limit their time underscored the moderators' failure. You have to read the entire transcript or a watch a recording of the debate to get a true feel for the failure, but consider this particularly revealing excerpt:
BUMILLER: Senator Kerry—
KERRY: No, I insist on being able to finish.
BUMILLER: I want to ask a really important question here—
KERRY: This is important.
BUMILLER: We're all arguing—
SHARPTON: Wait a minute, if we're going to have a discussion just between two, in your arrogance you can try that. But that's one of the reasons we're running. We're going to have delegates so that you can't just limit the discussion. And I think that your attempts to do this is blatant and I'm going to call you out on it because I'm not going to sit here and be—
BUMILLER: Well I'm not going to be addressed like this.
SHARPTON: Well then let all of us speak. You said that I could state next. What I wanted to say on this issue—
KERRY: Al, I wasn't finished.
SHARPTON: I'm going to let him finish. But I want to be, I want us to be able to respond. Or then tell us you want a two-way debate.
RATHER: Here's the way we're playing this. Certainly want to hear. I think you will agree the voters have spoken.
SHARPTON: No, the voters have not spoken. We've only had— He's won one primary. He's come in fourth seven times—
BUMILLER: How many delegates—
SHARPTON: What you're trying to do is decide for the voters how we go forward. The voters need to hear this morning from four candidates. Or say the media now is going to select candidates.
RATHER: Reverend, we've heard from you and we're going to hear from you. I don't understand what the argument is.
SHARPTON: I had to fight to speak on Haiti. I had to fight to speak on trade. You've got a guy with one primary that you're pretending he's Gary Hart. Gary Hart won more primaries than Mondale. Let's have an open debate in going to Super Tuesday. Or say that you guys want to decide the nominee.
RATHER: Reverend, debate them, not me.
If Rather doesn't want the candidates to debate the media, then a debate is exactly what he's going to get.
[The above transcription of the debate is based on the Times' transcription with my own corrections for accuracy and style.]
Blair's Witch Project
The New York Times' postmodern scribe, Jacques Steinberg, reported excerpts from Jayson Blair's forthcoming memoir Friday. (Thanks for bloggonit for the heads up.) Now, will the Times Book Review step up to the plate? The New York Daily News, erroneously claiming an exclusive, also revealed portions of the book Friday. Editor & Publisher compares the two accounts, but here's my favorite passage from Blair's Burning Down My Masters' House, referring to Zuza Glowaka, his girlfriend:
Zuza took pictures of me prancing around the newsroom wearing a Persian head wrap that covered my face, Kermit the Frog on my shoulders and a giant fake fur coat. I did a full tour de newsroom in this peculiar uniform. It is hard to know what I was feeling, other than it was exhilarating to shock everyone. Perhaps I was crying out for attention.
Perhaps.
Update: The Times Book Review will, indeed, take measure of Blair's memoir in the March 14 edition, Editor & Publisher reports. On television, Katie Couric will do the honors with a Dateline NBC interview taped in January. [6:19 PM]
The Passion of the Readers
As a student of film criticism who recently saw The Passion of the Christ and a journalist who has received my fair share of hate mail of late, I was interested to read Jami Bernard's response to her detractors in the Daily News. Bernard panned The Passion in a gutsy review which was sure to draw the ire of some fanatics. But the extent of vituperative crap she received is disturbing, if not surprising. As Bernard recounts:
A few of them referred to my weight, because I've been chronicling my effort to shed pounds in another section of the newspaper. "Eat a donut!" read the printable part of one missive.
Other critics who reviewed "The Passion" received similar hate mail, although Gene Seymour of Newsday told me he has yet to be called a "ho."
I was recently called "dirty, sleazy and disgusting" by one reader and accused of "lowering journalistic standards" by another. Still another called my writing "worthy of the paper my hamster shits on." All of these insults came over e-mail in response to the Kerry article. Michael Wolff dealt with this phenomenon in New York magazine in January 2002:
The themes of the e-mails are surprisingly consistent. Anything liberal is bad—"you are a LIBERAL fuck!" is a sufficient accusation. People in the media ("quasi-intellectual, elitist snobs"), or what's thought of as the liberal media, are bad—"Little pee-ons like YOU are who make ME sick!!!!!!!" says one correspondent, adding "FU clymer," which I assume refers to the Times political reporter Adam Clymer (another e-mail adds, "please give dad clymer my best regards"; another says, J'accuse-like, "You are Maureen Dowd!"). Bill ("President Buttface, to many of us") and Hillary Clinton are bad; indeed, the presidency of Bill Clinton ("the perverted/treasonist that preceded President Bush") is one of the most grievous political calamities of the twentieth century.
But I suppose angry e-mails beat spam or yet another virus attachment. | 
