by Michael Tomasky
"You don't have to be George Orwell to know that certain words mean certain things in regular life and other things in politics.
The word of the week, in this context, is "sad". In regular life, sad means, you know, sad. Unhappy. Upset. Not glad. In politics, sad means, "I am furious at so-and-so about such-and-such, and I think he is a contemptible idiot and I desire to crush him, but I don't want to let on that I'm furious, so I'm just going to call him 'sad', which suggests that so-and-so isn't really occupying much of my time, while it also connotes my contempt."
Rudy Giuliani was the master of "sad" when he was mayor of New York. Say some bunch of liberals on the city council cooked up a scheme to transfer funding from the police department to after-school social programmes. Or say a group of street artists, reacting to a mayoral crackdown on their ability to vend their wares, called him a fascist. Giuliani would invariably dub such moves "sad", a word he would utter with softness, mock affection, even, as though he were concerned for his enemy's mental health.
But the truth is, you know someone got under a politician's skin when they get a "sad" in response. So I was interested to note that that was the word White House spokeswoman Dana Perino used when asked by reporters to respond to the explosive new book by her predecessor, Scott McClellan.
I'm as happy as the next liberal that McClellan has exposed his former minders as a pack of thugs and liars. And their reactions, from Perino's above to Karl Rove's assertion that he "sounds like a left-wing blogger", are a sure sign that he's rattled them in a major way.
But I want to direct our attention to McClellan's other villain, because this allegation deserves its day in the sun too. America's political reporters, McClellan wrote, became "complicit enablers" of the Bush administration's push for war. Here, I find myself in total agreement with Rove. McClellan does indeed sound like a left-wing blogger. And God bless him for it.
Others have made the criticism of course, from the aforementioned bloggers to the excellent Michael Massing in the New York Review of Books, whose 2004 reporting on the reporting of Iraq was without equal. But McClellan saying it is different. He is, after all, the man who stood at the podium in the White House and defended the war on a daily basis for more than two years.
Reactions have been mostly but not entirely predictable. This New York Times story gives a rundown. Jessica Yellin, then of MSNBC and now with CNN, forthrightly said that she and other journalists had, after September 11 and up to the start of the Iraq war, been "under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation."
A few of the suits stepped forward in the Times piece to deny this, and a couple bigfoot journalists added that they didn't think this was so and that they sleep well at night, confident that they asked the "tough" questions. This is nonsense. Everyone knows that what Yellin said is true.
I was once lectured to this effect by someone who'd worked at a major US media corporation at the time. I didn't understand what it was like, I was told. People, regular Americans, were incessantly calling in furious complaints about some perceived piece of anti-American coverage. Threats were issued and so forth. There were risks involved in rocking the boat.
One can appreciate the gravity of the situation among a jittery populace but at the same time ask: what risks, exactly? Was some nut really going to shoot Peter Jennings because he quit wearing a lapel pin? No. The risks involved had to do with ratings, and hence, with money. The Bush White House and its right-wing abettors in the major media, led by Fox News, established a code of conduct for US media after 9/11. I almost wrote "enforced" instead of established, but enforced would be very incorrect. They had to enforce nothing. The sheep of the media, with a few exceptions, enforced it upon themselves.
In the meantime, no one from the Nation or the American Prospect or the New York Review of Books or Bill Moyers' public-broadcasting programme or any other outlet that opposed the Iraq war was threatened, shot or, so far as I know, even sneezed on in the subway for voicing their opposition to the war. This "pressure" from the public is something that cowardly executives, and some cowardly journalists, imposed on themselves.
The sorry epitaph of the era was written - actually spoken - by Elisabeth Bumiller, the New York Times' White House bureau chief at the time, when she was asked why the White House press corps was so abjectly deferential during an important press conference on the eve of the war:
"I think we were very deferential because ... it's live, it's very intense, it's frightening to stand up there. Think about it, you're standing up on prime-time live TV asking the president of the United States a question when the country's about to go to war. There was a very serious, sombre tone that evening, and no one wanted to get into an argument with the president at this very serious time."
The American media still have much to be ashamed about from that time and to atone for. That a flack, and a conservative one at that, has now called them out should make the shame that much worse. But Washington is a city of laughter and forgetting. The only people who'll remember the shame are the ones who don't need to learn its lessons."
