Failed former New York Times editor and “self-hating Southerner” Howell Raines — whose dubious journalistic legacy includes the Jayson Blair, Rick Bragg, and the Martha Burk fiascoes — has lurched out of the fly-fishing shadows with this bizarre op-ed piece, apropos of apparently nothing, in the Washington Post.
Why, the carefully crafted lede alone demonstrates why Raines was held in such high regard among the journalistic community during his brief, unhappy tenure in the seat formerly occupied by Clifton Daniel:
One question has tugged at my professional conscience throughout the year-long congressional debate over health-care reform, and it has nothing to do with the public option, portability or medical malpractice. It is this: Why haven’t America’s old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration — a campaign without precedent in our modern political history?
As Humpty Dumpty might have said: talk about a portmanteau!
`That’s enough to begin with,’ Humpty Dumpty interrupted: `there are plenty of hard words there. “BRILLIG” means four o’clock in the afternoon — the time when you begin BROILING things for dinner.’
`That’ll do very well,’ said Alice: and “SLITHY”?’
`Well, “SLITHY” means “lithe and slimy.” “Lithe” is the same as “active.” You see it’s like a portmanteau — there are two meanings packed up into one word.’
There’s more:
Whatever its shortcomings, journalism under those standards aspired to produce an honest account of social, economic and political events. It bore witness to a world of dynamic change, as opposed to the world of Foxian reality, whose actors are brought on camera to illustrate a preconceived universe as rigid as that of medieval morality. Now, it is precisely our long-held norms that cripple our ability to confront Fox’s journalism of perpetual assault. I’m confident that many old-schoolers are too principled to appear on the network, choosing silence over being used; when Fox does trot out a house liberal as a punching bag, the result is a parody of reasoned news formats.
My great fear, however, is that some journalists of my generation who once prided themselves on blowing whistles and afflicting the comfortable have also been intimidated by Fox’s financial power and expanding audience, as well as Ailes’s proven willingness to dismantle the reputation of anyone who crosses him. (Remember his ridiculing of one early anchor, Paula Zahn, as inferior to a “dead raccoon” in ratings potential when she dared defect to CNN?) It’s as if we have surrendered the sword of verifiable reportage and bought the idea that only “elites” are interested in information free of partisan poppycock.
Why has our profession, through its general silence — or only spasmodic protest — helped Fox legitimize a style of journalism that is dishonest in its intellectual process, untrustworthy in its conclusions and biased in its gestalt?
Over to you for comment and clarification.
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