Best Journalism Movie Ever

TCM is showing Billy Wilder's "Ace in the Hole" tonight, my favorite among all journalism movies over "The Front Page," "Deadline USA," "All the President's Men," "The Paper," "Broadcast News" and "Absence of Malice," all fine films about fallible human beings reporting the news.

In an era when journalists are routinely reviled by political ideologists, it's easy to forget that, from A. J. Liebling on, they have always been their own severest critics in a calling that usually attracts young people interested in doing good in the world beyond doing well for themselves.

In 1951, I had just started working on newspapers and magazines when "Ace in the Hole" hit me hard with Kirk Douglas' portrayal of a down-and-almost-out reporter who sees a man trapped in a mine as his ticket back to the big time and ends up killing him by exploiting and stretching out his rescue.

Journalists as seducers and betrayers of their sources is a theme that runs through modern culture, from Janet Malcolm's "The Journalist and the Murderer" through the recent movies about Truman Capote and the making of "In Cold Blood."

When it appeared in the what-me-worry postwar era, "Ace in the Hole" was a commercial failure and, when released for TV, was given the more palatable title of "The Big Carnival." But it was and is a mordant reminder that there can be people in life-and-death situations behind the collection of words and images we call news.

Why Is NBC So Touchy?

Ed Gillespie only wants to help. Karl Rove's successor in the White House has embarked on a new career as media critic, judging NBC guilty of "deceitful editing to further a media-manufactured storyline" and create an "utterly misleading and irresponsible" impression of a Presidential interview about his speech to the Israeli Knesset.

In times like these, Americans need all the media criticism they can get, particularly corrective analysis coming from such an informed source as a lifelong lobbyist whose clients have included Enron and, perhaps more pertinent in this case, Viacom, owner of CBS.

In 2003, the watchdog group Public Citizen called Gillespie an "embedded lobbyist" to further the interests of his "corporate benefactors" as Chairman of the Republican National Committee.

In his new incarnation, the Counselor to the President is urging NBC news honcho Steve Capus to reassure Americans that "blatantly partisan talk show hosts like Christopher Matthews and Keith Olbermann at MSNBC don't hold editorial sway over the NBC network news division."

Capus reassured him that the Presidential interview "has been available, unedited, in its entirety, for the past day, on our website. Our reporting accurately reflects the interview...NBC News, as part of a free press in a free society, makes its own editorial decisions."

But why can't they see that Gillespie just wants to help?

Studying Jon Stewart

"The Daily Show performs a function that is close to journalistic in nature, getting people to think critically about the public square. In that sense, it is a variation of the tradition of Russell Baker, Art Hoppe, Art Buchwald, H.L. Mencken and other satirists who once graced the pages of American newspapers."

That's the conclusion of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism after studying Jon Stewart and his merry crew for an entire year, buttressed by the fact that the Daily Show "not only assumes, but even requires, previous and significant knowledge of the news on the part of viewers if they want to get the joke."

The study picks up on the fact that the show is as much about media criticism as political satire by noting, "The press itself is another significant focus on The Daily Show. In all, 8% of the time was made up of segments about the press and news media. That is more than double the amount of coverage of media in the mainstream press overall during the same period."

In a time when MSM are featuring jokers like Robert Novak, William Kristol and Karl Rove, it's comforting to see some academic recognition of commentators who are being intentionally funny.

A. J. Liebling's War

As a charter member of what has been called the Church of Liebling, I have good news for fellow worshippers.

Liebling's coverage of World War II for the New Yorker has now been gathered into a volume of 1089 pages by the Library of America. Like everything else he wrote, by reporting what he saw and heard, Liebling conveyed more about his subject than all the TV cameras and embedded journalists have told us about Iraq.

I have had the temerity to borrow his name for the URL here, but it's likely Liebling would have been ambivalent about blogs. As a press critic, he was a premature blogger himself, looking behind the news and picking apart the work of those who delivered it, making connections between the motives and methods of the messengers and the frequent unreliability of the message.

But a reporter at heart, Liebling hated experts. He mistrusted anyone who claimed "to have access to some occult source or science not available to reporter or reader...the big picture."

He didn't like editors much, either. "They come to newspapers," he wrote, "like monks to cloisters or worms to apples. They are the dedicated. All of them are fated to be editors except the ones that get killed off by the lunches they eat at their desks...The survivors of gastric disorders rise to minor executive jobs and then major ones, and the reign of these non-writers makes our newspapers read like the food in the New York Times cafeteria tastes."

Above all, he hated publishers. "The function of the press in society," he wrote, "is to inform, but its role is to make money. The monopoly publisher's reaction, on being told that he ought to spend money on reporting distant events, is therefore exactly that of the proprietor of a large, fat cow, who is told that he ought to enter her in a horse race."

And that was before Rupert Murdoch.

The Case for Clobbering Candidates

Talk about “media bias” has a pornographic appeal for politicians and bloggers. Revealing MSM hypocrisy is as irresistible as finding Sen. Vitter on the D.C. Madam’s phone records.

Today’s “dirty little secret”: “America's political reporters don't like John Edwards, and have tried to destroy him,” according to Jamison Foser of Media Matters, quoting a piece from Atlantic Online by Marc Ambinder, one of the founders of ABC's The Note and a contributing editor to the National Journal's Hotline newsletter.

(Attribution nosebleed is a side effect of polemical reporting--anyone who agrees or quarrels with this post will be quoting me quoting Foser quoting Ambinder and will then be quoted until it all sounds like “A Partridge in a Pear Tree.”)

The main evidence for Edwards-bashing is the harping on his $400 haircut and working for a hedge fund while warring on poverty in his campaign, an assertion that leads to comparisons by another blogger to “the media's War Against Gore” that “gave us President Bush. It is why we are in Iraq today.”

Time out: Jokes about John Edwards’ haircut are unlikely to lead to another catastrophic war, but if the children will leave the room, we can talk graphically about “media bias.”

That journalists are human is not news and that they may, consciously or not, let their feelings color their reporting is indisputable. But from a lifetime of working, teaching and writing about that enterprise, another perspective:

It may very well be that reporters don’t like John Edwards. They may be put off by his over-acted sincerity, as I am (follow the links to my confession). But there is nothing new in letting that kind of reaction seep into their stories. In fact--and down comes the last veil in this stripping--that may have value for the public the media serves.

In the McCarthy era, we learned objectivity is not enough. If reporters who covered the Senator had done more probing about his methods and motives, it wouldn’t have taken Edward R. Murrow’s “biased” documentary to bring him down.

That kind of drama is rare--only Woodward and Bernstein’s Nixon takedown is comparable. But in subtler ways, the process goes on all the time.

Mitt Romney’s father comes to mind. In 1968, George Romney was the front runner for the Republican nomination. Reporters covering his campaign with a straight face were frustrated by not being able to communicate that the amiable car salesman-Governor was, to put it kindly, a lightweight. When he gaffed about being “brainwashed” in Vietnam, it unleashed headlines and commentary that ended his campaign.

His son and heir is following in that tradition. After his repeated fudging of issues, his defecating dog story and his pathetic swipe at Obama over sex education, yesterday this Governor Romney is pictured smiling over a sign reading “No to Obama, Osama and Chelsea’s Moma.”

Are the media trying to tell us something? I hope so. A little more “bias” in showing Bush the boob in 2000 might have spared the country a lot of grief.

If this sounds arrogant, sorry. Journalists spend their lives trying to be fair and honest--they don’t start out looking for money and power. If they sometimes slip and slide along the way, cut them some slack.

It’s easy (and attention-getting) to carp from the grandstands while they try to do their work of letting us know what the politicians and power brokers are really doing.

John Edwards and Mitt Romney are grown men who made a lot of money and now want the most powerful job in the world. All this attention goes with the process of trying to get it.