Journalistic Performance Art

Via Americablog, I read from CJR that Michael Wolff has an article in Vanity Fair that *gasp* questions the propriety of the major news organizations withholding important information from the public for their own purposes:

Michael Wolff deals with the Rove/Plame/Miller fracas in this month’s Vanity Fair (the article isn’t available online). Wolff manages to find a unique approach to the issue, positing the thesis that the New York Times and Time magazine are complicit in the cover-up of the fudging of intelligence in the prelude to war in Iraq — in that they knew Rove was the source of the Plame leak intended to discredit Joe Wilson after he called the administration to account. “Not only did highly placed members of the media and the vaunted news organizations they worked for know it, not only did they sit on what will not improbably be among the biggest stories of the Bush years, they helped cover it up. You could even plausibly say that these organizations became part of a conspiracy — they entered into an understanding that, as a quid pro quo for certain information, they would refuse to provide evidence about a crime possibly having been committed by the president’s closest confidant.”

To Wolff’s mind, newspaper and magazine editors need to ask themselves an elementary question: “To whom do you owe your greatest allegiance: sources or readers?”

As Wolff sees it, by throwing their hand in with anonymous sources up to no good, instead of with readers, several distinguished media outlets let themselves become tongue-tied and thereby muffed an incendiary story that was in the palms of their hands.

“… [T]he greatest news organizations in the land had a story about a potential crime that reached as close as you can get to the president himself and they punted, they swallowed it, they self-dealt” — all to protect a dubious source.

It’s a novel take, but an intriguing one.

I don’t think it’s so novel. Many of us among the unwashed masses continue to scratch our heads in wonder as we watch guys like Tim Russert engage in this weird kabuki where he grills others about information pertaining to issues in which he is intimately involved — and never mentions that fact. James Carville goes on Imus and pontificates about all the rumors he’s hearing about the case and nobody asks him about his wife — who is part of the story and was called to the grand jury. Bob Novak snaps at his press interlocutor, “how do you know if I’ve been called to the grand jury or not?” His questioner, of course, doesn’t bother to follow up with the logical question, “Have you?”

I didn’t know what Walter Pincus knew until he wrote an obscure piece for the Neiman Foundation. Meanwhile I’ve been reading his stories for two years as he quotes “people who’ve been briefed on the case” and tells it as he’s phoning it in from Mt Olympus.

The NY Times rails against Karl Rove for not holding a press conference to tell what he knows while their reporter has never written a word about the same story — an act of non-journalism for which she’s in jail because she refuses to reveal her sources. Apparently, the NY Times feels that Judith Miller, a professional journalist, has no obligation to tell the public what she knows. Her only obligation, apparently, is to protect her source(s).

The media have become performance artists. And apparently they don’t even see how surreal this whole thing looks to those of us who aren’t involved. They all know a hell of a lot more about the story than they have revealed. And none of them (excepting perhaps Novak) have any personal legal liability stemming from the Fitzgerald investigation. They are simply protecting powerful government sources or each other or God knows what — and in doing that they have failed spectacularly to do the job they are supposed to do. Nobody is saying that they have to reveal who their sources are, which is what the reporter’s privilege provides. But is it too much to ask that they at least stop pretending that they aren’t part of the story? Or better yet, is it too much to ask that they just tell the public what they know?

This is a huge scandal, as Wolff says, that may reach as high as the president. Half the press corps know details that they haven’t written about. Yet, modern journalistic standards seem to indicate that if bodily fluids had been exchanged instead of classified information we would have gotten to the bottom of this a long time ago.

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