Letters to the Editor
Jerry Elsea
Published Letters: 28 Editor's Choice: 2
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Murtha does what Hume did three decades ago
[Read the article: Why is Brit Hume treated like a real journalist and news anchor?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Brit Hume lives off his earlier reputation. Having cut his teeth as a good
investigative reporter for the Jack Anderson team, he moved to ABC with
this appraisal of how investigative reporting fits in television news.
"An investigative report requires that the viewer concentrate on what he's being told. It's usually complicated stuff, and sophisticated in the sense that it requires
judgments about what should and shouldn't be. But TV makes you lazy mentally.
It may be in the nature of the medium. We are not used to thinking while
watching TV -- so we won 't and don't."
(Source: TV Guide: The First 25 Years," Simon and Schuster, New York, 1978,
page 253)
Comment: Hume's attack on Murtha depends on mentally lazy viewers'
not knowing or thinking about the representative's motives. Murtha,
with knowledge based on deep-background briefings from military
officers, is heroic in his championing of the troops. In a sense, he is
an investigative reporter, presenting -- as Brit Hume might have put
it a generation ago -- "complicated stuff, and sophisticated in the
sense that it requires judgments about what should and shouldn't be."
Initially worried about TV watchers' intellectual limitations, Brit Hume
now takes advantage of them. It's good business for him and
for Fox, if unprincipled.
Jerry Elsea
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A matter of political life and death
[Read the article: Inside Bush's prosecutor purge]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]In Arizona (where I recently vacationed) the reason for former U.S. Attorney
Paul Charlton's ouster is well known. He and U.S. Attorney General Gonzales are on different pages regarding imposition of the death penalty. Charlton prefers case-by-case review; Gonzales, in deference to the president, prefers a more, well . . .
uniform application. For Bush's base, capital punishment is red meat.
Jerry Elsea
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Why we slept
[Read the article: Bush's long history of politicizing justice]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I recall that even when it was besieged on other fronts, the Reagan administration was credited with strengthening the Civil Rights Division. Such evenhandedness left us expecting decent performances on the part of Democrat and Republican alike.
Ashcroft . . . he lost an election to a dead man. What did it make him?
Attorney general.
Jerry Elsea
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Ditto for media complicity in the Downing Street Memo
[Read the article: The Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch frauds]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The same "news" people who think they did nothing wrong in the
Tillman and Lynch coverups probably would absolve themselves in
a later complicity: the 2005 burying of the Downing Street Memo story.
It was a thunderbolt from the Sunday Times of London: fresh, conclusive proof that Bush-Cheney lied us into the war while accomplices Blair & Co. were concerned with the niceties -- making it seem legal.
Yet few in the American news media acknowledged the disclosure.
Some said it was "old news," insisting that practically everyone knew in
2002 that Bush, eager to have war, was fixing intelligence around
policy. Well, it wasn't "old news" to the American
public. I'll wager that the majority of Americans still know nothing of the
incriminating Downing Street Memo. Besides, if the mainstream media
had been that aware that Bush-Cheney were ginning up of the case for war, they could have broken the story, sparing tens of thousands of lives.
A more probable explanation of the coverup is that the mainstream media were largely fearful that the Downing Street Memo would remind the public
of how complicit newsgatherers and commentators had been in the run-up to the Iraq war/occupation.
If anyone has the nerve to begin making amends, next Monday, May 1, 2007, presents an opportunity. It is the second anniversary of the Downing Street Memo news break, same day as the fourth anniversary of George W. Bush's
aircraft carrier strut, "Mission Accomplished."
On Tuesday, let's have a day of retrospect on epic-scale Bush administration lies and their devastating effects. Let's remember, too, how toadies in
the news media -- primarily inside the beltway -- let the war party
get away with it.
Jerry Elsea
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"Fitz" is a contender
[Read the article: Three years for Scooter?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]With most reporters abdicating their responsibility and a handful being involved in the
CIA leak coverup (turning Watergate on its head), writer par excellence Fitzgerald
should be in line for a Pulitzer Prize.
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As wordsmiths, political reporters should be ashamed
[Read the article: Ending the war vs. supporting the troops]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Packaging political issues in just the right language is a skill
that can sway voters. The typically busy citizen can be pardoned for
being misled.
But gullible political commentators shouldn't be let off so easily.
When the Anne Kornbluts parrot the "end the war vs. support the troops" mantra or other "war on terror" cliches, they aren't merely lazy or in thrall to
the "savvy" people they admire and respect. They are forgetting
their journalistic roots. They got where they are by taking innate
language aptitude and parlaying it into professional reward. As
wordsmiths, they are well positioned to inform the hurried
voter in clear, honest language. Avoiding cheap political
slogans is their duty.
Yet these supposedly elite analysts repeatedly fall for political operatives' most rudimentary word tricks, such calling a tax reduction "tax relief." The suggestion there is that taxation is bad.
That example isn't original with me. It comes from Cal Berkeley
professor George Lakoff's expert writings on the framing of political
issues. I recommend the Kornbluts brush up on their skills by reading
Lakoff.
Then when the government raises taxes, calling the move "revenue enhancement," Beltway commentators can expose it as a "tax increase."
That thought also is not original with me. "Revenue enhancement"
was a Reagan staff concoction in the mid-'80s, when the realities of
burgeoning debt finally struck home.