Posted on 07/24/2009 1:24:06 AM PDT by Rummyfan
Walter Cronkite died almost three decades after stepping down from his anchor gig. CBS pretty much stiffed him in retirement, the promised special reports et al mostly coming to naught (as they did rather more quickly for Dan Rather). But his death afforded his old colleagues, the rival networks and the rest of the legacy media to go into full eulogistical overload. There are a few dissenters, of course, and I've written more about "Uncle Walter" in this week's issue of Maclean's. But I was reminded of the last time the MSM (though not yet designated as such) bade farewell to one of their icons - back in 2001, when Katharine Graham died. This essay is from Mark Steyn's Passing Parade:
In all my time in the Conrad Black salt mines, the only occasion I’ve ever been subject to censorship was a couple of years back when I wrote a piece on something or other for The Sunday Telegraph in London and included a passing jest about Katharine Graham’s Georgetown dinner parties. Nothing rude or vicious, just mildly non-reverential. Nonetheless, the editor requested that, as he was dining with Kay later that week, would I mind if he removed the reference. I agreed. At that time I had not yet given up hope that one day I too might receive the summons to Georgetown to trade high-end Washington gossip with top Beltway power brokers like Vernon Jordan and leading figures in the arts like, er, Diane Sawyer.
But Mrs Graham died last week and I never made the cut. Still, judging from the tone of the drooling eulogies, most commentators are apparently assuming that The Washington Post’s proprietress will be continuing her salons in the unseen world and that, come their own demise, they want to make sure they’re at the top table with Kay, the Kennedys, Pam Harriman, and not down the déclassé end near the powder room with God, Christ, St Peter and the other losers. The media’s sense of proportion is never more out of whack than when bidding farewell to one of its own, but even so the passing of Katharine Graham set impressive new standards of laughability: “The Most Powerful Woman In America”, “The Most Powerful Woman In The World”, “America’s Queen”, “Kay’s Amazing Grace”, “Oh, Kay”, “Special Kay”…
No “Kay, Why?”, funnily enough, though the question is certainly worth asking. Many obituarists contrasted Mrs Graham’s iron sense of integrity re Nixon and Watergate with the more supine approach of her late husband, Philip, who prior to his suicide in 1963 thought nothing of squashing stories in The Washington Post unfavourable to his chum, President Kennedy. But that, of course, begs the question: Had the Kennedy and Nixon presidencies been chronologically switched and some minor operatives tied to JFK had broken into the Republican offices, would Mrs Graham’s Post have thought the story worth pursuing? The paper didn’t find Clinton’s various illegalities objectionable. At its stablemate, Newsweek, Michael Isikoff’s original Monica story was sat on for so long that the magazine wound up losing its scoop to the Drudge Report. And the presence at Kay’s funeral of Bill and Hill, Ted (Dangerous When Wet) Kennedy, and Marion Barry, DC’s cokehead mayor whose mountain of incompetence and corruption the Post cheerfully endorsed, strongly suggests that the paper’s fearless crusading begins and ends with GOP housebreaking.
No such unpleasantness was allowed to intrude on the coverage, not least by The National Post’s own fawning courtier Charles Laurence. Obituary-wise, Kay was the hostess with the mostes’, but nevertheless an inevitable hierarchy quickly set in, with points for how recently you’d last seen her (“At lunch last month…”) and a bonus for whether she’d come to you (Barbara Walters scored big here, entertaining Kay at her pad in the Hamptons). Many anecdotes were told and re-told and re-re-told: thirty years ago, dining at the home of columnist Joe Alsop, Mrs Graham discreetly rebelled by refusing to join the ladies while the men discussed world affairs over brandy and cigars.
As she modestly explained to Larry King on CNN, this brave stand singlehandedly brought about an end to the custom throughout the town. Perhaps Washington was singularly backward in this respect. By this stage, in London, New York, Winnipeg, all the great cities of the world, the ladies were no longer obliged to retire after dinner, a social revolution accomplished amazingly enough without the intervention of Mrs Graham.
One writer stood head and shoulders above the crowd, which admittedly isn’t terribly difficult when everybody else is prostrate. The anonymous editorialist at The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review evidently returned from lunch drunk and momentarily forgot himself. Possibly while working as a busboy in Washington in the early Sixties he’d been the victim of some casual slight by Mrs Graham. At any rate, summing up her life he started conventionally enough but then wandered deplorably off-message:
Born in New York City, the daughter of multimillionaire Eugene Meyer, she grew up privileged. In keeping with her father’s fortune, she graduated from Vassar College, where she was involved with the leftist trends of the day ...
She married Felix Frankfurter’s brilliant law clerk, Philip Graham, who took over running The Post, which her father purchased at a bankruptcy sale. Graham built the paper but became estranged from Kay. She had him committed to a mental hospital, and he was clearly intending divorce when she signed him out and took him for a weekend outing during which he was found shot. His death was ruled a suicide. Within 48 hours, she declared herself the publisher.
That’s the stuff! As the Tribune-Review’s chap has it, Mrs G got her philandering spouse banged up in the nuthouse and then arranged a weekend pass with a one-way ticket. “His death was ruled a suicide.” Lovely touch that. Is it really possible Katharine Graham offed her hubby? Who cares? To those who think the worst problem with the American press is its awful stultifying homogeneity, the Tribune-Review’s deranged perverseness is to be cherished. Give that man a Pulitzer!
But, of course, they never do. Instead, with feeble predictability, they gave the Pulitzer to Mrs Graham’s own carefully veiled memoir, Personal History. Her formula for her publications was succinctly expressed: “Mass With Class” – “perhaps the best three-word definition for what a good news magazine should be,” wrote Mark Whitaker in Newsweek. But what “Mass With Class” boils down to in practice is the genteel middlebrow conformity that makes so much of the mainstream US media such a world-class yawnfest. “Mass With Class” means you don’t ask Hillary Clinton about her husband’s perjury and trashing of his female, ahem, acquaintances but only whether she finds it difficult coping with the accusations and if she thinks this is because conservatives have a difficult time dealing with her as a strong intelligent woman in her own right. “Mass With Class” means Dan Rather piously declaring that the Chandra Levy story is too unseemly for the CBS Evening News, no matter that it involves a Congressman obstructing a police investigation.
“Mass With Class” equals “All the news that’s fit to print” and it’s never more protective than when giving the mass a glimpse of the class. Thus, Mrs Graham’s death clippings tell us more in their oleaginous uniformity about the relationship between journalism and politics than the heroics of Woodward and Bernstein ever did. The mourners at her funeral “read like a Who’s Who”, albeit a somewhat obvious one: Alan Greenspan, Bill Gates, Oscar de la Renta, John McCain, Tina Brown. I shall refrain from disparaging the guest list any further as our own power couple, Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel, were also among those present. But the cosiness of this world is American journalism’s principal problem: There is “us” and there is “them”, the “class” and the “mass”, and the media have long since decided which side of the fence they belong on.
Mrs Graham wasn’t a crusading journalist taking on the establishment. She was the establishment, and poor old Nixon wasn’t. She was great at parties, he was hopeless. Awkward, sweaty, no social skills, no small talk. After his resignation, he sat down for several weeks of in-depth TV interviews with David Frost. One Monday morning, as they were waiting for the camera crew to finish setting up, Nixon decided to try a little locker-room buddy-buddy stuff with Frost and asked, “Did you do any fornicating this weekend?” Frostie was doing quite a bit of fornicating in those days, but as he gleefully recounted to pals that’s the very last word real guys use, swinger to swinger. By contrast, Mrs Graham always knew le mot juste. As her own papers noted approvingly, she dismissed one Reagan administration official as a “starfucker”. Maybe he was. But nobody starfucks like the US media, and it would no doubt be deeply satisfying to Katharine Graham that her death gave them an opportunity for the starfuck to end them all.
A classic. Thanks for posting.
As Mark points out, these guys have a remarkably high opinion of themselves. No wonder they think they have the wisdom to determine what we should believe and the right to manipulate the news accordingly.
Mark Steyn would make a great foreign born POTUS!
This man is wicked funny!
Classic Mark Steyn. I'd love to hear him quote that sentence.
The Founders knew what they were about.
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Kay Graham is dead???
FOTFLOL!
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