Posted on 07/21/2005 4:35:01 PM PDT by CHARLITE
Michael Kelly was one of the best writers of his generation and an extraordinarily gifted observer of politics and culture. Despite having grown up in Washington to become a member of the media elite, Kelly was also one of the few writers willing to turn a scathingly critical eye at the press itself.
I've often wondered what Kelly's reaction would be to the atmosphere in Washington these days; what he might have written about the coverage of the war and, more recently, how he would have viewed the flap over Karl Rove and the CIA leak investigation. As it turns out, we don't have to wonder too much about the latter.
In 1993 Kelly wrote a lengthy essay for the New York Times Magazine titled "Master of the Game." The piece focuses somewhat unflatteringly on David Gergen's pioneering role in developing what we've come to know as the art of political spin: the sound-bytes, the photo ops, the leaks, message discipline, war rooms, etc. But Kelly's true lament was over a Washington press corps that grown insulated, lazy and enamored with spin - and he included himself among this group.
I Marvel at how relevant Kelly's words - now twelve years since they were printed on the page - are today:
"Washington has become a strange and debased place, the true heart of a national culture in which the distinction between reality and fantasy has been lost, a culture that has produced Oliver Stone as a historian, Joe McGinniss as a biographer, Geraldo Rivera as a journalist, Leonard Jeffries as a geneticist, and Barbara Streisand as an authority on national policy.
The rare governmental privilege of speaking under the cloak of anonymity, traditionally granted only to presidents, secretaries of state and generals in time of war, has become an accepted practice for midlevel White House aides explaining routine policy matters to large roomfuls of reporters. Movie stars show up with their press agents and their bodyguards to "testify" before Congress. Politicians and reporters make cameo appearances as movie stars, playing themselves in fictional scenes about politics and reporting.
"Political operatives call themselves journalists and journalists behave like political operatives, giving private advice to their politician friends - and this practice is so widely accepted as to be uncommented on....
"The press pack has become both obese and incestuous. There are 1,700 accredited White House reporters, and most of them keep in promiscuous electronic touch - through Nexis and the Federal News Service and the Associated Press and Reuters and CNN and PBs and C-Span - with one another's work and with the vast bloviation of words and pictures that Washington produces every day. Overwhelmed by size and undermined by excessive intimacy, the pack has lost its howling way. It has become as faddish as a teenager, vacillating in its attitudes toward the powers that be, going from bubbling enthusiasm to hysterical anger, from cheering all that the president says to denouncing all that the president does. It is so thoroughly conformist that it celebrates group-think as (conventional) wisdom.
"Obsessed with the appearances of things, the pack is perpetually susceptible to the machinations of the image makers. It rewards, with glowing praise, triumphs of form over content: medium-well-turned phrases, smart photo ops, effective PR stunts.
"Unhappily aware that much of what government officials say and do in public is a charade, unknowing of much that occurs behind closed doors and unwilling to admit ignorance, reporters fashion reality out of perceptions. A New York Times article in February reports that the president's advisers are worried about "the perception thus wrought" by his rocky beginning, and says the administration is working "to refocus its image as a government of broad, middle-class interests." A Times report in May finds "a perception that the president," who won office as a political centrist, "has come to look very much like the same old - liberal - thing."
"These bits of fatuousness are unexceptional in contemporary Washington journalism; they stand out in my mind only because I wrote them myself."
The Rove affair is the perfect embodiment of Kelly's criticisms of Washington; the anonymous sources; the incestuous relationships of the players involved (elite reporter Cooper married to Dem political operative Grunwald, "covert" CIA operative married to active Dem political supporter Wilson, etc); the lies, half-truths and misstatements told behind the scenes and then on the op-ed page to try and damage a president politically; and the subsequent sharing of information between between the adminstration and the press in an effort to knock down a damaging story and influence the shape of the news - something that may or may not have resulted in a crime being committed.
Meanwhile as Patrick Fitzgerald does his job, the rest of the press corps, who are in Kelly's words "unknowing of much that occurs behind closed doors and unwilling to admit ignorance," continue to bloviate and speculate endlessly to their own satisfaction while the world outside the beltway churns on.
I don't know what Michael Kelly might have written about this entire episode. I only know that I miss having the chance to open up the paper in the morning and find out.
Char :)
Ding, ding, ding!
We have a winner, folks!
It would be very funny, if it weren't so annoying, when the press insists on commenting when they have no data. They can talk for hours about how they have no information yet.
Bravo
The MSM doesn't need information, they just make it up as they go along. The bigger the lies against our President and our country, the better.
Good article.
Thanks for posting this...truly enjoyed it!!
You are SO right! I've sat through full hours, when it was obvious that there was no news, no information on a particular story, but the subject was so important that they kept rehashing speculative theories to run out the clock.
Thanks for your bright comments, OldFriend!
Char :)
Today's reporters otherwise do not have the bite of Mencken's dog. And to the best of my knowledge, the Sage of Baltimore did not have a dog.
Congressman Billybob
You could be a good "second" to Mencken, though. You've got "the bite!"
I was born and grew up in Baltimore, and he WAS "the sage!"
Thanks, billybob!
Char :)
Very good article on John Roberts. Thanks for your work and the link.
Thanks for the tribute, Timmy.
Char
"I had e-mail-copied him on my FR post..."
You might be thinking of Jack Kelly. This Michael Kelly was killed in a vehicular accident in '03 or '04 while covering the early part of the war in Iraq.
Char
My apologies. Yes, Michael Kelly of the Atlantic, wasn't it killed (Drowned) in that unfortunate humvee accident in a ditch in Iraq.
A great writer indeed, a brave man, and a great American, Michael Kelly! RIP.
Yes, Michael Kelly did not correspnd with me from beyond the grave. (I said slightly blushing.)
Thanks for the gentle cautionary words...
However, Jack Kelly does ahve good and relavant things to say on just this matter.
Long live the Kelly's!
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