Terence F. Smith

I am scheduled to join Howard Kurtz on his weekly media criticism broadcast Reliable Sources at 10:30 EST tomorrow on CNN.
The crisis before us? Will NBC’s Brian Williams trash his reputation and journalism by anchoring Saturday Night Live later tonight? I suspect he will do neither. The public can easily distinguish between the Brian Williams who plays it straight on the Nightly News, and the Brian Williams who plays it for laughs on SNL Those who know him, recognize Williams as a genuinely funny guy with a marvelous, self-deprecatory sense of humor.
I, for one, will still respect him in the morning.

MURDOCH’S JOURNAL

Now that he’s got it, the time has come to take Rupert Murdoch at his word.

He has said that he intends to build up The Wall Street Journal, not dumb it down. He has said that he will strengthen the Washington bureau, not reduce it through layoffs and buyouts, as so many other publishers are doing. He says he wants more coverage of politics and government, more international news, more reporters on big stories, more inter-action between the paper and its website, more synergy with broadcast outlets, more imagination on page one.

Bring it on, Rupert. It is a great opportunity to prove your critics wrong. And frankly, The Journal could use all of the above. It is good today, but not great, not nearly as bright and original as it used to be.

And that editorial page? It is the most predictable, knee-jerk, reactionary opinion column in America. You may agree with its positions, Rupert, but even you have to admit that its view of the world is so distorted by idealogy that it rarely judges events or people on the merits. Shake it up, surprise us with new columnists with a range of views, re-design it to draw readers in, not drive them away.

You have talked about selling off Dow Jones’ smaller newspapers and some of its other assets. That is an owner’s privilege. But what will you do with the cash? You could use it to buy down debt and pay off the Bancroft Family’s expenses.

But if you take the money and plough it back into the product, if you seize the opportunity to challenge the New York Times in foreign and national coverage, if you enhance the website and make it free, if you demonstrate that a newspaper, yes a newspaper, can find new ways to make money, then you will have done the world a favor, as well as yourself.

Go ahead, Rupert, prove that you are not the hack your critics say you are.

You’ll enjoy the last, best laugh.

THE MEDIA AND THE WAR

The Aspen Institute has just wrapped up its third annual Ideas Festival, which gathers a couple of hundred people in the Colorado Mountains for panel discussions on everything from politics to poetry. On one panel, five journalists were 30 or 40 minutes into a discussion of media credibility or the lack thereof, when a questioner in the audience stopped the conversation cold.

Where, he asked, was the media during the run-up to the war in Iraq? Why didn’t news organizations demand better answers from the Bush Administration on the reasons for the war, such as Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. Isn’t that your job?

The journalists on the panel squirmed for a minute and then one said: “Reporters thrive on conflict. The war was going to be a hell of a story.” A second panelist reluctantly, hesitatingly, agreed.

As the moderator, I was shocked. Were we really going to sit here in front of this audience and agree that the press had secretly welcomed the war as a way to sell newspapers and build ratings? That seemed a scandal to me.

And yet, I had to admit that at some point in the fall and early winter of 2002, as the military buildup in the Gulf continued and Congress voted to authorize the war, news organizations stopped asking whether the U.S. should attack Iraq and started to speculate on when, and how, and how as journalists they were going to cover it.

By Christmas, it was a foregone conclusion. The U.S. was going in. Among news organizations, the race was on to post people to the region and figure out how, technologically and editorially, they were going to cover it. Editors and producers stopped thinking about whether the war should happen, whether the Administration’s arguments made sense, and focused on what they would do about it.

Was it just groupthink? Were the media still stunned, like the rest of the country, by the aftermath of 9/11? Were news organizations reluctant to challenge a president who was standing tall in the polls? Worse yet, did they privately welcome the war as a great story?

These are awkward, uncomfortable questions, to say the least. But I have to admit that there is some truth in all of the explanations. It is certainly true that whatever the reason, the press, along with Congress, failed to nail the Administration down on why this war was necessary. I don’t really think journalists relished or welcomed the war, but they did accept it as inevitable, too easily and too soon.

So what if it happens again? What if this Administration or another begins to beat the drums for an assault on Iran, for example? You can already hear the rumblings in the think tanks of Washington. Will news organizations do a better job of demanding answers, questioning intelligence reports and challenging assumptions offered as justification? Will journalists ask the hard questions about the logic of such an attack and the aftermath?

I wonder. I know the political atmosphere has changed, given the ongoing agony of Iraq. I know the public and the Congress are more skeptical. But what about attitudes in America’s newsrooms? Have they changed?

I hope so. But I’m not so sure.

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A purely statistical Project on Excellence in Journalism study on Iraq war coverage on the cable channels seems to have gotten under Bill O’Reilly’s prickly skin.

The study documented that Fox News allots about half the airtime to Iraq war coverage that CNN and MSNBC routinely give it.

Bill O’Reilly, who sees liberal conspiracies in nearly everything, immediately concluded that his competition was covering the carnage in Iraq to make the war look like a mess, which he conceded it is, and more importantly, to make President Bush look bad. Ranting on The O’Reilly Factor, he lumped both channels together as part of the “anti-war media.”

Howard Kurtz brought this up on Sunday’s Reliable Sources on CNN. I questioned how O’Reilly could divine the motives of CNN and MSNBC from their news judgement. Another panelist, Emily Rooney, argued that O’Reilly himself didn’t really believe what he was saying and was only saying it to be provocative.

This provoked O’Reilly further and last night he refought World War II with Howard Kurtz on The O’Reilly Factor in an effort to prove that his show was being patriotic by downplaying the “carnage without context” in Iraq. Unfortunately, he was making this lame case on the same day that a horrific suicide bomb blast outside a mosque in Baghdad had killed scores and illustrated that , despite the Surge in American troops and the latest offensive, the insurgents can still cause mayhem in the Iraqi capital.

If that isn’t news, Bill, I don’t know what is.

Mark Jurkowitz of the Project for Excellence in Journalism made an interesting point on CNN’s Reliable Sources this morning in the midst of a discussion about the travails of CBS’ Evening News. A PEJ study of the network evening broadcasts shows that CBS, ABC and NBC offer roughly the same content and story selection these days. In other words, CBS’s response to Katie Couric’s lower-than-ever ratings has been to revert to a hard news format and dispense with the gimmicks.

Good move. We will see if it makes a difference over the coming months. CBS is in a street fight with ABC and NBC, and Katie will now get a chance to earn her $15 million on a level playing field.

A postscript: Rome Hartman, the former executive producer who had the unenviable task of tailoring CBS’ Evening News to Katie’s talents, now has a new job. The BBC recently hired Hartman, who CBS dumped in favor of Rick Kaplan, to head its new evening U.S. news broadcast, which Katy Kay will anchor out of Washington.

With Rome at the helm, and the BBC’s world-wide stable of talented correspondents, the new broadcast could have broad appeal to an American audience interested in international affairs. BBC America and public broadcasting stations around the country will carry the new broadcast. The BBC broadcast is not going to threaten the Big Three evening newses, but it could poach more than a few viewers from The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

The network evening news broadcast may be a vanishing art form — its demise has been forecast for years — but in the meantime the three major broadcast network programs continue to draw more than 25 million viewers a night and generate lots of cash for their owners.

In recent weeks, we have seen another of the shifts in the ratings race that occur every few years: ABC’s Charlie Gibson is now in first place, with Brian Williams second on NBC, and as usual, CBS in the toilet in third place.

This recent realignment provoked new criticism of Katie Couric as the reason for CBS’s continuing souris. Her predecessor, Dan Rather, who in a radio interview this week accused CBS of “dumbing down and tarting up” the broadcast, became her latest critic. Les Moonves, the head of CBS, promptly attacked Dan for indulging in “sexist” comments about Katie.

The “dumbing down and tarting up” aphorism is actually one of Dan’s standbys. He used it in an interview I did with him on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer in 2001. He was referring to the pressure from management to brighten the evening news — his evening news — format in another vain attempt to lure younger viewers to the broadcast. His “tarting” phrase was gender neutral, and still is.

Katie Couric is a fine, professional broadcaster. She demonstrated almost perfect pitch as anchor of the Today Show: serious in the substantive interviews, bright and funny in the lighter stuff. Making her the CBS evening news anchor may have been a mistake, a possible misuse of her talents, but the decision had a certain logic. Bring in a morning star, a proven performer, to the evening news and see if she could light a fire.

It is clear Katie has been unable to do that. She has been hobbled from the start by an overly-cute, even precious story selection and format that doubtlessly annoys many viewers. Those people who have 30 minutes to sit down in front of the tube at 6:30 p.m. or 7:00 p.m. want hard news in the 21 minutes they get between commercials, not frivolous entertainment. Instead, the management at CBS stressed the gimmicks, in a vain attempt to reinvent a wheel that doesn’t require reinvention.

So, bottom line: Katie is neither the problem with the CBS Evening News, nor the solution..
This topic, incidentally, will be the lead discussion on tomorrow’s Reliable Sources broadcast on CNN at 10 a.m. EDT, Sunday, June 17. I’ll kick it around with the host, Howard Kurtz, and guests Mark Jurkowitz and Emily Rooney. Should be fun.

THE SIX-DAY WAR REMEMBERED

Anniversaries have a way of sneaking up on you. Amazingly, it has been 40 years since the outbreak of the Six Day War between Israel and her Arab neighbors on June 5, 1967. It seems like a very long time ago — another era, really — and yet the seeds of today’s standoff in the Middle East were sown in that one, hot, incredible week in June.
My memories of it are as vivid as if it was last week. I had arrived in Jerusalem 10 days before the war as a newly-assigned and breathtakingly-green foreign correspondent for The New York Times. I covered the battle for Jerusalem, the rout of the Arab Legion on the West Bank and the Israeli drive up the Golan Heights. Then I turned to report on the devastation in the Sinai.
Israel’s victory was complete: in less than a week, her armies defeated Egypt, Jordan and Syria and captured some 26,000 square miles of territory, roughly three times the size of pre-war Israel.
Since then, politically at least, everything has changed, and nothing has changed. The world is still dealing with the consequences.
When the guns fell silent, some 1.3 million Palestinians awoke under Israeli occupation. That occupation continues to this day. It has been a disaster for both sides, as corrosive to the morale and morals of the occupier as the occupied. It remains what it has always been: an agony for the Palestinians, a costly, demeaning headache for generations of Israelis, an enormous obstacle to peace and the source of deep bitterness between the two peoples.
But it wasn’t that way initially. In the weeks after the war, Israelis and Palestinians were intensely curious about each other. Especially in divided Jerusalem, they had lived within sight and sound of each other for 19 years, separated by a United Nations-patrolled no-man’s land.
As soon as they were able, Israelis from West Jerusalem poured into the east, not only to visit the Western Wall and other holy places that had been inaccessible for two decades, but in search of bargains. Everything was cheaper in the former Jordanian sector, and Israelis flooded the shops in the Old City, snapping up imported electronics, appliances and souvenirs. I remember that carved, wooden camels were a particularly hot item.
Commerce, the great leveler, was doing its job and in the process, Israelis were discovering the quiet pride and dignity of their neighbors and the Palestinians were finding that, contrary to their pre-war image, Israelis were not 10-feet tall. It was not Camelot, not love at first sight, but some friendships were made, some barriers fell and a lot of long-held myths were shattered.
Had there been a serious move towards a peace agreement then, in those first weeks after the ceasefire, there were people on both sides ready to go along. Many if not most Israelis assumed from the outset that the newly-occupied lands would be exchanged for peace. Many Palestinians expected that they would win their own state in any settlement.
On the diplomatic front, Israel’s foreign minister, Abba Eban, was calling for direct negotiations with the Arab governments.
“There are two possible maps,” he told me and other reporters gathered in a conference room in West Jerusalem on August 14, 1967. “There is the ceasefire map as it exists today and there is the new map of the Middle East which could be achieved only by a peace settlement.”
The Defense Minister, Moshe Dayan, famously said he was “waiting for the phone to ring” from Cairo, Amman and Damascus. Everything seemed possible. Indeed, after such a total and devastating victory, only the status quo seemed unsustainable.
But the window of opportunity did not remain open for long. Dayan’s phone did not ring. The Arab leaders remained defiant in defeat. In the street, the war was commonly referred to as “an-naksah,” or “the setback.” A setback? No one is prepared to give away the store — in this case, recognition of Israel — after a mere setback. A defeat, maybe, but not a setback.
And many Israelis began to question whether it made sense to return the territories. The land provided strategic depth that Israel lacked before the war. On a human level, Israelis simply became accustomed to having the West Bank as their enlarged backyard. After all, it was nice to take the family for a drive on Saturday to Ramallah or shop for a few bargains in Bethlehem.
Of course, nothing stands still in that part of the world. Before long the first zealous Jewish settlers began to set up rump outposts in the West Bank and on the Golan. For them, this was the biblical eretz Israel, or greater Israel, and they were determined to keep it.
When I asked Dayan what he and the government intended to do about these settlers, he smiled indulgently, waved his hand and said, “If we can negotiate peace with the Arab governments, believe me, the settlers will be no problem.”
Today, those few pesky settlers number 250,000 in 120 government-sanctioned settlements throughout the West Bank. Another 180,000 Israelis live in the high-rise communities that encircle the annexed eastern half of Jerusalem. Along with the 16,000 settlers on the Golan Heights, they constitute a formidable, hard-line force in Israeli politics. It will not be easy to dislodge them, nor for the Palestinians to accept them as neighbors.
Four decades of occupation have hardened hearts on both sides. Young Israelis who have served in the Army on the West Bank have grown understandably bitter after being stoned and shot at. Palestinians who have had their homes blown up, their towns divided by the security wall and their roads choked with checkpoints are understandably angry.
That brief, hopeful period of good feeling that followed the 1967 war has evaporated. Those few months when peace seemed likely and shopping rather than shooting was the major interaction between Israelis and the Palestinians on the West Bank are a distant memory. Deep-seated animosity has replaced it on both sides.
But that moment of opportunity, that few months when Israelis and Palestinians were talking to each other, not shouting at each other, is worth recalling on the anniversary of the start of the war, even if it is but one of the many squandered opportunities over the last four decades. The prospects seem dim at the moment, with both Israel and the Palestinians riven by internal turmoil, but perhaps it can be revived before another 40 years pass
by.

*

In the end, Scooter Libby’s conviction took its toll on just about everybody involved.

None of the parties came out looking good.

Certainly not the Bush White House, whose clumsy attempts at manipulating the press and public opinion back-fired. Certainly not Vice President Cheney, who was seen to be willing to sacrifice the good name of his closest and most loyal aide. Certainly not Karl Rove, who leaked Valerie Plame’s identity but stood by silently as Scooter took the fall. Certainly not Mary Matalin, whose brainstorm to play Tim Russert and Chris Matthews off each other only got Scooter in deeper. And least of all, President Bush, who is left to somehow fulfill his pledge to fire anyone on his staff found culpable of the leak in the first place.

But the press did not cover itself in glory, either. Washington reporters revealed themselves through their own testimony to be far too dependent on far too few sources and far too cozy with the few they had. Scooter Libby had scores of “background” conversations with reporters — remarkable for someone described in the trial as incredibly busy with affairs of the highest national security. I’m glad that he was willing to make himself accessible, but the public learned from the trial testimony how limited are the sources of many of the capital’s top reporters.

The public learned as well just how far reporters were willing to go to protect their sources. Judy Miller of The Times agreed to describe Scooter in any article she wrote as “a former Hill staffer. ” Technically correct, but grossly, unnecessarily misleading. Now the reader knows that descriptions of anonymous sources are sometimes designed specifically to throw them off the track. (In the end, after their famous, two-hour breakfast, Judy wrote nothing. Did she not realize what she had?)

Finally, the Libby trial underscored just how empty a reporter’s pledge of confidentiality is when it involves anything that might come before a grand jury investigating a criminal matter. It demonstrated to reporters, potential sources and the public that there is no reporter’s privilege in such matters. Reporters can refuse to disclose a source, even go to jail in defense of the pledge, but a determined prosecutor can force their testimony if he chooses to do so. Only a federal shield law — carefully drawn — can resolve this dilemma.

The biggest loser in all of this, of course, is Scooter Libby himself. He is unlikely to ever spend a night in jail, given his appeals and the prospect of a presidential pardon if they fail, but he is, and will remain, a convicted felon.

*

A panel of experts on global warming convened by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation last week had a sobering forecast for those of us who live along the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. Their bottom-line message: expect a four-to-six-foot rise in the average sea level over the next century, perhaps over the next 50 years.

That would be a calamity. Scores of low-lying communities would be uninhabitable, Baltimore’s Inner Harbor waterfront would be awash, Annapolis would have water in the streets more often than not. The fragile islands in the Bay, especially Smith and Tangier Islands, would be flooded.

And, oh yes, expect a major hurricane to hit the Bay in the next 10 years. That’s a 70 per cent probability, according to the actuarial experts at Nationwide Insurance. Their response: the company has decided not to write any new homeowner policies on properties within 2,500-feet of coastal or tidal waters. Allstate recently announced a similar policy, delineated by waterfront zip codes. In other words, buy a property within half a mile of the waterfront and you’ll have to find insurance elsewhere, no doubt at inflated premiums.

Just one more barometer of the inescapable, inconvenient truth of global warming.

Thirty years ago this week, on January 20, 1977, Jimmy Carter of Georgia was sworn in as the 39th President of the United States. In celebration of that anniversary, more than 100 of the top veterans of his administration, including former Vice President Walter Mondale, and some of the journalists who covered the Carter Presidency gathered this past weekend at the University of Georgia in Athens, GA to look back, take stock and look forward.

Michael Bechlosss, the historian, said in one of the panels that it takes at least 25 years, preferably more, to get any perspective on a presidency. It reminded him, he said, of the famous comment of the Chinese leader, Chou En Lai, when asked what he thought of the French revolution. “Too soon to tell,” Chou said.

It may be too soon to make a final judgement on Carter, but with three decades of hindsight, his Presidency certainly looks more impressive than when he left office in 1981. His accomplishments in foreign policy — returning the Panama Canal to Panama, negotiating peace between Israel and Egypt at Camp David, normalizing diplomatic relations with China — are now seen as breakthroughs. His domestic achievements — deregulation of air travel, trucking and banking, his energy policies — established him as the first post-New Deal Democrat, the forerunner of the centrist policies later adopted by Bill Clinton.

Panel after panel drew harsh comparisons between Carter’s record and that of the current Bush Administration. But it was Fritz Mondale who made it most stark. “We told the truth,” he said, “we obeyed the law, and we kept the peace.”

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Adviser, who has been one of George W. Bush’s sharpest critics over the war in Iraq, forecast more trouble between this Administration and Iran. He contended that there is a small but influential group of neo-conservatives around the President who are determined to launch a military strike against Iran before the end of Bush’s second term. The likely scenario, Brzezinski said, is a skirmish along the Iraq-Iran border that becomes a pre-text for U.S. airstrikes inside Iran.

“That,” Brzezinski said, “could get us into a region-wide war that could last for 20 years.”

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