Beat the press: Don’t overlook Colbert’s real achievement

May 6, 2006

Guest Post by Morbo

I’ve been enjoying the reaction to [tag]Stephen Colbert[/tag]’s performance at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner last weekend.

Colbert’s attack on President George W. Bush was fun, but let’s face it, Bush is a soft target these days. What I really loved was the long overdue spanking Colbert gave the Washington press corps.

Beneath the laughs, however, lurks a serious question: Why is this event held in the first place? Every year when I read about the correspondents’ dinner, I get annoyed. To me, it’s the prime example of exactly what is wrong with the Washington press corps: a bunch of overpaid, over-pampered and often lazy reporters partying and hobnobbing with the power elite that they ought instead to be investigating.

Colbert zinged them good. As he put it:

“Over the last five years you people were so good – over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn’t want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew. But, listen, let’s review the rules. Here’s how it works: the president makes decisions. He’s the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put ’em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know — fiction!”

Too many in the D.C. press pack have become out-of-touch minor celebrities who yearn for C-SPAN and appearances on the Sunday morning talk shows. Long out of the middle class themselves, they no longer sympathize with the struggles of the average person under Bush II. When I see them in their tuxes and fancy gowns rubbing shoulders with George Clooney, I can only wonder if it’s possible that these card-carrying members of the glitterati could possibly remember the first duty of the journalist: to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

All journalists need to cultivate sources, but some members of the Washington press corps get too close, boozing and dining out with manipulative politicians whose primary interest is securing the right spin. As a journalism student, I was taught that a certain amount of skepticism was appropriate when approaching a politician or indeed anyone in public life. Keep your guard up, I was told, lest you be spoon-fed a pack of lies. Don’t get too close; these people are not your pals. If the most dishonest administration in history has not reinforced the importance of these maxims, nothing will.

But what do I know? I never made it to a correspondents’ dinner. That was not my goal. I was dumb enough to believe that spending my days covering school board meetings and town councils, with their dry talk of tax increases and paving roads, might be of some use to readers. After all, important decisions were being made. Decisions affecting the funding of the public schools, for example, could determine the fate of a generation of young people.

Washington’s press corps deals with similar issues but on a national scale. Consider just some of the questions that face us as a nation: How were we led to war? Do we have a coherent energy policy? Has anything this administration done in the name of homeland security made us safer? What sort of economy are we leaving to our children and grandchildren?

Rather than examine these questions, I see too many D.C.-based journalists regurgitating Karl Rove’s talking points or mouthing the administration’s Big Lie of the day because they’ve been told it’s an exclusive.

More and more Americans are on to the scam. Newspaper circulation isn’t just flat, it’s spiraling downward. Rather than rely on uneven coverage from a chain-owned urban daily with an ever-shrinking news hole, people are using the web to find new sources for information. There is a sense that, if we’re not being lied to, we are at least not being told the whole story. Anyone who relied on the BBC for coverage of the Iraq war can attest to this.

Did Colbert’s barbs again the lazy and compliant media hit home? I think so. That’s why so many establishment journalists are panning him. On Tuesday, two columnists for The Washington Post felt compelled to assert that Colbert’s routine had fallen flat, so it can be safely ignored.

Maybe it did fall flat that night. I’m not surprised that it flopped among the dinner crowd, because Colbert dared to speak uncomfortable truths. The people who no longer trust the D.C.-based media know this. Colbert is a hero to those folks.

Can the Washington press corps regain our trust? Perhaps. Here’s a start: rotation. Don’t let the Washington press corps get established. After a few years, a D.C.-based reporter should go back home and maybe start covering some school boards again. Get back in touch with real community journalism. Remind reporters that their obligation is not to a wealthy senator or lobbyist but to shop-keepers, school teachers and blue-collars workers.

Here’s another thing that would help: Cancel that damn dinner.

Right on!

  • “Don’t let the Washington press corps get established. After a few years, a D.C.-based reporter should go back home. . . .”

    So you’re recommending “term limits” for the press corps?

    You’re suggesting that too much time in a powerful position can lead to corruption and disconnection from the people being represented?

    Can’t we assume that if the press corps are no longer providing what the readers want, the readers will stop reading what they write, and their publishers will hire replacements?

    Hmm, I think I agree with this, only I find the concept applies elsewhere as well.

  • Excellent post.

    “The price of your entry is…..sin.” Simple abrogation of their responsibility under the Constitution of the United States isn’t too much to ask of members of the Washington-based media. After all, what’s pure principle compared to sitting at the same table with (fill in name here).

    So the people that my man, Colbert, skewered, torched, shredded, and then drawn-and-quartered are now desperately ignoring and/or panning as *sniff* not funny?

    Yawn.

    Who do they see when the lights are out?

  • Morbo hit the nail on the perfectly quoffed head.

    This trend can be simply based on the homeliness of the reporters. If you look at the reporters at the beginning of TV, you saw a bunch of grizzled radio men dealing with a medium. Edward R. Murrow could be described generously as craggy, but you can not doubt his journalist mind.

    By the 60s, we had the Walter Cronkites and John Chancellors, but we started to see pretty people fill up the TV slots. Then Baba Wawa showed up. Instead of focusing on intelligent reporter females, TV execs started hiring pretty females.

    The trend started to accelerate in the 70s partially due to the investigative reporter being viewed as a hero (due to Watergate.) This made journalist a popular career choice for the impressionable young person.

    Here is where I add in my own observations. I’ve noticed that whenever a profession becomes popular, it attracts a certain type of person who focuses on the benefits (usually $$$) and not the actual job. The worst are what can be politely termed as fame whores and at best, careerists who focus on where they’re going and not what they’re doing.

    So instead of a reporter who is focused on the profession, we have a bunch of pretty shallow folks at the top who are more interested in the parties and sucking up to the powerful. My observation on careerists like these folks is that moral courage within is about as rare as having a facial blemish. These are what we have for the media.

    For me, the only real MSM journalist of worth is the old warhorse Seymour Hersh.

  • Maybe they should exchange the “dinner” for a weekend getaway. Find somewhere outside the Beltway and move the entire press-gang there for the weekend. And for the love of whatever—DO NOT INVITE THE POLITICIANS!

    Maybe that’s a crazy thing to do. Some of these press-dogs (damn—they remind me more and more, on a daily basis, of a “herd of poodles” than a pack of wolves) are beyond journalistic salvation. They’ve lost the razor’s edge. Good grief—they’ve lost the whole blasted razor! Maybe some of the media sources need to pull their people out of the toilet that the White House press-room has become. Take the high road on the issue, and start telling the American people that “we’d rather be on the outside of the outhouse, rather than in the hole.”

    But considering that these poodles have been bought; given their cordial “thirty pieces of silver” in the form of airtime and some fancy schmoozing from their masters, I doubt they’ve the courage and integrity to do such a thing….

  • Larry King sets the tone. The cordial personality who attracts newsmakers on his show with a quid pro quo guarantee of a positive PR exposure by pitching softballs.

    Or Hardball Chis telling DeLay off air that he really “owed him” for the exclusive.

    Or Judith Miller’s secret pipeline to White House headlines.

    In a competitive news market, where access to newsmakers is the lifeblood of a reporter…. The more that tv news drifts towards entertainment, the more the reporters conversations with powerbrokers will sound like Late Night hosts pimping for movie stars.

    And then along comes the miracle of Colbert!

  • Steve #6: The poodle (and I am a proud owner, past and present), is the second most intelligent dog (after the Border Collie). These are dogs that can practically play chess with you. To compare the poodle to the press is a denigration of a joyous, noble being that I cannot abide. Better to compare the press to that iguana (I think) in the Galapagos that stands blithely in a pack as birds come by and select one for lunch.

  • Back, way back, when I was involved in San Francisco politics, the only journalists I knew were the ones I met in the newsrooms of the SF Chronicle or Examiner (or News and the Call-Bulletin, to take me really far back) or in the bar at Tommy’s Joynt, enjoying the free bowl of pickles along with drinks and gossip. Many of them were seedy, smarmy lowlifes who made it their business to find out was going on and push it into print, past the noses of their editors and publishers. None of them would have been hired to do TV “news”.

    I was shocked to find that there was another breed of reporter then, sent to cover the political speeches given at fancy luncheons in the Garden Court of the Sheraton Palace Hotel. After the luncheon was over and everyone else left (except me, who happened to be hiding behind a screen), these “reporters” picked one of their number to obtain a private interview with the dignitary. The report of that interview was then copied (thermofaxed?) and handed out to the other “reporters” who edited a word here, a phrase there, and published it as their own, while they “socialized”.

  • The problem is not with the reporters, but with the media owners. They are the ones who are picking and choosing who goes to Washington and who stays there.

    The current system of media ownership (consolidated media corporations) can only result in this unholy alliance between power and the fourth estate.

  • “I’m not surprised that it flopped among the dinner crowd, because Colbert dared to speak uncomfortable truths.”

    I’ve watched the video. When the guests at dinner are practically swallowing their fists to keep from laughing at the guys at the table next to them, Colbert did not flop. He blasted everybody in the room (well, not Wilson, Plame or Jackson) and they were all so embarrassed that they were all laughing so hard inside they had nearly busted a gut.

  • “At the recent Washington Correspondents’ Dinner, master comedian Stephen Colbert performed magnificently. With the rapier of wit and the mace of truth, he respectively skewered and censured the presidency of “dum’ass botch”.

    Talk about wonderful lagniappe! Mr Colbert made that nincompoop’s lap dogs in our national conventional media run for cover with their tail between their legs. And that’s not all our man accomplished.

    Tucked away in his address to the dinner’s flabbergasted attendees, like a ticking time bomb, there was an ‘easter egg’, which we had absolutely . . . here ‘we’ is a polite nod . . . NO right to expect. Like the Easter Bunny in a mischievous mood, Mr Colbert camouflaged a bon mot, so profound as to approach philosophical.

    oh, before I reveal Mr Colbert’s casual accomplishment, I should like to preface with a caveat. The appropriate interpretation of that remark requires sagacity an– . . .”

    oh, alright (!) already, I’ll admit it. The above text is meant to serve as “bait” for the dear Reader’s curiosity. Yes, I would like people to visit my blog. And why not?! The average visitor is bound to find one or two startling insights. What’s more, it’s a good bet that more than a few visitors will discover that I evoke with the written word thought, hitherto more, well, tantalizing than articulated.

    toodles
    …../
    .he who is known as sefton

    http://hewhoisknownassefton.blogspot.com/2006/04/rehabilitation-of-and-by-and-for-right.html

    . . . oh, yeah, I should add that the full title for that post is “rehabilitation of and by and for the right wing” . . . by the bye, depending on visitor’s essentiality, one might be either heartened or dismayed by one, or two, of my easter eggs.

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