Mugger: All Media's Gone Cable

All Media’s Gone Cable

This may be a cynical view, and no disrespect (in the old-fashioned definition of the word) is intended to the relatives of the shuttle Columbia’s victims, but what reason other than ratings can explain television’s literally nonstop coverage of Saturday’s space tragedy? I watched for about an hour, saw the horrific footage, George W. Bush’s moving statement (which most presidents, with the exception of Carter and Nixon, would’ve delivered with equal eloquence), and then went outside with the kids. /> It’s doubtful I missed anything of import, although "historian"/John Kerry adviser Douglas Brinkley was probably rousted about for some guest-starved cable show for his views, just as when he owned the airwaves after John F. Kennedy Jr.’s death several years ago.

There’s no disputing the bravery of the fallen astronauts, as every newspaper in the civilized world has pointed out, but remember that the seven men and women knew the risks they would encounter and courageously embraced them, much as do citizens who choose to join police and fire departments, or the military. In contrast, when an innocent family of five is killed by a drunk driver, or an unlucky person is, by coincidence, present at a convenience store robbery/homicide, it might make the "crime blotter" of the local daily.

Mark Steyn, writing in Sunday’s UK Telegraph, presented a rather jaundiced view of Saturday’s events. Saying the disaster was a "setback" for the Bush administration, since now Colin Powell’s Feb. 5 presentation at the United Nations will be overshadowed, Steyn then sort of defended the television networks.

He wrote: "Now, instead of steely determination [the run-up to war with Iraq], the television screens will be filled with funerals, elegies, interviews with neighbours, mounds of flowers and teddy bears: it enables the networks to slip in to their preferred mode, of America as victim, weak and vulnerable, which is why ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN were so good on September 11 and, for the most part, so bad in the months since.

"You can’t blame the news shows for their priorities: for most Americans, this will be the only attention they have paid to the space programme since the last disaster–the disintegration of the Challenger on take-off in 1986. Nothing in between has captured the public imagination–pictures from Mars? Yawn. There’s something very American about the presumption of success, about the way something unprecedented quickly becomes routine–unless it all goes wrong."

And Ronald Brownstein, the Los Angeles Times’ Washington correspondent, was the first journalist to predict short-term political benefits for Bush. In a sloppy dispatch printed less than 24 hours after the shuttle’s breakup–he quoted Democratic consultant Chris Lehane without noting that he’s now working for Sen. Kerry–Brownstein wrote that opponents to the Iraqi intervention may have their message drowned out.

He said: "Before the accident, Bush and congressional Democrats were building toward a crescendo of conflict this week, first over the budget he’ll release Monday and then over his continuing push toward a military confrontation with Iraq.

"But observers in both parties believe the tragedy will significantly change the tenor of Washington debate for at least the next few days. Many expect that critics will be more reluctant to attack Bush in harsh terms while he’s playing the less partisan role of expressing the nation’s grief over the deaths. And respect for that sense of loss, both among the affected families and the nation at large, also may discourage intense conflict."

Somehow, I think the Democratic presidential aspirants, as well as obstructionists such as Sens. Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd, will find a way to pay obligatory tribute to the dead astronauts and then blast away at the president.

The New York Times, right on cue, ran this banner headline on Monday: "NASA FINDS CLUES IN SHUTTLE DISASTER; NO DELAY ON IRAQ PLANS, BUSH AIDES SAY." Inside the paper, Jeffrey Gettleman contributed a pip of a story that neatly encapsulated the Times’ antiwar agenda. In "As Iraq War Looms, a New Sense of Vulnerability," Gettleman wrote: "The Rev. Charles Wildman is a believer in signs, and for him the loss of the space shuttle was clearly a sign.

"Of mortality. Of fallibility. And at a time of looming war, of America’s vulnerability. ‘It was a wakeup call,’ Mr. Wildman said as he prepared to walk into a Sunday school class and broach the topic with a group of sixth graders. ‘We’re not perfect. Bad things happen to us. Now I’m hearing from a lot of people who say if we go to war, we’re going to endanger a lot more than seven lives.’"

Count on the clergy, not to mention the pope or Nelson Mandela, for such searing insight.

But Gettleman attains a higher state of absurdity with the following sentence: "For others, any idea that America is invincible vanished on Saturday when all the resources and science invested in the shuttle program could not save seven astronauts from death as their craft hurtled toward Earth." What sentient American believes the United States is invincible? Was this naive Times reporter, no doubt fresh out of Columbia University’s journalism school, in Lapland on Sept. 11, 2001? Did he block out the sniper attacks last year in Maryland, Washington, DC and Virginia?

In any case, the Iraq debate is all but completed. Sure, Bush did Tony Blair a favor by not completely dismissing a second UN Security Council resolution, but that was simply to give England’s prime minister political cover at home. As for the United States, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll, 66 percent of Americans support military intervention in Iraq; and for the first time, "about half" of those surveyed said the invasion should take place even without the United Nation’s blessing.

It doesn’t help the antiwar crowd that the Iraqi reaction to Saturday’s tragedy was one of unfettered glee. According to a Reuters report just hours later, a government employee in Baghdad said: "We are happy that it broke up...God wants to show that his might is greater than the Americans’. They have encroached on our country. God is avenging us." Reuters also rounded up a car mechanic to espouse the anti-Israel angle. Mohammed Jaber al-Tamini said, in reaction to the death of Israeli colonel Ilan Ramon: "Israel launched an aggression on us when it raided our nuclear reactor without any reason [in 1981], now time has come and God has retaliated to their aggression."

Neil MacFarquhar, in a Monday Times article, quoted a 29-year-old Egyptian designer about the U.S. space failure. Muhammad el-Guindi said: "The fact that one Israeli died is good news. Also to have some Americans dead is good news because of what they are doing to us. God cannot forgive unfairness. When one Israeli or American dog dies, the world turns upside down, but if 500 Palestinians die, it’s O.K. They even blame the Palestinians."

It’s difficult to imagine how America’s professors and their obedient lemmings will be able to spin sentiments like those, but you can be sure they’re working on it right now.

Wait a minute. Here’s one comment I found via the Australian blogger Tim Blair, who linked to the mysteriously funded BartCop.com, a Blumenthal-like website whose motto reads, "A beacon of white light that makes GOP cock roaches scatter."

A reader said, and I leave in the illiteracy: "Can’t these Republicans run NASA without getting our astronauts killed? We have had 2 towers, part of the pentagon destroyed with 2823 people and now a shuttle with 7 people killed under this illegitimate administration.

"Next shuttle, how bout sending up a Jew and a Palestinian together, instead of arrogantly slapping a lot of people in the face at this time of Arab bashing by sending up a zionist.

"I feel so shallow. I was actually upset about those Astronauts in the morning and now I’m already over it!

"Another Republican, another recession, another Space Shuttle disaster.

"What about Duuuuhhhbya? Shittt!! I hate to think how this giggle monkey is gonna comport himself!

"Republicans fuck up EVERYTHING."

We all know that John Ashcroft has "shredded the Constitution," thanks to the typical fringe-left sources who conveniently forget that Democrat Woodrow Wilson actually jailed journalists for publishing dissenting views during World War I and the Japanese internment camps under FDR. If the Wilson administration were in power today I wonder if people like Robert Scheer, Eric Alterman, Bob Herbert and Jules Witcover would currently be bending over for soap in the pen instead of exercising their First Amendment rights, which have in no way been abridged by unjustly maligned Ashcroft.

Meanwhile, in New York City, Democratic Councilmen David Weprin and Albert Vann have sponsored a bill that would make water pistols illegal in the five boroughs. Why not? After all, these moronic legislators are simply falling into line with the dopey policies of faux-Republican Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who’s more concerned about the noise from nightclubs and secondhand smoke than the jobs that’ll be lost if he succeeds in busting the economy by driving away commerce with any number of new taxes.

And in Pensacola, FL, it was reported by the Associated Press that middle school teachers in Escambia County are now forbidden to hand out copies of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to their pupils. According to AP: "School officials said one parent of a seventh-grader complained about the usage of Mark Twain’s 19th-century novel, which chronicles the adventures of a white boy and a runaway slave and uses racial references more than 200 times. ‘There was one student who felt uncomfortable,’ principal Richard Harper told the Pensacola News-Journal... ‘Our feeling was, we’re not here to make kids feel uncomfortable and if he felt uncomfortable then it was a problem.’"

Presumably, Mark Twain’s insubstantial writings will be replaced in Pensacola by those of the far-more accomplished Maya Angelou.

Laura: Entertain Us!

It’s a rare occurrence when I agree with a Boston Globe editorial. True, although New England’s largest-circulation newspaper is owned by the New York Times Co., its reliably wishy-washy liberal opinions aren’t yet as shrill, anti-Semitic or deliberately misleading as those printed by Howell Raines’ puppet Gail Collins in the Times. The paper is a benign Democratic Party booster, in the same vein as the Baltimore Sun or Los Angeles Times.

Unlike Manhattan’s blustery broadsheet, the Globe rarely publishes much to work up a lather over, unless, I suppose, you consider Beltway lifer Thomas Oliphant’s nonsense on the op-ed pages serious commentary. And the Globe is dismissed as minor-league by the media intelligentsia in New York. I remember, a few years back at a Four Seasons party for some innocuous magazine editor, Walter Isaacson (then riding high at Time) admonishing me for wasting time reading the Boston daily. Everyone has weaknesses: I glance at the paper for Jeff Jacoby’s and Cathy Young’s excellent op-ed pieces, but mostly for the latest news on the Red Sox.

Anyway, last Saturday, a Globe editorial commented on the postponement of Laura Bush’s Feb. 12 "celebration of poetry" at the White House, a decision made because some disturbed poets planned to disrupt the event with their anti-American scribblings.

The Globe said: "Laura Bush’s decision shows respect for her husband [a courteous nod to the first lady that Raines would never allow in his paper] as well as the understandable limits that can a bind a president’s spouse. But what a fine, crackling public debate it would have been if the first lady had said: Let the angry poets come. Let them bring their metaphors of outrage, their similes of despair. Let the poets’ grievances clash with the passion of politics. Let poets explain the wisdom of wielding compassion against a man who murders his own people."

You see what I mean by "wishy-washy."

Nevertheless, the Globe is correct that it would’ve been a spectacle to remember, and a politically astute one at that. I’d have expanded the event beyond the number of no-name poets to include a vast array of celebrities/journalists who’ve made fools of themselves in visits to Baghdad, opinion columns or by signing near-illiterate protest advertisements in newspapers. Imagine the likes of Sean Penn, Noam Chomsky, Greil Marcus, George Clooney, Janeane Garofalo, Tori Amos, Moby, Sheryl Crow, Ed Harris, Michael Moore, Norman Mailer, Susan Sarandon and her actor husband, Bianca Jagger, Amiri Baraka, Michael Kinsley, John Cusack, Barbra, Paul Krugman, Alex Cockburn (who has a hard spot for Laura), Lewis Lapham and Chris Matthews, all at the White House for a no-holds-barred debate.

One wonders if manners would prevail at such a venue, or if Martin Sheen would spit his sherry at a security guard.

How Not to Laugh

One summer afternoon in 1986 I was spending a few hours with a good friend, a lawyer no less, in his North Baltimore backyard. Rob was, and is, a Fritz Mondale-liberal, and, as excellent litigators tend to be, a very worthy debate opponent. I don’t recall the specifics of that day’s jousting–most likely taxes, Ronald Reagan’s vigorous presidency, baseball and the emerging savings and loan scandals–but at one point he enumerated the virtues of this country’s most annoying "humor" columnist, Dave Barry. (Art Buchwald, of course, would’ve contended for the honor, but even 17 years ago he was about as coherent as Strom Thurmond in the South Carolinian’s last Senate term.)

When I protested that Barry’s writing was sheer nonsense, Rob trumped me, effectively ending the conversation, by saying, "Ah, once you have kids, you’ll see what I mean." A rabbit punch, to be sure, but he won the round.

Well, I do have children now and Barry–whose 1988 Pulitzer is on par with Jimmy Carter receiving the Nobel Peace Prize–is still awful. In fact, I almost never read his syndicated column, but last Saturday the headline "Hope (sort of) for the Red Sox" captured my attention in the Daily News.

The following is what passes for humor: "While you’re enjoying your comfortable, low-risk lifestyle, with your childproof aspirin bottles and your reduced-fat Cheez-Its, some brave divers are preparing to plunge into the dark, frigid waters of New England in a quest for a legendary object–an object that, if found, could have a profound effect upon all humanity. Or at least Red Sox fans.

"That’s right. These brave divers are looking for what could be the single most important submerged artifact (freshwater division) in all of baseball: Babe Ruth’s piano."

Barry then goes on to describe this latest stunt by beleaguered Bosox fans, the quest to find a piano Ruth allegedly threw into a Sudbury, MA, pond not quite a century ago. And of course that inevitably leads to the "Curse of the Bambino," the sale of Ruth to the Yankees in 1919, and the team’s futility in winning a World Series title since Woodrow Wilson was in the White House.

What a card that Dave is. Like I’m not already dreading the chants of "1918!" at Yankee Stadium this spring–regardless of whom the Bombers are playing–when my sons and I take our seats wearing the regal navy-blue caps with that simple red "B" stitched just above the bill.

Funny? I don’t think so. P.J. O’Rourke still has the stamina to produce a witty and amusing magazine article. (Christopher Buckley, the conservative’s go-to comedian, is almost as bad as Barry.) Molly Ivins, in a completely ironic way, always has a sentence or two in her columns that make me laugh out loud, as does her comrade Jim Hightower. The Weekly Standard’s Matt Labash is probably the country’s leading print humorist today.

But Dave Barry? More power to the guy that he’s bamboozled enough readers and editors to make a very handsome living–I’m sure he’s secretly praying that Bush’s proposed elimination of the double taxation of dividends is passed–but he’s still the Mel Torme of journalism to me.

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