News editors have a tough job, deciding what the lead story of the day is and what is secondary, and what you toss in if you have time or a few column-inches left here and there. It’s not as simple as “if it bleeds, it leads” – it was never that simple and that’s just something critics of the media toss out when they disagree with the decisions that have to be made, or you use as a point of conflict if you’re making a Hollywood movie about an idealistic reporter and the cruel facts of working in the real world. That’s a standard Hollywood convention.
The problem is that the news is infinite – something is always happening somewhere – and your time and space are firmly finite. The New York Times’ imperious and famous banner – ALL THE NEWS THAT IS FIT TO PRINT – was always mocked with “all the news that fits, we print.” Everyone knew all along – no matter how hefty any day’s edition the key word was never “all” but “fit.” Someone had to decide, each day, what was fit to print.
And what was “fitting” had little to do with dignity and decorum, although the Times was slow to move to color photos and still doesn’t carry comics – a bit of residual snootiness. The question always was deciding to go with what was important, that people really didn’t know (just like in the movie), or with what people want to know about because they know what they know about that thing and want more of it (most news coverage before the Iraq war), or what sells papers or radio and television airtime because people like to know about random depravity and disasters even if neither makes a bit of difference in their own lives, or about the lives of celebrities they simultaneously love and loathe. Some news decisions may be weighted in consideration of regulatory issues – you don’t report too incisively what will make the government angry – or in consideration of the corporate owners in question (now that Rupert Murdoch owns the Wall Street Journal there will be no more hard-hitting reporting about News Corp, of course). One could go on and on – it would only get more complex. If the news media is a “public trust” or something, providing the nation’s citizens with what they need to know to make decisions in their lives, and in how they vote, and, really, what they should value and what they should dismiss, then editors have a problem. You either relish that role – William Randolph Hearst to Rupert Murdoch – or you worry a whole lot about whether you’re doing the right thing, day in and day out.
Those of us who write online don’t have that problem – maybe blogging is just karaoke for shy people. We write for a small circle, or for ourselves, trying to work out some ideas, pleased if anyone tags along for the ride but not caring a whole lot if not many do. The point is to work things out. And if you do that is satisfaction enough. And you put it “out there” – maybe someone will agree, or even better, argue back the other way.
Now a news editor on this Monday, January 28, would probably say there were two big national stories, the president’s final State of the Union address to congress and Kennedy Endorses Obama. There was also all the Republican maneuvering just before the Florida primary, and we lost five more of our troops in just one bombing in Iraq, and blizzards in China, big trouble in Kenya, and this – “The uncovering of an illegal kidney transplant racket in a booming IT city has gripped India, with reports hundreds of poor laborers may have been duped or forced into donating organs to wealthy clients, including foreigners.” What do you do with that? And Barbara Walters said she had been contacted by Britney Spears’ manager and “very good friend” who said the pop singer had seen a psychiatrist.
But there were two main stories. If you had to lay out a newspaper or arrange items for the twenty-two minutes of your half-hour news show, you led with those two and let the others fall in behind in some sort of order based on all your calculations balancing what you thought was important, what you thought your audience would think was important, what you knew would pull in more folks and increase your profits, what would not offend your owner, what your competition would probably cover and you should cover too, not to look foolish, and so on.
It’s easier here online. Late in the afternoon Fox News went wall-to-wall with the State of the Union – they’re like that. But really, it came down to this – “President Bush, standing before Congress one last time, urged the nation Monday night to persevere against gnawing fears of recession and stay patient with the long, grinding war in Iraq.”
He pressed Congress to quickly pass a plan to rescue the economy. And that was it. He also pushed Congress to extend his tax cuts, to make them permanent. That’s news? And there was the usual:
He spoke of trust in people - taxpayers, homeowners, medical researchers, doctors and patients, students, workers, energy entrepreneurs and others - to drive their own success and that of the country. The unspoken message: Government isn’t the answer.
It was more of a social event. The news media covered it because, well, because one is supposed to cover these. Summary: The president said again what he said before.
The endorsement was more interesting – “Summoning memories of his brother the slain president, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy led two generations of the First Family of Democratic politics Monday in endorsing Barack Obama for the White House, declaring, ‘I feel change is in the air.’”
And while Fox News zeroed in on the president, Chris Matthews at MSNBC was in heaven – the Kennedy endorsement was the best of the sixties coming back. Hope, idealism, a sense things could be made better as we were all in this together – all of that stuff – had risen from the dead, or something. Change was now in the air for the first time since 1960, and on it went. His panelists too saw this is a big story – a shift in everything. The general idea they came up with was that Democrats now had to choose between the pragmatists – you may not like us but we win elections and do get things done, and for us things are right because we do them – and the idealists saying we ought to do the right things, no matter what, or something like that. It got a bit confusing.
But it started with the South Carolina primary, Once a Clinton advisor and now a Fox News regular, Dick Morris nailed it – “Obama has made the Super Tuesday vote more about who we are than who the candidates running for president are.”
So now it is about us all, and what we think of ourselves? Maybe so, and Andrew Sullivan adds this about how Obama pulled that off:
It’s the community organizer in him. Only now the community he is organizing is an entire country. I do think this is an important aspect to Obama’s liberalism that provides a bridge to conservatism. He is not a traditional top-down big government liberal. He’s a pragmatist who believes in finding ways to empower people to run their own lives. No, he’s no libertarian. But his view of government’s role has absorbed some of the right-wing critiques of the 1970s and 1980s. Hence the lack of mandates in his healthcare proposal and his refusal to engage in racial victimology. This nuance is worth exploring. Unlike Hillary, he doesn’t believe he is going to save anyone. He thinks he has a chance to help some people save themselves.
This is powerful stuff, and one solid conservative knows it – “If I were a Republican, I’d be very, very afraid. Oh wait, I am a Republican. Dang.”
But what happened with the endorsement? Melinda Henneberger, who wrote If They Only Listened to Us: What Women Voters Want Politicians To Hear, provides a good summary:
Sen. Ted Kennedy did not just endorse Barack Obama today; he passed him his brother John’s baton, 35 years on, and bet the whole darn Kennedy Compound that this man is The One. Oh, and he performed a double vivisection on the Clintons as 6,000 cheered.
It wasn’t subtle:
The biggest applause line of the day came when Kennedy said that Obama fights for what he believes in, “without demonizing those who hold a different view.” And unlike some he could name, what Obama is selling is “not just about himself, but about all of us,” Kennedy thundered.
For him it was just a choice between fear and hope, the past and the future, meanness and possibility. And he wasn’t happy with the Clintons:
He not so obliquely slapped down Bill Clinton’s description of Obama’s record on Iraq as “a fairy tale,” saying, “We know his true record. When so many others were silent or simply went along, he opposed the war in Iraq. Let no one deny that truth!”
And he spit on the attempt to paint Obama as a naive kid peddling false hope: “What counts in our leadership is not the length of years in Washington. …With Barack Obama, we will turn the page on the old politics of misrepresentation and distortion. With Barack Obama, we will close the book on the old politics of race against race, gender against gender, ethnic group against ethnic group, and straight against gay.”
He also brought up Harry Truman’s suggestion that JFK was too inexperienced to be president back in the old days. That was crap. And there was what everyone noted. Hillary Clinton had been running on the idea that, unlike all the others, she “would be ready on Day One!” Kennedy looked right in the camera, pointed his finger and practically shouted - “I know he’s ready to be president on Day One!” You have to assume that was directed right at her, her strategists and her staff, and her husband. He found the heir to his late brother, and you don’t mess with the last brother of the three, the one that wasn’t assassinated.
So we have the first black JFK, or something. Obama mentioned it in the speech, but there is some odd karma here:
The bond began with Kenyan labor leader Tom Mboya, an advocate for African nationalism who helped his country gain independence in 1963. In the late 1950s, Mboya was seeking support for a scholarship program that would send Kenyan students to US colleges - similar to other exchanges the US backed in developing nations during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Mboya appealed to the state department. When that trail went cold, he turned to then-senator Kennedy.
Kennedy, who chaired the senate subcommittee on Africa, arranged a $100,000 grant through his family’s foundation to help Mboya keep the program running…
One of the first students airlifted to America was Barack Obama Sr, who married a white Kansas native named Ann Dunham during his US studies.
He is the heir of JFK, sort of. It’s spooky.
Even odder, the same day, there was this:
Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, who once dubbed Bill Clinton the “first black president,” endorsed Senator Barack Obama on Monday and not Clinton’s wife in the White House race.
The African-American author’s announcement came the same day Obama was to receive a public endorsement from veteran Democrat Senator Edward Kennedy and Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of former president John F. Kennedy - assassinated in 1963.
Saying it was the first time she had issued a public endorsement of a presidential candidate, Morrison wrote in a letter to the Illinois senator that neither his racial background nor his rival Hillary Clinton’s gender were decisive factors in her decision.
Morrison said she chose to endorse Obama because it might help attract supporters and “this is one of those singular moments that nations ignore at their peril.”
“I will not rehearse the multiple crises facing us, but of one thing I am certain: this opportunity for a national evolution (even revolution) will not come again soon, and I am convinced you are the person to capture it,” she wrote.
If everyone thinks something big is happening, and this is a critical moment, then this must be the top story. And as much as it was a bad day for the Clintons, it wasn’t so much about either of them. Teddy told them they were irrelevant, but that was only to move on. They just don’t matter now. Something else is up. On the far right, see Josh Claybourn:
As a libertarian-minded conservative, I agree with almost nothing of Barack Obama’s actual policy positions. Whether it is with education, health care, or fiscal matters, Obama is a liberal in the truest sense of the word. He fails to respect federalism and his policies can often border on socialism. Indeed, I have trouble identifying any policy positions of Obama’s that appeal to me. In short, I think Barack Obama would make a terrible Head of Government.
Yet, as David Kopel has deftly noted, the Head of State is an entirely different role altogether, and regardless of your ideological perspective, there is something tremendously appealing about Obama. Indeed, several of his recent speeches - his Iowa victory, a speech on MLK Jr. Day, and the South Carolina victory - have given me goosebumps and caused me to swell with pride at being an American.
It was a good day.
