By: Mary Mostert, Analyst, Banner of Liberty (www.bannerofliberty.com)
June 6, 2003
Every once in awhile someone will say something, or write something, that gets stuck in my mind and causes me to wander down a whole new line of inquiry and research. A.J. Toogood, editor of Toogood Reports, did just that earlier this week when he quipped about on my Wednesday article:
“The Democrats are counting on this charge for 2004, Mary -- and, there you go again! Making it tough on the left to lie!”
The “charge” was media accusations that President Bush “deceived” the world about the danger Saddam Hussein posed based on something Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz said in response to a question by Vanity Fair writer.
Actually, I hadn’t even thought of the Democrats. Frankly, as a journalist I was puzzled by why most of the world’s “elite” media, Associated Press, Reuters, BBC, New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today and major European and Arab news outlets picked up one incomplete sentence in response to an incomprehensible question out of an article written for a magazine that really doesn’t even pretend to be a serious news source and tried used it to ”prove” Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. One report I read used that incomplete sentence to claim President Bush had “lied for months about the threat posed by a sovereign nation (Iraq).”
I thought back to my early training writing the news more than 50 years ago. Dr. G. Paul Butler, who wrote and lectured extensively in post-World War II college journalism courses taught:
“Writing for a newspaper is the fastest writing in the world. The newspaperman must write on command, or as it is called in a newspaper office, on assignment. The short-story writer, the playwright, the novelist or the magazine writer may write as he pleases, and correct and revise at leisure. Not so the reporter of spot news.“A reporter must be able to see, hear and tell – to get the facts and present them accurately, to tell what he saw and heard. Butler emphasized that “news reporters” included the basic five “W’s” (Who, What, When, Where, Why) and the “H” (How) of news writing in every story. Editors, on the other hand, could, and often did, rely heavily on opinion. In 1945 Dr. Butler noted, “Walter Winchell and Westbrook Pegler are the most talked about and criticized columnists in America, if not in the world. Both of them are widely read, loved and hated.
“Few people can read them and not take sides. Winchell probably has more enemies than any other newspaperman in the country, because he has attacked more things and more people than any other.”
The news reporter is not supposed to attack people. Once upon a time the news reporter dealt with facts. Opinion was left to others – editors, fiction writers, poets, etc. According to a 1995 Columbia Journalism review of a book entitled “Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity” written by of Neal Gabler, Walter Winchell “rewrote the rules for what was permissible in a major daily newspaper; it was Walter Winchell who first created a demand for juicy tidbits about celebrities and then spent more than forty years attempting to satisfy it. . . .”
In the 1940s, and 1950s more than 2000 newspapers carried Winchell’s gossip column. He ferreted out, or perhaps invented, dirty little secrets and embarrassing scandals about people he didn’t like and wrote favorably about powerful people he liked, such as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Senator Joseph McCarthy. When McCarthy fell from power, so did Walter Winchell. He died in 1972.
However, Winchell left his stamp on American journalism. In the intervening years more and more “news” reporters, seeking fame and fortune, especially on radio and TV, have used gossip-column writing techniques, not the five “W’s” and the “H” of news writing which is based on facts, not gossip or opinion.
By 1998 the Winchell doctrine of journalism had ripened to such a degree that Chicago Tribune columnist and editorial board member Clarence Page told the audience of journalist at a
"Diversity and the News " forum at the University of Michigan that they had “an obligation to broaden the minds of our readers, our viewers, our listeners.”
What ARE the facts on terrorism? To start with, Saddam Hussein USED poison gas on the Kurds, Assyrians and Iranians during the 1980s. He invaded Kuwait in 1991. On a quiet September morning in 2001, three thousand people were killed in New York, Washington D.C. and Pennsylvania by terrorists who hijacked American commercial airliners. Shortly thereafter someone mailed anthrax to a few U.S. Senators, closing down Senate offices.
Those facts put the terrorism issue in a different light. The overwhelming majority of the American people supported President Bush in his effort to make sure the terrorists didn’t strike again. Whether Saddam had weapons of mass destruction or was merely playing cat and mouse with UN weapons inspectors for 12 years to make them THINK he had them is really not all that important at this point. We do know he was promising and paying $25,000 per family to Palestinians who produced suicide bombers willing to kill Israelis and Americans.
Today Saddam is not running Iraq. The American military and the Iraqis have found a lot of dead bodies of people Saddam had killed and have blown up a whole lot of mines and missiles he wasn’t supposed to have and located a couple of his mobile chemical weapons labs. None of the Arab nations rose up in rebellion. And, best of all, the Middle East seems a whole lot more stable.
So stable, in fact, that this week at a meeting at Sharm el- Sheikh, Egypt, a smiling President Bush chauffeured President Hosni Mubarak, King Abdullah of Jordan, Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, and Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud around in a golf cart while getting them to agree to take more action against terrorism in their own countries and to provide stronger support for his blueprint for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
None of that would be happening if Saddam Hussein were still running Iraq.
Which brings me back to the point: Worldwide Walter Winchell style gossip columns attacking President Bush while ignoring both the crimes of Saddam Hussein and the President’s obviously successful personal diplomacy don’t even come close to being “news reporting.”
To comment: mmostert@bannerofliberty.com