Dear Susan,
OK, I’m willing to drop my lame effort to be Mr. Outside the Beltway. Let’s get straight to Steve Brill, which in truth is what all my colleagues in the commentariat are jabbering about. The lunchtable wisdom about this can be broken down into a few points.
1. Starr was, as you say, incredibly stupid to talk to Brill. He was probably falling for the “You and I are sophisticated grown-ups above the common herd” conceit. Whenever a reporter can get a source to start thinking that way, he’s got him.
2. Brill may have been wrong about the law. He argued in his piece in Brill’s Content that it is illegal for Starr to talk in this way to the press. Some of my buddies agree, but others argue that while Starr can’t disclose grand jury stuff, he can respond to other sorts of queries. (Iran Contra Prosecutor Ken Walsh was not exactly shy in this regard).
3. Brill is hiding his bias under a gauze of objectivity. He is a regular donor to liberal Democrats and he gave $2,000 to the Clinton-Gore campaign. He portrays Starr as an all-powerful prosecutor while omitting the White House campaign of leaks and attacks that are the context for Starr’s behavior.
4. Brill distorts. Howard Kurtz has a piece in the Washington Post today in which reporters from the Post, Newsweek, Time and NBC make separate charges that Brill was not totally accurate in describing their work.
As to why Brill is getting such an incredible publicity ride, a few theories. First, many of us media types have been longing for a good media magazine. The two existing ones are lame. (I’ve always thought that the fact that the journalism magazines are bad journalism is an irony akin to the fact that publicists have a bad reputation). If we get a good magazine covering us, that is testimony to the fact that we are important, and have become not only authors but also subjects. Second, we are in this terrible phony war period of the scandal. We’re all asked to pundicize (bees gotta buzz), but since the Starr report is not yet out and none of us really know what is in it, we are really doing nothing but blowing air. Any morsel of novelty gets beat to death.
I also wonder how the media establishment will respond to this contretemps. During the climactic period of Watergate the DC media was united against Nixon. But now there is a division, with some reporters and outlets reporting hard against Clinton and others reporting hard against Starr. So it is difficult to predict whether the big media powers will embrace the Brill position (as CNN, for example, seems to be doing) or come out blazing against it (as the Washington Post may be about to do). By the way, the magazine title, Brill’s Content, reminds me ofa no doubt apocryphal story told about Mortimer Zuckerman when he bought The Atlantic. It’s said that Zuckerman told an editor that he was thinking of changing the name of the magazine to Zuckerman’s. To which the editor is supposed to have replied, “Why don’t you change the name of the ocean to Zuckerman first. Then it will be easier to change the magazine later.”
As for Trent Lott, I’m among the silent minority of conservatives that believes that being gay is not a choice and that therefore it cannot be a sin. So, yes, I am bothered by Lott’s comments. On the other hand I do believe that anybody who has more than a handful of sex partners in a given year is probably a sleaze, so I am more offended by some of the ideologists of the gay movement.
I am desolated that your kids don’t want to see Mulan, the new Disney flick. If your 8-year-old doesn’t want to see it, odds are my 7-year-old won’t. And I like Disney movies. I even liked Hunchback of Notre Dame.
all the best
David
