Dear Tim,
I share your fascination with the fallout of the CNN/Time story. When you think about it, Time’s defense, like Peter Arnett’s, amounts to “We are Ted Baxter.” It’s hilarious that adding a question mark to the headline was Time’s way of hedging its bets. (Are you still beating your wife?) Strangely reminiscent of Newsweek’s fabulous fudge when it published the Hitler Diaries: “Real or not, it almost doesn’t matter in the end.”
What most of the coverage of CNN lacks, I think, is some essential context. (Ah: our theme of the week so far.) The volume of the anguish there–and the level of rage, which seems to have taken CEO Tom Johnson and president Rick Kaplan by surprise–has to do with some long-running problems. CNN’s original franchise, the breaking news that made Arnett, quite justly, a star, just doesn’t cut the mustard in any era that lacks its Gulf War or OJ trial. (It says volumes that Arnett was out at pasture, giving speeches.) For several years now it’s been a network in search of a new identity; the flubbed NewsStand: CNN & Time report was surely supposed to be part of the answer. Hence the stakes here were higher than just one documentary whose producers ran off the rails.
Of course, the network’s problems occasioned the usual grumbling that afflicts staffs whose bosses are cutting costs and running scared. When I was reporting a piece last year on Larry King-who is, sadly, the most important thing going for CNN-other staffers there said the most savage things about the network. A long-time producer told me, “We got big, we got fat, we got rich, we got stupid.” On a reporting trip last year I got an earful from some CNN cameramen about the company’s increasing tendency to employ their ilk as contingent workers, without job security.
So the reaction of CNN’s rank and file seems a pretty just response to a perception that the grunts got fired while the stars got their wrists slapped. I think Kaplan’s defense is risibly unsustainable: I take full responsibility for the mistake, but I don’t need to resign because I had no responsibility for the mistake. It’s hard to believe he’ll last.
I don’t think I take as merciful a view as Richard Cohen of producers April Oliver and Jack Smith. But I am troubled by their accounts that the inquiry led by Floyd Abrams never gave them a chance to sit down and talk through their own conduct of their investigation. I don’t imagine they could have convinced Abrams (or you or me or anyone) that their conclusions were supported by their reporting. But it’s clear they still believe in their story, and the least a reporter is owed is a chance to defend her or his work.
Now that we’ve hashed out CNN, where oh where is the story that will illuminate the Cincinatti Enquirer case, in which the paper paid $10 million to Chiquita Brands International Inc. after it found that its own reporter had somehow stolen multiple voice mail messages from the company’s internal system? I obviously see that they had a serious problem on their hands once they’d established that, er, unconventional reporting techniques were involved: of course it was in order for them to apologize and fire the reporter. But ten million–before a single complaint has been filed? Their apology carefully didn’t include a retraction of the story itself (which alleged environmental malfeasance, foreign bribery, and more), so surely they had some ground–P.R. ground, if not legal ground–from which to fend off a huge judgment in the event of litigation.
So much for news. I’m not quite done with sexual politics, though–check out the New York Times’ great piece today, in “Science Times,” about entomologists who study “the divine absurdity of phallic diversity.” Yes, bug penises. Have another cup of coffee before you read it; prepare yourself for “hooks, knobs and grooves, cerci, epiprocts and paraprocts. How about something that unfolds blade by blade, like a Swiss Army knife?” (Careful where you put that thing, pal.) The delightful Natalie Angier wrote it with an attitude that is probably the exclusive province of the human female.
Happy trails,
Marjorie
