The Breakfast Table

Think Pink!

Dear Marjorie,

After yesterday’s exuberant foray into sexual politics, I feel the need to extend an olive branch: You and Alice looked so sweet this morning drawing with magic markers at our Real Breakfast Table. I felt a bit sad to head upstairs so I could sit down to this, our Virtual Breakfast Table.

But there’s work to be done. What are we to make of the brimstone hurtling through the corridors of CNN? Clearly, this botched story about the United States deploying nerve gas in Laos is turning into something more than just a botched story. It’s become a morality tale about some shoddy-but-routine practices in journalism, especially TV journalism: Investigative reporters and editors pushing an intriguing-but-unproven thesis way too far based on shaky evidence; famous TV reporters and anchors accumulating reputations as hard-nosed reporters, and yet failing to subject their producers to the sort of grilling that’s routine between editors and writers at any small metropolitan daily; top managers who helped create the pressures for Holy Shit stories running for cover. The whole thing is much more redolent of what’s truly wrong with journalism than the cases of the New Republic ‘s Steven Glass and the Boston Globe’s Patricia Smith, both of whom were caught in outright naked fabrication. There aren’t many Glasses and Smiths out there (such people always do themselves in), but there are a lot of April Olivers. (She’s the CNN producer who got canned over this.)

In today’s segment of the CNN soap opera, we learn that chief executive Tom Johnson twice submitted his resignation over the sarin gas fiasco and twice it was rebuffed by Ted Turner. But since when do you need your boss’s permission to quit your job? If Johnson feels he dishonored the network, he should just go, Japan-style. (I’m not implying he needs to disembowel himself.)

CNN president Rick Kaplan, according to Howie Kurtz in today’s Washington Post, considered resigning but decided he hadn’t played a significant enough role in the story’s editing. I don’t know what to make of this defense.

Star correspondent Peter Arnett, meanwhile, is pushing hard the line that he was only following orders. In a conference call to CNN staffers, he said “I contributed not one comma” to the story. He said he was reporting from Iraq while the thing was researched, and when he returned he was busy giving speeches. The questions he asked in two key interviews, he says, were composed by Oliver. Also, he says, it was Oliver who wrote the synergistic piece in Time, even though they both got bylines for it (and Arnett’s name came first!). In sum, Arnett’s defense is “I am Ted Baxter.” It’s hard to see how this accomplished reporter will ever be taken seriously again.

Richard Cohen, in the Washington Post, invites us to think Oliver should keep her job, on the theory that she has a good track record and everybody’s entitled to one mistake. I like the column’s humanistic tack, though clearly Oliver would have to apologize for committing bad journalism– something she appears to be in no mood to do.

Time, meanwhile, seems to be coming out of this only lightly scathed: Everyone seems to accept that in this era of media conglomeration, its role (as CNN’s corporate sibling) was one of Content Provider rather than Magazine, so it can hardly be blamed for letting shoddy journalism into its pages. It’s essentially the same defense AOL used successfully against Sidney Blumenthal in his libel suit against Matt Drudge. I find this tolerant view a bit cynical. Anyway, Time does get a pasting by Ted Gup, one of its former investigative reporters, in a story posted yesterday on Salon. Gup is a great reporter (he broke the wonderful story about how Congress built a Cold War bomb shelter for itself under the swank Greenbrier resort in West Virginia), and his Salon piece is worth reading (though his condemnation of Time’s editorial culture is a bit short on details).

Well, enough about CNN. Did you see that Kay Thompson, the singer and author of Eloise and its sequels, passed on at the estimated age of 92-to-95? Interestingly, at forays to bookstores with Willie and Alice, I’ve never been able to get them interested in Eloise, probably because Hilary Knight’s exquisite illustrations are too austere for a generation used to seeing lots and lots of colors in books. (Willie has the same problem with Robert McCloskey’s Make Way for Ducklings.) Myself, I will always remember Thompson for her performance as the Diane Vreeland-esque magazine editor in Funny Face, in which she sang, “Think Pink,” a big dance number that I think probably captures fairly accurately how whims can become fashions in the magazine world.

Also, Louis Goldstein, the beloved, Methuselah-like comptroller of Maryland, died. He was first elected to office the year you and I were born! The Washington Post reports that William Donald Shaefer, former mayor of Baltimore and then governor of Maryland, wants his job. But only the New York Times shares Goldstein’s signature salutation, with which I’ll end this morning’s message.

God Bless You All Real Good,

Tim