How a Caged Bird Learns to Sing
Or, my life at the New York Times, CBS and
other pillars of the
media
establishment
by JOHN LEONARD
The Nation June 26, 2000
Like a tribal warrior in the Ramayana,
throwing dice, juiced on
soma, I want to
tell some stories and brood out loud. But it's
tricky. My favorite stories are all about what they did to me.
What I've done to myself, I am inclined to
repress, sublimate or
rationalize. Once
upon a time, I was a Wunderkind. Now I'm an Old
Fart. In between I've done time at
National Review, Pacifica
Radio and The
Nation; the New York Times and Condé Nast; New York
magazine during
and after Rupert Murdoch; National Public Radio
and the Columbia
Broadcasting System. I was a columnist for
Esquire, whenever Dwight Macdonald failed
to turn in his
"Politics" essay; at the old
weekly Life before it died for
People's sins; at Newsweek before the
Times made me stop
contributing to a wholly owned subsidiary of its principal
competitor; at Ms. during its Australian walkabout interim; and
at New York
Newsday before it was so rudely "disappeared" by a
Times-Mirror CEO fresh to journalism from
the Hobbesian
underworlds of
microwave popcorn and breakfast-cereal
sugar-bombs. And
I have written for anyone who ever asked me at
newspapers like
the Washington Post, the LA Times and the Boston
Globe, at magazines like Harper's, The
Atlantic Monthly, Vogue
and Playboy, and
at dot-coms like Salon. I like to think of
myself as having
published in the New York Review, The New
Statesman, the Yale
Review and Tikkun. But there was also TV
Guide.
This sounds less careerist
than sluttish. It is, however, a
sluttishness
probably to be expected of someone who had to make a
living after he
discovered that the novels he reviewed were a lot
better than the
novels he wrote. We may belong to what the poet
Paul Valéry called "the delirious
professions"--by which Valéry
meant "all
those trades whose main tool is one's opinion of one's
self, and whose
raw material is the opinion others have of
you"--but
reporters, critics and "cultural journalists," no less
than publicists,
are caged birds in a corporate canary-cage.
Looking back, I see what I required of my
employers was that they
cherish my every
word and leave me alone. If I understand what
Warren Beatty was trying to tell us in the
movie Reds, it is that
John Reed only soured on the Russian
Revolution after they fucked
with his copy.
On the other hand, as Walter Benjamin once
explained:
The great majority of
intellectuals--particularly in
the
arts--are in a desperate plight. The fault lies,
however, not
with their character, pride, or
inaccessibility.
Journalists, novelists, and literati
are for the
most part ready for every compromise. It's
just that
they do not realize it. And this is the
reason for
their failures. Because they do not know, or
want to
know, that they are venal, they do not
understand
that they should separate out those aspects
of their
opinions, experiences, and modes of behavior
that might
be of interest to the market. Instead, they
make it a
point of honor to be wholly themselves on
every issue.
Because they want to be sold, so to speak,
only
"in one piece," they are as unsalable as a calf
that the
butcher will sell to the housewife only as an
undivided
whole.
I throw in Walter Benjamin, who killed
himself a step ahead of
Hitler, to muss the hair
of the academics among you. Having been
to too many
conferences where working reporters and media
theorists reach
an angry adjournment of minds before the first
coffee break, I
seek to ingratiate myself. If it'll help to wear
a Heidegger
safari jacket, Foucault platform heels, Lacan
epaulets and a
Walter Benjamin boutonniere, I'm willing to bring
the Frankfurtives and the Frenchifieds.
Indeed, the production
process of every
major news-gathering organization can be thought
of--in Foucault's
terms--as an allegory of endless domination,
like hangmen
torturing murderers or doctors locking up deviants.
And whether they know it consciously or
not, these organizations
are in the
"corrective technologies" business of beating down
individuals to
"neutralize" their "dangerous states"--to create
"docile
bodies and obedient souls." How we escape their "numbing
codes of
discipline," if we ever do, is more problematic.
Somehow, art, dreams, drugs, madness,
"erotic transgression,"
"secret
self-ravishment" and going postal seldom add up to an
"insurrection
of unsubjugated knowledges."
I like to think of
myself as Patsy
Cline. I sang the same sad country songs before I
ever got to the
Grand Ole Opry. After the Grand Ole Opry, I can
always go back to
the honky-tonks.
Another paradigm is sociobiological.
Everything is hard-wired,
from the behavior of ants, beetles, Egyptian fruit bats and
adhesive-padded
geckos to the role of women, the caste system in
India, the IQ test scores of black
schoolchildren and the
hierarchy of the
newsroom. If the people on top of this Chain of
Being are mostly male and mostly pale, in
the missionary
position, talk to
Darwin about it. They've been Naturally
Selected.
Moreover, inside such a white-noise system, there is a
positive feedback
loop between nature and nurture, thousands of
teensy units of
obedience training called "culturgens,"
dictating
what societies
can and can't do, obsessing in favor of patriarchy
and
"objectivity," deploring socialism and "bad taste." Having
ceded ultimate
authority, on the one hand, to the credentialed
nitwits of the
mini-sciences, and, on the other, to the chirpy
gauchos of the
media pampas, we may thus find it difficult, ever
again, to think
through dilemmas of personal conscience, which
look a lot like
bad career moves.
Molly Ivins, who
was fired from the New York Times for saying
"chickenplucker" in its pages, has admitted that
if she ever
dies, what it
will say on her tombstone is she finally made a
shrewd career
move. Molly also claims that she's actually played,
on a jukebox
somewhere, a country-western song called "I'm Going
Back to Dallas to See if There Could Be
Anything Worse Than
Losing You."
A third paradigm is novelistic. It's
amazing to me how much the
controlled environments
of both CBS and the New York Times
resemble Tsau, the utopian community on a Botswana sand dune in
Norman Rush's Mating,
with windmills, boomslangs, dung carts,
abacus lessons,
militant nostalgia, ceramic death masks,
"Anti-Imperialist Lamentations,"
a Mother Committee and an
ostrich farm. And
how similar the plantations of Murdoch and
Newhouse are to
Orwell's Animal Farm and Kafka's Penal Colony.
Whereas Pacifica Radio and The Nation
bring to mind Voltaire's
Candide. On these margins, where everyone is paid so poorly that
office politics
are ideologized into matters of first principle,
a little more
self-censorship might actually be a good idea. I am
reminded of what
Amos Oz said in The Slopes of Lebanon about the
Israeli left:
The term Phalangist
is derived from the Greek word
"phalanx."
The phalanx, in the Greek and Roman armies,
was a unique
battle formation. The soldiers were
arranged in
a closed-square formation, their backs to
one another
and their faces turned toward an enemy who
could
neither outflank nor surprise them, because in
this
formation the men gave full cover to one another
in every
direction. The lances and spears pointed
outward, of
course, in all four directions.
The moderate, dovish Israeli left
sometimes resembles a reverse
phalanx: a square
of brave fighters, their backs to the whole
world and their
faces and their sharpened, unsheathed pens turned
on one another.
But, wherever, they always fuck with your
copy.
* * *
So much for the Big
Pixel. And now for the prurient details. And,
stuck as I am on
my periphery of books, movies and television
programs, I can't
tell you for sure whether Tom Friedman, when he
covered the State
Department for the Times, should have played
tennis with the
Secretary of State. Or if Brit Hume, when he
covered the White
House for ABC, should have played tennis with
President Bush. Or if Rita Beamish of the
Associated Press
should've jogged
with George. Or if it was appropriate for George
and Barbara to
stop by and be videotaped at a media dinner party
in the home of
Albert Hunt, the Washington bureau chief of the
Wall Street Journal, and his wife, Judy
Woodruff, then of the
MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and now of CNN.
Or if one reason Andrea
Mitchell, who covered Congress for NBC,
showed up so often in the
presidential box
at the Kennedy Center was that she just happened
to be living with
Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the Federal
Reserve Board. Nor can I be absolutely
positive that there's
something deeply
compromised about George Will's still
ghostwriting
speeches for Jesse Helms during his trial period as
a columnist for
the Washington Post, and prepping Ronald Reagan
for one of his
debates with Jimmy Carter, and then reviewing
Reagan's performance the next day, and
later on writing speeches
for him. Or about
Morton Kondracke and Robert Novak's collecting
thousands of
dollars from the Republican Party for advice to a
gathering of
governors. Or John McLaughlin's settling one
sexual-harassment
suit out of court, facing the prospect of at
least two
more--and nevertheless permitting himself to savage
Anita Hill on his
McLaughlin Group. Or, perhaps most egregious,
Henry Kissinger on ABC and in his
syndicated newspaper column,
defending Deng
Xiaoping's behavior during the Tiananmen Square
massacre--without
telling us that Henry and his private
consulting firm
had a substantial financial stake in the Chinese
status quo.
* * *
For that matter, who knows deep down in
our heart of hearts
whether the
nuclear-power industry will ever get the critical
coverage it
deserves from NBC, which happens to be owned by
General Electric, which happens to
manufacture nuclear-reactor
turbines? Or if
TV Guide, while it was owned by Rupert Murdoch,
was ever likely
to savage a series on the Fox network, also owned
by Rupert Murdoch,
who was meanwhile busy canceling any
HarperCollins books that might annoy the
Chinese, with whom he
dickered for a
satellite-television deal? Or whether ABC, owned
by Disney, will
ever report anything embarrassing to Michael
Eisner, the Mikado of Mousedom?
It wasn't the fault of
journalists at
ABC's 20/20 that Cap Cities settled the Philip
Morris suit before
selling out to Disney. But nobody quit, did
they? Nor was it
the fault of journalists at 60 Minutes that CBS
killed another
antismoking segment, to be immortalized later in
Michael Mann's movie The Insider; it was
the fault instead of the
CBS legal department, on behalf of a Larry
Tisch who actually
owned a tobacco
company of his own, on the eve of the big-bucks
sale of the
network to Westinghouse. But nobody quit there
either, did they?
Not even aggrieved producer Lowell Bergman,
till two years
later. Nor have any of the Beltway bubbleheaded
blisterpacks
on the all-Monica-all-the-time cable yakshows quit
in embarrassment
and humiliation, renouncing lucrative lecture
fees, after being
totally wrong in public about almost everything
important ever
since the 1989 collapse of the nonprofit police
states of Eastern Europe.
Stop me before I go on about the petroleum
industry and public
television's
shamefully inadequate coverage of the Exxon Valdez
oil spill, not to
mention Shell Oil's ravening of Nigeria. Or say
something I'll
regret about the $5-11 million a year that the
NewsHour With Jim Lehrer gets from Archer Daniels Midland, the
agribiz
octopus whose fixing of prices and bribing of pols got so
much attention in
1995 everywhere except on the NewsHour. How
suspicious is it
that so many Random House books were excerpted
in The New Yorker
back when Harry Evans ran the publishing house,
his wife, Tina
Brown, ran the magazine and all of them were
wholly owned
subsidiaries of Si Newhouse? Is anybody keeping tabs
on what Time,
People and Entertainment Weekly have to say about
Warner Brothers
movies? What else should we expect in a
brand-named,
theme-parked country where the whole visual culture
is a stick in the
eye, one big sell of booze, gizmos,
insouciance,
"lifestyles" and combustible emotions? Where the
big-screen
re-release of George Lucas's Star Wars trilogy is
brought to you by
Doritos and the associated sale of stuffed
Yodas, Muppet minotaurs, trading cards, video
games and a
six-foot-tall
Fiberglas Storm Trooper for $5,000? Where the
newest James Bond
is less a movie than a music-video marketing
campaign for
luxury cars, imported beers, mobile phones and gold
credit cards? Where Coke and Pepsi duke it out in grammar
schools
and Burger King
shows up on the sides of the yellow buses that
cart our kids to
those schools, in whose classrooms they will be
handed curriculum
kits sprinkled with the names of sneaker
companies and
breakfast cereals? Where there is a logo, a patent,
a copyright or a
trademark on everything from our pro athletes
and childhood
fairy tales to the human genome, and Oprah is sued
for $12 million
by a Texas beef lobby for "disparaging" blood on
a bun during a
talk-show segment on bovine spongiform
encephalopathy
and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease?
And where, I might add, all of us
"delirious professionals" sign
away, in
perpetuity, our intellectual-property rights, our
firstborn
children and our double-helix to synergizing media
monopolies that
will downsize our asses before the pension plan
kicks in. Marx
made a mini-comeback on the 150th birthday of his
Communist Manifesto.
But years before he wrote the Manifesto he
was overheard to
say: "Since money, as the existing and active
concept of value,
confounds and exchanges everything, it is the
universal
confusion and transposition of all things, the inverted
world, the
confusion and transposition of all natural and human
qualities."
In other words, if money's the only way we keep
score, every
other human relation is corrupted.
* * *
There's a great line in one of Grace Paley's
books: "Then, as
often happens in
stories, it was several years later." Let me now
get up close and
personal.
Not long after I took charge of the Times
Book Review, in the
early seventies,
I had a surprise visitor. Lester Markel, the
editor who had
invented the Sunday Times with all its many
sections, the
eighth-floor Charlemagne who was rumored like Idi
Amin to have stocked his fridge with the
severed heads of his
many enemies,
liked to stop in and sit a while, like a bound
galley or an
urgent memo. This was because, after his forced
retirement, he
wasn't welcome in anyone else's office. Alone
among the editors
of the various Sunday sections, I had never
worked for or
been wounded by him. I was, besides, a fresh ear.
It was rather like chewing the
early-morning fat with El Cid
himself, propped
up on a horse but secretly dead.
It turned out that Markel was writing his
memoirs. And he was
having trouble
finding a publisher. I made some suggestions and
some calls. Never
mind the propriety of the editor of the Times
Book Review lobbying a publisher on behalf
of an author with a
manuscript for
sale. We achieved a contract. And I didn't see
Markel for months.
Until, of course, galleys of his book came in.
And so did he,
with suggestions for reviewers. And I had to
acquaint him with
the etiquette of disinterested criticism. After
which he fixed me
with the blood-freezing basilisk's eye. And I
still had the
problem of finding a reviewer who would pay Markel
his due as a
giant of yore, while not at the same time neglecting
to mention his
memoir's tendency toward stupefaction--a reviewer
who would not
only be fair, but who would be perceived as fair by
everybody else. I
had already been burned by my predecessor, who
left me for my
very first issue a review of the memoirs of
another retired
Times executive, Turner Catledge, by one of his
best friends at
the University of Mississippi.
* * *
Let me digress for a moment to observe
that a Times executive who
wrote a book
could always count on generous review attention so
long as he was
retired. As Wilfrid Sheed
reminded us in Max
Jamison, his novel about criticism:
"They were soft, affable
people who
wouldn't hurt you because they couldn't bear to be
hurt themselves.
Paternal organizations were built on great piles
of spiritual
blubber." But the same has not until recently been
true lower down
the totem pole, for the serfs. And these serfs
write a lot of
books. When Christopher Lehmann-Haupt and I
alternated as
daily critics we looked at these books the same as
we'd look at any
other. If we liked it or it seemed at least
symptomatic of
something compelling in the larger culture that we
wanted to
sermonize about, we'd review it. If not, we didn't.
Pretty simple.
You'll have noticed that in recent years books by
Times employees are farmed out to
freelancers. They are never
reviewed by
in-house critics. This, we are told, is to avoid the
appearance of
conflict of interest. Sounds good. Never mind just
how often these
outside reviews are actually negative. (I recall
two in ten
years.) But have you also noticed that this new policy
means that all
books by Times writers are always reviewed in the
daily paper?
Minus Saturdays and Sundays, there are 261 book
reviews published
in the daily New York Times every year. There
are 65,000 new
books published in the United States every year.
Some of these books are more equal than
others in the paper of
record.
Back to Lester Markel, and the paragon I
needed to review him.
That paragon, clearly, was Ben Bagdikian--a hugely respected,
eminently
fair-minded, award-winning reporter, and also a gent,
who had gone to
academe. And he agreed to do the review. And then
just when the
days before publication of Markel's memoir dwindled
down to a
precious few, Bagdikian called in a pickle. He had
been
hired by the
Washington Post. And the Washington Post had a
policy that
prohibited any of its employees from writing for the
New York Times.
(The New York Times, in fact, had the same policy
in reverse, which
is why they told me to stop writing a TV column
for Newsweek,
which is owned by the Washington Post.) Anyway, Ben
was stuck. Well,
I needed to know, was he still willing to do the
review if I could
get the Post to make an exception in this one
instance, to
which of course we had entered into an agreement
before he sold his soul to the company store? Yes, he said;
he'd
already done the
work.
So I called Bill McPherson, the editor of
the Washington Post
Book World, whom I knew from literary
cocktail parties,
explaining my
Markel problem and beseeching him to intercede on
my behalf with
Post pooh-bah Ben Bradlee,
whom I had met once at
a Harvard Crimson
alumni softball game and another time, I'm
sorry to say, in
the Hamptons. A long week passed. Finally
McPherson called. Bradlee
would relent on Bagdikian, on one
condition. And
what was that condition? It was that I,
personally, agree
to review a book of Bradlee's choice for the
Post. Done, I
said, figuring I'd square it somehow with the
Times. Which book? Well, Bradlee
hadn't made up his mind. OK, so
I got my Bagdikian
review, which was as scrupulous as I'd hoped,
and published it,
which stung Markel to furious rebuttal in a
letter to the
editor, which received from Bagdikian a mildly
puzzled response,
which correspondence dragged on intolerably
until I called it
off, after which I never saw Lester Markel in
my office again.
But that's not the point of this story. A
year later the phone
rang, and it was
McPherson, and he said: "Bradlee's calling in
his chit."
Which book, I asked? Well--and McPherson was
embarrassed--Sally
Quinn is about to publish a book on her year
at CBS. That's
the one. Many of you are too young to remember
that there was a
Ben Bradlee before Jason Robards
played him in
the film version
of All the President's Men, and that this Ben
Bradlee left his
wife for Sally Quinn, a reporter for the
Washington Post "Style" section,
and that this Sally Quinn then
left the Post,
very briefly, for a CBS morning show about which
most TV critics
had been savage, although at least one of us, me,
had been lukewarm
in Life.
Nor is the point of this story that I
refused to write that book
review. The point
is that Lester Markel had no business in my
office, that I
had no business trying to find him a publisher or
to arrange for a
judicious review--and that Bradlee's way is how
the big boys play
the game. While making sure your girlfriend
gets a
talked-about review, at the same time sticking it to your
principal
competitor. Only Bagdikian emerges with honor. Which,
some years later,
is exactly what I told a class Bagdikian taught
in "The
Ethics of Journalism" at Berkeley. These students,
including my own
son, were amused at an anecdote starring their
professor, but
didn't get the ethics of it. It seemed sort of
locker-room to
them, as it seemed to grad students from the
Columbia Journalism School in a seminar I
later taught myself.
They were all children of the triumph of a
glossier idea of
journalism that
postures in front of experience, rather than
engaging it; that
looks in its cynical opportunism for an angle,
or a spin, or a
take, instead of consulting compass points of
principle; that
strikes attitudes like matches, the better to
admire its wiseguy profile in the mirror of the slicks.
* * *
I am aware that my own regard for books is
overly worshipful--one
part Hegel, two
parts Tinkerbell, with garnishes of Sacred Text,
Pure Thought and Counter-Geography--at a
time when most of the
dead trees in the
chain stores have titles like How I Lost
Weight, Found God, Smart-Bombed Ragheads,
and Changed My Sexual
Preference in the
Bermuda Triangle. But I also know it's just as
hard to write a
bad book as a good one, and a lot easier to
review one than
achieve one, and if book critics in mainstream
newspapers and
magazines seem to have appointed themselves the
hall monitors of
an unruly schoolboy culture--this one gets a
pass to go to the
lavatory; that one must sit in the corner
wearing a dunce
cap--then it is a condescension and a contempt
passed down and
internalized from bosses like Bradlee, for whom
the whole process
is a whimsical scam. I've yet to meet a media
heavy who didn't
think all of the books by all of his friends
deserve fawning
reviews. Nor have I met a media heavy who thought
I should ever employ as a reviewer anybody
who has ever
criticized him or
his friends. Max Frankel, who accuses me in his
autobiography of
trying to turn the Times Book Review into a
combination of
The Village Voice and The New York Review of
Books, once called me on the carpet for
using Timothy Crouse as a
reviewer, because
Crouse had made fun of his Washington press
corps friends in
The Boys on the Bus. Abe Rosenthal not only
called me on the
carpet for saying nice things on the daily book
page about I.F.
Stone and Nat Hentoff, but suspended me from the
job entirely
after I panned a book, The Second Stage, by his
friend Betty
Friedan. The next thing I knew, they'd killed a
sports column I
wrote, during the pro football strike, pointing
out that the head
of the Players Union, Ed Garvey, used to spook
for the CIA. This
of course goes beyond the butthole politics of
the buddy-bond.
It's over in another office, where foreign editor
Jimmy Greenfield killed a "Private
Lives" column I wrote about
the Philippines,
back when the Frog Prince Ferdinand and his
Dragon Lady were still in charge, and
playwrights like Ben
Cervantes were still in prison, and
Greenfield in New York knew
more about it
than I did in Manila, where a goon in a blue
jumpsuit followed
me out of the Palace of Culture, all over the
landfill in the Bay, unto a lurid jeepney.
* * *
This sounds like whining. It is whining. A
primary characteristic
of any news
organization are subcultures of the crybaby and the
gripe. (As if we
ever had it harder than a schoolteacher, a
factory worker, a
farmer or a cop; as if we'd ever been
threatened with
redundancy, much less a firing squad; as if our
slippery slide
weren't down into a wad of cotton candy.) And so I
could go on about
what happened to Richard Eder as the drama
critic, and to
Ray Bonner at El Mozote, and the class-action suit
by the women of
the Times, for which I was deposed, and Roger
Wilkins, who quit the paper to write his
own book (which I so
incautiously
reviewed), and Jerzy Kosinski, and Neil Sheehan, and
Attica, and AIDS.
I could even tell you about having to write my
review of the
first volume of Henry Kissinger's memoirs two days
early, so that it
could go all the way to the top to be vetted,
after which I was
permitted to suggest that some of us, on
hearing from
Henry that his only sleepless night in public
service had been
on the eve of his first mixer with the Red
Chinese debutantes--well, some us thought
maybe he should have
tossed and turned
more often. And I still don't know who cut the
last two
paragraphs of a review I wrote in 1970 about a couple of
JFK assassination books.
Those two paragraphs, asking perplexed
questions about
the sloppiness of the Warren Commission Report,
simply vanished
between the first edition and the last--an
incriminating
fact on microfilm periodically rediscovered by
assistant
professors of conspiracy theory, who write me paranoid
letters that I
dutifully forward to Abe.
No wonder that when Ed Diamond, while
researching his book on the
Times, mentioned my name to John Rothman,
Keeper of the Archives,
Rothman sniffed: "Some people just aren't
good Timesmen." And
then just as
promptly edited himself: "Some people aren't good
organizational
men." I could live happily with that, had I quit
on any one of a
dozen fraught occasions. But I allowed myself to
be promoted instead,
and stuck around for sixteen years. And when
I did finally leave,
it wasn't about a matter of principle. Those
of us who go over
the wall--who leave the Catholic Church or the
Communist Party or the New York
Times--usually decide at last to
jump because of
something small. You have swallowed a whole
history of
whoppers, but there is a fatigue about your faith.
Without any warning, the elastic snaps,
and you are hurled out of
the closed system
into empty space, and your renunciation,
arrived at by so
many increments, looks almost capricious. In my
case, I decided
to believe that the brand-new Vanity Fair would
be a serious
magazine, as did many of my friends. And so we
entered the halls
of Condé Nast like the children who followed
Stephen of Vendôme
south to Marseille in 1212, expecting the Club
Med to part like a Red Sea, allowing us to
pass over to the
Promised Land. We
were sold instead into slavery in Egypt. Well,
it wasn't that
bad. Actually, I was in Jerusalem writing a story
on Peace Now when
they called the King David to tell me to come
home, that they'd
fired the editor who had hired me and it wasn't
going to be a
Peace Now kind of magazine anymore. But when we
leap over the
wall, we always imagine that they, whoever they
are, will love us
more in the outside world. They will love us
just as much, or
as little, as we serve their interest.
* * *
But to finish with the Times: When I told
them I was quitting,
first they said I
had promised I never would. Well, never say
never. Then they
explained, "The Times is a centrist institution,
and you are not a
centrist." Fair enough, although the center
sure had moved
since they hired me directly out of the antiwar
movement.
Finally, they screamed at me: "We made you! You'd be
nothing without
the Times!" This surprised. It had never before
occurred to me
that they'd published what I wrote, two or three
times a week, out
of the kindness of their hearts--that we hadn't
been somehow even
every day. For years after, I thought of this
departing as
Freudian-dysfunctional. Maybe they wanted to be our
fathers. Maybe we
wanted them to be our fathers. Oedipus! Peter
Pan! Then I began to wonder whether there
wasn't about our
servitude
elements of an abusive marriage--tantrums, fists and
fear; excuses,
apologies and denials; dependency and
self-loathing--battered
wives and battered writers. Now,
contemplating all
the ghosts in this denial machine, I'm inclined
to remember the theater tickets, and the stock options, and all
the cocktail
parties I got invited to as if I were important.
Paul Krassner,
the Yippie editor of The Realist, once explained
to a conference
on "Media and the Environment" how to tell the
difference
between "news" and "dreaming." When you see something
you don't
believe, you should flap your arms like wings. If you
seem then to be
flying, it's a dream. In this dreamtime, I am
overdue at CBS,
where I've spent the last twelve years.
Before I was hired at Sunday Morning, I
asked for a free hand in
choosing which
television programs I reviewed, regardless of
network. My own
credibility was at stake. I was assured of a
hands-off policy.
That was three presidents of CBS News ago.
In fact, for the first seven or so years,
I was, if not ignored,
then rather
negligently embraced as a sort of punctuation mark, a
change of rhythm
or a passionate parenthesis, in one of the
vanishingly few
network news programs to embody and cherish
old-fashioned
journalistic standards. When Sunday Morning wasn't
thinking about
culture, its splendid idea of news was to notice
that, hey, here's
a social problem; here are some people trying
to do something
about it; why don't we spend eight whole minutes
seeing if what
they're doing actually works? Those of you who
only recall
Charles Kuralt as a kind of Johnny Appleseed of
avuncular
anecdotes and homespun decencies need reminding that
he'd been a fine
reporter in Southeast Asia and Latin America;
that he went to
China at the time of Tiananmen, where his take
was very
different from Dr. Kissinger's; that he expressed his
doubts, over the
air, about the Gulf War. It's not just that he
listened better
than most people talk; he was an exacerbated
conscience of his
profession. He even refused to appear on the
Murphy Brown sitcom: "I don't know
where the line is," he told
me, "but
that's crossing it." With his passing, we were
diminished in
heart and jumping beans.
* * *
The world of television journalism has
been changing, not since
O.J. or Monica or the Internet, but ever
since they discovered
that news can be
a "profit center." I should have got an inkling
my first year on
air, when I reviewed a public-TV documentary on
Edward R. Murrow, whose valor and grace made him our very own
tragic hero.
Emerging on CBS television from the radio and the
war, he grasped the
new medium's power to modify the way a nation
thought about
itself, then watched helplessly as the medium
pawned that power
to the ad agencies, and smoked himself to
death. He even
looked like Camus, the Shadow Man of the French
Resistance--Bogart with a microphone. We were
reminded in the
documentary that
he'd been stunned when they opened the gates of
Buchenwald. That
he cared so much about words, he often forgot to
look at the
camera. That he made up See It Now as he went along,
forever over
budget. That after his famous demolition job on Joe
McCarthy, Alcoa dropped its sponsorship of
See It Now and William
Paley, the Big Eye in the Black Rock Sky,
turned against his
best-known
reporter, bumping the program from the prime-time
schedule. That in
his last years at CBS before he resigned in
1961 there were many more Person to Person
chats with the likes
of Marilyn Monroe
than there had ever been exposés like Harvest
of Shame, on the
plight of the migrant farmworkers. What I should
have noticed at
the time was the allegorical nature of the Murrow
story. In every
institution of our society, but especially in the
media, there have
always been brilliant young men (and men almost
all of them have
always been) who find surrogate fathers as
Murrow found Paley. For a while in this
relationship of
privilege,
patronage and protection, these young men imagine they
can go on being
brilliant, on their own terms, forever, immune to
the bottom-line
logic of a corporate culture that, for its own
reasons, has
surrounded and preserved them in aspic. But we are
not fathers and
sons at all; we are landlords and tenants; owners
and pets. It shouldn't surprise the brilliant young men, and
yet
it always
surprises the brilliant young men, when the party's
over and the pets
are put to sleep.
* * *
I am once again peripheral to the larger
story. But when CBS lost
pro football, and
then a bunch of affiliate stations, to Rupert
Murdoch's Fox, everybody freaked. One
Thursday, I went in as
usual to submit a
script for TelePrompTing, record the voiceover
for my tape
package and go home again to watch more television.
Later that afternoon, the executive
producer called. The
then-president of
CBS News--he's gone now, Eric Ober, or how
likely is it that
I'd be telling you this?--had seen that I was
reviewing a TV
movie forthcoming on Fox, a feature-length reprise
of the old Alien
Nation sci-fi series, and he'd hit the roof. He
had to go to an
affiliates' meeting next Monday morning. They
would chew his
ears off after hearing their own network promote a
program on the
evil empire's competing schedule. I said I had
been specifically
promised that this would never happen; that,
anyway--and never
mind my poor powers to cloud anybody's mind,
including A.C.
Nielsen's--it couldn't really be my problem if the
stock of the
corporation went up or down, or if the president of
CBS News had to go to an affiliates'
meeting or a therapist. I
was told they'd
get back to me, and late that night they did. The
president was
adamant. Then, I said, I guess I'll have to quit.
Don't be silly and overreactive,
I was told. And then the
executive
producer handled me. A month before, I had proposed a
piece about Doris
Lessing, on the occasion of her 75th birthday
and the
publication of the first volume of her autobiography.
Nobody, then, had been interested. But
now, if I wanted to sit
down immediately
and write it up, they'd run it on Sunday in
place of Alien Nation.
Quid pro quo, Q.E.D., ad nauseam and beat
vigorously.
It occurs to me that thirty years ago Life
rejected one of my
"Cyclops" columns, about Richard
Nixon as a jack-in-the-box
television
President: Surprise! Look what Daddy brought home from
the cold war! A
secret bombing of Cambodia! Then, too, I vented
at length to a
sympathetic but helpless editor. The next day,
Life sent me a brand-new color TV set--my very first. All night
long, with my
children, I shopped for friendship in the gorgeous
beer commercials.
So Doris Lessing is a sort of color television
set.
What followed Doris Lessing--since, if I
couldn't review the
network
competition, I refused to review CBS, although cable and
public television
were still fair game--was some strong
encouragement for
me to branch out more, into movies and books.
This made rationalizing easy. More books is always better. Free
movies spice it
up, even while you quickly realize that TV is
more various and
interesting. They still, amazingly, let me say
exactly what I
want to about abortion and capital punishment,
racism and
homophobia, misogyny and war. (We are hired for our
stylistic bag of
tricks, our jetstream vapor
trails, not our
politics. Had my
politics been right-wing rather than left,
somebody else
would have overpaid for this vapor.) And there's a
new president of
CBS News. If I combine network shows in a
thematic clump,
one from column A, two from column B, I'm back in
the
consumer-guide business. What's more, this wandering in the
wilderness has
led me to realize that we end up, in the
cultural-journalism
business, reviewing the buzz more often than
the artifact itself. That the more money spent on promotion,
the
more attention we
have to pay, no matter what our opinion. If it
is heavily hyped,
it automatically becomes newsworthy. So long as
we are talking
about what everybody else is talking about, we
will sound smart.
Never mind the little foreign movie with the
distracting
subtitles--nobody else will review it, either. So I'm
smarter now. Flap
your arms if you think you're dreaming.
The sad thing is that, since now at last I
am old enough to be
too old, almost,
for network television--a demographic
undesirable to
the ad agencies--my very senior citizenship means
that my children
are out of college, I own the roof over my head,
and I ought to be immune to the terrors of authenticity. I
need
not be beholden
to those who choose to leak on me, nor belong to
any hard-wired
paradigm that imagines itself a fourth branch of
the government,
even a separate country, with its own pomp,
protocols, dress
codes, foreign policy and official secrets,
lacking only its
own anthem and maybe a helicopter beanie. And
yet the Times
paid for that house, CBS bought me a new kitchen,
and in the last
decade I have vacationed in China, Egypt, India
and Zimbabwe.
I've actually stayed in hotels like the Danieli in
Venice, the Peninsula in Hong Kong and the
Oriental in Bangkok,
in spite of the
fact that I know I don't belong there--that you
can take the boy
out of his class, but not that class out of the
boy.
This is the deepest censorship of the
self, an upward mobility
and a downward
trajectory. Once upon a time way back in high
school, we
thought of reporters as private eyes. We thought of
journalism as a
craft instead of a club of professional perkies
who worried about
summer homes, Tuscan vacations, Jungian
analysis,
engraved invitations to Truman Capote parties and
private schools
for our sensitive children. We scratched down an
idea on a scrap
of yellow paper, typed it up on an Underwood
portable, took it
below to the print shop, set it on a Linotype
machine, read
that type upside down, ran off a proof on a flatbed
press and seemed somehow to connect brain and word, muscle
and
idea, blood and
ink, hot lead and cool thought. But that was long
before we got
into the information-commodities racket, where we
have more in
common with Henry Kravis and Henry Kissinger than we
do with
paper-makers, deliverymen and Philip Marlowe, or those
ABC technicians who were so recently so
alone, on strike, on
Columbus Avenue. After which our real
story is ourselves, at the
Century Club or Elaine's or a masked ball
charity scam--Oscar de
la Renta, Alex Solzhenitsyn and Leona Helmsley invite you to
Feel
Bad About the
Boat People at the Museum of Modern Art--with
plenty of
downtime left, after we have crossed a picket line by
e-mailing our copy to the computer, to mosey over to Yankee
Stadium, where Boss Steinbrenner will lift
us up by our epaulets
to his skybox to
consort with such presbyters of the Big Fix as
Roy Cohn and Donald Trump, and you can't
tell the pearls from the
swine.
E-mail
this story to a friend.
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John Leonard is a contributing editor of
The Nation. This article
is adapted from a lecture that was part of a series on
self-censorship
in the media given at New York University. The
lecture series is
being published this month in The Business of
Journalism (New Press).
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