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Frank Rich knows Arts

Rightfully banished from the OpEd pages of the NY Times, Frank Rich has
found his stride in the Arts section. This week he reviews the intersection
of reality reporting shows, cable talking head shows, and exposes films
of corrupt journalists.

What next at the Times ? Perhaps Paul Krugman has a talent for
home and garden commentary.

FRANK RICH
So Much for 'The Front Page'
2003 November 02

ITY, though not too deeply, the American press. Once the wisecracking truth
seekers of "The Front Page" and the brave gumshoes of "All the President's
Men," the fourth estate has fallen into such cultural disfavor that it risks being
renamed the fifth estate, if not the sixth. Hollywood no longer depicts reporters in
ruthless pursuit of criminals, high and low. Now they are the criminals.

In the past month alone, television's reigning dramatic franchise, "Law and
Order," has resourcefully squeezed two shows out of the Jayson Blair scandal. In
one, an African-American reporter on "The New York Sentinel" (not to be
confused with The New York Times because it's on East 43rd Street, not West)
literally commits murder. In last Sunday's "Law and Order: Criminal Intent," it's
another Sentinel reporter who gets caught up in murder, only this time it's his
father who is the killer. The motive? To try to prevent the unmasking of his son
as a plagiarist and fabricator who wrote a story about oyster fishermen in
Louisiana without leaving Brooklyn. How did this reporter get hired by The
Sentinel in the first place? He was the darling of a white, diversity-minded editor
best known for his memoir about the black housekeeper of his childhood.

"You guys are rising to the top of America's most despised list," says Detective
Lennie Briscoe (Jerry Orbach) to a Sentinel hack. Hey, Lennie — we're already
there! For further confirmation, there is "Shattered Glass," this weekend's new
movie about The New Republic's own Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, who wrote
dozens of fictionalized stories before being exposed. Anyone searching for an
altruistic reporter on a movie screen had better run instead to "Veronica Guerin,"
a Hollywood project that had to go to Ireland to find a journalist to root for, and
posthumously at that. But run fast. Though the movie's producer, Jerry
Bruckheimer, has a shrewd eye for mass taste, this one proved dead on arrival
at the box office. These days a film about a truth-seeking newshound strikes
audiences as more ridiculous than "Gigli."

"Shattered Glass," a study in smarminess in which even the honest journalists
come across as pretentious brats, is unlikely to draw crowds either. It's
handsomely made and decently acted, especially by Hayden Christensen, who
plays the creepy title character as if he were the smarter kid brother of Anthony
Perkins's obsequiously androgynous Norman Bates in "Psycho." But the movie as
a whole seems an irrelevancy. While the press deserves some of the rancor
coming its way, there's a gaping disconnect between a Hollywood critique like
"Shattered Glass" and the news media's more distressing ailments.

In a production note for the movie, its writer-director, Billy Ray, observes:
"When people can no longer believe what they read, their only choices will be to
either turn to television for their daily news or to stop seeking out news entirely.
Either path, I think, is a very dangerous one for this country." Where has Mr. Ray
been since "Network"? Most people have long ago turned to TV for their daily
news, and many no longer believe what they read. One of the most disturbing
revelations of the Blair scandal was that few subjects of his bogus stories, Jessica
Lynch's family included, called The Times to complain about his fictions. They just
assumed that reporters make stuff up.

The likes of a Glass and a Blair are true embarrassments to their peers. But the
larger culture in which they thrived has done more longterm damage to the press
than these individual transgressors, however notorious. "The standard for
journalism used to be, `What's the best obtainable version of the truth?' " Carl
Bernstein said when I asked him how the profession has changed since the
Watergate era. "Now we're living in a celebrity culture that no longer values truth
more than hype. You have to go back to what was great about the movie of `All
the President's Men.' It was not about the characters of Bob and me. There's not
a woman in our lives in it; it's not about us at all. It's about the process of good
journalism: methodical, empirical, not very glamorous, hard-slogging reporting.
Now journalism is as infected by the celebrity culture as every other institution."

"Shattered Glass" does show that its ambitious villain was less turned on by
being a reporter than by being a Somebody worthy of a Pulitzer (though
apparently no one told him that Pulitzers are not awarded to magazine writers).
But more often the movie doesn't puncture so much as perpetuate the
star-worshipping celebrity culture that attracts a Glass. "Shattered Glass" is as
pompous about The New Republic as its fictionalized New Republic staffers are,
portraying the publication as the biggest thing to be handed down from on high
since the Ten Commandments. As one oft-repeated line of dialogue has it, The
New Republic is "the in-flight magazine of Air Force One," an inflated claim to
glamour that the magazine has never made for itself. The movie even
opportunistically wraps itself in the tragic celebrity of the former New Republic
editor Michael Kelly, by invoking his death in the war in Iraq in the final credits.
Mr. Kelly was covering the war for The Atlantic; in the movie proper, his actual
role in the Glass saga, while still at The New Republic in the 1990's, is
substantially fictionalized and downsized.

The atmosphere that pervades high-end journalism now can be better seen in an
incident that occurred while the movie was being completed than in the movie
itself. When the real Stephen Glass went on "60 Minutes" this year to push his
own autobiographical novel about the scandal, Charles Lane, the New Republic
editor who published a number of his fictions before finally nailing him, criticized
him for cashing in. "I guess that's the way America works these days," he said.
He knew whereof he spoke. Days later Variety reported that Mr. Lane was
working as a paid consultant to "Shattered Glass."

Funnier than "Shattered Glass," though just as indicative of how embedded the
news media have become in the celebrity whirl, is "K Street," the Steven
Soderbergh fiction-meets-reality series that really must be seen before HBO puts
it out of its misery. It should be seen not because it succeeds in its stated
purpose, which is to dramatize the Washington "process," but because with Andy
Warhol-like candor it shows you a bit more than you want to know in its
snapshots of the capital's players.

Though the program's most substantive story line seems to be the charting of
Mary Matalin's escalating display of fashion-victim couture, Washington reporters
cannot resist going on camera to play "themselves." In one installment, a
character dismisses Time as a magazine that "nobody reads beyond the cover"
not long before an actual Time columnist, Joe Klein, shows up in a cameo. He
embraces Ms. Matalin on the street and offers her private p.r. advice — a
vignette that mainly lends credence to the show's insulting characterization of
Time while simultaneously reinforcing the public's impression that reporters have
been co-opted by rubbing too many shoulders at the Palm.

Almost as weird was the "K Street" appearance by Howard Kurtz, the Washington
Post media critic, who then invited the show's executive producer, George
Clooney, to be a guest last Sunday on his own CNN show, "Reliable Sources."
(Both HBO and CNN are owned by Time Warner.) In their conversation, Mr.
Clooney complimented Mr. Kurtz's acting; then both men expressed their
bemusement that Matt Drudge had had the audacity to refuse to appear on "K
Street." I never thought I'd say this, but could Drudge be the last guy covering
Washington who has any sense of dignity?

The antics on "K Street" are innocuous, heaven knows, but the show's
recruitment of reputable, even distinguished journalists as actors tells us more
about the news media than the case studies of the rookie malefactors in "Law
and Order" and "Shattered Glass." Young con men like Jayson Blair and Stephen
Glass are not the primary cause of the public's disenchantment with the news
media. Their fictionalized stories, largely features, did not cause any lasting
damage to the world beyond that inflicted on the credibility of the publications for
which they worked.

If anything, history may judge that a far bigger blot on The Times's reputation
than Mr. Blair is Walter Duranty, who won a 1932 Pulitzer Prize as a foreign
correspondent in the Soviet Union. His willful shilling for Stalin went uncorrected
for years. (He is also a blot on the history of the Pulitzer Board itself, which, in
keeping with journalism's new haste to rectify even its old sins, is now weighing a
belated revocation of Duranty's prize.) By all accounts, Duranty, like Mr. Glass
and Mr. Blair, was an ambitious self-promoter infatuated with the limelight. But
his capital journalistic crime, hiding the truth about a Ukraine famine that killed
millions, offers a much darker picture of where this corruption can lead than the
relative misdemeanors of his successors.

The public, like Lennie Briscoe on "Law and Order," gets the drift. It sees too
many reporters showboating Geraldo-style on camera, whether on "K Street" or
in the middle of hurricanes, catastrophic fires and wars. They see a famous
columnist reveal the name of a C.I.A. agent and never say he's sorry. They see
news media less preoccupied with the news than with boosting their own status in
the entertainment firmament that now literally owns most of them.

In this vein, CNN's Christiane Amanpour recently criticized the wartime press, her
own network included, for muzzling itself during the war in Iraq and not asking
"enough questions, for instance, about weapons of mass destruction." She
attributes this lapse in part to the need to compete with the ostentatiously
gung-ho Fox in a more important war — for ratings. In the book "Embedded," a
new oral history of journalists in Iraq, the Times correspondent John Burns talks
about the "corruption in our business" when describing how fellow reporters
cozied up to Saddam Hussein, minimizing his regime's atrocities before the war
much as Duranty did Stalin's. Next to these real-life scenarios, an exposé of
journalistic sins like "Shattered Glass" seems like a valentine. No wonder The
New Republic itself co-sponsored a celebrity screening last week to promote it in
Washington.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Posted by dc at November 2, 2003 04:27 PM | TrackBack