Site Presented By
Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
The one-time most important man in journalism makes a startling confession about the media's Clinton coverage.
Nov 30, 2001 | Journalists expend considerable time and effort writing about themselves, their colleagues and their trade, usually to little effect. Such pieces tend to be preening and defensive, haughty and guilty, cynical and yearning; but rarely is anything significant said.
One of the rare exceptions is available in the Dec. 20 New York Review of Books, which features a highly favorable review of Joan Didion's "Political Fictions" by none other than Joseph Lelyveld, former executive editor of the New York Times. In case you don't know, that's the top job at the newspaper of record, the very pinnacle of American print media, held by this distinguished Timesman from 1994 until September. What is remarkable about Lelyveld's essay has little to do with his specific impressions of Didion's work. No, the startling things are what the former Times chief reveals about himself. Unlike most of us, his opinions about politics and media matter a great deal, or at least they did until very recently. Over seven historic years, it was he who controlled the paper that sets the national agenda.
It turns out that the man who used to run the Times is quite troubled by the quality of journalism during the era when he was in power, though we learn that circuitously, through his endorsements of many of Didion's complaints. He is plainly contemptuous of his old rivals at the Washington Post. He worries that readers regard him and his colleagues as part of a "self-serving, self-satisfied, self-enriching establishment" that conspires in the creation of a trivial and misleading narrative of our national life. And most surprisingly, he suggests that there was substance behind suspicions of a "vast right-wing conspiracy" against the Clintons. (Now he tells us.)
Lelyveld is too discreet to refer directly to himself or his career, although he makes an occasional passive allusion to his own insider status. His own views remain somewhat opaque; he remains strangely distant from the events in which he played an important role. Unlike most writers for the New York Review, probably the best-written and certainly the most important literary periodical in the United States, he doesn't quite advance any argument of his own. Instead, he argues both for and against Didion, almost as if he were talking to himself.
He relishes her "savaging" of Bob Woodward and Michael Isikoff, both of whom Didion decries as practitioners of a journalism that presents reality "not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say, as it is manufactured." (He also delights in a sardonic shot she takes at Post media critic Howard Kurtz.)
In Woodward's case, this facade of "fairness" is designed to stroke important sources and shape consensus thinking (which is achieved, writes Didion, without "measurable cerebral activity"). With Isikoff, it meant ignoring the motives and misconduct of the sources who fed him dirt about Bill Clinton, up to and including the Office of Independent Counsel.
Much as Lelyveld enjoys Didion's elegant evisceration of those celebrated employees of the Washington Post Co., he clearly wishes to exempt his own paper from her broiling indictments of pack journalism. A loyal company man, he specifically defends two of the Times' better reporters, Francis X. Clines and Michael Winerip, against charges of pack journalism -- in a footnote. Still, he admits that her harsh perspective on the craft is "reasonable" for someone living outside "the process."
