Having spent the majority of my adult life in the news media, it is increasingly difficult to admire the current product, both written and electronic versions.
While many newspapers have adopted new styles to accommodate their new (and dwindling) audience, broadcasters have only changed their technology. Edward R. Murrow and David Brinkley would have no trouble understanding the presentation of today’s news – in my estimation – although their evaluation of the content would likely be in line with my own. TV news delivery is an antiquated product that is well-calcified from its largely-unchanged 1950′s inception.
Old school thinking.
I try to imagine what journalistic pride can be taken by KJRH (Channel 2, Tulsa – found on Cox channel 9) in featuring a presumably-serious news item promoted to answer questions as to whether the Sham-Wow is e everything that the commercials claim. Sham-Wow is one of those late night advertisements, with the product being a paper-towelish chamois, of sorts.
There are slow news days, to be sure. But KJRH seems to fall back regularly on these – exposés – of dustmops and table polishes.
Writing in a Tulsa Today web column, old school journalist Mike McCarville unloads on former Governor David Hall, who is hawking a recently-published book. McCarville wrote for the Tulsa Tribune in the 60s and covered Hall as a candidate for governor against incumbent Dewey Bartlett.
He writes that Hall’s work regarding the scandal and his later conviction and prison sentence is the product of delusional thinking – that Hall must believe himself the victim of a political attack.
In his article, McCarville displays a bit of his own delusional thinking:
I was visited by old friend Mike Hammer, reporter for The Daily Oklahoman-Oklahoma City Times. We had a pleasant, personal (I thought) conversation about politics and the campaign. It didn’t occur to me we were on the record and Hammer never displayed a notebook. The next day, Hammer wrote about the governor’s race in a Page One story and quoted me as discussing how we’d handle voters “out in the sticks.”
Hammer and McCarville were a little before my time as a reporter, although we may have had articles published in the same time frame as part of overlapping careers. While I recall both names, I don’t believe I met either Hammer or McCarville during the period I wrote for the Oklahoman-Times.
The delusion comes in when a news media veteran talks to another reporter, and later claims surprise when the conversation is discovered in print. If any subject of a news article should know better, it should be a reporter.
Certainly, claims of naiveté and corresponding accusations of delusional thinking by McCarville fall in different realms of importance in the overall scheme of politics and the news media. McCarville admits there is a possibility that his “sticks” quote could have cost Bartlett enough rural votes to lose the election – which Bartlett did.
It is a little disingenuous for McCarville to label the former governor as “devious” in actions that marked his political career, and painting David Hall as “deluded” in recalling it these many years later – while excusing his own quoted comments as “personal” and not intended for publication. McCarville’s own recollection of events is drawn from a similar passage of time as Hall’s memories.
I recall being quoted in print by Steve Patterson, former Chief-of-Staff for Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln. Patterson was then a newspaper writer at a much-earlier stage of his career. The radio station at which I worked had been vandalized. I knew Patterson personally, and answered his questions frankly when he called regarding the damage.
When I read the word “chunked” as a colloquial verb attributed to me in describing the vandal’s method of sending a brick through a plate glass window, I was embarrassed. That which was so easily spoken in an unguarded conversation seemed clumsy and inarticulate in print.
I could not deny having said it, though, and I knew when I spoke to Patterson that he was a reporter – despite the casual tone of our conversation.
The reminder served me well in recalling that – with all due respect to my friend and colleague Steve Patterson – reporters write in the same way that snakes bite. It isn’t personal.
It is just what they do.
And what about politicians and the books that they write, even so many years removed?
There are voters that would place a political book in the same category as snakebites: an inevitable assault on the unsuspecting with a similarly painful result.
