By Steve Rhodes
Publication: Tribune
Cover: A quill to represent a book about the Founders.
Other Reviews & News of Note: Of course not.
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Publication: Sun-Times
Cover: “Studs on Studs,” a review by Carol Marin of Studs Terkel’s memoir, Touch And Go.
“At last,” Marin writes in a beautiful piece, “Studs Terkel has turned his trusty tape recorder on himself.”
Noted: “Terkel celebrates the gritty stars of Chicago, like City on the Make author Nelson Algren and legendary columnist Mike Royko, men who sugarcoated nothing. Then again, neither did Terkel’s social activist wife, Ida, to whom he dedicates a chapter, telling the story of how Ida one day silenced the mighty Royko, who was on a rant about a certain ethnic group. The small, normally soft-spoken Ida had two words for Royko, the first of which is unprintable in this newspaper, the second of which is ‘off.’ Royko shut up.”
Other Reviews & News of Note: “Chicago firefighter Kevin Helmond writes an action-packed novel with what could be his literary alter ego.”
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Publication: New York Times
Cover: “The Colossus,” a review of A Life Of Picasso
Other Reviews & News of Note: The most important piece of the week – and beyond – appears on the very last page of the New York Times‘s book review: Matt Bai’s essay on Richard Ben Cramer’s epic work about the 1988 presidential campaign, What It Takes.
Unfortunately, Bai – a former Newsweek reporter who now writes about national politics for the Times magazine – seems to miss one of the major points of Cramer’s seminal work, as well as the point of classic campaign books such as The Boys on the Bus and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. After all, the boys on the bus are the press. And they are not treated favorably.
The real achievement of Cramer’s book was to provide amazing – and by all accounts accurate – psychological profiles of six presidential candidates whom, it could be said, we really barely knew despite the reams of media attention showered upon them all.
That’s because Cramer’s 1,000 pages of reporting revealed how dysfunctional, shallow, incompetent and mediocre our political press corps really is.
Cramer’s book wasn’t published until 1992; it wasn’t intended as a tell-all or colorful road journal. It was a lesson; one the media still hasn’t learned.
Cramer takes great glee – and anger – attacking those in the press he calls the Karacter Kops, whose moral judgements about apparent (and sometimes mythical) personal and human failings have everything to do with the trivial and nothing to do with the substance of being the president.
Laments about the lack of substance in our process are achingly familiar, of course, but Cramer’s detailed reporting leaves the media in shambles, though many members of the media, like Bai, still don’t seem to get it – just as Boys on the Bus was an indictment of a sheepish media afraid to rely on its own eyes when preconceived notions and established narratives were much easier (and better office politics) to convey.
This is the political reporting of how potato is spelled and Al Gore alleged exaggerations, spun out of whole cloth by, as critic Bob Somerby puts it, media clowns dumbing down your discourse and feeding you its blinded, stupid judgements that rely on cocktail party chatter and caricature and dismiss actual reporting. (You could say the same thing about the coverage leading to the Iraq War.)
One of Cramer’s central points is that the media uses (often fabricated) incidents such as Dan Quayle’s misspelled potato and the Internet claim Gore never made to tell you what they really want you to know about a candidate: They can’t just come out and say Dan Quayle is stupid or Al Gore is . . . well, whatever they were trying to tell you about Al Gore. (The idea that he’s a stiff was old and inaccurate news; by Bill Clinton’s re-election campaign Gore had turned into a hilarious orator. On the other hand, Obama is a bore but nobody wants to say so.)
You can see examples of this to this day. As the waitress at the Iowa Maid-Rite said of the Hillary Clinton tip flap, “You people are really nuts.” That’s right; there’s a war going on and the press is focused like a laser on what kind of tip Clinton’s campaign did or did not leave.
Of course, the Clintons are a prime example of where this tendency described by Cramer headed. The Clinton Administration was certainly fallible, but it wasn’t, on the whole, corrupt. None of the so-called Clinton scandals amounted to anything, a phenomenon documented best by Gene Lyons in Fools For Scandal, but Hillary Clinton was so damaged by the right-wing media conspiracy led by the likes of Richard Mellon Scaife that did learn the lessons Cramer spoke of and fed the lunacy into the mainstream news that now candidates like Saint Obama are saying that “it may not be fair” but Hillary Clinton isn’t electable because the right-wing did such a good smear job on her, so let’s just give that to them and move on.
There are plenty of reasons to vote for someone other than Hillary Clinton without validating the exact kind of politics that Obama – he of Daley, Rezko, Stroger and Lieberman – pretends to eschew.
What It Takes ought to be required reading in every newsroom in America. Unfortunately, the press will lap up the juicy details and fail to see the larger point of their own incompetence.
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CHARTS
1. Stephen Colbert
2. Eric Clapton
3. Clarence Thomas
4. Navy Seal
5. Alan Greenspan
6. Valerie Plame Wilson
Posted on November 14, 2007