Book Report: The Last Debate

Your Humble Blogger was going to direct Gentle Readers to this interesting but wordy article by Jay Rosen, who makes an interesting note about the changing place of the Press in the minds of the public and in the minds of the current Administration. Mr. Rosen sees the traditional view of the press as the Fourth Estate, with an institutional role as watchdogs, rejected by Our Only President.

But then I stalled, and delayed, and when I checked this morning, the original 3,000 words had been joined by another 30,000 in comments. Some of them are either stupid, so biased as to be almost unrecognizable, or dittoing other notes, but a surprising number of them are articulate and appear to be the result of some thought. I don’t claim to have read more than a sampling, by the way. So that link now inclines me to think about the collaborative nature of blogs, and the kind of conversation (for want of a better word) that goes on, and so on.

This all was probably involved in my choice to reread Jim Lehrer’s novel The Last Debate (New York: PublicAffairs 1995), which deals, at its heart, with the growing irrelevancy of Old Journalism. Not that Jim Lehrer is against Old Journalism; he vastly prefers it to the Sunday morning clownalists, the gotcha-grabbers, or even the crusading Civic Journalism that he seems to indicate may be the best of possible journalism futures. It’s just that he does what he does for a fairly small number of people, and the people who are governing are, more and more, not paying any attention to him or to those people watching his show.

Oh, I exaggerate, but then I’m depressed these days, so I exaggerate a lot. Anyway, the book is interesting, particularly as an if-this-goes-on sketch written in 1995. Taken as predictions, it’s lousy—Ross Perot is, in fact, forgotten, and Carville&Matelin have pretty decisively failed on TV more than once—but as warnings, they are impressive. He totally misses the internet, though, which is perhaps understandable, but makes the plot unworkable. (The plot hinges, more or less, on some highly sensitive information that a newspaper wouldn’t be able to publish in a hurry, due to fact-checking procedures, but which could well change the outcome of the election if it becomes known in time.)

Oh, and the presidential election is between an amiable but unimpressive Democratic nominee and a charismatic but eeeeeeevilllll Republican. Most of the journalists are shown as moderates with liberal sympathies; they worried about Reagan, but this guy really scares them. To the point where they see a conflict between their journalistic responsibility to attempt objectivity and their duty as citizens to do anything they can to keep this nutbar out of the White House. Honestly, I wonder what Jim Lehrer thinks these days. Not enough to watch his show for clues, but I do wonder.

Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.