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Sound and Fury
Also by Eric Alterman
Who Speaks for America? Why Democracy Matters /n Foreign Policy (1998)
ItAiri't No Sin to Be Glad You're Alive: The Promise of Bruce Springsteen (1999)
Sound and Fury
The Making of the Punditocracy
Eric Alterman
p. cm.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a Includes bibliographical references and index.
review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be ISBN 0-8014-8639-4 (pbk.)
low-VOC inks,
xO'
and acid-fnee papers that are recycled, totally chlo-
FSC FSC Trademark © 1996 Forest Stewardship Council A.C.
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rine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers.
Contents
'
Introduction
2 Lippmanndom '8
3 Post-Lippmanndom: The Rest and the Rightest ,
57
Conclusion 279
Notes 291
Index 313
vli
/ live in New York and I have not the vaguest idea what Brooklyn
is interested in.
left the hall depressed. Havel was not exactly at his best, but he was still
while more than two hundred years after our revolution, we remain
mired arguments about flag factories and Willie Horton?
in
If ideas have consequences for society, then so, too, does their absence.
Jay Leno and David Letterman get plenty of mileage out of current politi-
cians' day-to-day squabbles, but our lack of coherent political discourse
really is a serious problem. Our politicians' rhetoric is so riddled with mis-
information, mindless cliche, and meaningless spectacle that it has
ceased to have any relevance to the problems it alleges to address. Even
the candidates hardly pretend to believe themselves any longer. The
forms of American political —
communication nine-second television
sound bites, negative advertisements, and ceaseless fundraising have —
buried even the possibility of fruitful debate. And the political system has
coasted so long on the fuel of its own irrelevance that the people who
operate it have lost both the imagination and the inclination to rethink
its premises. Meanwhile, back in the real world, America's problems pro-
liferate. Our economy declines, our cities collapse, our environment
deteriorates, and Washington fiddles.
*A minor example in this case makes a major point. On March 24, 1990, the New York Times
reported that President Bush had announced himself to be opposed to statehood for the
District of Columbia because, the president said, "its funds come almost exclusively from
the Federal government." Instead of seeking to discover whether the president's insistence
was true or false, the report merely quoted an opposing politician, in this case Jesse Jackson,
calling Mr Bush "unfair" forhis attempts to "disenfranchise six hundred thousand Ameri-
can citizens." The story wholly conformed to the Times demanding standards of objectivity
but was nevertheless based on a falsehood. As the Washington Post did happen to mention in
its story the same day, only 14 percent of the district's budget is provided by the Federal gov-
ernment. Objectivity, in the unfortunately typical case of the Times report, had absolutely no
relevance to truth. See Philip Shenon, "Statehood for Capital Opposed by President," New
York Times, 24 March 1990, and Ann Devroy and R. H. Melton, "President Opposes State-
hood," Washington Post, 24 March 1990, p. Al.
Introduction
clothes on —^without first attributing it to "sources close to the alleged
parade route."
It is the argument of this book that our economy, our security and,
most particularly, our democracy, are imperiled by the decrepit state of
our national political discourse. We lack the ability, as a nation, to con-
duct a simple, sensible, and civil conversation about the choices we face.
Unless we diagnose the disease and begin to treat it, the sick state of the
American body politic will certainly worsen. The net result will be not
only the amplification of what George Will calls the "tawdry ferocity" of
American debate, but the increasing paralysis of our political system in
the face of the most daunting set of challenges America has faced since
we slept though the birth of Fascism more than half a century ago.
cation. Our shameful education system turns out so many illiterate citi-
zens that intelligent poUtical participation is all but impossible except for
a decreasing minority. And political corruption, individual alienation,
cal. Whether these people bring any special expertise to their subject is
wholly at the discretion of those doing the anointing. The ability to call
oneself an expert on a particular topic is a useful, but hardly necessary,
qualification.
The punditocracy, like what used to be the Soviet politburo, has full-
Gang 2ind Crossfire, as well as regular slots on all-news cable stations such as
CNN, MSNBC, and the Fox News Channel. The punditocracy's print
portfolio consists of the op-ed columns of the New York Times, the Washing-
ton Post, and the Wall Street Journal; the top editorships of the New Republic
and the Weekly Standard; and the Washington-based columns in the news-
weeklies. The most celebrated commentators —
super-pundits like George
F. Will, William Safire, and William Kristol —
earn mountains of money
and play a role in insider culture analogous to that of Leonardo DeCap-
rio or Brad Pitt in Hollywood. Their colossal incomes derive, however,
'Evidence of the American people's alienation from their political system is not exactly diffi-
cult to come by. The Times Mirror Company publishes a monthly poll of just how much
attention Americans pay to the news. An extensive survey of this data indicates that to say
that it more than half the country to sit up and pay
takes a major war (or a tax cut) to get
no exaggeration. At one point in 1990, more Americans were aware
attention to politics is
that George Bush hated broccoli than that he had ordered the invasion of Panama. See
Times Mirror Company, "The American Media: Who Reads, Who Watches, Who Listens,
Who Cares," 15 July 1990. This phenomenon has important implications for any consider-
ation of the revival of American democracy, most of which are beyond the scope of this
book. For an excellent discussion of many of them, however, see the Kettering Foundation's
pamphlet "Citizens and Politics: A View from Main Street America" (1991), discussed in the
conclusion of this book, and E. J. Dionne's thoughtful work, Why Americans Hate Politics
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991).
Introduction
a
The NewsHour with Jim and many other network and public televi-
Lehrer,
'Another exceptionally talented performer during the 1980s was Jeane Kirkpatrick, who
managed, despite the perceived disadvantages of being a Democrat, an academic, and a
woman, to catapult into the first rank of ex-officialdom.
In most cases, however, the public's views are not relevant. The public
does not possess the means nor, apparently, the inclination, to interfere
in Washington's policy apparatus in any but the most exceptional cases.
This is particularly true in matters relating to foreign policy. It is not the
populace's views that are defined by the pundits, but those of the Wash-
ington insiders —that informal aristocracy of the powerful, the influen-
Introduction
tial, and the well-connected in whose hands either fate or a presidential
appointment has placed the levers of national power. The people who
inhabit the insular world of Insider Washington are largely divorced from
the travails that can make everyday life in the United States such a strug-
gle. They live in neighborhoods like Georgetown, Cleveland Park, and
Chevy Chase, with green lawns, safe playgrounds, good schools, and an
extra room for the maid. Their biggest problem in life, according to one
Washingtonian magazine survey, is traffic.
Within insider culture, social status rests not so much on wealth as
on proximity to power. How much money you earn is less important
than whether you have been to Katharine Graham's (or, even better,
"Kay's") for dinner. Wisdom is judged not on the depth of knowledge
but the speed with which it is acquired. If you have to wait for the polls
to close to hear who won an election somewhere, forget it. The only
returns worth mentioning are those gleaned from exit polls. The only
scandals worth raising an eyebrow over are those about to break. To
know who is about to be appointed assistant secretary of state for Near
Eastern and South Asian affairs is a great deal more impressive than
knowing where the hell either place is. Insiders intimidate outsiders in
cocktail party conversation by implying that they know more about a
particular policy than they can, in good conscience, say. (This has
always been Henry Kissinger's secret.) Even worse, insiders possess the
unspoken potential to end a conversation by responding, "Oh, really?
The Under Secretary and I just flew back on the Concorde together,
and he says you don't know what you're talking about." And it is in this
tiny but powerful universe that the intellectual sovereignty of pundit
power reigns supreme.
The power of the punditocracy takes many forms. One can identify
examples of political pundits entering the history books directiy. Pat
Buchanan has used his status as a pundit to run for president three times
now. Buchanan is, of course, a special case, and he is unlikely ever to vdn
his party's nomination, but a pundit presidential candidate has been inev-
itable for more than a decade, ever since the punditocracy achieved its
prominence as the primary locus of our national political discourse. On
announcing his first candidacy in December 1991, Pat Buchanan could
credibly brag that "No other American has spent as many hundreds of
hours debating the great questions of our day on national television."
With seven weekly tele\ision appearances, two regular columns, and a
popular newsletter, Buchanan was able to enlist the support of his conser-
vative minions through infinitely greater access to the American people
than any mere representative or senator. As a result of his unmediated
televisual relationship with his constituency, Buchanan was able to over-
Brinkley. James Baker, the most powerful and influential figure in the
Bush campaign save Bush himself, told Quayle not to do it. But George
Will intervened and apparendy, in Quayle 's view, outranked Baker.
Quayle did the show and got the job.
Pundit interventions in international politics are rarely so heavy
handed, but politically no less significant. New York Tim£s columnist Wil-
liam Safire, for instance, went on a rampage in 1989 against Germany's
sale of poison gas to Libya, calling it "Auschwitz in the Sand," and compar-
ing it to a "final solution" for the Jews. Chancellor Helmut Kohl com-
plained to his American visitors that "this Safire fellow has done more
damage to German-American relations than any other individual." But
Safire 's story turned out to and the Kohl government was forced
be true,
to instigate a criminal investigation and change its export laws. When
George Will challenged Ferdinand Marcos' democratic credentials on
This Week with David Brinkley, Marcos responded by calling a snap election
on the air, setting in motion a process that yielded the "People Power" rev-
olution of 1985. Lyndon Johnson once said that the Washington Post op-ed
page under editor Russell Wiggins was "worth two divisions" in Vietnam,
while \he Jerusalem Post likened New Republic owner Martin Peretz to a simi-
lar percentage of the fighting force of the Israeli military. Punditocracy
efforts, as is discussed later in the book, were absolutely essential to Presi-
dent Bush's efforts to convince Congress to approve his decision to go to
war in January of 1991. When, in the war's bloody aftermath. White House
Chief of Staff John Sununu quipped that the only pressure on the United
States to intervene on behalf of the Kurds was "coming from columnists,"
these same columnists reminded him that, six months earlier, they were
Introduction
"the only ones supporting the use offeree to liberate Kuwait." Within two
weeks of the invasion, the president had reversed himself and accepted an
open-ended commitment to defending the lives of the Kurds.
But these are rare cases. Usually, the punditocracy's influence is invisi-
ble and therefore unprovable. No politician can credit a television talk
show or newspaper op-ed column with influencing his policies, lest he
compromise his reputation for independence. Not a single political pun-
dit earned a mention in Ronald Reagan's memoirs: not even Pat Bucha-
nan, who served as White House director of communications, or George
Will, who coached the president's debating tactics, touched up his
speeches, and frequendy hosted dinner parties Reagan attended.
Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine a president who could have paid
more attention to political pundits than Ronald Reagan. In addition to
hiring Buchanan and befriending Will, Reagan was a dedicated fan of The
McLaughlin Group and was known to bang on the tables at Camp David
when one of its members took issue with one of his policies. He appeared
at the Group's birthday party; visited its host, John McLaughlin, at his
home for dinner; and appointed McLaughlin's wife to be secretary of
labor. Reagan was also known to call members of Agronsky and Company
after the show. The president took Sun Myung
the editorial pages of
Moon's Washington Times so seriously that when Buchanan entered the
White House, he proceeded to allow his entire communications staff to
languish in bureaucratic limbo while he devoted himself to the only work
he thought truly mattered: planting articles and ideas in the Washington
Times' far-right Commentary section.
Even more important than the ability to influence the president's
mind is the ability to fashion his intellectual environment. Walter Lipp-
mann observed nearly fift)' years ago that "he who captures the symbols
by which the public feeling is for the moment contained, controls by that
much the approaches of public policy." These approaches are exacdy
where the influence of the punditocracy is so powerfully pervasive. As
right-wing media critic Jude Wanniski observes, "If politicians are able to
decide what the electorate wants, they have to have the parameters of the
debate communicated to them by the scriveners." By determining these
parameters, the punditocracy can create for a president either a hostile
or sympathetic context in which to pursue his agenda. James Fallows, a
speechwriter in the Carter White House, recalls that "what was on the op-
ed pages provided the boundaries of what we were allowed to say in the
speeches. Underlings in the government, like me, could move the ball up
and down the playing field, but the columnists defined the field." Part of
Fallows' job, therefore, was to contact op-ed writers to convince them to
address issues which the president was preparing to approach. In one
Introduction
charted along similar lines as the earlier discussion. Within the con-
fines of Washington's punditocracy-driven insider debate, when reality
and ideology come into conflict, it is the former, almost uniformly, that
gives way.
For the first half-century of its existence, political punditry was simply a
*Lippmann fell in love with the wife of his best friend, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, and the
two left their respective spouses in New York to begin a new life together.
and ambitions.
Because of its tangled roots in personal journalism, political com-
mentary, and television production values, the punditocracy never
developed a recognizable code of ethics. This situation was further
complicated by the entry into the profession in the early 1980s of large
numbers of political operatives who could not even pretend to con-
sider themselves journalists. No longer a means of rewarding the pro-
fession's most distinguished members, the jobs opened up to political
deal makers, speechwriters, press flacks, and professional ideologues.
During this period, the political column came to be seen as the step-
ping stone to riches, fame, and kingmaker status all in one. Even bet-
ter, there were almost no rules about how such success might be
'The first "Conversation with Walter Lippmann" aired on August 11, 1960.
^McLaughlin settled the case out of court for an undisclosed payment. See Chapter 5 for
details.
Introduction I 3
—
techniques and then judges his performance a few days Morton
later.
Kondracke and Fred Barnes of Fox News Channel's The Beltway Boys sell
their dinner conversation to wealthy American Express Platinum Card
holders, "by invitation only." Kondracke, together with Robert Novak,
happily accepts thousands of dollars in payments from the Republican
party, ostensibly in return for sharing his political wisdom at a gather-
ing of its governors. Novak and his partner, Rowland Evans, have cre-
ated something approaching a mini pundit conglomerate, hosting two
television shows, publishing three newsletters, sponsoring pricey off-
the-record briefings by cabinet officials for corporate fat cats, and
like Barnes and Kondracke —auctioning off their dinner conversation
to starstruck fans. If anyone objects to the coziness of these arrange-
ments, their beneficiaries are shocked that anyone would question
their integrity.
Just why this class came to cohere as the most
of commentators
influential determinants of the shape of American political discourse
in the early 1980s may be clearer to future historians than it is today.
The most convincing explanation lies in the coupling of the collapse of
the punditocracy's competition with the inexorable expansion of the
empire of media dominance in all aspects of American cultural life. In
many ways, the pundits won the fight because they were the only guys
left standing in the ring. The bull market in pundit influence coin-
cided with the collapse of the bipartisan establishment that had guided
American foreign policy for the previous five decades. This process
began in Vietnam, which sapped the self-confidence of the "Wise Men"
and destroyed the trust the American political system had invested in
them. It continued through Watergate, the oil crises of the 1970s, and
the debilitating stagflation of the same period. The rise of the New
Right provided the final shove over the ledge. Political parties by and
large disappeared during this period as well, in part because of inter-
nal divisions on both sides and in part because the onset of the elec-
tronic campaign made their infrastructure obsolete. The community of
academic experts on whom our national political discussion had previ-
ously relied took the same opportunity to withdraw to the academy
partially as a result of Vietnam-related divisions and partially as a result
of an increasing obsession with social-scientific arcania. Independent
intellectuals of the Partisan Review model also slipped off the public's
screen during this period, falling victim to the balkanization of public
culture and the collapse of the socioeconomic foundation that sup-
ported their professional lives.
An equally important factor was the pundits' ability to hitch themselves
successfully to Ronald Reagan's rising star. Whether right-wing pundits
ture. Most newspaper publishers and the lion's share of public affairs
television funding originated on the Right, as well; their prejudices were
suddenly unleashed by the newfound respectability Reagan accorded
them. Suddenly, views that had been considered Cro-Magnon just months
earlier became sophisticated. While a tiny cadre of stalwarts managed to
hold fast to their liberal instincts during this period, most professed to
see new wisdom in cutting taxes for the rich, threatening war with the
Soviets, and cracking down on vodka-guzzling welfare queens. The pundi-
tocracy hardly required a weatherman to determine which way political
winds were blowing.*
A final addition to the dominance of misinformation and misinter-
pretation in American political discourse was the punditocracy's ever-
expanding pretension to expertise in areas its members could not
really be fairly expected to master. This is less a reflection on the tal-
ents of the men and women who people the punditocracy than on the
increasingly impossible demands of their jobs. In Lippmann's day, both
the world and the American role within it appeared a great deal sim-
pler. When David Halberstam returned from two years in the Congo in
the mid-1960s, his boss, James Reston, sent him over to see Lippmann.
When he arrived, the pundit asked him, "When I understood Europe
they told me I needed to understand Asia. Now that I've been trying to
get Asia, they tell me I need Africa. What can you tell me about Africa?"
When Halberstam gave up daily reporting and was approached by a
syndicate about beginning a regular column, he remembered this story
and decided the entire idea was futile. Even in Lippmann's later days,
punditry was becoming increasingly difficult to defend as an intellec-
tual enterprise.
Today, a good column has become harder than ever to write, not
only because issues have proliferated and increased in complexity, but
also because this has become increasingly obvious inside Washington,
owing to an explosion in the specialized fields of policy research and
political consultancy. The most defensible columns are those that spe-
*Several rightist organizations have spent a great deal of their funders' money convincing
Americans that the media is on behalf of liberals. I would not argue that the media is
biased
—
not biased, or that this bias does not manifest itself on certain issues particularly abor-
tion— in a politically liberal direction. But the bias is more cultural than political. It is
urban, secularist, pseudo-sophisticated, wholly ahistorical, and tremendously cowardly in
the face of concerted government or corporate pressure. Overall, conservatives benefit
more from these biases than do liberals, but the point is arguable.
Introduction I
cialize in a particular beat or speak with an intensely personal voice
while addressing larger issues from something approaching a human
scale. The problem with beat columns, however, is that they force pun-
dits down the same hole into which reporters historically fall: they
become prisoners of their sources. The latter, more personal style can
have great value when done well. But the temptations toward laziness,
self-satisfaction, and plain old burnout are more than most pundits can
resist. Only a negligible number of pundits manage to pull off the
During the 1990s, the size of the punditocracy exploded, and its frivo-
lousness increased exponentially. The O.J. Simpson case, the death of
the Princess of Wales, the trial of the au pair Louise Woodward in the
so-called nanny murder, and the JonBenet Ramsey com-
investigation,
bined with the media's obsession with President Clinton's relationship
with Monica Lewinsky, drove nearly all serious discussion of larger
problems from the public domain. The endless talk of sex and murder
in the American public sphere made it nearly impossible for interested
citizens to feel themselves to be participants in a larger conversation
about the nation's future. The public frequently condemned the
media's relentless focus on sex and tawdry tabloid topics, but the pro-
ducers of these shows insisted that they had no other way to attract
largenumbers of viewers. The result was an endless cycle of cynicism
on both sides and an ever-widening gap between the rulers and the
ruled. "Ignorance is correctable," notes the social critic Neil Postman,
"but what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?" By allow-
ing the punditocracy to determine the content of its political dialogue.
the American political system has committed itself to a path that all but
guarantees the acceleration of the destructive pathologies threatening
our common future. What follows is an examination of how this cata-
strophic situation came to pass.
Introduction 1
"
SECTIOH ONE
department, apparently, the men decided to call their club "The Club."
Their wives, however, thinking all this high-mindedness to be a bit much,
have come from the pen of Henry Luce, who founded Time magazine in
1923. Luce adopted the term pundit, which he derived, most likely, from
—
another well-knovm club this a group of Yale undergraduates and —
applied to the New York World editorial writer Walter Lippmann.
II
It is particularly fitting that Lippmann should have the honor of being
the first journalist so zinged with the moniker, since the art form did not
begin to approach its current level of pretension until he chose journal-
ism as a profession on graduating from Harvard in 1910. Pre-Lippmann,
journalists had been considered incompletely evolved life-forms on the
American Reporting was seen a job for winos, perverts, and
social scale.
those without sufficient imagination to become successful gangsters. The
notion of a young man choosing to be a journalist rather than a professor
of political philosophy at Harvard, as Lippmann had done, was akin to
that of a guest at a societ)' cocktail part)' refusing a glass of Dom Perignon
and inquiring, instead, if the hostess could come up with a cold SchUtz.
The emergence of Walter Lippmann as America's semi-official public
philosopher in the 1920s and 1930s represented the fulfillment of a kind
of circular journey for American journalism. In the days of the American
and pamphleteers
revolutionary press, politicians, journalists, pundits,
were by and large the same people. Politicians owned and published
newspapers and pamphlets, and probably no one even thought to sepa-
rate fact from opinion. The press played an absolutely essential role in
the creation of a revolutionary consciousness among the colonists, stok-
ing a \ibrant public discourse in the late 1760s and early 1770s from resis-
Adams, without exception "the vilest purveyors of slander during the last
electioneering campaign," which by the way, Adams lost.+
The carrying of a newspaperman on the public payroll was no doubt
helpful to the scribe's standard of living, but it was hardly necessary.
James Gordon Bennet, the profession's first Washington correspondent,
"Without Freedom of Thought," wrote Mrs. Dogood, "there can be no such Thing as Wis-
dom and no such Thing as Publick Liberty. Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a
. . .
Nation, must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech." See Karl E. Meyer, Pundits, Poets
and Wits (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. xvii. The letters themselves can be
found in Benjamin Franklin's Letters to the Press, ed. Vemer W. Crane (Chapel Hill, NC: Uni-
versity of North Carolina Press, 1950). The full name of Franklin's magazine was The General
Magazine and Historical Chronicle for All the British Plantations in America. Unfortunately for
Franklin's place in the record books, however, he went to press three days after his
employee, Andrew Bradford, brought out his short-lived American Magazine.
+See John Tebbel and Sarah Miles Watts, The Press and the Presidency (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1985), p. 78. Adams' quote may deserve greater credibility than his polit-
ical interests might imply. These appointments were drawn from a pool described by fel-
low editor John Fenno as "the most ignorant, mercenary, and vulgar automatons that ever
were moved by the constandy rusting wires of sordid mercantile avarice." Quoted in Allen
Nevins, American Political Opinions, 1893-1922 (Port Washington, NY: Kinnikat Press,
1928), p. 7.
friends of the country, and that they will encourage every interest but
favor none." Although wealthy publishers and their hired editors did
enjoy the prerogative of purely editorial columns, these were often noth-
ing more than a harmless vanity: the true editorializing was done in the
news columns.
For the first twelve or so decades of the republic, the only generally
recognized names in the journalism profession were those of the
wealthy owTier-publishers, crusading editors, and the syndicated feature
writers, the vast majority of whom were humorists and satirists. Many
belonging to the first category did enjoy a significant degree of influ-
ence over the opinions of their literate publics. The late A'^^; York Times
pundit Arthur Krock saw the forerunners of his profession at work at the
Cincinnati Liberal/Democratic convention of 1872, at which publisher-
journalist Horace Greeley was nominated for president. Scheming quite
openly to deny their print colleague his ambition were four powerful
editors who called themselves the "Quadrilateral": Henry Watterson, the
legendar}' publisher of the Louisville Courrier-Journal; Murat Halstead of
the Cincinnati Commercial; Sam Bowles of the Springfield (Mass.) Republi-
can, and Horace White of the Chicago Tribune. The editors were so
impressed with one another's wisdom that each printed the editorials of
the other three in his paper.' The plot failed, due to the fact that Gree-
ley's assistant, Whitelaw Reid, was inexplicably admitted to the inner
councils of the cabal.
The incident may mark the beginnings of the all-important institution
of the syndication of individual pundits. The technological phenomenon
of newspaper syndication itself, the foundation on which pre-electronic
punditrv' rested, came on the heels of the invention of the telegraph,
when, in May 1846, the New York Tribune and the New York Herald began
running identical wire dispatches from Washington.^ The most widely
syndicated writers were, however, rarely political. The New York Sun svudi-
cated the work of Henry James. McClure's syndicate handled the work of
Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, Henry Cabot Lodge, Rudyard
Kipling, Jack London, and Arthur Conan Doyle. William Randolph
'Greeley was nominated on the Liberal Republican and Democratic tickets. He lost to
Republican U. S. Grant, which is just as well, since Greeley died before the electoral college
cast its ballots. See Arthur Krock, "The Early Personal Journalists," in Walter Lippmann and
His Times, Marquis Childs and James Reston, eds. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jo%'ano\ich,
1959), pp. 83-110.
^his development led to the formadon of the .Associated Press three years later.
What Greeley did not do, or make any pretense of doing, was remove
the same opinions from his news pages. His former managing editor,
'Greeley's hiring of KariMarx is a wonderfully ironic episode in the history of both the
philospher and American journalism. Marx himself hated writing his columns, and
political
complained to a friend that "this continual journalistic hack-work is getting on my nerves. It
takes up a lot of time, destroys any continuity in my efforts and in the final analysis amounts
to nothing (quoted in Neil A. Grauer, Wits and Sages [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
at all"
versity Press, 1984], p. 7). Looking at his published letters, however, it is hard to work up
much sympathy. Unbeknownst to Greeley and his managing editor Charles Dana, Marx had
subcontracted out at least —
nineteen of these London-based dispatches those dealing with
revolution in Germany and published between October 1851 and
and counter-revolution
—
October 1852 to his uncredited German partner, Friedrich Engels. The articles stopped
arriving, however, because the paper cut the fee for them by 50 percent, from ten dollars to
five. With his family sick and hungry, the author "did not have the penny to go read newspa-
pers." Why he needed to read newspapers, however, when Engels was doing all the work,
Marx does not The entire correspondence between Marx and Engels on the sub-
explain.
ject is Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Letters: The Personal Correspon-
reprinted in Karl
dence, 1844-1877, ed. Fritz J. Raddatz (Boston: Litde, Brown, 1980), pp. 34-51. The "did not
have a penny" quote appears on page 51.
*The Nation, America's oldest continuously publishing political magazine, was founded by
the architect Fredrick Law Olmstead in 1865. Godkin, its founding editor, sold it to his New
York Evening Post in 1881, where it was issued as a weekly supplement for the next thirty-
three years.
*The percentage of the American labor force engaged in non-agricultural work jumped
from 41 percent in 1860 to 62 percent in 1900. Bank deposits tripled between 1865 and
1885, then quadrupled in the twenty years following that. The population of New York City
jumped from 1 million to 1.5 million between 1880 and 1890. Meanwhile, illiteracy declined
from 20 percent of the population to 10.7. See Arthur M. Schlesinger, Rise of the City, 1878-
1898 (New York: Macmillan, 1932). For more recent data and interpretative material, see
Sam Bass Warner, Jr., The Urban Wilderness: A History of the American City (New York: Harper
and Row, 1972), and Charles N. Glaab and A. Theodore Brown, A History of Urban America
(New York: Macmillan, 1976). The literacy figures in particular had enormous implications
When "Boss" William Macy Tweed instructed his henchmen to destroy copies
for politicians.
ofNew York's anti-Tammany newspapers in the 1860s, he worried not about the editorials,
but only about their cartoons. "My constituents can't read," Tweed explained, "but damn it,
they can see pictures." Tweed died in prison in 1878. See Stephen Hess, "The Ungentle-
manly Art," The Gannet CenterJournal (spring 1989): p. 122.
sian Revolution, the Times reported that Petrograd had fallen six times,
been on the verge of capture three more times, been burned to the
ground twice, and been in absolute panic twice and in revolt against the
Bolsheviks on six different occasions, and insisted that the regime was
on the verge of collapse over ninety times. None of these impending
catastrophes, Charles Merz and Walter Lippmann pointed out in the
New Republic, had much foundation in fact. But for the purposes of
delineating the history of punditry, the Times' failure to be "objective"
in its news columns is less important than the impression it created: that
"objectivity" was possible and desirable, and that any responsible news-
paper had better strive for it if its owners wanted to be rich, powerful,
and admired like those of the New-York Times. As a result, during the
next two decades, smaller-scale imitations sprouted up across America.
Although the professional developments it inspired were gradual,
Ochs' philosophical departure was, in fact, a radical change. Without at
least the pretense of objective news reports as a counterpoint, it is impos-
sible to imagine punditry's occupying anything like the political role into
which it has grown in the twentieth century. Absent a professionally
sacred faith in objective news gathering, there would be no call for politi-
cal pundits to comment on it and interpret it. This relatively banal obser-
vation goes a long way toward explaining why the United States is the only
Western country to enjoy (if that be the word) the presence of a pundit
class: it is the only nation in which the aspiration toward objectivity domi-
nates the profession of quality journalism. Where journalism drops the
pretense of reporting only fact, the need for opinion writers, dedicated,
ideally, to placing the news in a larger and more useful context for read-
ers, diminishes accordingly.
ble, like a baseball box score or a stock market quotation. He titled the
most impressive chapter in Public Opinion, the most demanding of his
studies, "The World Outside and the Picture in Our Heads." The prob-
lem with journalism, according to Lippmann 's critique, was its inability to
focus the lens correcdy on the more intricate manifestations of reality.
"News comes from a distance," Lippmann complained, "it comes helter-
skelter." Journalism works fine, Lippmann explains, "when it can report
dispatches in 1915. When the Post began syndicating him a year later, he
fulfilled the basic criteria for Washington punditry, nearly twenty-five
years before Lippmann joined him: he wrote his column from Washing-
ton, he was nationally syndicated, and he had been given full authority by
his superiors to vent his opinions.
Lawrence and his journalist colleagues, however, formed an intensely
parochial and self-contained fellowship. When Arthur Krock first arrived
in 1919, he found what he called "a small group of pompous frauds"
dominating the Washington press corps, "identifiable not only by their
disinclination to do legwork, which was great, but in most cases by their
attire. They habitually wore frock coats and silk hats, dropped big names
in profusion, carried canes and largely made contacts with their single
news source in the noble saloons of the period." Before Lippmann came
to the city in 1939, Washington punditry was important only to Washing-
tonians —and to them not terribly so.
Lippmann began his career as a regular political commentator in
November 1914, having already published two considerable works of polit-
ical inquiry, when he appeared on the masthead of the first issue of the
himself of the merit of the man's viewpoint. When it was over, Lippmann
returned to New York and convinced Croly as well. Shortly thereafter, he
received his first invitation to dine at the White House.
From dinner at the Wilson White House to the days of his banishment
from Lyndon Johnson's Oval Office more than half a century later, Lipp-
mann dealt with the tension inherent in his business in a decidedly
ambivalent fashion. He professed the need for "airspace" between the
worlds of power and punditry but freely ignored his own advice. Time
and again, Lippmann proved all too easily misled by powerful insiders
who encouraged him to mislead his powerless outsiders, with disastrous
results. In the matter of the still unsolved 1948 murder of the journalist
George Polk in war-torn Greece, Lippmann lent his name to a white-
washed investigation that dishonesdy served the interests of U.S. Cold
War diplomacy. Whether calling a 1933 speech by Hitier "genuinely
statesmanhke" and "evidence of good faith" or accepting the Pentagon's
1965 assertion that the bombs it was dropping on North Vietnam did not
"kill anybody" because "they're political bombings," Lippmann found
Throughout his early life, Lippmann had benefited from the patron-
age of great and powerful men, to whom he attached himself with an
enthusiasm that Michael Kinsley has named "the American sycophancy."
From the time that he abandoned his radical Greenwich Village preten-
sions and metaphorically moved uptown to the luxurious and well-
funded liberalism of the New Republic, Lippmann wedded himself to the
views and interests of the American elite. Party meant nothing to Lipp-
mann. His only loyalties were to the influence of his ideas and the idea of
his influence.
As his friend James Reston observes, "One of the interesting things
about Lippmann was that he did more to argue for the principle of
detachment and was [himself] more attached" to politicians than any
other columnist. Reston attributes Lippmann's weakness on the issue to
his need for social status and his "fascination for the social whirl." Lipp-
mann loved, according to Reston, "going to embassies and philosophiz-
ing after dinner and he liked to be asked to the White House. It's true
that people talk about money as corruptive, but the social life is much
more so than money."
After the war and a unhappy return to the New Republic, Lipp-
short,
mann was recruited for what may have been the best job in the history of
journalism: editorial writer for New York World. Since the WorW turned out
its final heartbreaking issue on February 27, 1931, America has yet to see
and the U.S. imperial mission in Asia, came to dominate its news coverage.
When the Wor/cJ finally expired in 1931, Lippmann moved to the Repub-
lican Herald-Tribune and began writing his regular column, "Today and
Who but a political hack can believe that . . . the fate of the nation hangs
upon the victory of either political party. . . . Who can believe that an
orderly, secure and just economic order can be attained by the simple pro-
cess of arousing the people against the corporations. ... Is it vain to sup-
pose that our problems can be dealt with by rallying the people to some
crusade that can be expressed in a symbol, a phrase, a set of principles or a
program? If that is what the progressives are looking for today, they are
looking in vain.
Lippmann's liberalism had, by 1931, lost all vestiges of its former radi-
calism. He had long ago given up, as Reston notes, "bleeding for the
poor." The problems faced by modern government, he recognized, were
post-ideological and managerial in nature. Thirty years before Daniel Bell
sounded his clarion call to the New Class/managerial elite, Lippmann
"more civilized and rational" organi-
enlisted liberalism in the search for a
zation of the corporate economy. While some of his former colleagues at
the New Republic were calling for a vote for the Communists, Lippmann's
liberalism was now completely self-identified with the exercise of power
Thus did Walter Lippmann fulfill the role he had envisioned for his phi-
losopher kings in Public Opinion. By convincing both the rulers and the
ruled that his work was integral to their well-being, he created a central
role for political pundits in the political power structure of the emerging
superpower. The American people needed him to understand their
world. The government depended on him to explain its role, both to the
citizenry and to itself. Both political punditry and elite journalism grew in
status as a result. As Lippmann negotiated these trends in the 1920s and
early 1930s, the role of other pundits also expanded in the public's con-
sciousness. Evidence of the increasing importance of pundits of all politi-
LE PRINTEMPS
FIN DE PRINTEMPS
AU COMMENCEMENT DE L’ÉTÉ
LA TISSEUSE
Pages
Préface 1
Le Mariage 3
La Fièvre 13
L’Exposition Universelle de 1889 21
Le Tour du Monde en 72 jours 37
Une Première 49
Les Morts 65
L’Ombre chinoise 77
Si ? 83
Le Duel 93
La Villégiature 103
Une Visite au Musée du Louvre 113
En Ballon 123
A la Bourse 131
Dans le Train 141
Les Grands Magasins 151
Au Grand Prix 159
La Presse 169
A travers champs 179
La Bibliothèque nationale 189
Les Cirques 201
Un Cabinet de lecture 211
Les Cafés de Paris 221
La Famille 231
Une Visite au Palais de Justice 241
Au Quartier latin 253
La Justice politique en Chine 263
Les Bas-bleus, en Chine 271
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