This Media Life

WMD, FCC & Tina

But conspiracy wouldn’t quite be the right word.

Negotiation, however, would be the right one. An appreciation of the whole environment, the careful balancing of interests, the subtleties of the trade (at this point, the ritual denial: “There was no quid pro quo”).

The interesting thing is that in most newsrooms, you would find lots of agreement as to this view of how businessmen and politicians get the things they want. A general acceptance of the realities of ass-kissing, if not a higher level of corruption. You’d find nearly everybody saying, Yes, duh, everybody gets something in return—but not when it come to the news. Not like that. Not so . . . quid pro quo.

Now, this is not entirely true. The people at Fox certainly wouldn’t swear on the life of their grandmothers that the news wasn’t customized for larger business purposes.

And everybody at NBC seems to understand that if Bob Wright doesn’t like what he hears, he’ll be calling the control room—that GE guys aren’t exactly committed to the independence of news.

And certainly, while at the New York Times there would be resistance to the notion that Arthur Sulzberger might have said to Howell Raines, You know, there’s this FCC thing—there would be less resistance to that notion now.

And ABC and Disney, oy.

And CBS and Viacom and Jessica Lynch!

Still, it comes down to the literal point of influence. Who said what to whom? Did anybody in any news organization actually say, “Go easy on the war”?

We tell ourselves it doesn’t go that far.

But do we believe it?

The BBC meticulously dismantled the Jessica Lynch–rescue story weeks ago, but we’re still defending it (although ever so steadily it gets chipped away, altered, recast).

Even the term WMD is a nod to an inside joke—that the existence of the weapons has been established only by constant repetition.

And set the war justifications against this moment in time when the media theme is not to give anybody any wiggle room. Anybody in any position of authority—political, business, journalistic—is being held to the strictest interpretations of meaning and context and responsibility. This cannot equal that. Transparency is the grail. Everybody is held to meticulous account. Except for the Bushies. They have a media pass.

The war is one of those great, suspicious, excessively justified, what-you-see-is-not-what-you-get, dubious-accounting, reality-distorting, even Clintonian (although it seems far vaster in its plasticity than anything the Clintons ever did) endeavors. They piped it. Wolfowitz is Jayson Blair.

And yet as the whole mess continues to unfold, it remains, in the media mind, a pretty good war, with or without the weapons of mass destruction.

And the FCC thing graciously sailed through.

And now, Tina Brown’s new show:

I think it’s good. I think it’s strangely good. I think it’s the kind of fairly verbal, almost nuanced, culturally attentive, smarter-rather-than-stupider show that people see and say, What’s that doing on television?

Where are the blowhards and nutcases? The vulgarians?

The show is oddball. It has a late-night fifties air. Tina should be smoking.

The discussion the other night among Brown and her guests—Nora Ephron, Whoopi Goldberg, and Laura Ingraham (I swear, it was a good match)—might possibly be the first time in the history of television a group of women has gotten to speak about something other than women’s-category issues.

Whereas almost all talk television is downmarket, from-the-gut, red-state stuff, this show is upper-middlebrow, discursive, almost European (the certain kiss of death).

Hence its strangeness. It seems entirely out of place among the reactionaries and the shouters on the Fox-influenced cable lineup. And obviously, given its now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t, almost sheepish schedule, the programming people don’t know what to do with it.

Tina’s show is clearly not where anyone in the media business believes the world is going (network stooges as well as the crowd at Michael’s).

So, all right, it isn’t just that media execs sucked up to Bush and his war effort for a favorable FCC ruling. They did, but the supplication goes well beyond that. After all, there’s nobody but a fabulist or paid believer who doesn’t think the Democrats are going to lose in 2004. What’s more, you can’t have any reasonable sense of commercial and political equilibrium and not feel the pull: It’s a right-wing country! The only question is how bilious and fanatical.

And so, given the president’s amazing popularity, together with Fox’s continued success (moving the news business in an ever-more-imitative conservative direction), on top of the continued sickly showing of the Democrats (and the real prospect of a conservative supermajority), added to the continuing regulatory concerns of big media, I don’t hold out much hope for our ever getting to the bottom of the WMD fraud or for some network tastemaker really getting behind Tina Brown’s (yes, say it) liberal-minded show.