Aug
27
Books: ‘Political Fictions,’ by Joan Didion
August 27, 2008 |
By Clarence Cromwell
This book is an important read for bloggers and online journalists because it documents, over and over, the greatest malady of the big news media: a chronic failure to document facts and impressions that should be clear to a reasonable person. In the author’s words, the political news is sometimes not “based. . .on observable reality.”
My favorite anecdote comes early in the book, a campaign stop during the 1988 presidential election. The press on the Michael Dukakis plane are forced to witness a staged moment on the tarmac in San Diego, when the candidate and members of his entourage toss a baseball around in sweltering heat, in the middle of a breakneck day of campaigning that had them flying in and out of three major cities. The game of catch was apparently designed to promote the candidate as a regular guy. Although the event was, according to Didion, obviously contrived by the campaign, the reporters on the plane reported it as if it had been a spontaneous game of catch, a candid moment in the middle of the campaign. They spun the story the way the candidate wanted them to.
A reasonable person, might ask what good newspapers are, when they allow powerful outside interests to tell them what version of the truth will go into print.
Didion spends the rest of the book driving this point home, and exploring reasons why journalists are willing to offer a version of reality that they know is not entirely true. In the case of the ball game, she points out, those journalists consider the campaign a plum assignment and they are willing to trade their skepticism for access, which might lead to a permanent seat covering the White House. Needless to say, they’ll never need to bring their skepticism to work, if they win that post.
This isn’t the only comic episode in the book, it just happens to be my favorite. Didion also looks at the Reagan and Bush administrations in amusing detail. She goes on to probe a massacre in Mozote, El Salvador–led by U.S. military advisors. And how the august New York Times backed down and pulled a reporter from the story when the feds denied it. Only problem is that the story turned out to be true–The bodies have been dug up. You would think that the Times would believe its own reporting and the photographic evidence of the slaughter. You would think that the most powerful newspaper in the world would have the wherewithal to expose such an ugly attack on human rights, even if the guilty parties should deny it. Later, Didion describes how the Paula Jones vs. Bill Clinton trial advanced, when it probably shouldn’t have, and then the Lewinsky case stayed front and center for months, despite the lack of public interest. Apparently because news outlets had something in common with a small group of conservatives–a vested interest in the unseating of the president. I enjoyed all of these essays.
I like the sense of cutting through the bull that Didion imbues this book with. I think the impulse that drives people to journalism or blogging is the sense of indignation when we witness something for ourselves and then we are given a version of events that doesn’t jibe with what we experienced.
The job, of course, is to write down the details exactly as we saw them with our own eyes. To obtain a verifiable, objective version of the truth, one that other reasonable people would most likely agree with. To not back down when people try to influence our version of the events, for their own benefit. To say that there was a game of catch, but it was staged.
(This is not a new book, so it may not be available at bookstores. It can be bought at Amazon.com.)
Category: Books
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