The Wages of Wankery
Joe Klein, who in the past had oft been a critic of blogospheric ire, has done some of the very best writing on John McCain’s presidential campaign. For his trouble, he’s been banned from the McCain and Palin campaign planes:
Campaign spokesperson Michael Goldfarb responded that “we don’t allow Daily Kos diarists on board either.”
Michael Calderone observes that “other Time magazine staffers, including Washington bureau chief Jay Carney, reporter Michael Scherer, and Mark Halperin (The Page), have not had a problem with access.” You might think that if Time were a real news organization, it would stand up for Klein and say that if the McCain-Palin campaign isn’t going to let Klein on the plane, then they’re not going to send some other journalists to give them kinder coverage. Instead, though, Time operates in conventional MSM style. If you get good access, your stories get good placement. So if like Scherer and Halperin you decline to tell the truth about McCain, you get access to McCain and your career benefits. If you do tell the truth about McCain, you lose access to McCain and your career suffers. Which is a great way to run a magazine if you don’t care about informing your audience. Which, I guess, Time’s owners and editors don’t care about.
UPDATE: Klein writes in defense of his colleagues.
49 Responses to “The Wages of Wankery”
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October 21st, 2008 at 10:40 am
Shareholder value rules. Follow the money.
October 21st, 2008 at 10:42 am
EL’s right. Publications like Time stopped caring about substantive, informative journalism a long time ago, if they ever cared at all.
October 21st, 2008 at 10:45 am
They don’t care about informing their audiences, and they never have. They care about selling magazines to a certain group of people who like to feel like they’re being informed, without being told anything too harsh or critical about the world.
October 21st, 2008 at 10:50 am
“Which is a great way to run a magazine if you don’t care about informing your audience. Which, I guess, Time’s owners and editors don’t care about.”
Welcome to planet Earth!
October 21st, 2008 at 10:52 am
Karen Tumulty was already kicked off the John McCain campaign, for what it’s worth.
October 21st, 2008 at 10:57 am
Yeah, things have certainly changed from my youth. I remember hearing about publishing outfits pulling all their reporters over full access. This is probably the biggest reason why the 4th estate is so spineless. Their afraid of losing access. Thank god I gave up my Time sub years ago. Same reason I don’t watch network or cable news programs. You’d think they’d realize why they’re not trusted or viewed in the same numbers.
October 21st, 2008 at 10:58 am
Unless you’re Judith Miller. Your career suffers when you don’t tell the truth, then it’s on to Fox News!
October 21st, 2008 at 11:09 am
It’s a business, nothing more. Time has always been a tool of the corporate right, going back to its founding under Luce. They might kick a fuss if the candidate restricting access was a Democrat. But McCain, no.
October 21st, 2008 at 11:14 am
Yglesias is worried because he himself has turned into a “dailykos diarist” of late. Don’t worry Matt, with insights like this one “Joe Klein… has done some of the very best writing on John McCain’s presidential campaign” you’ll be getting calls from Keith Olbermann in no time. Just gotta drop some pounds homes!
October 21st, 2008 at 11:15 am
I guess this will make McCain’s post-defeat apologia for the sleaziness of his campaign that much harder for Klein to swallow…
October 21st, 2008 at 11:24 am
Kind of emphasizes the lack of real reportage McCain counts on from Scherer, Halperin and Carney. That would be in line with what I see when I read them, too. Halperin on the TV is always an assault on reason.
October 21st, 2008 at 11:26 am
Time has been a right wing rag since Roosevelt. The idea that they would stop pandering to McCain ignores history.
October 21st, 2008 at 11:26 am
It rubs the BBQ sauce in its skin, or it gets the hose again
(shamelessly stolen comment)
October 21st, 2008 at 11:27 am
“For his trouble, he’s been banned from the McCain and Palin campaign planes.”
Beats getting arrested, or having your broadcast license pulled.
October 21st, 2008 at 11:28 am
There’s two corollaries: AFTER the campaign, all the reporters working on the campaign need to be moved to a different desk. Foreign. Business. Sports. I don’t care.
But it’s well known that spending 18 months on the plane and buses with the candidate tends to lead to the reporters going native. And those are precisely then the wrong reporters to be reporting on the new administration.
And similarly, no one, unless their name is Sam Donaldson, should be able to cover the whitehouse for more than a year without some long period of time covering other stories IN OTHER CITIES AND OTHER COUNTRIES.
Reporters should not be encouraged to buy homes in Washington DC and should be told they are not allowed to go to cocktail parties as guests. Only as working on the job, on the record reporters.
October 21st, 2008 at 11:30 am
Says more about the reporters still on the plane–what have they implicitly agreed to write, or not write–than about anyone off the plane.
October 21st, 2008 at 11:37 am
In a truly sane and just world, the whole lot of the non-Fox News would sit out in protest.
Is Jeff Gannon still around, by the way? Shouldn’t he be on the plane?
October 21st, 2008 at 11:53 am
This is just like the US Attorney scandal: don’t focus on the ones who got dumped; focus on the ones who got to stay, and try to discover what they did in order to get to stay.
It’s all about the decline in peer-enforced adherence to professional standards. No pride in the mission, no humility about the position.
October 21st, 2008 at 11:55 am
Klein has done some of the worst writing of the McCain Campaign. His recent jumping off the Tire Swing doesn’t wash away his writing from last year and earlier this year. He’s largely gotten his panties in a bunch over realizing what we all knew long ago – McCain is a liar who will say and do anything to chase power. Klein was shocked… Shocked! to learn this. We don’t need to pat him on the head for it.
As far as Time, if they had any principle, they would pull all “campaign trail” coverage from McCain for the duration of the campaign. Instead, focus on McCain Policy, Lies and other issues, none of which are winners for him.
Of course Time is a bunch of pussies, so they roll over. Treat Joe badly… just let out other Tire Swingers on board the plane.
John
October 21st, 2008 at 11:55 am
TIME has been run by a bunch of 4th graders for over a decade now. McCain – Palin has just decided that some unruly 4th graders aren’t worth their time (pun intended).
October 21st, 2008 at 12:02 pm
“Which is a great way to run a magazine if you don’t care about informing your audience.”
As Jonathan Schwartz of A Tiny Revolution likes to point out, the audience is the product. The customers are the advertisers.
October 21st, 2008 at 12:05 pm
Do people actually read Time magazine when the’re not in a Dentist’s waiting room?
October 21st, 2008 at 12:09 pm
Time is a waste of ink and has been for years now.
October 21st, 2008 at 12:16 pm
WHAT? The brainchild of Henry Luce is a right-leaning, profit-driven, pseudojournalistic charade?
This is old news, Ezra. As in, it’s been common knowledge since 1923 — the year Time began publication.
October 21st, 2008 at 12:27 pm
I suggest you read Bob Somerby on Joe Klein’s wankery and lack of credibility, Matthew.
Joe Klein is a hack, much the same as Andrew Sullivan.
Good choice, McCain campaign! America has been hopeful that many of these hacks would finally just be IGNORED for the trash they call “journalism.”
October 21st, 2008 at 12:36 pm
If it’s a Democrat, you can expect angry denunciations if the campaign doesn’t serve enough mint jelly with the lamb chops. Apparently Republicans are not held to the same starndards.
October 21st, 2008 at 2:08 pm
Joe Klein earned my respect when he finally said what too many other Jewish journalists were afraid to say – that the neocons primarily Jewish ancestry was the pivotal factor in the “Securing the Realm” foreign policy they manipulated G.W. Bush into adopting. Tim Rutten of the L.A. Times, had up to that point written umpteen columns smearing anyone who suggested that fact as a “virulent anti-Semite” and had also stated that to pin blame of any kind on Perle, Wolfowitz, ad nauseum for the Iraqi invasion was a “blood libel canard.” Since Joe’s gutsy act – Rutten has gone back to writing about what he knows, in other words – nothing.
October 21st, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Perhaps Time magazine considered pulling their other reporters. Perhaps those other reporters said “no, Joe Klein is a douche-bag that deserved to get the boot.”
I don’t know if that happened. But I think it’s just as likely as Yglesias’s wild accusation that the other reporters are lying hacks.
October 21st, 2008 at 6:19 pm
I’m glad to see you adopted my suggestion, Matthew. Good boy.
October 21st, 2008 at 7:24 pm
Armed neutrality
The media is supposed to be neutral. But neutrality isn’t passive. It entails not just rights, but duties. If Time won’t do its duty and defend its neutrality from the McCain embargo of Klein, it doesn’t deserve to be treated as a neutral by the Obama campaign. The Obama campaign should embargo Time until it once again defends its neutrality.
No, this doesn’t mean that Obama wold be descending to the same level as McCain. McCain tells Time, “Your’re either for me or against me!” Obama would be saying, “You don’t have to be for me, or against me. You can be neutral. But you have to actually be neutral if that’s what you claim to be.”
October 21st, 2008 at 10:52 pm
Klein says, “an important part of their (his fellow Time writers) brief is to try to see the race through the eyes of the McCain campaign and explain to the rest of us what that looks like.” He apparently confuses journalists with apologists.
October 21st, 2008 at 11:31 pm
I’m shocked, shocked, shocked that when you crap all over someone on a daily basis, they might not want you around. Joe can joint Maureen Dowd flying commercial if he wants to cover the McCain campaign. Given that he just phones in the latest Obama campaign talking points, he doesn’t even need to be there in order to continue to shovel his s@#t.
On the other hand, the Obama campaign barred Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker from their plane, because they thoght an article he wrote was unflattering to That One, so campaign vindictiveness seems to run on both sides of the highway.
December 16th, 2008 at 2:09 am
There are always at least two sides to everything in politics. The up-side for Barack Obama of the persistent controversy over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s black militancy and racist sermons was that it sure drove home the point to millions
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