Walter Cronkite has passed:

Walter Cronkite, the premier TV anchorman of the networks’ golden age who reported a tumultuous time with reassuring authority and came to be called “the most trusted man in America,” died Friday. He was 92. Cronkite’s longtime chief of staff, Marlene Adler, said Cronkite died at 7:42 p.m. at his Manhattan home surrounded by family. She said the cause of death was cerebral vascular disease.

Adler said, “I have to go now” before breaking down into what sounded like a sob. She said she had no further comment.

Cronkite was the face of the “CBS Evening News” from 1962 to 1981, when stories ranged from the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to racial and anti-war riots, Watergate and the Iranian hostage crisis.

It was Cronkite who read the bulletins coming from Dallas when Kennedy was shot Nov. 22, 1963, interrupting a live CBS-TV broadcast of the soap opera “As the World Turns.”

Cronkite was the broadcaster to whom the title “anchorman” was first applied, and he came so identified in that role that eventually his own name became the term for the job in other languages. (Swedish anchors are known as Kronkiters; In Holland, they are Cronkiters.)

“He was a great broadcaster and a gentleman whose experience, honesty, professionalism and style defined the role of anchor and commentator,” CBS Corp. chief executive Leslie Moonves said in a statement.

CBS has scheduled a prime-time special, “That’s the Way it Was: Remembering Walter Cronkite,” for 7 p.m. Sunday.

His 1968 editorial declaring the United States was “mired in stalemate” in Vietnam was seen by some as a turning point in U.S. opinion of the war. He also helped broker the 1977 invitation that took Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to Jerusalem, the breakthrough to Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel.

He followed the 1960s space race with open fascination, anchoring marathon broadcasts of major flights from the first suborbital shot to the first moon landing, exclaiming, “Look at those pictures, wow!” as Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon’s surface in 1969. In 1998, for CNN, he went back to Cape Canaveral to cover John Glenn’s return to space after 36 years.

“It is impossible to imagine CBS News, journalism or indeed America without Walter Cronkite,” CBS News president Sean McManus said in a statement. “More than just the best and most trusted anchor in history, he guided America through our crises, tragedies and also our victories and greatest moments.”

Cronkite lived to a ripe old age and his health had been failing, so this is hardly a shock.    I wasn’t old enough during Vietnam for his controversial remarks to cloud my judgment of his career, which mostly came in the last five or so years of his time as anchor and then as elder statesman.

It’s often said that there will never be another like someone who has just passed on.  In Cronkite’s case, it’s not hyperbole.  He was universally respected but shuffled out the door far too early, just toward the end of the period when people were simply expected to go away when the reached a certain age.  At roughly the time same, David Brinkley, Harry Reasoner, and John Chancellor were moved along, too, with then-youngsters Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, and Tom Brokaw brought in to fill their chairs.  All of them did so with distinction but they never occupied the same central role that the previous generation had.  And none will be anywhere near as powerful as even they were.   Katie Couric could well be the last anchor at CBS News; in any event, no one will much care.

And that’s the way it was, Friday, July 17, 2009.

As 2008 winds to an end, it’ll soon be time for the OTB staff to post its predictions for the coming year.   First, though, is the painful look back at our predictions for 2008.

Predictions that came to pass

• The Republicans will eventually nominate someone, pundit chatter about a divided base notwithstanding.

• “Ron Paul won’t win a single state primary. If he runs as a Libertarian or other third party, he won’t get a single electoral vote.”  (Paul came in 2nd place in 10 states and 3rd in 17.)

• The eventual president will be either a Democrat or Republican, regardless of whether Ron Paul, Mike Bloomberg, or anyone else runs on a third party ticket.

• “Nothing of any substance will be accomplished by the Congress on any of the following issues: immigration, healthcare, Social Security, education, product safety of imports.”

• “President Bush will not be impeached by the House of Representatives” — nor will any past or former administration official be tried for war crimes.

• The United States will have 100,000 or more troops in Iraq at year’s end. The trend toward lower body counts will continue but civil society will remain an elusive goal.

• Vladimir Putin will still be running Russia at year’s end — but with a new title. (Arguably, this could go in the “Not Enough Data” category.  But most analysts think Putin’s still the Man.)

• Neither the U.S. nor Israel will either bomb or invade Iran.

• The Lisbon Treaty will fail, forcing a dramatic rethinking of the European Union’s agenda.

• The Wall Street Journal will be a more successful paper with Rupert Murdock running it.

• Sirius and XM will be allowed to merge.

• The television writers strike will end but the major networks will never recover their market share, making it a lose-lose proposition.

• The Boston Celtics will win the NBA championship.

Predictions that did not come to pass

• The winner will be a Protestant white guy, defying predictions of the First Woman, First Black, or First Mormon President.  (If I were a lawyer, I’d claim to be mostly right here in that a Protestant guy was elected.  As a political scientist, however, this was all wrong.)

• Pervez Musharraf will still be president of Pakistan at year’s end. One way or the other.  (He resigned on August 18th.  I’m happy to be wrong on this one.)

• The New England Patriots will beat the Dallas Cowboys in the Super Bowl, becoming the first 19-0 team in NFL history.  (The Pats went 18-0 before losing in the Super Bowl to the wild card New York Giants.  The Cowboys went 13-3 and then choked in the playoffs, losing to the Giants.)

• The Atlanta Braves will win the World Series with a starting rotation of pitchers in the twilight of their careers.  (Instead, all three of their top pitchers wound up on the injured reserve and the team was quite mediocre.)

• Katie Couric will not finish the year as anchor of the CBS Evening News.  (She’s rumored to be out in January, though.)

• NBC will pull the plug on one of its cable news ventures. (Why they haven’t escapes me.)

Half-Right / Half-Wrong

• The Democrats will retain both the Houses of Congress, picking up two seats in the Senate while losing fourteen of the House seats they picked up in 2006.  (Even aside from the over-specificity of the prediction, the Dems picked up House seats.)

• Tiger Woods will win two Majors, passing Bobby Jones and coming within two of Jack Nicklaus.  (He won one in spectacular fashion — on a broken leg — but then sat out the rest of the season.)

• The United States will finally win the gold medal in basketball again, along with the overall gold medal count, in this summer’s Olympic Games. Few will much care.  (China won the gold count easily, although the USA won more medals overall.)

Final Tally:  Actually, better than I remembered having done:  13-6-3.    If you take off the overly glib predictions, it falls to 11-6-3, which still isn’t bad.   I did, however, get the 2008 presidential election, World Series, and Super Bowl wrong, so not great on a weighted scale.

Correction:  I moved the Olympics prediction into the half/half category and updated the tally accordingly after a commenter pointed out that I’d ignored a third of my prediction.

Kirsten Powers has an amusing piece in the NY Post headlined “BIDEN’S BUNGLES: A BLATANT BIAS.”  It echoes sentiments I’ve been seeing in the comments section:

Barack Obama’s choice of Joe Biden as his running mate prompted a small wave of warnings about Biden’s propensity for gaffes. But no one imagined even in a worse-case scenario such a spectacular bomb as telling donors Sunday to “gird your loins” because a young president Obama will be tested by an international crisis just like young President John Kennedy was.

Scary? You betcha! But somehow, not front-page news.

Again the media showed their incredible bias by giving scattered coverage of Biden’s statements.

There were a few exceptions. On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” co-host Mika Brzezinski flipped incredulously through the papers, expressing shock at the lack of coverage of Biden’s remarks. Guest Dan Rather admitted that if Palin had said it, the media would be going nuts.

So what gives?

The stock answer is: “It’s just Biden being Biden.” We all know how smart he is about foreign policy, so it’s not the same as when Sarah Palin says something that seems off.

Yet, when Biden asserted incorrectly in the vice-presidential debate that the United States “drove Hezbollah out of Lebanon,” nobody in the US media shrieked. (It was, however, covered with derision in the Middle East.) Or when he confused his history by claiming FDR calmed the nation during the Depression by going on TV, the press didn’t take it as evidence that he’s clueless.

So, the liberal media is covering up Biden’s gaffes while falling all over themselves to make Sarah Palin look like an airhead, right?  Well, sort of.

Powers essentially gives the answer:  Biden is a known quantity.  He’s been around Washington more than three decades and earned a reputation as a bright guy in command of the issues, especially foreign policy, but with a tendency to say dumb things from time to time because he never shuts up.

Sarah Palin arrived on the scene, by contrast, to the sound of Who in the hell is she? This set off a frantic round of investigative reporting but allowed her first significant public impression to be her convention acceptance speech, which she hit out of the park.  She was more popular in the polls than any of the other three people on the two tickets.  But, then, she went into hiding, refusing to give press interviews — apparently a campaign decision — and emerged to give two really bad ones to Katie Couric and Charlie Gibson.

It should be noted, too, that Biden’s not the only gaffe-prone, seasoned foreign policy expert to be given a pass this cycle.  The lefty blogs were livid all summer that McCain’s various statements confusing countries, religious sects, and otherwise seeming to call into doubt his expertise were being “covered up.” (Interestingly, as with Biden, we somehow all know about the gaffes even though the media haven’t reported them.  Very odd, that.)  But, as I noted at the time, you get a certain benefit of doubt when you’ve been around the block a few times.

Palin and Barack Obama didn’t have a bank of credibility to draw from.  They basically had to step out into the spotlight and survive.  I thought for months that Obama would wither under the intense light being reflected through the media magnifying glass, precisely because of the big leap from and essentially uncontested Senate race to a presidential contest.  Obviously, he didn’t.   By comparison, Palin has.

In all four cases, the press is guilty of bias.  Confirmation bias.  Once they’ve got a narrative, it’s very hard to change it.

Joe Wurzelbacher views the debate from his Springfield Township home. (TOLEDO BLADE/LORI KING )

Joe Wurzelbacher, a/k/a “Joe the Plumber,” took up an inordinate amount of time at last night’s debate, to the annoyance of many.  CBS reports that:

McCain and Obama mentioned Wurzelbacher 26 times during the 90 minute debate. By contrast, Iraq came up six times, and the word “economy” was used 16 times.

As Megan McArdle put it in her live blog, “I am second to none in my appreciation of the many contributions that plumbers make to Our American Way of Life. Nonetheless, I am slightly concerned that we are spending so much time focusing on the effect of our national policy on Plumbing-Americans.”

Ezra Klein observed that the repeated references made McCain sound “like your great-grandfather telling you about his childhood milkman.” He also points out that “the United Association of Plumbers and Pipe Fitters was one of the first unions to endorse Obama.”

While we bloggers may be tired of him already, however, the mainstream press is fascinated.  His hometown Toledo Blade did a nice feature on him.

Mr. Wurzelbacher, 34, was more interested in taking in the debate than in assessing his place in presidential politics.

“Honestly, I’m a small part of it,” Mr. Wurzelbacher said. “They’re just using me as an example right now for the American public. I think they’re discussing more important issues.” He excused himself so he could finish watching Barack Obama and John McCain debate.

Afterwards, even he was tired of hearing about Joe the Plumber.

But after the debate, Mr. Wurzelbacher expressed some embarrassment that he was now known across America as Joe the Plumber. “There’s a lot more important issues than me, and I’m starting to feel a little uncomfortable with it,” he said. “Everyone’s more worried about what Joe the Plumber has to say than what Obama or McCain has to say.”

While watching the debate at home with his father, he was interrupted several times by calls from the national media including CNN, Fox News, and Good Morning America. In addition, CNBC, ABC News, the Wall Street Journal, the Houston Chronicle, and the BBC called The Blade in their quest to reach Joe the Plumber.

Joe goes video:

The Blade also recaps the incident that generated his 15-plus minutes of fame.

Mr. Wurzelbacher and Mr. Obama had something of a debate Sunday as the candidate walked house to house on Shrewsbury at the start of the candidate’s four-day visit in the Toledo area.   He told Mr. Obama that he was trying to buy a plumbing business.  “I’m being taxed more and more for fulfilling the American dream,” Mr. Wurzelbacher said Sunday.

Mr. Obama said, in part, “It’s not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure that everybody that is behind you, that they have a chance for success, too.”I think that when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

The exchange was caught on videotape and was broadcast on a variety of news outlets and put on numerous Web sites, including YouTube. It was the “spread the wealth around” comment that caught the attention of conservative commentators, including Rush Limbaugh, and in discussions on the Internet. Mr. Wurzelbacher was a guest of Fox News’ Neil Cavuto on Tuesday.

Apparently, Joe didn’t mind the media attention too much, since he agreed to talk with Katie Couric after the debate.  He makes a truly insightful point here:

COURIC: Well, he supposedly will raise taxes only on people who make over $250,000 a year. Would you be in that category?

WURZELBACHER: Not right now at presently, but, you know, question, so he’s going to do that now for people who make $250,000 a year. When’s he going to decide that $100,000 is too much, you know? I mean, you’re on a slippery slope here. You vote on somebody who decides that $250,000 and you’re rich? And $100,000 and you’re rich? I mean, where does it end? You know, that’s – people got to ask that question.

They do indeed.

He was at it again on ABC’s Nightline:

“Joe The Plumber” has weighed in on Wednesday’s presidential debate and he says that Barack Obama’s tax plan “infuriates me.”

“To be honest with you, that infuriates me,” plumber Joe Wurzelbacher told Nightline’s Terry Moran. “It’s not right for someone to decide you made too much—that you’ve done too good and now we’re going to take some of it back.” “That’s just completely wrong,” he added.

[...]

During his telephone interview with ABC News, the Ohio plumber argued that the government should not tax some Americans at a higher percentage than others and argued that this principle should extend not only to taxpayers at his income-level but also to the world’s richest man.

“I don’t like it,” said Wurzelbacher. “You know, me or — you know, Bill Gates, I don’t care who you are. If you worked for it, if it was your idea, and you implemented it, it’s not right for someone to decide you made too much.”

I hereby take back my threat to punch this guy in the nose.  Indeed, maybe McCain should announce his intention to nominate Wurzelbacher for Treasury Secretary.  We’ve had worse.

Several commentators have objected to my characterization of Sarah Palin as an”ignoramus” in the post below. I’m simply using the term in its precise meaning as “an extremely ignorant person.”

The dictionary definition of ignorant:

1.    lacking in knowledge or training; unlearned: an ignorant man.
2.    lacking knowledge or information as to a particular subject or fact: ignorant of quantum physics.
3.    uninformed; unaware.
4.    due to or showing lack of knowledge or training: an ignorant statement.

She fits the bill in all those but especially 2.  She’s likable and, I presume, of above average intelligence.  She is, however, utterly lacking in knowledge or training about matters of public policy, law, or international affairs that one expects a vice presidential nominee to bring to the table.

I didn’t call her an idiot or a moron. I don’t think she’s too stupid to learn about any of those things but she’s demonstrably spent the first 44 years of her life without displaying the curiosity to do so.

Scott Adams (of “Dilbert” fame) says we’re all idiots, just about different things.  Sarah Palin knows more about moose hunting and snowmobiling than I’ll ever know.  Unfortunately, those things are of only tertiary help for one who could, in a little over four months, be a heartbeat away from the presidency.

I’m hardly an outlier in this view.  According to two national surveys taken after the VP debates, a plurality of Americans agree with my assessment:

• NBC News/Wall Street Journal: “Forty-nine percent say that Pali is unqualified to be president if the need arises, compared with 40 percent who say she’s qualified. By contrast, 64 percent believe Biden is qualified to be president, versus just 21 percent who disagree.”

• CNN/Opinion Research: “87 percent of the people polled said Biden is qualified while only 42 percent said Palin is qualified.”

So, incidentally, do a growing number of prominent conservative commenters.

• George Will: “The man who would be the oldest to embark on a first presidential term has chosen as his possible successor a person of negligible experience.”

• Christopher Buckley: “And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?”

• David Brooks: “She has not been engaged in national issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like President Bush, she seems to compensate for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness.”

• Peggy Noonan: “The most qualified? No. I think they went for this, excuse me, political bullshit about narratives. “

• Charles Krauthammer: “Palin fatally undermines this entire line of attack. This is through no fault of her own. It is simply a function of her rookie status.”

• David Frum: “Ms. Palin’s experience in government makes Barack Obama look like George C. Marshall.”

• Kathleen Parker: “Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League.”

There are many more where that came from.

“Saturday Night Live” is continuing to weigh in heavily on the presidential race, hitting Sarah Palin and John McCain hard in last night’s installment.

Tina Fey reprised her role as Sarah Palin on “Saturday Night Live,” again appearing as the Republican vice presidential candidate in an opening sketch. Saturday night’s show — the third of the season for the NBC comedy program — brought back the season premiere tandem of Fey and Amy Poehler, who opened the season with a memorable sketch featuring Fey as Palin and Poehler as Hillary Clinton.

This time around, Poehler played CBS’s Katie Couric, parodying the interview with Palin earlier this week. Poehler, though, mostly played straight man to Fey, who ratcheted up her performance of Sen. John McCain’s running mate by satirizing her foreign affairs experience. When Poehler’s Couric pushed Fey’s Palin to specifically discuss how she would help facilitate democracy abroad, Fey gave in: “Katie, I’d like to use one of my lifelines. … I want to phone a friend.” When a confused Poehler informed her that that wasn’t how the interview worked, Fey’s Palin responded — alluding to one of the governor’s most quoted lines from the interview — “Well, in that case, I’m just gonna have to get back to ya.”

[...]

Fey wasn’t the only former cast member who returned Saturday night. Chris Parnell came back to play presidential debate moderator Jim Lehrer in a sketch that parodied Friday night’s contest between McCain and Democratic rival Barack Obama — which occurred less than 27 hours earlier than the live “SNL” broadcast.

The sketch mainly played up McCain’s attempts to shake up the debate process, as Darrell Hammond’s McCain urged his opponent to join him in “nude or seminude” town hall meetings. At the outset, Parnell announced: “Throughout the debate, I will urge you both to look at one another up to and beyond the point it becomes uncomfortable.”

SNL’s treatment of the 1992 debates, notably their caricatures of Ross Perot and Jim Stockdale, and their dead-on parodies of Al Gore and George W. Bush in 2000 were instant classics and helped shape the public perceptions of those candidates.

They may well help transform Palin’s image from a feisty hockey mom to a clueless ditz. Then again, they’ll need to be funnier than this to do it. The first Fey-Palin segment was genuinely clever parody; this was just lame jokes delivered in Palin’s accent.

The Obama-McCain “intro” spot was mildly amusing:

The debate spoof was much better:

They’ve long had Jim Lehrer down. Hammond is a master impressionist but hasn’t gotten McCain down yet. The writing on the debate skit was pretty solid, though. The hits on McCain’s various gimmicks and Obama for playing the race card were clever. The Chicago corruption stuff with Obama, less so.

Here’s an interesting Q&A from Katie Couric’s interview with John McCain.

Kate Couric: Senator McCain, Senator Obama says, while the increased number of US troops contributed to increased security in Iraq, he also credits the Sunni awakening and the Shiite government going after militias. And says that there might have been improved security even without the surge. What’s your response to that?

McCain: I don’t know how you respond to something that is as– such a false depiction of what actually happened. Colonel McFarland was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that’s just a matter of history. Thanks to General Petraeus, our leadership, and the sacrifice of brave young Americans. I mean, to deny that their sacrifice didn’t make possible the success of the surge in Iraq, I think, does a great disservice to young men and women who are serving and have sacrificed. [emphasis added]

In other words, John McCain is making the claim that the “Anbar awakening” occurred as a consequence of the Surge. The problem with this claim is that the awakening clearly preceded it. As Dave Wiegel points out, the “awakening” began around September of 2006, while the Surge did not begin until early 2007. Indeed, as Matthew Yglesias points out, Colonel (now-General) McFarland was out of Anbar before the Surge began. Not only that, while a few hundred extra troops were sent into Anbar in early 2007, the vast majority of extra troops were sent into Baghdad. In Baghdad, it does appear that the Surge did help reduce violence (though not in a very sustainable way), but the Anbar Awakening was well underway before the troop surge began.

This is yet one more incident that causes me to be deeply skeptical about McCain’s Iraq campaigning. Given other mistakes of his–mistaking Sunni and Shi’ite, conflating al-Qaeda with the insurgency, falsely accusing Iran of arming al-Qaeda, and other misstatements–I question his interest in learning more actual details about the Iraq conflict. I am just a part-time political pundit who is, frankly, more interested in domestic and science issues than I am in military matters. John McCain should be much more informed about the facts on the ground than I am. At the very least, he should know exactly who the players are.

UPDATE: Writing on this topic for Slate, Christopher Beam points out that the Anbar Awakening was actualy used by President Bush in his 2007 State of the Union address to justify the Surge:

Our military forces in Anbar are killing and capturing al Qaeda leaders, and they are protecting the local population. Recently, local tribal leaders have begun to show their willingness to take on al Qaeda. And as a result, our commanders believe we have an opportunity to deal a serious blow to the terrorists. So I have given orders to increase American forces in Anbar Province by 4,000 troops.

Now, it may well be that the extra troops helped sustain the Awakening (though I suspect that the bribes arms and resources we supplied to the Sunni tribes had a bigger effect). However, there’s really not much of a factual basis to say that the Surge caused the Awakening.

John McCain trotted out a new sound byte yesterday:

This is a clear choice that the American people have. I had the courage and the judgment to say I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war. It seems to me that Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign.

Here’s the video, which provides a little more context:

Marc Ambinder says he used the line at least twice and, indeed, has a slightly different variant on the theme.

Most of the reaction to this has come from the Left and, as one would expect, they find it “outrageous” and “appalling” and “scurrilous.” I think it’s less than that, although a decidedly poor way to advance the debate.  It’s a hamhanded way of creating a memorable parallelism but one that falls flat.

Interestingly, this debate is happening simultaneously with a very much related one over Obama’s interview with Katie Couric on the success of the Surge.  Couric asks him, repeatedly, whether the Surge worked and he says, in effect, that American troops have done a great job in tamping down violence but that it’s not achieving worthwhile goals.

What happens is that if we continue to put $10 billion to $12 billion a month into Iraq, if we are willing to send as many troops as we can muster continually into Iraq? There’s no doubt that that’s gonna have an impact. But it doesn’t meet our long-term strategic goal, which is to make the American people safer over the long term. If that means that we’re detracting from our efforts in Afghanistan, where conditions are deteriorating, if it means that we are distracted from going after Osama bin Laden who is still sending out audio tapes and is operating training camps where we know terrorists’ actions are being plotted.

If we have shifted away from the central front of terrorism as a consequence of enormous and continuing investments in Iraq, then that’s a poor strategic choice. And ultimately, what we’ve got to do is – we have to recognize that Iraq is just one of our … security problems. It’s not the only one.

We’ve got big problems in Afghanistan. We’ve got a significant threat in Iran. We’ve got to deal with Pakistan and the fact that there are safe havens there. Those are all the factors and all the issues that I’ve gotta take into account when I’m president of the United States.

McCain believes that Iraq is a central front, if not the central front, in the war against terrorism and that pulling out short of total victory would be to lose that war.  He thinks he was right and  Obama was wrong on the Surge and resents that he’s not getting more credit for that.  Further, reading between the lines, I gather that he thinks Obama knows the Surge worked and thinks we can win, too, but is unwilling to change course at this stage on his signature issue:  Getting us out of Iraq as soon as possible.

Tactically, the two men’s positions are much more similar than they’d have you believe.  Both will reduce the number of forces in Iraq and would still have a sizable force in Iraq well beyond the sixteen month mark of their presidency.  Their strategic visions, however, are starkly different:  McCain wants to win a war he thinks was necessary and Obama wants to cut his losses on one he believes is a mistake.

Does Obama want to lose the war?  Of course not.  But, from McCain’s perspective, Obama’s plan would snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Embattled CBS News anchor Katie Couric is is making a “major announcement” on tomorrow’s edition of NBC’s “Today” show.

Let the speculation begin.

UPDATE: Drudge: “SOURCE: NBC, CBS, and ABC jointly hosting cancer research telethon. Couric to announce on NBC’s TODAY SHOW tomorrow… Developing…”

Less interesting than many other theories, including the Katie Couric/Anderson Cooper job swap rumors, but it sounds plausible.

Yesterday’s exchange with Thers over the state of conservatism reflects a major defect in the blogging medium. For the most part, we write blogs in serial fashion, as a conversation with our readers, and presume that recent posts on the same subject have been read. Most blog readers, on the other hand, parachute into posts based on links from elsewhere and fill in the blanks based on pre-existing biases.

When I saw a post entitled “The Autumn of Wingnuttia” atop the page at memeorandum, with firedoglake as the venue, I expected the worst. Encountering an insult and expletive laden post*, I was not disappointed. I responded with “Conservatism’s Safety Net,” arguing that such hubris and contempt coming from the progressive camp would ultimately ensure a conservative comeback.

Thers responded with “Lose Its Appeal Over Years,” which noted that his first post was “not especially intended to please a ‘conservative’ ear” and explains that, while taking glee in the problems of the conservative Republican coalition, he’s under no illusion that the Democrats won’t make the same sort of mistakes. Instead, his “Wingnuttia” post was about Movement Conservatism.

In turn, Thers makes a reasonable but false set of assumptions about what I think based on my residing in the conservative camp. Obviously, I must fundamentally disagree with George Packer’s “The Fall of Conservatism — Have the Republicans run out of ideas?” the essay that started this round of discussions. And of course I blame the bad things that the GOP does on heretical leaders who have strayed from the One True Path, not on the movement itself. Two posts from last week, “Rebuilding the Republican Brand” and “Going to War with the Ideology You Have,” address those concerns.

What we’re left with, then, is one fundamental disagreement which I have with Packer and Thers: the motivation of the founders of Movement Conservatism.

Movement conservatism started off as a racket. Movement conservatism has always been about exacerbating and then profiting from existing cultural, social, and economic resentments. There was never any fall from an original ideological Eden. The corruption was there from the start. Packer is quite right to emphasize how the political and popular success of movement conservatism owes everything to its legitimization of a politics of resentment that arose in the 1960s. Movement conservatism has nothing without Hatred of the Liberal, a point reinforced not least by the image with which Joyner chooses to adorn his post.

[...]

[T]he brute fact is that without accusations like, say, that Barack Obama is an un-American socialist, well, the GOP might as well just concede the election immediately. And everyone knows it. The right just cannot win if it renounces the politics of resentment, and that’s all there is to it.

The adornment was an illustration of the hubris and contempt for the opposition that was at the core of the post, not a commentary.

Yes, there is a sizable contingent on the Right who think those on the Left are, as many warbloggers put it, “Not anti-war, just on the other side.” And, yes, there’s a strong element of resentment at work in conservatism. But, as I wrote in response to Packer’s statement that “[The Nixon] Administration adopted an undercover strategy for building a Republican majority, working to create the impression that there were two Americas: the quiet, ordinary, patriotic, religious, law-abiding Many, and the noisy, élitist, amoral, disorderly, condescending Few,” “A more charitable characterization would be that the overwhelming majority of Americans saw their culture under assault from an urban elite and a sympathetic Supreme Court” and Nixon’s campaign responded to that.

Frankly, there’s plenty of resentment to go around. After all, it’s not just conservatives who exploit the divide between “Real Americans” and an undeserving Other. John Edwards used Packer’s phrase, “two Americas,” to exploit the resentment of lower middle class voters for those higher on the economic ladder. Hillary Clinton is currently touting her success among “working Americans” in an attempt to exploit the same resentments.

Liberal Democrats try to win by pretty much the same tactics as conservative Republicans: exploiting class resentments; recalling a vision of the past that never existed; and just generally spreading fear, doubt, and uncertainty. It’s just a different set of resentments being stoked. Republicans hate people of color and want to see old people starve. They don’t want your kids to be educated. All they care about is the rich! It’s all nonsense. But let’s not confuse the divide-and-conquer tactics by which campaigns are run with political movements. Conservatism isn’t “the Southern Strategy” any more than liberalism is “triangulation.” Much of politics is about exploiting fear and “Who gets what, when and how.” But, to the extent that people vote ideologically, it’s about more than that.

In the American context, there’s a remarkable consensus on politics combined with heated rhetoric. We’re essentially all descendants of Enlightenment Liberalism and the disagreements are on the margins. We pretty much agree on the goals; the disagreement is about how to get there and in which direction trade-offs should go. Conservatives prioritize military power, liberals emphasize diplomacy. Liberals push for diversity and change while conservatives fight for the protection of cherished cultural institutions. Conservatives emphasize private property rights while liberals emphasize fairness and community.

The campaign rhetoric used by the two parties, however, is about putting together a 50 percent plus one coalition to achieve power. Campaigns are usually about whipping the ideological base into a frenzy to increase turnout and trying to persuade the non-ideological mass that it’s too risky to vote for the other side. None of that has much to do with a “movement,” on the Left or the Right.

“Intellectual movements” that end up unable to cope with empirical scientific data (global warming), that end up making excuses for torture, that depend upon self-flattering fantasies such as a belief in a partisan “liberal media,” that delight in the sort of race-baiting nonsense we’ve already seen in this election season, have nowhere to go. It is eminently reasonable to draw the conclusion that there is just nothing to “movement conservatism” except a dead end. “Conservatism” as it is currently embodied just cannot handle the truth. It can’t afford to.

I’d note that most of the “race-baiting nonsense we’ve already seen in this election season” has come from the Democrats. Bill and Hillary Clinton have been positively hamhanded on the subject and the Obama camp has been masterful in crying “racism” even where none exists, essentially casting any vote by a white person against him as only explainable by bigotry.

Yes, a large number of conservatives are skeptics of global warming and especially the proposed solutions. They see environmentalists as an elite who are willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of jobs and economic progress to save some fish they’ve never heard of, so they’re naturally suspicious. Then again, John McCain made doing something about global warming a major plank of his campaign and got the Republican nomination.

A sizable number of us have opposed the administration on torture. Again, McCain has been among us. But we’ve been largely overruled by a mass, bipartisan consensus that we have to use any means necessary to protect ourselves against the terrorist barbarians. The liberal stalwart Alan Derschowitz has been leading that charge for years and the popularity of “24″ and its protagonist Jack Bauer isn’t owing to some conservative fringe. It’s the basic human instinct for self-protection kicking in.

The “liberal media” trope is overblown but its origin is hardly a fantasy. A generation ago, when the New York Times, Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS were the entirety of the national media, there was a legitimate sense that a liberal, urban elite set the agenda and skewed the conversation. This was especially the case on the hot button social issues, where reporters and commentators with a metropolitan perspective simply couldn’t understand how anyone could disagree with them on so many issues. Why, they’d never even met anyone who’d voted for Richard Nixon.

The view was furthered by Watergate and its new culture of sensational “investigative journalism” and “speaking truth to power.” That the advent of this took place under a Republican administration and the culture spread during a period of GOP dominance of the presidency didn’t help, because it always seemed that the press was taking the liberal/Democratic side. It became rather obvious during Bill Clinton’s tenure, though, that the bias was toward “gotcha” rather than against conservatives.

And, of course, the spread of multiple media outlets rendered much of this moot. While Peter Jennings and Sam Donaldson and Dan Rather and Katie Couric still had a lot of power, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and other outlets were now available to conservatives to get news and commentary from people who shared their perspective. But old resentments die slowly.

In any given election cycle, one or both parties will be using an old playbook. The Democrats were still fighting the battles of the 1960s in 1988 and the Republicans are still far too reliant on Ronald Reagan’s script from 1980. Meanwhile, the issues are either overtaken by events or co-opted by the other party.

Interestingly, Barack Obama and John McCain are both genuinely trying to change themes and forge new coalitions. That’s fairly rare. Bill Clinton pulled it off in 1992, running as a “New Democrat,” and Ronald Reagan did it in 1980, putting an optimistic, forward-looking face on conservatism. If the race doesn’t turn into a blowout, though, we’ll likely see quite a bit of the standard, divisive language.

_______________

*As an aside, I mostly disagree with Rick Moran’s contention that prolific use of the F-word and the spewing of insults renders the author a half-crazed ignoramus. Thanks to my Army training, I can employ colorful language with the best of them and do so more often than I should in oral communication. I choose not to do that at OTB for a variety of reasons, though, not least of which is that it makes conversation with those not already disposed to agree with you much more difficult.

CBS plans to oust Katie Couric from the anchor chair of the “Evening News” soon after the election, Rebecca Dana reports for WSJ.

After two years of record-low ratings, both CBS News executives and people close to Katie Couric say that the “CBS Evening News” anchor is likely to leave the network well before her contract expires in 2011 — possibly soon after the presidential inauguration early next year.

[...]

Adding to the pressure on CBS to improve the newscast is the faltering performance of CBS’s prime-time schedule and CBS Corp. itself. CBS’s stock price has slumped in recent months amid questions about the company’s growth potential. Its broadcast network is a key revenue source for CBS — more so than for most media companies, which tend to have a wider array of assets.

[...]

One possible new job for Ms. Couric: succeeding Larry King at CNN. Mr. King, who is 74 years old, has a contract with the network into 2009. CNN President Jon Klein, a CBS veteran with close ties to some at the network, has expressed admiration for Ms. Couric’s work, and the two are friends. They had lunch in late January, and the anchor attended Mr. Klein’s birthday party in March. Time Warner Inc.’s CNN said, “Larry King is a great talent who consistently delivers the highest profile guests, and we have no plans to make a change.” Through a publicist, Mr. King declined to comment. Mr. King’s talk-show slot at CNN might be a better fit than evening-newscast anchor for Ms. Couric, who is 51. She made her reputation as a skilled interviewer when she was an anchor at the “Today” show on General Electric Co.’s NBC network.

CBS Chief Executive Les Moonves lured Ms. Couric to CBS with promises that the staid “CBS Evening News,” once anchored by Walter Cronkite, would be remade in a format more suited to her skills. He vowed to dedicate more money to the broadcast and to build up its Web presence. People close to Ms. Couric complain that the network didn’t follow through on all those promises.

When she started on the show in September 2006, Ms. Couric incorporated longer interviews, occasionally conducted in front of a fireplace, and chatty asides into the broadcast. For the first few days, curiosity drove more than 10 million viewers to tune in, but in the months that followed, Ms. Couric’s ratings plummeted to a low for the broadcast, bottoming out to around five million in the spring of 2007 — well below the seven million viewers the show was drawing before Ms. Couric’s arrival.

Since then, the network has scaled back its ambitions drastically, returning to a traditional format. Ratings have ticked up modestly, but Ms. Couric’s show is still placing a distant third. For the week of March 31, the “CBS Evening News” drew an average of 5.9 million viewers. By contrast, NBC’s “Nightly News With Brian Williams” drew 8.3 million viewers and ABC’s “World News With Charles Gibson” drew eight million.

All three broadcast-network evening newscasts have been losing viewers for years. In 2007, the total audience for NBC’s “Nightly News,” ABC’s “World News” and CBS’s “Evening News” was 23 million, a 5% drop from 2006, according to Nielsen Media Research.

CBS is in a particularly difficult situation because its affiliate TV station group is weaker than those of other broadcast networks, a result of the loss of some of its strongest affiliates to News Corp.’s Fox network in 1993 after Fox outbid CBS for the right to air National Football League’s NFC games. (Last year, News Corp. bought Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal.)

While I always thought the perky Couric a poor choice for Walter Cronkite’s old job, she was in an untenable position. She took over a third place network that was beset with scandal and which had serious capital and infrastructure disadvantages compared to its competitors. That’s not a good position from which to work miracles, which is what she was expected to do.

Then again, it’s hard to feel to sorry for her. She’s made an amazingly high salary over the years and was given a shot at the most prestigious job in network news. And, certainly, Larry King’s slot would be a soft landing.

My OTB colleague Dave Schuler made his 2008 predictions on New Year’s Eve but I’ve decided to wait until the first official work day of the year to get a better sense of the lay of the land.

U.S. Politics:

• The Republicans will eventually nominate someone, pundit chatter about a divided base notwithstanding.

• “Ron Paul won’t win a single state primary. If he runs as a Libertarian or other third party, he won’t get a single electoral vote.”*

• The eventual president will be either a Democrat or Republican, regardless of whether Ron Paul, Mike Bloomberg, or anyone else runs on a third party ticket.

• The winner will be a Protestant white guy, defying predictions of the First Woman, First Black, or First Mormon President.

• The Guinness Book folks will have some consolation, if my prediction of John McCain winning the whole thing pans out, in having the oldest man ever elected to a first term.

• The Democrats will retain both the Houses of Congress, picking up two seats in the Senate while losing fourteen of the House seats they picked up in 2006.

• “Nothing of any substance will be accomplished by the Congress on any of the following issues: immigration, healthcare, Social Security, education, product safety of imports.”*

• “President Bush will not be impeached by the House of Representatives”* — nor will any past or former administration official be tried for war crimes.

World Politics:

• The United States will have 100,000 or more troops in Iraq at year’s end. The trend toward lower body counts will continue but civil society will remain an elusive goal.

• Pervez Musharraf will still be president of Pakistan at year’s end. One way or the other.

• Vladimir Putin will still be running Russia at year’s end — but with a new title.

• Neither the U.S. nor Israel will either bomb or invade Iran.

• The Lisbon Treaty will fail, forcing a dramatic rethinking of the European Union’s agenda.

Media:

• Katie Couric will not finish the year as anchor of the CBS Evening News.

• NBC will pull the plug on one of its cable news ventures.

• The Wall Street Journal will be a more successful paper with Rupert Murdock running it.

• Sirius and XM will be allowed to merge.

• The television writers strike will end but the major networks will never recover their market share, making it a lose-lose proposition.

Sports:

• The New England Patriots will beat the Dallas Cowboys in the Super Bowl, becoming the first 19-0 team in NFL history.

• The United States will finally win the gold medal in basketball again, along with the overall gold medal count, in this summer’s Olympic Games. Few will much care.

• The Boston Celtics will win the NBA championship.

• The Atlanta Braves will win the World Series with a starting rotation of pitchers in the twilight of their careers.

• Tiger Woods will win two Majors, passing Bobby Jones and coming within two of Jack Nicklaus.

*Borrowed from Dave’s list.

While the right side of the blogosphere busied itself with outrage over planted questions in the YouTube debate, our counterparts on the left were exulting over news that Rudy Giuliani billed New York City taxpayers for security services and travel expenses for his then-mistress (now wife) back in 2000. TPM’s Josh Marshall has dubbed this “Rudy’s Shag Fund,” an appellation which has apparently caught on.

ABC’s Richard Esposito has a quick run-down:

Well before it was publicly known he was seeing her, then-married New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani provided a police driver and city car for his mistress Judith Nathan, former senior city officials tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com. “She used the PD as her personal taxi service,” said one former city official who worked for Giuliani.

New York papers reported in 2000 that the city had provided a security detail for Nathan, who became Giuliani’s third wife after his divorce from Donna Hanover, who also had her own police security detail at the same time.

The former city officials said Giuliani expanded the budget for his security detail at the time. Politico.com reported yesterday that many of the security expenses were initially billed to obscure city agencies, effectively hiding them from oversight. The former officials told ABCNews.com the extra costs involved overtime and per diem costs for officers traveling with Giuliani to secret weekend rendezvous with Nathan in the fashionable Hamptons resort area on Long Island.

When the New York City comptroller began to question the accounting, Mayor Giuliani’s office declined to provide details to city security, officials told ABCNews.com today. “The Comptroller’s Office made repeated requests for the information in 2001 and 2002 but was informed that due to security concerns the information could not be provided,” a spokesperson for the comptroller’s office said.

Giuliani, as might be expected, claims he did nothing wrong. The Politico’s Ben Smith reports,

Giuliani said that the “perfectly appropriate” practice of funneling his security detail’s expenses through the mayor’s office was begun in the mid-1990s to speed payments that had been delayed in police bureaucracy. “The police department would sometimes … be slow in payment,” he told CBS’ Katie Couric. “City Hall would pay it first, then the police department would reimburse every single penny of it.”

A spokesman for Mayor Michael Bloomberg confirmed that the police department reimbursed the mayor’s office for its expenses. The spokesman, Stu Loeser, declined to comment on Giuliani’s claim that the billing practice was unremarkable, or that it predated the period examined by Politico, which coincided with Giuliani’s affair with Judith Nathan.

Giuliani was not asked directly why payments went through offices like the Loft Board and the Assigned Counsel Administrative Office, rather than directly through the mayor’s office. A top campaign aide who was his City Hall chief of staff, Anthony Carbonetti, said he simply doesn’t know the reason. “It was a bookkeeping exercise,” he said in an interview with Politico. “Why it was done this way, I don’t know.” Carbonetti also said he was unaware that the city comptroller had sought explanations for some of the billing during Giuliani’s last year and early in the term of his successor. “I couldn’t even tell you who that correspondence went to,” he said.

”When [the auditors] tried to get answers to the questions, they were getting stonewalled by City Hall and this is in the previous administration, under the Giuliani administration. They were not giving answers,” [City Comptroller William] Thompson said Thursday. “This isn’t the normal practice that we see now in other agencies. … These are disturbing trends that we made the Bloomberg administration aware of, and it’s clear that … they haven’t repeated the same mistakes, they haven’t used the same processes of the former administration.”

This morning’s NYT adds:

Rudolph W. Giuliani last night called a Web site’s account of his spending a “political hit job” as his campaign struggled to explain why hundreds of thousands of dollars in travel expenses for his mayoral security detail were billed to obscure city offices instead of the Police Department.

[...]

Mr. Giuliani, in an interview on the CBS Evening News, went further. Speaking of the Web report, which was posted on Wednesday afternoon on Politico.com, he said: “This story is five years old. It came out two hours before a debate. It’s a typical political hit job with only half the story told.”

[...]

It is unclear precisely how and when the billing practice developed, but there was no question that Mr. Giuliani’s travel itinerary grew more expansive toward the end of his tenure as mayor. He had been a mayor who seldom left the city and prided himself on rarely taking a vacation. But at that time, he began to move about the state and beyond, in part because he was running for the United States Senate against Hillary Rodham Clinton, and in part because of his relationship with Ms. Nathan.

[...]

Bernard B. Kerik, who was Mr. Giuliani’s police commissioner when some of the charges were billed, said in an interview yesterday that the security detail’s travel expenses would normally come out of the Police Department’s budget. “There would be no need for anyone to conceal his detail’s travel expenses,” said Mr. Kerik, who was indicted earlier this month on unrelated federal tax fraud and corruption charges. “And I think It’s ridiculous for anyone to suggest that the mayor or his staff attempted to do so.”

Big Tent Democrat, an experienced attorney, argues that Giuliani’s actions “sound like a felony.” The evidence is rather thin, though: A NYT story that a former city comptroller pled guilty to crimes related to providing a chauffeur for his wife. There’s a small problem, though:

Mr. Hevesi admitted to using the driver but claimed he was needed for security reasons. He paid the state back nearly $83,000, which is what his office calculated was owed to cover the driver’s services. But a State Ethics Commission report found that there was no security threat to justify the use of a driver for his wife, and charged Mr. Hevesi with breaking a civil law.

I don’t know how far the law goes in allowing protective services for people close to public officials but Giuliani had a reasonable case to argue he had legitimate security concerns. Indeed, it appears he was entitled to use police services in this way. The scandal, if there is one, is that he may have tried to hide where the money was going through deceptive filing practices (which strikes me, as a layman with little legal training, as fraud) in an attempt to cover up the fact that he was traveling to see his mistress. Then again, his explanation — that this was done to speed up payment processing as well as to keep his secret locations secret for legitimate security reasons — are plausible.

I hasten to add that doing the wrong thing for the right reason might still be illegal. Further, while I’m willing to have tax dollars going to protect public officials and their families from crazies who want to do them harm, paying for mistresses to back and forth or wives going shopping out of state seems above and beyond the call in that regard. For that matter, campaign trips out of state ought be funded out of campaign funds. But my preferences in that regard aren’t necessarily the law.

Josh Marshall, who is actually apologizing when he posts about something other than the Shag Fund, has three reporters working the story and is updating at a furious pace. It’s a story that bears watching. I’d like to see the thoughts of some Republican-leaning experts on this one but haven’t seen anything as of yet. Patterico? Beldar? Volokh Conspirators?

Photo source: ABC News.

Jonah Goldberg yearns for the golden days of yore, when American journalists wore their patriotism on their sleeve.

In a recent speech at the National Press Club, Katie Couric expressed somber disapproval of the jingoistic excesses after 9/11. Among the things that vexed her: “The whole culture of wearing flags on our lapel and saying ‘we’ when referring to the United States.” From what I can tell, nobody among the journalistic swells bothered to ask, “Who isn’t ‘we,’ Kemo Sabe?”

I don’t want to revisit those supposedly Orwellian flag pins, which sat so heavily on so many journalistic lapels. But it’s worth recalling that during World War II, civilian correspondent Walter Cronkite — whose anchor job Couric now holds — gladly wore a uniform, not just a pin, and subjected himself to military censors. He also used, I’m sure, the word “we” when referring to the United States.

That was a different time and a different war. FDR’s kids joined the military, too, and the whole economy switched over to support the war effort. For this war, the president quite literally told Americans that they could best help by going shopping.

Do we really want Katie Couric wearing a military uniform? For that matter, isn’t Cronkite the guy who, a couple of decades later, is blamed for singlehandedly turning public opinion against the Vietnam War after Tet?

Matthew Yglesias thinks the question bizarre, anyway, wondering how Goldberg could possibly “think that American nationalism is insufficiently present in American television news?”

Marc Danziger thinks it in fact is but, more importantly, tends to agree with Goldberg’s premise that the particular strain of liberalism that dominates the elite media is one of a cosmopolitan rejection of the very notion of nationalism. He contends that the “civic religion” of flag waving, Fourth of July celebrations, and all the rest is essential for binding a nation of immigrants into a cohesive society.

Goldberg:

Many liberals hear talk of national culture and shout, “Nativist!” first and ask questions later, if at all. They believe it is a sign of their patriotism that they hold fast to the idea that we are a “nation of immigrants” — forgetting that we are also a nation of immigrants who became Americans.

As the host of the “Today” show in 2003, Couric said of the lost crew members of the space shuttle Columbia: “They were an airborne United Nations — men, women, an African American, an Indian woman, an Israeli. . . .” As my National Review colleague Mark Steyn noted, they weren’t an airborne U.N., they were an airborne America. The “Indian woman” came to America in the 1980s, and, in about a decade’s time, she was an astronaut. “There’s no other country on Earth where you can do that,” Steyn rightly noted.

That’s certainly true technically; there aren’t many countries where one can become an astronaut, period. There are other societies that take in immigrants and assimilate them into their society but the United States is no doubt one of the most open in that regard and certainly unrivaled in the sheer diversity of our immigrant population.

Just how far journalists should go in preaching the civic religion is an interesting question, although not one I’m sure I can answer. Americans rightly criticize the foreign press for its distorted vision of American policy and scoff at journalists in less free societies who are mere shills for the government. For that matter, conservatives like Goldberg routinely criticize the Katie Courics of the world for interjecting their personal ideological bias into their reporting. More “objectivity” rather than more cheerleading is likely to produce the best reporting.

At its extreme, though, I agree that journalists are Americans first. Marc and I have both referred to this exchange 1987 roundtable discussion between the late Peter Jennings and Mike Wallace about a hypothetical war to make that point:

With Jennings in their midst, the northern soldiers set up a perfect ambush, which will let them gun down the Americans and Southerners, every one. What does Jennings do? Ogletree asks. Would he tell his cameramen to “Roll tape!” as the North Kosanese opened fire? What would go through his mind as he watched the North Kosanese prepare to ambush the Americans? Jennings sat silent for about fifteen seconds after Ogletree asked this question. “Well, I guess I wouldn’t,” he finally said. “I am going to tell you now what I am feeling, rather than the hypothesis I drew for myself. If I were with a North Kosanese unit that came upon Americans, I think that I personally would do what I could to warn the Americans.” Even if it means losing the story? Ogletree asked.

Even though it would almost certainly mean losing my life, Jennings replied. “But I do not think that I could bring myself to participate in that act. That’s purely personal, and other reporters might have a different reaction.” Immediately Mike Wallace spoke up. “I think some other reporters would have a different reaction,” he said, obviously referring to himself. “They would regard it simply as a story they were there to cover.” “I am astonished, really,” at Jennings’s answer, Wallace said a moment later. He turned toward Jennings and began to lecture him: “You’re a reporter. Granted you’re an American”-at least for purposes of the fictional example; Jennings has actually retained Canadian citizenship. “I’m a little bit at a loss to understand why, because you’re an American, you would not have covered that story.” Ogletree pushed Wallace. Didn’t Jennings have some higher duty, either patriotic or human, to do something other than just roll film as soldiers from his own country were being shot? “No,” Wallace said flatly and immediately. “You don’t have a higher duty. No. No. You’re a reporter!” Jennings backtracked fast. Wallace was right, he said. “I chickened out.” Jennings said that he had gotten so wrapped up in the hypothetical questions that he had lost sight of his journalistic duty to remain detached.

Fairness in covering the story, including conveying an understanding of the enemy’s point of view, is a journalist’s job. Being neutral to the point of allowing fellow citizens to be murdered, it seems obvious, is crossing a bright line. I’m not sure, however, about the many shades of gray in between.

There is apparently quite a bit of controversy over the fact that a Texas CBS affiliate has agreed to let swimsuit model and former WWE diva Lauren Jones anchor the local news for a month as part of the Fox “Anchorwoman” reality show.

Does citing Katie Couric help her case or hurt it? On the one hand, Jones has a roughly similar skill set. On the other, the ratings have tanked since Couric took over the anchor duties from Bob Schieffer.