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KEYWORDS: Ron Lim, Ron W. Lim, blog, art direction, advertising, photographs, illustration, Spider-man, Amazing Fantasy |
Posted Friday, February 17, 2006 10:00pm Rumsfeld suffers from a "dangerous deficiency" By now you may have read about Donald Rumsfeld comments today about how Al Queda is winning the PR battle and how the U.S. needs to be more tech saavy. "Our enemies have skillfully adapted to fighting wars in today's media age, but ... our country has not adapted. For the most part, the U.S. government still functions as a 'five and dime' store in an eBay world," Rumsfeld said,"While al Qaeda and extremist movements have utilized (new technologies) for many years ... we in the government have barely even begun to compete in reaching their audiences." Consider his words as you read this excerpt from an earlier story on MSNBC: The House committee established to investigate Katrina was “informed that neither Secretary Chertoff nor Secretary Rumsfeld use e-mail." Read that again: Rumsfeld doesn't use e-mail. How the hell do you get ANYTHING done today without using e-mail? What kind of pictures does this conjure up in your mind. I can just see old Rummy now... trying to figure out how to stop the VCR's clock from blinking "12:00"... boiling a cup of water on the stove instead of using a microwave... writing his appointments in his Dayrunner instead of his Palm or Blackberry. "Hey Donald... what are you doing there with those sticks?" "Trying to make fire!"
"Let's put this headline in amber and pack it into the time capsule. Let folks know what it was like." - Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo I was talking to a friend a few weeks ago and we were lamenting the lack of journalists in the world right now. Last month, I saw a clip from a 1973 NBC news broadcast. John Brinkley introduced a clip of John Erlichman from the Watergate hearings and then they rolled the footage. It was an unedited 4 minutes excerpt. Imagine any evening news broadcast doing that today. It's all about soundbites and single sentence quotes. Today, network news is all about reporting. That's it. No investigation, no confirmation of whether anything someone is saying has any factual basis. Instead, they will have a clip of Bush followed by a Democrat refuting whatever Bush says. Why be a journalist when you can simply show film of two guys contradicting each other? When Bush says his wiretaps are legal and Al Gore says they are illegal, that's all we get. The networks don't even bother to send out any legal factcheckers to actually find out. No, that would be too much work. A few years ago, I read a story where reporters complained about having to clean up President George W. Bush's statements. Apparently, he stutters and uses many "um's" and "ah's" while talking to reporters. Well, no reporter is going to publish a quote from the president that is punctuated by poor grammar and rambling. So the reporters would edit out all of Bush's stuttering and awkward pauses. Their thinking was it was best simply to represent the point of Bush's speech without all garbage; it read better. The problem is this: by fixing the president's mistakes, they are not painting an accurate picture of this president's ability to hold a simple conversation. Witness the occasional viral news clip of Bush as stumbles through a press conference (the tribal sovereinty speech is a classic). Or moments of the 2004 presidential debates (the stutterin' George W. McBlinky). And who could forget "subliminable"? That's why I found George Clooney's "Good Night, and Good Luck" to be such a revelation. I knew that Edward Murrow helped take down joe McCarthy and his communist witchhunt, but I didn't know how. The fact is that Murrow simply ran about 20 minutes of various McCarthy speeches without editing them. He buried McCarthy with his own words. A couple of weeks later when CBS gave McCarthy 30 minutes to rebuke Murrow's report, he was simply rebutting his own public statements. The McCarthy follow-up episode only made him look desperate and sad and effectively helped ruin him. Imagine a network running 20 minutes of George W. Bush or anyone else contradicting himself. Think of all the false statements and bad predictions on how the Iraq War would go. There's no way any of these guys would still be office when faced with their own history. I would just love to see the networks return to actual journalism where politicians were held responsible for the crap that comes out of their mouths.
©2006 Ron Lim unless noted
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