How A Reporting Angel Loses Their Wings

One of the best ways to try and fly over the times, to live outside time a bit, is to be a reporter.

Reporters cover every day fresh. We may gain insight from covering a beat for some time, but each story is a tabula rasa, meaning that if you have background on today’s happenings you must bring them in or they will not exist. Stories stand on their own.

For performing this service, reporters are given the privilege of living outside their times. They can cover Iran Contra, the Clinton "scandals" and the Bush years, without really being touched by them. It’s a bit of immortality, and it drives mere bloggers, who while they live in the moment are animated by it, crazy.

Want to know how such an angel loses its wings?

It’s when they become the story.

Just as Howard Beale (left) will always be in the film Network and the mid-1970s milieu of Paddy Chayefsky from which that great work sprang, so Lou Dobbs and Bill O’Reilly will become tied to this time, and will never be able to emerge from it.

The tragedy is especially sad in the case of Dobbs, who spent decades as a fairly average TV journalist, doling out the Dow Jones average and interviewing  CEOs, before going all Howard Beale on us a few years ago.

O’Reilly’s career meant far less, but he could have escaped the trap of today if he had just backed off a little, not become so dedicated to his own view, or moderated that view to conform to events. Geraldo Rivera has always done that, which is why he has been around since the early 1970s and O’Reilly is in the process of flaming out.

What will tie Dobbs and O’Reilly down to this time, and this time only, are what Firedoglake calls their Kabuki Denials, claimed corrections to past words which are, in fact, everything but. They are, instead, a theatrical dance around the reality of what they have done, as when a politician gets caught-out and claims "everyone else does it."

All the elements of the non-correction correction, which works just like a politician’s non-denial denial, are here:

• 
  The feint. This is the “correction” itself, such as it is. Typically this requires the pundit to suggest that some minor transgressions, none of which even potentially affected the overall thrust of the reportage, occurred.
• The assurance. This involves the pundit assuring both his interlocutor and his audience that he is well-intended and decent, and therefore any minor errors that occur along the way are perforce inconsequential. (Typically delivered with a smarmy, thoroughly insincere sincerity.]
• The defense. Here, the pundit produces some kind of half-fact, mischaracterization, or non-sequitur that serves to stake the claim that the overall thrust of the reportage is perfectly accurate, no matter to what extent it was built upon the foundation of errors or falsehoods previously admitted. Indeed, the more the reportage was built on those errors, the more ferocious the defense. This part of the ritual is almost always delivered in a bullying, petulant, intimidating tone, which makes the previous smarminess all the more clearly phony.
• The attack  The interlocutor is at this point accused of engaging in the same kind of error and smear tactics, forcing him to defend a point that has nothing to do with the pundit’s own rotten journalism.

Just as politicians who issue non-denial denials are eventually dragged down by the weight of their own scandals, self-proclaimed journalists who do the same thing are dragged down in the same way.

Lou Dobbs is no longer a journalist. Bill O’Reilly is no longer a journalist. At best, they are entertainers.

They have no more wings, and will be stuck in this time, forever, while the rest of us have the chance of going on to honorable retirements.