The Dish

The hardest working man in journalism, Washington Post media reporter Howie Kurtz, has a piece today comparing the current New York Post Page Six blackmail scandal to the way political journalists operate: Be nice to sources who cooperate; make life difficult for those who don’t.

To illustrate his point, Howie cites a number of journalistic episodes/practices that have drawn criticism of late: Judy Miller’s serving as a mouthpiece for bad WMD info; White House reporters agreeing to secret, off-the-record chats with Bush; Bob Woodward acting as a stenographer for White House power players (Howie is, of course, more diplomatic in his characterization), and White House reporters occasionally writing positive stories to ingratiate themselves with key sources. (This last practice, of course, is hardly confined to White House scribblers; though Howie doesn’t mention it, the production of “beat sweeteners” is standard operating procedure for journalists assigned to a particular industry or area of government.)

In the broadest sense, I can see the parallel. (And before anyone asks, I don‚Äôt have much of a dog in this hunt. Coaxing sensitive tidbits out of reticent sources isn‚Äôt exactly in my wheelhouse.) Source reporting requires certain techniques and compromises that can carry a whiff of the dishonest and lend themselves to abuse‚Äîespecially if the reporter in question is, say, an out-of-control megalomaniac like Miller. Even so, there seems to be a significant difference between the examples Howie cites–all of which involve reporters cutting either implicit or explicit deals with sources in exchange for info that (ostensibly) enables to the reporter to better do his or her job‚Äîand a reporter informing some billionaire that, unless he wants to have his personal life splashed all over the papers, he had better start fattening said reporter‚Äôs personal bank account.

Couple of caveats: Yes, in the cases Howie mentions, the reporters in question are also expecting to benefit  personally in the form of career advancement. But being personally ambitious is not an ethical no-no per se. Blackmail, by contrast, is. Also, there‚Äôs no question that some reporters get too close to sources and wind up getting snowed or use their cozy relationship with sources as a way to be lazy in their reporting. But those are examples of the way such reporting techniques can be corrupted, rather than indictments of the techniques themselves. Blackmail for personal financial gain, by contrast, is by definition a corrupt enterprise.

None of which is to suggest that the political media doesn‚Äôt have a lot to answer for of late–most notably letting itself get suckered into backing a lousy war. But unless, say, Timesman David Sanger is ginning up Iran hysteria because Dick Cheney has refused to buy him a new Maybach, the Page 6-political press parallels seem like a reach.

—Michelle

Since I’ve never watched Commander-in-Chief, I don’t understand why the show’s ratings started high and have sunk lower, but perhaps part of the reason is that the prospect of a female president grows less novel the more one thinks about it. The potential Hillary Clinton administration that we began contemplating several years ago is, in my mind, already finished, done — I’ve been picturing it for so long and handicapping its likelihood so incessantly that I’ve imagined it right out of existence and passed on to livelier futuristic scenarios starring more dynamic main characters. Ones with actual human features rather than poll-driven, mechanized expressions that digitally adjust themselves to three points plus or minus the margin of error.

But one question about Hillary’s possible candidacy continues to interest me: who will her no-doubt-male running mate be, and what persona will he adopt? Al Gore was the somber younger brother to Bill Cinton’s exuberant chosen son and Dick Cheney comes on as George W’s tough, rich uncle, but what auxiliarly-yet-subordinate-seeming psycho-familial-sexual role will Hillary’s partner play? He could play kid brother, too, I guess, and if he turns out to be John Edwards, he’ll be able to play it convincingly. But such a duo might lack traditional gravitas. Maybe Hillary should choose a kind of doting, proud father figure– not someone as old and daft as Senator Byrd, but along those general lines. Or she could cast her number two as the loyal, devoted, supportive mate that her real husband has never been but that every ambitious woman dreams of having. This might be a job for John Kerry. They could hug a lot, and then he could stand aside — and down a step — and nod and smile and give her the thumbs-up sign while she orates horizonward about her ‘vision.’

Tricky business. Any suggestions?

–Walter

My father has spent his entire career in the nuclear field‚Äîfirst in the Navy, then in nuclear power. He has long insisted that, despite what my lefty media colleagues might think, when environmental activists got serious about global warming they would concede that nuclear energy ain’t all bad. I always thought he was nuts‚Äînot so much on the merits of his point as regarding his belief that any self-respecting green would embrace anything nuclear. Then comes today‚Äôs Washington Post opinion piece from Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore. Apparently, Moore has been moving in this direction for quite some time. Looks like I owe Dad an apology.

—Michelle

Sorry about the late start. I spent the morning having my sweet, snuffly daughter checked out by her pediatrician. (Yes, the office has emergency hours even on Easter. I‚Äôm thinking of lobbying the Vatican to have the entire practice considered for sainthood.) Nothing addles the mind quite like an 8-month-old with a 103-degree fever. But with everyone either napping or in a chocolate-bunny-induced stupor, I wanted to share a few choice bits from the dozens of much-appreciated emails you all sent regarding faith, doubt, and parenthood. (Please excuse any formatting disasters, I’m working against the clock here.)

From Jordynne Olivia Lobo:

Your envy of the certitude of the believing and non-believing is, I think, misplaced. Having been an atheist who has since had her faith return–by the least expected and suprarational means: it found me–it seems that the atheist does not know certitude but imperfect belief insofar as his empiricism allows belief in the non-existence of the Almighty. Even the most resolute agnostic or atheist may not argue that Science Knows All, because he knows that Science–like its archaeological branch that binds you in thrall through its unearthing of hitherto unknown and lost scriptures–is constantly having to correct its own view of every phenonmenon. You will, I hope, give a listening to the Alison Krauss & Union Station song "Living Prayer" which, I feel, nicely captures the (and my) human experience of genuine faith (and genuine faith is always ingenuous), which is, I assure you, is not about and which has nothing to do with certitude.

John writes:

Certitude may be all right for angels, but we haven’t made a great success of it. Too often it’s an excuse for pounding on people who lack it, or who lack our particular brand of it. And it almost always means, "Stop thinking, everyone. We already have the answer. Anything more will just muddy the waters." And then you have to choose your friends very carefully, and your reading. Besides, two groups of people are often certain about contradictory things. For at least one group, certitude is a principle of error. Why envy that? Anyway, uncertainty gets a bit more bearable when I can stop thinking of it as a deficiency, or as something I need to get over, like a bad cold. I am finite, short-lived, and easily distracted; Reality‚Äîor whatever you call it‚Äîis not in my league. Even the small questions are maddening. Why does ice float on water? Yeah, yeah, the hydrogen atoms shift with respect to the oxygen. But why is that? It’s certainly a good thing for us; we wouldn’t be here otherwise. But why? Beats me. But it beats me in a way that keeps me coming back for more, and I can’t say that about ingesting dogmas.

This from Andy Krauss and Ted McDermott:

As a couple of gay occasional Catholics with two kids in preschool, we’ve given a lot of thought to the matter of how, or what, to teach little ones about religion, the mysteries of the universe, Catholicism, etc. Needless to say, there are some things about official Catholic teaching that we consider utterly false that no child (or adult) should be subjected to. But there is also some helpful structure and simple answers to certain of life’s questions that the Catholic religion offers which have served us well in the past year or two. As to whether kids should receive any religious indoctrination at all from such an early age, just ask those parents who’ve raised their kids in a religious vacuum what it’s like to come home and find their kids bedrooms transformed into shrines to some awful spiritual cult. (Evangelical Christianism comes to mind.) We think it’s better to inoculate them early so that they don’t discover spirituality in a dangerous sort of way at an impressionable stage later in life. We hope it works for us!

I couldn’t resist Geoff Arnold’s superdiversity:

You want diversity, Michelle? Let me tell you about diversity: I was born to Church of England (i.e. Episcopal) parents in England, my mother adopted Catholicism when my father left (when I was 6); I became a hard-core atheist at age 15 (in 1965). I still am; I have an abiding interest in the philosophy of religion. (Read Antony Kenny and Dan Dennett!) My wife was born of American Lutheran and Episcopalian parents, went to Catholic and Quaker schools, spent 10 years as an agnostic "apatheist", then converted to Judaism. Our son experimented with Quakerism before settling on the Episcopal church; he’s now (at age 32) enrolled in an Episcopal Seminary in California, where he lives with his wife. And my daughter keeps coming back to Wicca, but when she got engaged to a Boston Irish Catholic she went through all the processes to convert to Catholicism (including a stern homily be Cardinal "Paedophil-lover" Bernard Law). However both my daughter and her husband are so appalled by the intolerance of the Catholic church that they want their son (my first grandson) to have nothing to do with it! How did all this happen, how did we approach things? Open communication, no indoctrination, supporting the kids’ questions and explorations. We all respect each other, even if we all disagree fundamentally about the nature of spirituality and the divine. And we all know when to keep our mouths shut!

From two unsigned missives. This:

As one who went from Roman Catholic to Pentacostal to Orthodox Christian, I understand disenchantment with religion and the draw of faith. I was taught that Orthodox meant ‚Äúmore strict‚Äù when it came to religion, but in practice I find the opposite to be true. Why? Because Orthodoxy is largely apophatic. It approaches the person of God from what we know we don‚Äôt know, rather than by asserting things about God which we can only guess about. So…Instead of teaching what must be true, you can explain what cannot be true and leave the rest to the kids. I‚Äôm often not sure what I believe about the world, but I‚Äôm really sure about two things: 1) My personal experience and 2) I don‚Äôt know what I don‚Äôt know. Seems simple, but we humans so often sentimentalize our experience to be much better, or worse, than reality. We also focus so much on what we think we know that we start to believe that we know more than we actually do…which is the mother of all assumptions. When it comes to faith, refusing to sentimentalize our history and keeping our eyes on what we don‚Äôt know protect against cultism and fanaticism.

And this:

As I see it, we all need code of belief to live in society and a set of core principle to dichotomize the universe into useful partitions. And there are different ways we can arrive at that code. Religion evolved to fill that need and serves a very useful purpose. Many people need ritual and liturgy to bind themselves to a community. The binding is important and how you get there is less important. Thus religion per se is not a problem. It’s the illogical extrapolation of religious zealotry that is bad about religion. The tension between encouraging participation through faith and reigning in its excess is as old as the schism between protestants and catholics. In the end, people who can think for themselves are never a problem whether they believe or don’t.

And finally, Chadrick123 writes:

There has been lots written about the journey of faith. Most of us spend our whole life in our quest for understanding. The journey out of faith is just as intense and just as long-lasting as any journey into it. Most of us who have been Christians in the past are always conflicted with the good we experienced alongside the bad. We finally come to terms and admit that we learned many beautiful and meaningful concepts about life, death and god, even though we reject the greater part of a previously held religious belief. Today, I do not call myself a Christian simply because I do not claim Jesus as a personal savior as that seems to be a defining requirement. But I still hold dear some wonderful concepts which can be correctly called Christian because they were taught to me in a Christian context. Life, at its best, is a journey. Teaching our children that at an early age seems important to me, more than teaching that they must believe one thing or another. I have far greater confidence in the people who admit there are lots of concepts they’re uncertain of than I am those who are sure they’ve got it all nailed down. There’s nothing to be ashamed of in admitting we’re still in the process of learning and becoming. At 77 years I’m far more comfortable still being on the journey than I was as a brash young man convinced I had all the answers. Calling myself an agnostic is comfortable for me because I’m unwilling to declare that there is no god, as much as I’m not entirely convinced there is one.

Many thanks all. —Michelle

Privacy. The right that many defend but fewer and fewer seem interested in practicing.

I’ve been thinking about privacy while writing my Web novel, The Unbinding, which is made up of documents obtained from the surveillance of everyday people. When I began the story, news of the NSA telephone intercepts was all over the media. I expected the outrage to grow and grow, but it trailed off rather quickly and precipitously. At the same time, Bush’s Pro-Life Supreme Court appointees were settling into their chairs and South Dakota was moving to make abortion very, very rare. One could only conclude that privacy, as an issue, wasn’t stirring much passion in the land.

In the land of manic attention-getters, which is what the country’s become in the age of American Idol, Oprah, and nonstop self-revelation on the Web. Consider the wild growth of MySpace. Com, a service that grants all who use it at least the hope of obtaining an audience for their biographies. The personal secrets that people broadcast on this and other websites far outstrip, in intrusive depth and detail, anything the government is capable of gathering. Users cough up, without ever being asked, and for the benefit of perfect strangers, every last sexual quirk, obsessive thought and grandiose fantasy that they can render in words. And then they add pictures. Sometimes naked pictures. They spill their souls onto the Web as though trying to purge themselves of loneliness through exhibitionism.

It’s not Big Brother prying into our lives that we have to fear, perhaps, but the Little Brother in each of us who craves the notice of others — even if he has to make mischief to attract it.

The “right to privacy,” increasingly, is the right to something not widely cherished. Which is why it’s a right that may not last.

–Walter

Question for the parents out there. The Dish readership seems like a theologically diverse bunch. Anyone out there in a situation similar to mine‚Äîa lapsed Catholic, a fallen Methodist, a disenchanted Anabaptist? If so, how have you opted to handle the issue of faith with your kids? There are myriad advantages to raising one‚Äôs tots in the bosom of a religious community (though I‚Äôd certainly prefer something a little less damnation-focused than the Southern Baptists of my youth). But when you‚Äôre not remotely sure of your own beliefs, how do you begin to address the mysteries of the universe with the preschool set? —Michelle

As someone reared in a religion that doesn‚Äôt exactly thrive on theological debate, I‚Äôm encouraged whenever a serious controversy breaks out over something like the Gospel of Judas‚Äîor even a less serious one over something like ‚ÄúThe Da Vinci Code.‚Äù Having once held but then lost the comfort of a strong faith, I‚Äôm just short of obsessed with matters of the soul. I envy the certitude both of those convinced they know the will of the divine and of those convinced that there is no divine. Impassioned argument over the history and shape of Christianity‚Äîwhich, for all its merits, too often can seem pinched and unreasonable in what it demands that its adherents accept on faith‚Äîoffers a comforting reminder that I‚Äôm hardly alone in my uncertainty. —Michelle

The retiring head of Exxon-Mobil has just been awarded a compensation package worth an estimated four-hundred million dollars. This is the same man who on Capitol Hill last fall testified that soaring gasoline prices were uncontrollable and that “We’re all in this together.” But not together in the same way, of course. This man and his lieutenants made lots of money off of expensive petroleum products. I lost some.

But I do begrudge him his mammoth windfall? No. First I’d have to be able to conceive of it. The wealth piling up in some individuals’ hands these days passeth all understanding. They may as well be infinitely rich — unless, that is, they’re thinking of using their cash to assemble private air forces and navies. I think they should be required to, in fact. Once upon a time, the oligarchs had a political obligation to fund (beyond the payment of normal taxes) fighting forces for the kings and emperors under whose protection they’d grown so powerful. Let’s revisit that practice. The First Exxon-Mobile Mountain Division. The Seventh Microsoft Fleet.

Half a billion dollars, huh? Out here in the west (I live in Montana) it’s not uncommon to come across the many-thousand-acre ranches of non-resident commercial titans. At the ends of their multi-mile driveways are largely un-lived in palatial homes — or so I assume, since I can’t cruise down to see them due to all the ominous “Keep Out” signs. All one sees of the ranches’ mythic landlords are their jets swooping in around Independence Day, when the big guys throw barbecues for other big guys featuring famous country-western singers and private fireworks displays that are more splendid than any our little towns can throw. The skybombs sparkle surreally against the mountainsides as I drive to town to buy lemonade and hot dog buns for my own backyard festivities. A sense of being in things together doesn’t come over me as I watch the light bursts. It’s more a sense of being on my own in a land of unimaginable giants.

–Walter

Alright, I give! I have been chastised by many of you for not properly appreciating the value of knowledge for knowledge’s sake regarding my wonderment over who thinks up (not to mentions finances) studies about things like whether short or tall gals are more inclined to breed. I was thinking there were probably more urgent issues to be explored, but I in no way want to come across as anti-science. A few of you also demanded to know if I might have an undisclosed bias. I’m a shade over 5’4”. I’ve got two kids and a career. Add me to the research sample and do you worst.

—Michelle

In the previous post’s first line I meant to write “just dissed” and not “dust dissed.” But inaccuracies creep into all texts, even the holy one in question.

–Walter