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Look, Ma, I'm a TV Pundit

Making the world safe for soundbites

This afternoon I received a mildly panicked phone call from a reporter at Channel 5 News, the Twin Cities' hometown ABC affiliate. Since the networks had chosen not to broadcast Bush's speech--it's the last week of May sweeps, for God's sake--would I care to come into their studio and watch it? And would I then serve as chew toy to the ever-gleaming incisors of Minnesota's first lady of Republican punditry, Sarah Janacek, in a debate over the president's "plan"? Mindful of Gore Vidal's injunction that one should never turn from a microphone, I accepted.

Well. It was the same canting recitation of Bush rhetoric about a democratic Iraq that we've grown accustomed to, organized this time as a term paper. (The line with the loudest unintended resonance, and I am unfortunately paraphrasing: We are trying to make the Iraqis free, not to make them Americans.) 

Did it connect? the reporter wanted to know afterward. Janacek averred that it did, and I--shockingly--claimed that it did not. I pointed to what I called the three main lies in the speech, and Janacek gamely countered two of them and conceded the third. I noted that while scandals have come and gone, no administration in the past hundred years has been subjected to so many complaints from institutional voices about its base-level competence. I was asked to defend Kerry's waffling over withdrawal from Iraq, and declined.

We talked for 20 minutes or so on camera, and I have to say it wasn't bad. When we were done, the reporter, a woman named Joanne, thanked us profusely and told us she would be spending the next two hours turning Bush's speech on the war on Iraq and our reaction into a 1-minute, 15-second segment.

It's a sweeps period, as I said. Any other time the future of the "free world" might have gotten 1:45.

[Those three lies I alluded to, if you're curious, were: 1) Iraq is the hub of the war on terror; 2) the resistance fighters in Iraq are Saddam loyalists and foreign "terrorists"; and 3) the US wants a democratic government in Iraq.]

Posted by Steve Perry at May 24, 2004 9:32 PM

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