Tangled Up in News

The scene remains iconic for any fan of Bob Dylan’s song, Tangled Up in Blue – the story of two young lovers, their turbulent affair, and repeated chance reunions: The boy leaves the girl for the first time, heading east on a rain-drenched road; the two lovers part for what they assume is forever.

As the most often played song in Dylan's arsenal, he continuously rearranges the lyrics with each tour – altering between first and third-person, and amending certain lines. In a 1984 concert, immortalized on his album, Real Live, (my personal favorite of all the recorded versions) Dylan ends this particular scene with this line: “She turned around to look at me/ As I was walking away/ She said I wish I could tell you all the things/ I never learned how to say/ And he said it’s alright, babe, I love you too/ But they were tangled up in blue”.

Rather than enter into a loving exegeses of this line and the song, I will instead claim that no one has or will say this line to New York Times columnist, Maureen Down.

Clearly, I am no fan of hers, and yet I mean nothing personal by this theory – I could even imagine her to be charming or something. She’s even quite fetching, by the looks of her glamor shot that accompanies her online columns:


Hubba, hubba. The premise of my theory rests of the fact that there is nothing that she would ever leave unsaid, and after she says it, and by some chance no one listens, then she’s just keep on saying it in different ways, just to know that someone is listening (or perhaps she is an attention hogging catty gadfly who has lost the ability to report on the news and chooses, instead, to create it). After her interview with David Geffen stirred up a useless controversy between Geffen and his former political ally, Hillary Clinton, exposed not only Clinton’s thin skin and the media’s need to drone on and inflame the most empty of hubbub, but also the fact (though highly obscured) that Senator Obama wants nothing to do with this type of nonsense. So what does our intrepid journalist do? She gets a sit down with the Senator and repeatedly prods him to comment on the issue. Regardless of the fact that the election has moved on to other issues – Iraq, Health Care, the Black vote, and other, real issues – our flaxen haired Maureen feels the need to continue stirring the perverse cocktail that we have been forced to drink these past few weeks. And I was just getting done with the hang over. From the interview with Senator Obama, in which she “feel[s] like Ingrid Bergman”:

"Channeling Ingrid, I press on and say: “I know you want to run a high-minded campaign, but do you worry that you might be putting yourself on a pedestal too much? Because people also want to see you mix it up a little. That’s how they judge how you’d be with Putin.”

“When I get into a tussle,” he replies, “I want it to be over something real, not something manufactured. If someone wants to get in an argument with me, let’s argue about how we’re going to fix the health care system or where we need to go on Iraq.”

Just to make clear, this is how Dowd sees herself:

Does no one with a public platform, besides Obama, see that he had nothing to do with this, that he has made no comment in what has been called a “dust up”, a “kafuffle”, and political “infighting”, “The Clinton-Obama psychodrama”? Why do Dowd’s fellow columnists continue to propel this image of an Obama/Clinton controversy? Through the prism supplied by these “journalists” it would seem that the more one reads the news, the less one learns about the issues affecting the election and the more the election becomes a battle of personalities – Bill Clinton is slick, Gore is wooden, Kerry is wooden, Obama's inability to fight about nonsense will hurt him, which is Dowd's hypothesis. (For more on this trend, I suggest you read this post)

It is with great consternation that I watch as these reporters manufacture these projected shortcomings and neuroses and then lament when the populous seems not to vote on the issues. How can we even find the damn issues amidst all this “dust up”? Certainly not in this post, as it merely comments on the commentators, thus adding only another level of mediation between the reader and the facts, but there are vast bastions of unfiltered and ice-brewed facts to be found. Just don’t look for them on the Op-Ed page in your Saturday edition of the New York Times. And do not send to know for whom the facts are aired. Not for Maureen or for David Brooks. They are aired for thee.

Luckily there are Blogger's and we're many strong, who agree with what I believe to be an objective assessment of Dowd's interview with Barack:

Colin McEnroe: "...the only kind of political story Dowd knows how to cover these days. Obama's replies were calm and thoughtful. He came across as a grown-up, MoDo the perpetual teenager and so careless an observer of contemporary polticis that she somehow failed to notice the real story."

Political Discourse and My Discontents

Recently I wrote about Maureen Dowd and her nonsense style of side-line reporting. It didn't take her more than 24 hours to substantiate my criticism (read Eric Boehlert's "Dissecting Maureen Dowd" for more detailed proof). Dowd has recently stirred up a nice little controversy, after chatting with Hollywood mogul, David Geffen, who supplied her with some choice quotes attacking Senator Clinton's honesty, while also offering an astute political assessment of why he won't support Clinton:

"I don’t think that another incredibly polarizing figure, no matter how smart she is and no matter how ambitious she is — and God knows, is there anybody more ambitious than Hillary Clinton? — can bring the country together."

It seems to me as if Dowd has continued on her downward spiral, reminiscent of an aging former prom queen, with no marriage prospects and bad skin (recommend the Vague Nihilism blog for a good characterization of Dowd.) It's kinda sad, but nevertheless she has managed in what I hope are the last throws of her career to force both Obama and Clinton to pay attention. You gotta give Dowd some credit, cause the Clinton campaign took the bait, garbled the argument and ran with it.

The basic situation: Geffen (former Clinton loyalist) sways large donors to Obama and insults Clinton publicly.

Rational response: To either disregard Geffen's comments and possibly try to salvage the friendship privately, or, if you gotta say something, offer your regrets for Geffen's changed attitude, continue to campaign on the issues and smile until this blows over. There are plenty of rich people in L.A.

Clinton response: To shift the burden onto Senator Obama, whose only role in this has been to accept a check from a guy who likes to talk to Maureen Dowd (see Clinton's communications director on Hardball). Clinton bizarrely (though not really; it's politics today) believes that it is incumbent upon Obama to publicly disavow Geffen's comments and give back the money, because Obama's campaign promises to change the public discourse.

Sour grapes, Senator Clinton. You didn't get Geffen's money and connections, big deal. I'm sure that if the press could remember how to investigate they could find a tactless donor of yours. Would you give their money back? Also, why do you incorrectly refer to Geffen as Obama's campaign finance chief. That's just a falsehood.

On a personal note, I actually believe that Senator Clinton would make a fine president. I don't buy into the Lady Macbeth characterization, nor do I feel emasculated by a strong, intelligent and highly capable woman. Her recent controversy with Geffen and subsequent shifting of the burden onto Senator Obama is what is wrong with politics, and just makes her look bad, like the nerdy girl who blossomed into a successful woman but is still vulnerable to the bitter attacks from the aging prom queen (Dowd).

Geffen spoke it, Dowd wrote it, and it should have stopped there. Instead, Clinton was duped into taking the hot potato and tried to pass it to Obama, who remains the one figure in this sordid story who knows when to shut up:

"You know, it's not clear to me," said Obama. "Why would I be apologizing for someone else's remarks?"

Two Comedians, a Senator, and an Aging Institution

As a presidential candidate, Senator Obama, like Robert Kennedy before him, stands apart from the field of hopefuls by his easy and sincere ability to connect with young America. It only takes a moment to compare his campaign website, complete with social networking and a blog, to that of Senator Clinton or of Senator Edwards; Senator Obama mixes effortlessly with the Web 2.0 crowd, and more conspicuously, he seems equally at ease on the cover of fashion magazines (Men's Vogue) and the couches of our late night talk shows (Conan and The Daily Show). It is this natural ease that inspires both overblown praise and masked and bitter skepticism from the journalistic establishment (see Dowd below), as well as bewilderment, envy and careful praise from his fellow politicians.

Much in the same vein, the mainstream media display a similar uneasiness regarding Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. It’s getting hard to listen to NPR (for some of us, it has always been difficult) without hearing one of its many deadpan hosts invoke a quotation or clip from a recent Daily Show or Colbert Report. Whatever keeps “Fresh Air” fresh, I guess. Their forced and awkward (the type of awkwardness found only in the slew of movies depicting old white women dancing and/or rapping)deference toward Stewart and Colbert only betrays their total cluelessness for whatever it is that the kids are listening to these days. You know, they’re like totally clueless, dude, and so un-rad, man. Like whatever, Pops.



For simplicity’s sake and for that of my argument, let’s narrow the aging mainstream media and their frustration for their own ineptitudes to one journalist, Maureen Dowd of The New York Times. Dowd was given the recent cover story in Rolling Stone, featuring an interview with Stewart and Colbert. And it may just be that I was not picking up on her deft ironic tone or her comedic wit, but her opening lines are retarded:

"I thought Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert might be a little nervous to meet with me. I was the real news commentator, after all, and they were the mock. They threw spitballs at presidents; I interviewed presidents before throwing spitballs at them. I had crisscrossed the globe to cover news stories, while these guys just put on dark suits and threw up imported backgrounds on a green screen."

Yeah, I guess, Maureen.

Again, if you, the reader, are trying to grasp the moment that you felt such a similar sense of uneasy embarrassment for another person, please see photo above. Dowd follows this with what is either a carefully thought out and philosophically taut opening question, a joke that falls painfully on its face, or just a bad question:

Dowd: A fake news show, "The Daily Show," spawned a fake commentator, Colbert, who makes his own fake reality defending the fake reality of a real president, and has government officials on who know the joke but are still willing to be mocked by someone fake. Your shows are like mirrors within mirrors, using a cycle of fakery to get to the truth. You've tapped into a sense in society that nothing, from reality shows to Bushworld, is real anymore. Do you guys ever get confused by your hall of mirrors?

Stewart: I didn't know we were going to have to be high to do this interview.

Her interview style, which seems ripped from the stuffy 1960’s journalists who used to ask Bob Dylan what his message is. She ranges from broad personal opinion, “Do you think the country would be better off if the Republicans or the Democrats were running it?”, to moments that reveal her deeper anxieties as a journalist: “Is there any way to bring young people, or all people, back to news?”. Dowd displays a similar approach to her Times column when, as she often does, she discusses Barack Obama – both condescending and awed at once – clearly fixated, but still able to bestow upon him such nicknames as “Obambi” and “Legally Blonde.” How cute! You really tapped into some happening pop culture puns there, Ms. Dowd. Maybe next time you could go with Ally McBama or wait, wait, wait…90210bama; that’ll sure grab the youth’s attention.

The walls are closing in for Dowd – the next two years she will be forced into writing about the Senator’s campaign while she and her colleagues pay increasing homage to Stewart and Colbert. In a moment that must have been both sheer terror and masochistic ecstasy for Dowd, these three figures that light the way to her oblivion are discussed at once during the Rolling Stone interview, when she asks, “But wouldn’t, say, a President Obama be harder to make fun of than these guys [the Bush administration]?” Luckily, we have Jon Stewart to return the question with the one I would like to ask her: “Are you kidding?”