How Journalists Lost a CT Senate Race Even Though ‘Their’ Candidate Won
By Jim Sleeper – November 4, 2006, 10:21PM
By instinct and necessity, daily newspaper reporters are democratic, inquisitive, and therefore easy to talk to. But there is, as they say, another side of the story, and, wow, was it ever on display last week in two big New York Times profiles of Ned Lamont and Joe Lieberman, both of which read as if written by Lieberman’s Senate campaign. Lamont seems likely to lose on Tuesday, and since I’m a Lamont partisan, you’ll assume I’m writing this from sour grapes. But no. Good journalism and civic-republicanism matter more than the outcome of this one contest. Judge for yourself how they’re doing in this one.
According to the two big Times profiles, Ned, “a son of privilege,” can’t be a grounded civic-republican who taught awhile in an inner-city school; and Joe, an independent thinker toughened by the scourging of leftist bloggers and activists who’ve taken over the Democratic Party, can’t have voted for the worst aspects of the Iraq War, the detainee bill, or the mauling of Terry Schiavo. At least the profiles don’t break out of their own fixed ideas enough to report any of these facts.
Lamont, rather, “raised in a well-connected family” and “schooled in training centers of power,” has been “flirting with the possibility of running for major public office” for some time, the Times tells us. But what does that mean? Don’t most Exeter and Harvard grads actually become dray horses for corporate power who, by age 30, can barely finesse a civic-republican idiom? Lamont’s family legacy and personal decisions stand in rather admirable contrast, as I found last month.
The Times profile chose not to understand this and instead rode the “Greenwich millionaire” stereotype relentlessly. I’d told one of its writers to call The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, who shared a Vermont farmhouse with Lamont decades ago as they and others worked on a weekly newspaper there. Mayer’s is the one admiring quote that’s not from a “country-club” friend of Lamont’s, but the reporters, apparently obsessed with how many cars he has owned, make clear that he was driving an Audi even in Vermont. Somehow they don’t discover that much more recently he taught poor, nonwhite kids in Bridgeport, for two years, although that may be corrected in a small item between now and Tuesday.
The Times’ Lieberman profile is straight out of the playbook of his old advisor Carter Eskew, who’s quoted twice. Lieberman’s rejection by Democrats has “freed him to do and say exactly what he felt,” reporter Janny Scott tells us. But the question of what, exactly, Lieberman does feel is obliterated by quote after quote asserting that lockstep leftist Democrats have left him, because Joe thinks for himself:
“‘He’s always done whatever he wants to do. Why would anyone expect him at this point to become a good soldier?'”
“‘To his credit, he did run in the primary. And, to his credit, he didn’t trim his sails.'”
“‘The last thing I would have predicted was that, to me, this genuinely spiritual, genuinely likeable guy would arrive at a point at which so many of the leaders of his own party felt insulted by him.'”
“‘I think he came away with a resolve to answer to his country first and his party second.'”
These are representative, from four different speakers. And the other view? Reporter Scott offers that herself, sort-of: “[Lieberman] has long chosen to describe himself as ‘independent-minded’ rather than moderate. That quality has surfaced at every stage of his political career, apparently the product of a combination of upbringing, intellectual orientation, religion, experience, perhaps expediency. Where admirers see a man of deep principles, detractors see an opportunist.”
And the supporting quote from someone to buttress that last assertion? There is none. Anywhere.
But what does Lieberman think when he’s doing all this independent thinking for himself? Not only are there no Schiavo or detainee positions here; there is no evidence Lieberman thinks of anyone besides himself. No reporter asks him how many Connecticut soldiers have died in Iraq, as a Times editor did ask Lamont over dinner. Caught by surprise, Lamont didn’t know. Lieberman must, because a staffer sends out condolences and keeps a list; but would he really be able to answer, if asked on the spot? The Times doesn’t tell, because it didn’t ask.
What’s going on here? A “news side” rebellion against the editorial-page’s Lamont endorsement? An effort to anticipate Lamont’s likely loss to Lieberman? Not at all. Harried reporters, trying to think big, are reminding us that their “first rough draft of history” tends to see breaking news through the rear-view mirror of premises they haven’t time to examine. They work under rushed conditions that prevent them from thinking beyond conventional story lines and cultural mindsets; rather, they have to play to them, collapse things into them, to write something equally rushed readers will understand.
Times journalists didn’t sit in some room wondering, “How can we take down Lamont?” If anything, it was “What makes this guy tick?,” and then they ran around trying to make a horse by committee, grasping at some concept – “son of privilege”; “hardened independent” – that gestures at something in each candidate but buries much of what’s true.
Really these two profiles should be read in their entirety and taught in journalism schools for years to come. They probably won’t be, not least because Lamont may lose, for reasons actually unappreciated in the profiles. For one, Lieberman, in public office since he was 28, feels to many Connecticut residents like an uncle or a comfortable old coat. “I know Joe,” they’ll say, still touched that he patted them on the back once fifteen years ago.
By comparison, Lamont was dry as a stick in debates, even if very decent and principled. He’s been a jejune campaigner, than which there is no greater sin to a savvy reporter. He doesn’t balance an instinct for the avuncular with an instinct for the jugular that would have shredded Lieberman’s folksy charm by hammering on his positions. When Lieberman called last month for doubling the number of troops in Iraq, it seems not to have occurred to Lamont to demand to know if Lieberman was calling to reinstitute the draft, which Joe somehow avoided back in 1967, when he was of age and the Vietnam War was raging.
“Lamont admits he wasn’t ready” to mount that kind of attack. ‘I watched [Lieberman] with Cheney,’ he says of the vice presidential debate six years ago. ‘It was all “My worthy adversary, my esteemed colleague.” It was right out of the House of Lords. Some people say I should have pushed back a little harder, but my nature is my nature.’
“Asked if maybe obnoxious just isn’t his style, he rolls his eyes a bit. He knows where nice guys finish, and it isn’t in the Senate. ‘Oh, I can see the headline now,’ he says. ‘Ned Lamont: Too Decent for Politics.’”
But the preceding two paragraphs are from a Washington Post profile, by David Segal in the paper’s Style section, from back before Lamont won the Democratic primary. Maybe the Times will get there by November 8.