Jay Rosen has the best commentary on how Dick Cheney has handled the press after the shooting accident. As a foil, Jay quotes former White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater: “If [Cheney?s] press secretary had any sense about it at all, she would have gotten the story together and put it out. Calling AP, UPI, and all of the press services. That would have gotten the story out and it would have been the right thing to do, recognizing his responsibility to the people as a nationally elected official, to tell the country what happened.”

Jay replies: “But Cheney figures he told the country ‘what happened.’ What he did not do is tell the national press, which he does not trust to inform the country anyway. … He treated the shooting as a private matter between private persons on private land that should be disclosed at the property owner’s discretion to the townsfolk (who understand hunting accidents, and who know the Armstrongs) via their local newspaper, the Corpus Christi Caller-Times.”

Note the synecdoche in Fitzwater’s statement: API and UPI stand for the people and the country. Cheney doesn’t accept that, and neither do I–not in the age of blogs and other peer-to-peer media. A few national news organs do not have a right to be informed about anything in particular–especially since the news will get out anyway. However, Jay also argues that the old relationship between the national press corps and the White House served as a check on the latter, and that something must be able to challenge the presidency.

For my part, I have two incompatible reactions to this affair:

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Paul Krugman wrote in last Friday’s New York Times:

Many people in the news media do claim, at least implicitly, to be experts at discerning character — and their judgments play a large, sometimes decisive role in our political life. The 2000 election would have ended in a chad-proof victory for Al Gore if many reporters hadn’t taken a dislike to Mr. Gore, while portraying Mr. Bush as an honest, likable guy. The 2004 election was largely decided by the image of Mr. Bush as a strong, effective leader. (Article now available by subscription only.)

Many people on both the left and right agree with Krugman’s causal hypothesis. They assume that journalists have some choice about how to portray the characters of politicians, and their choices affect voting decisions. It is because people buy this theory that they expend enormous energy looking for bias in the major news media and trying to influence mainstream coverage. A belief in the power of journalists’ implicit judgments raises the temperature; it encourages people to be highly critical readers who focus on the “spin” in news stories.

Of course there must be something to the theory. (And the 2000 election was so close that anything could have changed the outcome, including a rain storm or fewer earth tones in Al Gore’s wardrobe.) However, I believe the importance of journalists’ implicit character judgments is often overstated. Most surveys find that average voters are quite inattentive to the news, to start with. News coverage is always diverse, even when there seems to be an overall tilt like the one that Krugman detects in 2000. Moreover, the spirit of news coverage is not completely under the control of journalists. Al Gore, for example, had some potential influence on the way Al Gore was covered in 2000; this wasn’t simply a discretionary call by reporters.

Finally, we can almost always explain a presidential election as a result of economic indicators, leaving news coverage aside. Larry Bartels has argued that 2000, like most US national elections, was determined by the change in disposable per capita personal income (dpi) over the twelve months prior to the election. It follows that Al Gore would have won in 2000 if the Clinton administration had decided to cut taxes, thereby raising people’s dpi. Instead, they decided to pay down the national debt, thereby increasing the odds that Bush would win. If anything, it is surprising that Gore got more popular votes than Bush.

If I’m troubled by anything, it’s not anti-Gore (or pro-Bush) spin, but rather the way that our democratic system seems to reward borrowing and punish fiscal responsibility. By the way, Bush’s popularity until now may have a lot to do with the billions he has borrowed and spent.

Jay Rosen captures one’s attention with the lead to his latest post: “Just one man’s opinion, but now is a good time to say it: The New York Times is not any longer–in my mind–the greatest newspaper in the land. Nor is it the base line for the public narrative that it once was. Some time in the least year or so I moved the Washington Post into that position.” (And this from a quintessential New Yorker!)

Here is what I take away from Jay’s argument. First, the Times represents a traditional conception of the daily newspaper as an institution that tries to extract significant information from politically powerful people and present it to a judicious public. This is not the only valid conception of a newspaper’s role; I have defended a rival view (that journalism exists to promote public participation). However, if the Times has a claim to excellence, it is the conventional one.

Jay cites a series of disturbing recent cases in which the accuracy of the Times’ news coverage has been found wanting: the “breakdown in controls in reporting Weapons of Mass Destruction, … Jayson Blair, Wen Ho Lee, Paul Krugman’s correction trauma.” But everyone makes mistakes, and an outsider could imagine that the Times must now be tightening its internal controls.

The Judith Miller story reflects a deeper problem than mere error. As she investigated the Valerie Plame case and faced a subpoena for her information, Miller became part of a classic Washington story about the secret behavior of powerful people. The extraordinary list of her visitors in jail (John Bolton, Bob Dole, Tom Brokaw) illustrates how close she has come to power, and how tightly linked are our media leaders and politicos. Jay notes that “Miller is a longtime friend of the [Times] publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. They socialize. It’s not a scandal, but it is a fact.” Indeed, it is the Times’ traditional role to get close to the powerful; to offer coveted space in its news columns in return for information. Thus Sulzberger, Brokaw, Bolton, Dole, and others like them move in similar circles, as do reporters like Judith Miller. Readers potentially benefit from those connections, when the Times presses to reveal as much as possible from its exalted sources. That, after all, is the heroic story of the Pentagon Papers and Times v Sullivan.

Miller, however, became a newsmaker, a decision-maker, someone with information that she could deploy strategically. She did not choose that role: a subpoena dragged her into it. However, her contacts, her friendships, and all of her tactical choices underlined her close connections to insiders and “newsmakers.” This impression presented a challenge to the Times, whose role is to explain what decision-makers are up to. We want to assume that some have power and others gather independent knowledge about them; the state and the press do not mix. But here, through no deliberate choice of Miller’s, the lines were blended.

It was then the responsibility of the Times to show that it was a trustworthy explainer. Every instinct should have pressed the newspaper’s editors and staff to extract information about its own reporter and to explain what she had done. Instead, the Times’ coverage of Miller’s legal predicament has been confusing, low-key, half-hearted, and passive. Its columnists have been virtually silent. And it is has issued no meaningful public statements or press releases.

The implicit deal that the Times offers is this: We will cozy up to the power-brokers, but we will do it in your interests, so that we can keep you informed about their wheeling and dealing. When the Times becomes a power-broker itself, the deal comes into question. At that moment, the editors should understand that their whole justification is at stake, and they should rush to serve the public’s “right to know.” Failure to do so raises fundamental questions about the value of the New York Times that go far beyond any cases of misreporting or run-of-the-mill bias.

I worked yesterday with a small group of undergrads who wanted me to help them follow current events. I asked them to read the lead article in the New York Times, because I thought it exemplified certain journalistic conventions that make it difficult for novices to understand the news.

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I’m quoted in a recent story on Yahoo News (provided by Agence France Presse), entitled, “Katrina: US TV swings from deference to outrage towards government.” The lead is, “In the emotional aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, US television’s often deferential treatment of government officials has been replaced by fiercely combative interviews and scathing commentary.” Some examples follow, and then I am quoted near the end:

Media expert* Peter Levine, of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, said the shift in stance of American television was a return to normal following four years of toeing the government line following the September 11 attacks.

“After 9/11 those who publicly dissented from support of the president and the government were rounded on from all sides,” he told AFP.

“The political calculation of (opposition) Democratic politicans was that it was best to support the president and so no one wanted to be seen dissenting, giving the media little to base any criticism on,” he said.

But with local officials, including Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin openly slamming the government response to the New Orleans catastrophe, usually reserved media feel free to do the same, he said.

Added to that, the horror played out on live television belied the government’s claims that its preparations for the storm and subsequent rescue effort had been sufficient.

“(Television stations) have people on the ground and are seeing a huge difference between what they are being told by officials and what they are actually seeing,” Levine said.

None of this is profound or original, but it exemplifies the phenomenon I meant to describe. The reporter probably had the thoughts that he attributed to me before I said them. But he could not simply write those ideas down in his own words, because that would be editorializing, interpreting, or analyzing, and he couldn’t do that as a reporter. His assignment was to record facts, such as what a “media expert” had said. So he called around until he found someone who told him something that he wanted to say himself, and then he quoted that person–in this case, me.

Between Sept. 11, 2001 and the Iraq invasion, relatively few of the people whom reporters quote were willing to say anything bad about US foreign policy, and that is why critical perspectives were so rare.

*My media “expertise” comes solely from regular reading of The New York Times, including the news, arts, op-ed, NY region, and business sections and the obituaries, but rarely the sports and never the new “style” section, which I condemn unequivocally.