The twin-pack. Rumsfeld's testimony yesterday gets the full-on Major Public Event treatment from Saturday's Times: the A1 straight-news/news-analysis twin-pack, plus an inner-page review of Dr. Strangefeld's performance qua performance. And despite Dan Okrent's (self-serving, ultimately disingenuous) disavowal of the phrase, this pattern of coverage is very much in the style of a Paper of Record. (Okrent's piece is disingenuous, by the way, for ignoring how much the institutional power of the Times continues to reside in the "Paper of Record" idea, which Okrent obtusely treats as just some inexplicably lingering artifact of a bygone era, a perverse readerly nostalgia.)

It's easy not to notice how artificial a genre this is, that yokes together "reporting" and "analysis" on occasions of large public significance. At the moment, I don't have the time (or the means) to investigate the history of its establishment in the Times—but I can at least gesture toward its purpose and its effects. The twin-pack serves to produce the notion of a Record, by displaying and enforcing the difference between the "recording" function and its analytic sidekick. That the difference is not maintained out of journalistic probity—to create some kind of cordon sanitaire around the precincts of fact—the writerly results will testify. Okrent chides readers who might harbor a retrograde desire for omniscience in their newspaper by saying that they "deserve what they [would] get ... a catalog, a soporific or an apologist. Probably all three, in fact." But what could be more disconnected, more soporific, more superficial than the kind of reporting on offer in today's "straight" piece by Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt ("Rumsfeld Accepts Blame and Offers Apology in Abuse")? This dutiful, dull, thoughtless grab-bag is exemplary of the Times' house style for such things: it displays, not a respect for fact but a conviction (perhaps unconscious) that fact-based reporting is a rote exercise, a tedious fulfillment of the requirements of Record, better written than read.

Presented in contradistinction to "analysis," reportage isn't just relieved (as, obviously, it should never be) of the burden of thought: it's under some kind of obligation to avoid appearing as the product of thought, to the extent that narrative coherence and even plausible shape are out of bounds. Let's troll through the heads of the Shanker-Schmitt article by way of illustration:

• The public shaming—Rumsfeld apologizes (grafs 1 - 4)
• Further revelations, investigation on tap (5 - 8)
• Will Rummy resign? (9 - 15)
• Rummy & co.'s "demeanor" during testimony (16 - 20)
• Jumble of critical statements from members of Congress (21 - 25)
• What's up with the photographs? (26 - 29)
• Lawmakers question Rummy over the role of military intelligence, command in prisoner abuse (30 - 35)

I defy anyone to find a thread of logic in this arrangement. What we have here is a shabby paste-up of disjointed fragments, most of them four to five paragraphs in length, the seams ever more visible as the article fumbles toward its conclusion. I repeat, this is the Times standard for reporting of this nature. I might almost say that the style exists to discourage reading: to emphasize the weight and difficulty (and value) of job the Times performs maintaining the Record by putting readers in the position of being unable to make sense of it when it appears.

The most telling aspect of the article, I think, is that only in the last, most exhausted section—the piece's throw-up-our-hands-and-try-to-end-this final gasp—do the writers bother to address any issues of substance, any policy issues, that might have emerged in yesterday's full day of testimony. And you know what's really sad? Shanker-Schmitt's slapdash final grafs are the only place anywhere in the paper today to acknowledge that policy issues exist in the Abu Ghraib scandal and occupied anybody's attention as Rummy was being questioned. Everything else is public spectacle, personality, will-he-won't-he resign. Which begs the question, Why would the Times invest in producing a Record that it serves so badly? I'll get around to some thoughts about that when I post on today's "analysis" pieces.

posted by michael  3:32:24 PM  
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