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 Recent commentary from National Journal: Legal Affairs: Why the Jobs Went to China—And How to Get Them Back (October 14, 2003) If the yuan were revalued the Mack companies could start making computer servers again. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: The Triumph of Change (October 14, 2003) Next year Bush will be selling just what Davis was selling—continuity. By William Schneider. Wealth of Nations: The War Against Iraq: All a Big Mistake? (October 14, 2003) With hindsight, the war in Iraq looks ever more doubtful. By Clive Crook. Media: Out of Character (October 6, 2003) Character journalism gives most journalists the creeps, but maybe they've defined it too narrowly. By William Powers. Social Studies: America Has a Brilliant Strategy for Iraq: Muddle Through (October 6, 2003) With Saddam toppled less than six months ago, defeatism today reflects badly not on Bush, but on his critics. By Jonathan Rauch. Legal Affairs: The White House Leak Scandal: Is a Cover-Up in the Works? (October 6, 2003) The investigation will be credible only if shielded from any but the most nominal supervision by Ashcroft. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: Sagging Male Support (October 6, 2003) President Bush's support among men has plunged because they are upset about jobs. By William Schneider. More from National Journal. |
Media 
All in Good Time
Why did the Novak-spy and Schwarzenegger-sex stories take so long to emerge? It's a story all its own. by William Powers ..... Why do the media wait so long? It's the nagging question of the hour, the thread uniting two very different political stories. As everyone now knows, the White House spy stink began way back in July, when syndicated columnist Robert Novak, citing administration sources, revealed the identity of intelligence operative Valerie Plame. The column appeared in The Washington Post and other papers, and was presumably read by thousands of highly intelligent people, perhaps even a few journalists. Yet the scandal didn't become a scandal—in fact, was barely noticed—until late September. And countless wags have wondered why. How is it that a malicious, politically motivated, and, if you believe President Bush, downright criminal leak could just sit there for so long? Were our great national news organs asleep at the switch? Then there's the Schwarzenegger sex story, which broke in the Los Angeles Times just a few days before Tuesday's recall vote. Everyone with a friend in Hollywood knows the seamy Schwarzenegger rumors have been circulating for years. What took the Times so long? This mystery is now a meta-story all its own, generating so much noise that, even as Californians went to the polls, The Wall Street Journal ran a piece about the public "outcry," and claims that the Times story was "an obvious, biased attack on Mr. Schwarzenegger." If only life were as simple as the bias crowd wants it to be. In fact, there is nothing obvious about the process by which a minor news story becomes a major one. It's an extremely subtle kind of alchemy, and it never happens in exactly the same way. Indeed, the question on the spy story is why it wasn't picked up sooner, while with the Times story, it's why it was published so late. But if you watch closely, it's possible to lay out a few rules for why stories explode when they do. First, relevance is everything. This is the most ancient criterion for news, but in recent years the definition has become narrower than ever before. For a story to be deemed relevant in today's crowded media universe, it doesn't just have to be related to topic A, it has to clearly move the ball forward. In fact, news organizations will sometimes get lazy about stories they've vaguely heard about, and not do anything until the story takes on the rare qualities that spell relevance. I'm not privy to the editorial decision-making of the Los Angeles Times, but I think I know why it took until last Thursday for Arnold's movie-set behavior to be a story for that paper, and it wasn't mostly ideological bias. The man was on the verge of becoming governor; the relevancy quotient had just gone through the roof. Although Novak's July column was about a subject that was all over the front pages at the time—the uranium question—it did not seem, on first reading, to significantly advance the story. Here's how it began: "The CIA's decision to send retired diplomat Joseph C. Wilson to Africa in February 2002 to investigate possible Iraqi purchases of uranium was made routinely without Director George Tenet's knowledge. Remarkably, this produced a political firestorm that has not yet subsided." That sounds like an intro to a thumbsucker, and most of the column read like one. When you reached the Plame revelation, it seemed a bit of piquant background that Novak had inserted to show off his reporting skills, as in: Look what I got! Indeed, he phrased the scoop in a way that suggested it wasn't a scoop at all: "Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me his wife suggested sending Wilson to Niger to investigate the Italian report." Thanks to the attribution, it appears that the first sentence is a well-known fact, while the second is the real news. Beyond content, there's the matter of who's delivering the news. Novak has had a long, storied career in Washington journalism, and the column he wrote with the late Rowland Evans was long a very hot commodity. But over the years, Novak has cooled considerably, to the point where his column is part of the wallpaper. Until the last few weeks, if you asked random capital types if they read him, I'd wager more than a few would have looked blank. "The CNN guy? Does he still do a column?" If Plame had been outed by a columnist with more juice—someone with Maureen Dowd's drawing power—there would have been a lot more interest right away. Finally, a scoop that appears on the opinion page, under the byline of a highly partisan columnist, sourced to leakers in an administration with which that columnist is sympathetic, is a very different animal from a news story by full-time reporters. The Plame story didn't take off until September because that was when it moved to the front page of The Washington Post. It was no longer just one columnist's edgy tidbit, but a stunning piece of hard news about a Justice Department investigation. Likewise, the Schwarzenegger story may have occurred late in the game, but it had the impact it did because it was clearly reported out, and presented as exactly what it was: a real scorcher, meant to shake things up when the stakes were high. Isn't that the definition of news?
What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. More from National Journal. More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. William Powers is media columnist for National Journal. This column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C. For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com. Copyright © 2003 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. | [an error occurred while processing this directive] | ||
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