The White House Correspondents' Dinner is tonight. It's an incestuous, ethically grotesque event that serves as an annual reminder that mainstream political journalists in the U.S. do not even pretend to take their jobs seriously. Political journalism, in theory, is about challenging power, exposing lies and corruption, digging for the truth at all costs, and so on. It's supposed to be fundamentally confrontational. Most mainstream political journalists in the U.S. disagree with this traditional notion of how journalism is supposed to work and think, perversely, that the profession is actually about serving the powerful, which allows for greater access and notoriety. Journalists are celebrities now. The scrappy, intrepid journalist, relentlessly skeptical of powerful interests, is a notion that has almost become quaint. There are, of course, exceptions to this, like Matt Taibbi, Michael Hastings, and Jeremy Scahill, but they do their work on the periphery of the mainstream and will never be regulars on the Georgetown cocktail circuit.
Ron Fournier of National Journal is a paradigmatic example of the modern political journalist. He reveres the politicians he covers and openly cheers for them to succeed. A 2008 email exchange between him and Karl Rove about how great members of the U.S. military are, released as part of a congressional report, revealed that Fournier encouraged Rove to "keep up the good fight," whatever that means. One recent column of Fournier's was titled "Pray for Our President." He can regularly be found on Twitter yearning for "leadership" from "my leaders." Fournier appears to lack even a shred of self-awareness about how this instinctive deference to power runs directly counter to his mandate as a journalist.
In Fournier's column on George W. Bush, though, published last week and titled "Go Ahead, Admit It: George W. Bush Is a Good Man," he takes the reverence he so fervently feels for his leaders to entirely new levels.
It begins with what is supposed to be a touching story about how sincerely appreciative President Bush was when, at a May 2002 news conference in Germany, Fournier and other members of the traveling press corps rose out of their seats when Bush walked into their room - "when the president entered our presence," as Fournier puts it without any embarrassment - in contrast to the "snickering" German press corps, who had the nerve to remain seated in the presence of the Dear Leader. Bush subsequently wrote a thank-you note, which Fourier proudly kept; he "dug it out" this week "while contemplating" the opening of the Bush presidential library.
Having established his premise - George W. Bush is a Good Man - Fournier quickly gets the messy stuff, like Hurricane Katrina and lies about weapons of mass destruction, out of the way, announcing that his only intention here is to "take a few paragraphs to discuss something that gets less attention from the White House press corps – the essential humanity and decency of our presidents."
Those members of the White House press corps, such ingrates, never taking the time to properly appreciate the moral greatness of their leaders. Sure, Bush's war of aggression in Iraq might have killed more than 100,000 civilians and caused levels of infant mortality, cancer, and leukemia in Iraq that exceed those reported in Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped, but those arguments are so 2005, and now it's time to celebrate "the essential humanity and decency" of Bush, indeed of all our great leaders.
Fournier goes on to praise Bush for such colossal acts of goodness as arriving to meetings on time and requiring his staff to wear jackets in the Oval Office. Bush also, Fournier reminds us, visited troops who were wounded in the wars he launched, as did Obama and Clinton, "in private and for hours at a time." Do you feel sufficient awe?
Fournier teases us with "many stories about the basic decency" of all our recent presidents; limitations of space, sadly, preclude sharing all of them in one column. He then regretfully accepts that he is "the worst offender" of this reprehensible practice of "demonizing presidents," before lamenting the fact that the "small acts of kindness" that presidents do "every day" receive "little or no public notice." He concedes that our presidents are "not perfect," decrees that it's perfectly okay to disagree with them on the issues, and closes by recalling the time Bill Clinton told him that presidents "don't check their humanity at the Oval Office door." QED.
This is truly a case study in sycophantic vapidity. It should be taught in journalism school as the exact antithesis of how to write about the powerful people one covers. Fournier completely ignores the victims of Bush's catastrophic policies, instead focusing on "small acts of kindness" that are so trivial that most people do them without even thinking. One would have to read Pravda's archives from the Stalinist era to encounter this kind of obsequiousness. Fournier, and others like him, though, are not living in a totalitarian state. They don't have to fear for their lives. They are willing servants of power. That's much worse.