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Inexact Justice?

Thursday, February 8, 2007

An honest man sent abroad to lie for his country – that’s a widely-used definition of “diplomat” from the Elizabethan English courtier, ambassador and poet Sir Henry Wotton. In recent days we’ve seen how closely it can also apply to government spokespersons – especially with the current Administration which, more than any since Richard Nixon’s presidency, treats the media as if they were "abroad" ... were indeed alien, even enemy territory.

The Lewis “Scooter” Libby perjury and obstruction trial, especially with ex-presidential flack Ari Fleischer and his vice-presidential equivalent Cathie Martin taking the witness-stand, has highlighted just "how the sausage gets made" inside the White House media manipulation factory – to borrow several Washington commentators’ ugly but apt image. (I speak with some authority; I did once work in a sausage factory - very briefly and nauseously.)

But how much more sharply has the duplicitous work expected of a government hack been exposed this week, while the machine was rolling out, and desperately spinning, George W Bush’s $2.9 trillion budget.

The approximately $200 billion devoted to the disastrous military misadventure in Iraq has understandably gained the lion’s share of media attention, but the Justice Department’s allocation of $1.2 billion in federal funding to states and local jurisdictions also cries out for journalists’ scrutiny. This figure represents no real growth since the last budget, and in these times of more than 3% annual inflation that of course means a cut in practical terms.

In specifics, it means that no funds are any longer devoted to drugs courts, mentally-ill offender programs, or prison rape prevention programs – just to itemize a few. And federal support for local community policing - which under Bill Clinton reached a peak of $1.5 billion - is being cut down to just $32 million, following on previous Bush Administration reductions.

But Justice’s designated voice on the issue, Will Moschella has been wheeled out to claim that none of this means actual cuts. He has told reporters that money is being held in a “consolidated” fund from which the affected programs will have to compete for a share. And with the straight face he is presumably paid for, he claimed “Competition for these scarce resources should be viewed as a step in the right direction”.  And about the community policing program in particular, he has claimed it “was never intended to last forever”.

It wasn’t? Hundreds of thousands of local law enforcement officers across the country – not to speak of local community councils that liaise with police precinct houses – recall that the program was meant to be a continuing mainstay of neighborhood policing.

I fear Moschella may be guilty of something which, in the properly constrained language of the people’s government (at least in my home country’s so-called “Mother of Parliaments” where it is terribly bad form to accuse any “honorable gentleman” of lying) Sir Winston Churchill once carefully described as a “terminological inexactitude”.

Incidentally, I’m sure this has nothing to do with avoiding questions about inexactitudes, but Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez has a publicly-advertised phone number, which I called while reporting for this column, only to encounter this recorded message: “The mailbox … is full. To disconnect, press 1”.


THE GODS OF TELEVISION CAN BE AS PUNITIVE as those of Ancient Greece. Last week The Discovery Networks’ president Billy Campbell boldly brought something rather different to a company sales conference in Florida - a survivor from the famous Andes plane crash of 1972 recounting his ordeal. The idea was to enthuse network staffers with the spirit of perseverance in the face of all challenges.

Such may be the general notion that some people might associate with those extraordinary Latin American survivors, but for me – and maybe for you – the specific thought that I admit jumps more immediately to mind is … eating other humans. That, after all, is essentially how they survived.

(I have to recall that my colleague John Fielding, while still at the British network ITV where we both worked before he went on to his transatlantic award-winning productions at ABC and CNN, obtained an exclusive interview with this group, not long after their crash. One condition imposed by their handlers - their European publishers, I believe - was that we should not bring up the subject of cannibalism. Fielding is rightly remembered in London’s journalistic fraternity for reacting to his interviewees' descriptions of eking out a meager supply of chocolate by asking simply: “What happened when the chocolate ran out?”)

Billy Campbell may see no irony in this but within days of his Florida booster-session, he and four of his senior team were turned on and chopped off by Discovery’s topmost executive, chairman John Hendricks, who eliminated Campbell’s post and is restructuring the others. Thus Hendricks adds to his already ravenous reputation among the carnivores of cable TV.