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The Report -- or What-You-Will

Thursday, September 6, 2007

We all use the same word. Journalism, government, academic study and – dare I say it – market research … all these ostensibly differing fields of endeavor employ that neutral-sounding label “report” to describe a basic building-block of our work. We’ll commission a report – and all too often if we don’t like it we’ll commission another, more to our liking.

The blindered cherry-picking and selective Mix’n’Matching of gathered evidence that often goes on in newsrooms, political offices whether square or oval, think-tanks and boardrooms would sometimes boggle the mind of an outsider. 

 

In journalism, such selectivity (albeit taken to a megalomaniac extreme) is attributed to the New York Morning Journal at the 19th-20th turn of the century, and especially its owner-publisher William Randolph Hearst in his deep disappointment with Frederic Remington, then his hapless man-in-the-field in Latin America. Remington couldn’t deliver the kind of stirring war coverage required, indeed couldn’t see evidence of any conflict at all. Hearst’s reputed response - “You supply the pictures. I’ll supply the war” - has passed into media legend, in large part due to Orson Welles parlaying it, somewhat paraphrased, into a scene in Citizen Kane.

 

Continuing the Iraq war seems to take a plethora of reports. George W Bush commissioned from General David Petraeus (pictured above) and Ambassador Ryan Crocker the now intriguingly nicknamed Pet-Crock Report (coinage by the ever-inventive former Richard Nixon speechwriter, and now studious “language maven” William Safire).

 

But this report business is all a bit - perhaps deliberately - confusing. It was formally Congress that commissioned the President to provide the report by this month, and he in turn asked the general and the ambassador to work on it, “reporting” to him, of course. In the meantime, however, both Bush’s men-in-the-field will travel to Washington and give evidence on Capitol Hill next week. Strictly speaking, the final official report to Congress should be called the Bush Report … but let’s stick with “Pet-Crock” for the sake of discussion.

 

The Administration media machine’s stratagem has been to dangle Pet-Crock, along with warnings not to prejudge it but instead wait for its conclusions, as a way to dampen or divert full consideration of successive efforts at objective assessment. There have been, for instance, the National Intelligence Estimate in August which painted a chillingly bleak security picture, and this week’s Government Accountability Office report concluding that only three out of eighteen so-called “benchmarks” of both political and military progress have been achieved in Iraq. Benchmarks, by the way, that were originally laid down by the White House, not by Congress.

 

And now there's today's contribution from the 20-member independent panel set up by Congress and led by retired Marine commander General James Jones, which predicts at least another 18 months before Iraqi security forces can take charge in their own country, and devotes its most scathing findings to the "incapable" national police.

 

Offered such a spread of reports (and add to them all the individual members of Congress who’ve been on their own "fact-finding” tours) policy-makers can now, in one more example of an old DC game, pick and choose what elements they want from a variety of sources to bolster just about any argument for what to do or not do about Iraq.

 

But the almost screamingly obvious truth is that the man who calls himself "The Decider", while telling all of us to not jump to any conclusion yet ("Wait for Petraeus"), has firmly made his mind up. Just use this report to kick the matter down the road aways … and somebody else (after November 2008) will have to deal with it. Very decisive indeed.

 

 

 

NICE TO SEE THAT MICHAEL PALIN HAS BEEN IN NEW YORK. That most affable, if manic, member of Monty Python’s Flying Circus is promoting his new book, and another TV travel series coming soon to American screens.

 

The book is in fact a journal, Diaries 1969-1979 (from the Thomas Dunne imprint of St Martin’s Press) covering the Pythons’ heyday. It’s hilarious, revealing, and touching by turns.

 

Much of it is concerned with life on the road for the Pythons, who toured more than you might think, and with life in hotels especially. One egregious establishment, a certain Gleneagles Hotel in the seedy coastal English town of Torquay was run by a man so appallingly crazy and controlling that most of the team checked out. Not John Cleese, though. He masochistically stayed on, and years later based the transcendent Fawlty Towers series with its self-righteous, quite barking Basil Fawlty, on his Torquay experience.

 

By Palin’s account most of their hotel stays were fun, especially the dining-room meals … but I carry a different recollection. I was part of the press gang that covered the Lincoln Pop Festival, an even windier and wet British successor in 1972 to upstate New York’s Woodstock Festival. The Pythons were there - odd though it may seem - doing what Palin calls “our first foray into mass cabaret”, in front of 50,000 sodden music fans. At dinner I remember they all looked terribly nervous, not least about being in a room full of reporters – maybe they felt they were expected to be funny while they ate.

 

 

I'VE HAD LITTLE TASTE FOR THE REPULSIVE DIANA-FEST that’s gripped the media a decade after the Princess was killed. But I have my keen-eyed wife Melissa Bellinelli to thank (unlike me, she's not a Brit) for pointing out how helpfully Tina Brown, in her book The Diana Chronicles (from Doubleday), sets the British scene on the eve of that disturbed young woman's public emergence; to do so the author cites the Monty Python phenomenon.

 

Brown alludes to Britain’s degeneration into self-hatred during the 1970s as a "sarcastic embracing of national decline". And she goes on with some skillfull broadbrushing:

 

"Everything about England increasingly seemed a joke, a disaster, a cock-up. That's why we all loved Monty Python's Flying Circus, with its "Upper Class Twit of the Year" contests, its wheedling shopkeepers and tacky game-show hosts and its "Ministry of Silly Walks" (pictured above right) ... Basil Fawlty perfectly nailed the cultural mood: a gigantic man, threatening but ineffectual, full of the postures and shibboleths of Empire, its pompous diction, manners and attitudes - and always betrayed by them. He was typical of the times because he was failing and furious."

 

I feel that's telling it like it was!

 

Now, though, it's another time, and another country.