The Chris Moeller Archives

Dateline: Newhall

My hometown of Newhall (est. population 976) in Benton County, Iowa will be featured in Tuesday's edition of the New York Times. Reporter Susan Saulny spoke at length with local farmer Dave Timmerman about the flooding effect on the area's corn and soybean crop. The story goes to show that even the flooding of the smallest tributaries across the state, like Newhall's Wildcat Creek, which you won't find registered in your home's road atlas, will be contributing to the limited crop outputs this year. Saulny describes Timmerman as "an optimist at heart and a pragmatist with German roots." Aren't we all?

My favorite line-- "...Under the wide skies of Benton County, an idyllic landscape that could rival a movie set with its picture-perfect backdrops of big red barns..." I seem to recall many more big white barns than red ones in the area, but that's parsing things. The Times botched that whole WMD thing in Iraq, but they got this one right.

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This AP photo is getting a lot of attention today. It's on the websites of both The Des Moines Register and Cedar Rapids Gazette. What are your thoughts? Trigger-happy poe-lee-cin' or justified security of the flooded areas? Of course none of us can be completely sure if we weren't physically there, but I vote 'justified' if the idea is to protect these access checkpoints.

Already an energy company employee fell through an open manhole cover in shallow water in Cedar Rapids, and this would become a larger issue than just one man and his property if contamination, natural gas, or chemicals come into play. It's one thing to blow up yourself or even your own home, but what then happens to the home next door if yours blows? The authorities are there to protect us all. If it's a more helpful way of looking at it, think of it as the floodwaters temporarily obscuring the property lines.

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NBC's Tim Russert, who died Friday, seemed like a perfectly nice guy, but I can't join in the chorus of praise for his work as Sunday morning moderator. The fact that Beltway insiders considered Russert so publicly and so universally to be the toughest of the political interviewers only worsened the impact on the electorate's level of misinformation when his "Meet the Press" product failed to deliver.

We live in an era in which politicians and their hacks are allowed to steamroll the traditional media, which is supposed to be our guardian by de-spinning the rather sophisticated bullshit spun out of each political camp on a daily basis. It's not even a fair fight at this point. Russert's lowest point professionally had to have been the Scooter Libby trial when Dick Cheney's communications director, Cathie Martin, testified that going on the journalist's show "was a tactic we often used. It's our best format."

Russert was frequently and expertly promoted by NBC as "a former prosecutor" and that came across distinctly in his style, but the format flaw of "Meet the Press" that ultimately compromised everything else was that Russert had to continue to reinforce the status quo of Washington to demonstrate for the television audience that he was the most daunting inquisitor therein. We were given constant reminders and implications that Russert was a blue-collar kid from Buffalo that had made it into "the club," but the idea all along should have been to stay the hell out of the club.

In Esquire in 2004, Tom Carson wrote:

(O)ne reason Russert never makes the powers that be squirm, except individually, is that he's refereeing a game whose rules he's eager to endorse, playing a time-honored role in Washington media culture. A decade or so ago, Ted Koppel was the Daunting Guy. In the eighties, it was Sam Donaldson, a sheep in wolf's clothing if ever there was one. And back when Nixon walked the earth, believe it or not, Dan Rather was supposed to be the toughie. This isn't exactly a list of angry villagers. It's a roster of careerists who've all known that despite the appearance of adversarial probing, the Daunting Guy's job is essentially ritualistic--not that far removed, independence-wise, from being Louis XIV's confessor. Like his predecessors, Russert challenges authority only to the exact extent that the Beltway-insider consensus has agreed that challenge is permissible. That's why he's more useful as a barometer than a scourge.

Regular "Meet the Press" viewers like myself were subjected time and time again, week after week, to the increasingly antiquated and irrelevant punditry of the likes of Washington insiders and Russert pallies James Carville, Mary Matalin, and Bob Shrum. Such segments would even routinely end with warm updates or references to the participants' children, advertising that the dinner party would thus continue even after the cameras stopped rolling. The fossilized remains of David Broder and William Safire were still getting carted onto the MIP set once or more per month to offer their keen insights on the stories of the day even after more than 600 "Meet the Press" appearances between them. The mood was always lighter than air, as if as an important reminder to the viewing public that Democrats and Republicans in Washington can all get along in spite of their differences.

Was there any politician that was afraid of going on "Meet the Press" during the time that Russert served as moderator and chief editor of the broadcast? Like any other discussion show in the traditional television medium, the topics were more often focused on the horse-racing of politics rather than on the substance of policy, and politicians were still evaluated more for their political skills than for their vision. The time of the man's death may not be the ideal time to point out these perceived flaws, but the man was so well-esteemed in our nation's capitol and his passing has elicited such outsized praise for his very public legacy that they can't be passed over. Journalistic ideas are constantly being shaped, in particular when journalists and their craft are cast into their own bright spotlight, and like the persons and subjects they investigate, we should demand a full accounting.

posted by CM @ 4:37 PM