Poetry eulogy proves editors aren't obsolete

Call it the case of the edited blog. In the print version of The Washington Post, there was a sober meditation on the uses and popularity of poetry, in the paper's appropriately named blog site, Compost, there was a rant.

Obviously, the blog was the brain fart of one Alexandra Petri. This young woman who professes omniscience after all of three years out of Harvard (two years less than my younger son, a fellow former Cantabrigidian), rose (descended?) in 2010 from Post intern to Post blogger. I see her byline occasionally on the op-ed page when even Eugene Robinson has nothing left to say.

Her piece in this morning's printed paper, headlined "Ode to an Obsolete Art," offered an uncharacteristically humble and sober outtake from the fact of a poem being read at the second Obama inauguration.

She calls poetry "a field that may well be obsolete." Lest one take her for her usual smart-ass self, she then declares

I say this lovingly as a member of the print media. If poetry is dead, we are in the next ward wheezing noisily.
But sometimes I worry about poetry.

I was delighted, as a journalist of more than three decades, to see that she seems to be maturing.

Reviewing the literary form's history she makes obligatory stops by Homer and Shelley. Predictably, she completely elides past the ancient rhyming and metered forms as mnemonic artifacts in a world in which most history was oral.

I would give you a link, but the moribund Post forces you to sign in to see the printed paper online (how's that for not getting it?). I just couldn't bother.

But wait!

Online, in the Compost site I found not one but two pieces, the first "Is Poetry dead?" Here is an unedited version of what saw print. Colorful, lazy and flatulently narcissistic as all blogs are (this is not journalism, folks!)

Here is the Alexandra Petri her Post patron fell in love with, all-knowing and arrogant as ever ...

Still I think there is a question to be asked. You can tell that a medium is still vital by posing the question: Can it change anything?
Can a poem still change anything?

You'll also find that the millions who spend their time commenting on newspaper websites had already given her the just recompense by the time the printed piece appeared. In her follow-up blog post ('Poetry is not dead,' says poetry), she sheepily warns that saying "poetry is dead" will result in zealots "sonetting" on one's lawn.

Petri's follow-up is a semi-chastised, quirkily funny blogiad, fine as far as it goes, but still not journalism.

The moral of the story?

Clearly, editors aren't obsolete. They can turn an online rant into a thoughtful printed piece. Not quite the lesson she intended, yet true.

A headline's echo of 1963

For years grizzled old journalists bored cub reporters with the tale of the wire correspondent who became nearly incoherent one November Friday afternoon in Dallas. Yesterday, the French paper Le Monde offered an echo of what happens when the media megaphone tries to react to unexpected tragedy.

You could find it in the feed*  hours later.

As news flashed around the world of the shooting of Rep Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz), some editor in Paris stuck with the Saturday morning shift assumed the worst and dashed off this headline for the Web:

Une parlementaire américaine tuée dans une fusillade

Translation — An American legislator killed amid gunfire.

Indeed, the first graf of the initial story said: Une parlementaire américaine et six autres personnes ont été tuées samedi dans l'Arizona par un tireur qui a ouvert le feu au cours d'un meeting. (U.S. congresswoman and six others were killed Saturday in Arizona by a gunman who opened fire during a rally.)

It's an easy mistake to make. Indeed, that was initial assumption. Who survives a gunshot to the head?

Anyone who has ever been stuck in the middle of breaking news knows the initial cacophony right after a startling, shocking and unexpected event. I witnessed the oh-so-macho George W. Bush White House employees skitter out in what was an obvious panic attack in the first hour of the Sept. 11, 2001, events. Even chicken hawk Georgie Porgie himself scrambled to a bunker in Nebraska.

Of course, some people simply act in disregard of their own well-being. Such as the now-dubbed "hero intern" Daniel Hernandez whose quick moves essentially saved Gifford's life.

In journalism, such adrenalin-pumped responses are not uncommon among war correspondents. One reporter whose family I knew got himself blown up as he tinkered in fascination with an improvised Viet Cong grenade.

Then there's the surviving film by a Swedish-Argentine video journalist Leonardo Henrichsen in Santiago, Chile, during the Pinochet 1973 coup. He was manning the camera.

You see the images keeps rolling as soldiers approach to shut his filming (for Swedish television), it tumbles and shows the lens-eye's last skaky views, then it goes black. Henrichsen was killed on the spot.

Now if you click on LeMonde's feed on the Gifford shooting you still get the dramatic, but more accurate

Etats-Unis : une députée entre la vie et la mort après une fusillade

Translation — United States: a congresswoman between life and death after a fusillade.

By the Orwellian magic of the Web, the newspaper goof never happened. Except it did.

---

* http://www.lemonde.fr/ameriques/article/2011/01/08/une-parlementaire-americaine-tuee-dans-une-fusillade_1463036_3222.html#xtor=RSS-3208

Tonto TV on Mundovision

My recent encounter with an NPR reporter's misuse of the image of a telenovela made me think of the shudders U.S. Spanish TV in general induces in me, given its obsessive pandering to the lowest common denominator among the least educated rural immigrants in this country. Bad enough that they have that crap in "Latin" America!

Telemundo and Univision, two Spanish-language television networks in the United States, broadcast South American telenovelas to distract their mostly female, low-skilled, low-wage daytime audience from the notion of being accorded respect with better pay and a healthier balancing of work and family demands -- and immigration reform.

Their other shows feature Chaliapin-bass announcers that scream out "SAAAAAAAAAbado!" like late-night Anglo TV fire sales and fake blondes in bikinis coochy cooing their buttocks and breasts at the audience. Ay, mamita! 

Mama eu queiro, mama eu queiro, mama eu queiro mamar ...

And when it's not year-round carnival, there's always sports: GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL!!!!!

The world of Spanish-language mass media entertainment rarely departs from swimsuits, "fútbol," and absurdly maudlin dramas with romance and a pastiche of superstitions and magical thinking. It's the equivalent of the minstrel show, only put on by Hispanics with no shame.

Every once in a while I stop while channel surfing, try to give it the umpteenth chance, but my brain explodes inside my head within three minutes.

Forget religion. Tonto* TV is the modern opium of the masses.

---

*Tonto: Spanish for "stupid" or "dumb," hence the insult that The Lone Ranger represented to American Indians. (Yes, they prefer "Indians" these days.)

Telenovelas and the NPR Reporter

Just Thursday morning, I  heard a reporter on National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" comparing the then-upcoming conference between President Obama and the Republicans on health reform to a "Latin telenovela." In case listeners didn't know what a telenovela is, he added, "you know, one of Latin American those soap operas that go on for hours and hours."

I get it. We're all supposed to laugh. Imagine Barack Obama and John Boehner (R-Ohio) going on like those crazy "Latins" sitting in the shade in their Mexican "sombreros" and going on endlessly about nothing while sipping their tequila! Ha, ha, ha!

You know, of course, that all Hispanics wear mariachi band outfits, right? In addition, they have no sense of time -- not like punctual, lickety-spit Anglos -- and can't use a pithy Anglo-Saxon phrase where a guitar-accompanied serenade can be had.

Right, Mr. NPR reporter? Ha, ha, ha!!!

Oh, but wait! I am no fan of telenovelas, yet even I know that they keep to their appointed half-hour or hour schedules. They don't go on continuously for "hours and hours" like the debatefest at the White House on health reform.

That's Anglo politicians, Mr. NPR reporter. Not Hispanics in telenovelas.

What's long about telenovelas and Anglo soap-operas alike is that they have interminable, implausible plots that go on for years over thousands of episodes.

The NPR reporter obviously merged in his mind the long plots with the stereotypes about Hispanics -- not "Latins," unless you want to count Andrew Cuomo as one. Doesn't NPR have editors capable of deleting a simile that not only runs against the facts, but is subtly racist?

I understand you didn't mean to offend anyone, Mr. NPR reporter. You wanted to show off that you are so culturally broadminded that you know the word "telenovela."

Earthquakes and Coups

The U.S. press has always dealt with countries south of the Rio Grande whenever generals march into palaces or Mother Nature throws a temper tantrum. Never mind the ongoing social and economic dramas in between.

This is how we find ourselves hearing about Haiti's "unpreparedness," as if it were New Orleans or some part of Ohio, and not the most wretched, poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, the first self-governing majority black country in the new World, and the one most abused, occupied and exploited by the United States.

The earthquake is natural, but the ensuing human disaster is man-made.

But you won't hear the U.S. mass media delve into the root causes of misery. After all, Haiti vanished from the front pages and television bulletins since the mid-1990s, as it will vanish once again in a few weeks, the minute U.S. readers and viewers get "compassion fatigue" and turn to another channel or turn the page.

Don't believe me? Recall another Latin American country whose name starts with an H. In 1998 Americans were aghast at the devastation of Hurricane Mitch in this country, but the nation vanished from the U.S. radar screen until in 2009 an elected president was overthrown.

Give up? Honduras.

Had Honduran poverty been eliminated in 1999? Were all the proceeds of the aid evenly distributed according to need, or did the lion's share of any money go to the top?

It doesn't matter. U.S. news consumers couldn't have cared less, so why should editors, reporters and TV twinkies.

The Write-Right Rite

This week I banged out a story late in the day, tired and rubbing against deadline, and it came back from the copy editor without a scratch. "Perfect," she said. I realized then that I had become one of the geezer reporters of yore.

I'm talking about the days in which newsroom afternoons meant work in a deafening din of manual typewriter keys hitting on the platen behind the paper, mixed in with the "ding!" of carriages returning. When I started working, such places existed.

Every newsroom had some legendary grizzled man who arrived five minutes before deadline with a cigar in his mouth and the smell of gin on his breath, sat at his desk and banged out his requisite 700 to 1,500 words without ever having to x-out anything. His story was ready to print with a minute to spare.

Of course, the rest of us -- in particular, me -- had to compose ploddingly, cross out words, replace entire pages, curse and turn out something that would go through several eyes and red pencils before it was printed.

All that is gone. The Washington Post's closing of news bureaus in several cities and The Washington Times' abandonment of paid subscriptions augur the demise of newspapers in the nation's capital, where I live.

Yet the truly ominous writing on the wall is for standards of writing and, more broadly, language. In sum, the editorial process.

Of course, fact-checking arguably went out the window not long after Watergate in the major press.

Remember the lawsuit over entirely made up quotes in no less than The New Yorker? Iran-Contra, uncovered by small and independent publications, happened because no one in the major media was actually reporting news. The self-important news peacocks in the White House and State Department briefing rooms were all transcribing press releases.

Now the guardians of language are being tossed out. To cut costs, the Post and many other papers have eliminated copy editors, the people who fussed at punctuation, style and more grammatical rules than you ever knew existed.

These people turned every wannabe-novelist's inchoate thoughts into clear and precise statements that anyone with a modicum of education -- papers used to aim for 10th grade -- could understand. Now writing by people who can't tell the difference between "affect" and "effect" sees the light of day every day.

The news business has devolved to bad blogging that comes a day late on dead trees. No wonder it's sinking.

The Anti-soundbite and its Uses to Officials

Do all officials answer reporters questions these days with a questions? No.  But does it help those who do wiggle out of a tight spot? Sure. Why do they do that? Have I said they do?

Do you get my drift here or do I have to explain? Just in case, here goes an explanation.

To my knowledge, the anti-soundbite question was originated by one Donald Rumsfeld, Republican muckety muck and master obfuscator since 1962. Last seen as George W, Bush's secretary of defense. In that position one could see him at Pentagon press briefings responding to reporters' questions by asking himself a question.

Typically, the question was aimed at only a portion of the issue, the more convenient part. The answer, or non-answer, was usually a few words that lent themselves to multiple interpretations.

The advantage of this rhetorical device is that it up-ended the soundbite, which is a piece of speech taken from longer statement. In television and radio time is money and, in any case, the viewers' and listeners' attention has been trained to fit 30-second commercials.

Imagine the following broadcast:

President Lincoln at Gettysburg said yesterday that "The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here." Asked about this comment, following a battle involving close to 50,000 casualties, the CEO of War Widows of America called Lincoln's remarks "insensitive."

The quote would have been a soundbite. It's the exact words of Lincoln at Gettysburg. Not all the words, but the ones this particular reporter -- from an early version of Fox News? -- deemed "newsworthy."

Now imagine Lincoln at a Rumsfeldian briefing:

REPORTER -- Did our forefathers mean for this civil war to happen?

LINCOLN -- Well, now, son, did they bring forth a new nation four score and seven years ago? Yes. But did they conceive it in liberty? One would think so. Didn't they state in the Declaration of Independence that they believed it as self-evident that "all men are created equal"? Sure, but notice the word "men." Are women mentioned there? I don't think so.

PRESS POOL (all male): [laughter]

See how the anti-soundbite question pulverizes the sounbdbite. What words are you going to select to quote? You have the statements "Yes," "One would think so," "Sure, but notice the word 'men'," and "I don't think so." The rest were arguably questions, not answers.

Even in paraphrase, what did the Rumsfeldian Lincoln actually affirm? Only that a new nation had been brought forth four score and seven years ago. Not much of a story.

Yet listen to the next broadcast and watch how many times officials of all kinds pretend to answer questions using this device. Examine what is said and notice how little the official has committed himself to any opinion or position and how easily, if questioned further, he can weasel out.

Three Headlines on Ted Kennedy

No wonder folks are awash in Kennedy bathos. Washington Post Aug. 27 front page headline: "End of an American Epoch." Washington Times: "End of Camelot." New York Times: "Senator Kennedy, Battle Lost, Is Hailed as Leader." Respectively, self-referential pop history, Camelot amnesia and, finally, from the Gray Lady, a measured, dignified and even poetic banner that declined to canonize.

The important point made by the Times -- the real Times not the Moonie rag -- is that journalism is about what others say and do, not what journalists think. Ted Kennedy said a lot, but toting up his record, he accomplished extremely little, particularly if balanced against what he received.

It is appropriate to report that others -- mostly politicians desperate for a sound bite -- are the ones drooling about the younger Kennedy. Notice the absence of hard facts in all the praise? No? Well, The New York Times' headline reports it. Take note.

Walter Cronkite was a bore

Since when are people who read news on television deserving of posthumous panegyrics befitting a Nobel Prize winner? What did Cronkite do, other than deliver in the same flat bass the most trivial, intellectually deadened factoids, such as the alleged precise time President Kennedy died?

A trained monkey could have done better.

One of the reasons television is one of the worst sources of information is precisely because of individuals such as Cronkite, who devoted his life to perpetuating the stultifying deception that they were delivering news, when all they were doing was reading headlines.

It's the broadcast pretense of seriousness, conveyed merely through a particular ton of voice, that allowed millions to be deceived into voting, against their own best interests, for people who sounded and looked as smooth as Cronkite. It was Cronkite who taught Americans that TV form outweighs substance: how else could Ronald Reagan, a man who at best play acted the roles of governor and president, ever have been elected?

Reading is today a kindergarten skill. Reading clearly and audibly can be learned by the end of elementary school. A male bass voice develops in junior high school without any particular training. So, where's the achievement of using these abilities in front of a camera?

The Tabloidization of Michelle Obama

Just as Condoleezza Rice made a splash in Europe with her boots, MIchelle Obama is making a news with bare arms and -- gasp! the salts! -- hugging a queen. Obviously, Rice had fun amid her prevarications about Iraq and Obama decided to play with the hand she was dealt.

Does anyone remember what Rice, no dummy by any standard, had substantively to say and how she fell short of her oath of office? Has anyone remembered that Obama -- who did not run and was not elected -- is a lawyer with training and experience every bit as rigorous as her husband?

Why are people discussing Obama's looks and manners when the world is beyond the brink of disaster?

Perhaps it is that the powers that be, who own the "news" media, don't want anyone to be thinking, lest they realize how badly they have been shafted. Perhaps we are all too lazy or lobotomized to rub those two brain cells we've got left.

The G-20 meeting was important but essentially secret. Why was there no questioning of how come those democratically elected heads of governments were keeping secrets from their electorates?

We, the public, owe it to ourselves not to feed on lazy, tabloid journalism.

The Loser Goes to the Press

Details now leaking out suggest that, at the heart of the Tim Geithner-AIG bonus story, lies a political stratagem explained to me years ago by a master news manipulator when I was a very green journalist: never go to the press, unless you lose behind closed doors.

AIG paid the bonuses on Friday. News leaked out during the weekend, with The Washington Post apparently breaking the story. Now we know that Geithner was on the horn to New York all week trying to stop the bonuses.

Why not announce an outrage that was about to happen rather than a fait accompli? Because if you're a wheeler dealer you're most powerful behind closed doors, when you and those in the room are the only ones with the knowledge to act. Information is, after all, power.

If Geithner had gone public and pointed his finger, and à la Èmile Zola cried out "j'accuse," his power of persuasion over AIG would have vanished instantly. Naturally, once that power had been lost behind closed doors, Geithner -- and President Obama -- were free rend their garments in public.

This is how the power game is played. Reporters know to look for the disgruntled for their leaks. Never ask why the news was leaked, merely ask who the leaker was in order to understand what happened in a power struggle waged behind closed doors.

The Information-free Society

Recent irking experiences as a working journalist remind me of a problem I have watched developing to the point that it has become epidemic: nearly every institution has developed a myriad of ways to stonewall reporters and, partly as a result, almost all news publishing operations have come to offer thinner, more poorly verified factoids. It's reached a point that I wonder how the average person in the street finds out anything of significance.

This is not a matter of a loss of innocence. I have long instructed new reporters not to believe government officials if they say the sun is out without first going to a window to see for themselves. Government officials lie as a matter of practice; it must be in the manual: when in doubt, lie.

In my experience covering religion, I have learned that people in religious institutions lie even more egregiously, albeit more stupidly. Professionals of religion don't understand that they can get caught lying, especially if they lie in writing. Clerics think people will be buffaloed about anything they say, so long as they use the right mumbo-jumbo.

Corporations, however, are among the most secretive, most bureaucratic institutions when it comes to information. Since the Reagan era, the private sector's art of secrecy has permeated public discourse.

Even unions, whose officials were once the brashest, most quotable figures in American society, now have layer upon layer of public relations officials to hide just how little their members get for their dues and how much high-paid union executives are in collusion with their highly paid golfing partners in business.

Time to turn shine the third-degree lamp on journalism.

In the world of print journalism, it's no longer a secret that declining portions of the American get their news by reading -- a real loss for democracy. Indeed, we all now know that the majority of people under 30 get their first-hand news from a television program devoted to satire of news, Comedy Central's "The Daily Show."

Most people do not understand the difference between the information content of a written news story and a broadcast newsflash and the consequent effect of the public shift to broadcast news, let alone the effect of learning about something from a comedic version of the news.

Allow me to explain.

An efficient reader can scan about 1,000 words in just about the time it takes to read out loud 50. Because journalistic style writing is crafted to pack as many facts as possible in few words -- wire services typically do not accept lead sentences longer than 30 words -- written journalism has it all over broadcasting when it comes to conveying facts.

This is why print reporters have traditionally called TV reporters "twinkies" (blond on the outside, fluffy on the inside.) I will never forget the twinkie who launched a press conference with the momentous question, "How do you feel about the national unemployment rate?"

But that's not all.

The broadcast news industry, because its is an expensive medium, is controlled by an ever smaller number of investors and holding companies with little real interest in delivering information of actual value and meaning to watchers. If newspapers were reluctant to investigate advertisers, imagine the pressure for broadcasting.

At least one network, Fox, has become a purveyor of all the news conservatives want to hear. I would not object quite as much if there were a counterpart with progressive news.

In England, I learned while working there, the news business has always been explicitly ideological. There is even a job title for the person in charge of protecting the "line," the sub-editor, a creature who does not exist in the U.S newsrooms.

You pick up the London Times and you know you'll get the Tory story, while you pick up the Guardian and you'll read the Lefty take. British journalists have come to regard facts as somewhat of a nuisance and the British public muddles through as it always has.

My point is that broadcast news not only does not convey too many facts, increasingly it misinforms or disinforms.

"Disinformation" (dysinformatsya in Russian) is a Soviet term used in the art of espionage for deliberately conveying false information to an adversary. The Allies used the practice in World War II to mislead the Germans into thinking the invasion of continental Europe was taking place in a variety of sites other than Normandy.

Modern disinformation is more subtle.

In a recent Fox broadcast, for example, a Chris Wallace interviewer asked Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) about the alleged "conflict of interest" in heading the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee while investigating Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. When a clip of Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa) voicing the charge was shown, the word "SCANDAL" was blazoned across the screen.

(The almost complete transcript -- minus the broadcast banner -- is available here.)

In the same show Chris Wallace allowed Newton Leroy Gingrich, former right-wing bomb-thrower in the House of Representatives, to explain himself concerning his calling Spanish a "ghetto language." Wallace described that bit of racism as "something of a flap."

So, according to Fox "news," when a Democrat politician is involved in -- oh, surprise! -- politics it is a "scandal" calling for resignation; when a Southern right-wing white Anglo politician from the party known to have used the famous "Southern strategy" to gain the votes of white bigoted Americans denigrates than language of an ethnic minority, that's "something of a flap" and the politician is allowed ample time, with little interruption, to explain.

This is how we come to the point at which, between stonewalling news sources, a declining general readership press (I work in the specialized trade press, which also is in decline) and a corrupted general audience broadcast media, we are left with a few wire services and the Internet.

How good are these sources? Just last week ago, I watched Reuters blare to the world through the Internet the news headlined "Women's group to stop sponsoring workplace event," leading many newspapers in the Midwest to proclaim that Take Our Daughters and Sons To Work, celebrated April 26 this year, was coming to an end.

The actual story was that this was the 15th anniversary of the event. More importantly, this year sponsors (the Ms. Foundation) were asking parents and children to text message Congress in support of legislation mandating a minimum 7 days of annual sick leave for every U.S. employee. The minor organizational future news, with which Reuters chose to lead, was that the event would henceforth be run by another organization as it had taken on a life of its own.

Never mind that 35 million parents and children participated. Let's proclaim an ending to this.

Result: Reuters eviscerated a feminist event and pushed a major labor legislative battle to the bottom of its story. They even got a woman reporter to do it!

This is the sad, sad state of information in our society. How can we expect citizens to be able to see through the web of lies and deception of businesses, churches and government in these circumstances?

We have reached the information-free society.

No News Is Bad News

In a world without news there would be no common knowledge and no possibility of real democratic debate, yet that seems to be the Orwellian direction in which 21st century economics are taking all of us.

Indeed, one of the rarely sung stories of the Soviet Union's Glasnost is the rise of Argumenty i Facty, a Moscow-based weekly newspaper put together by activists to provide a source of facts that were then hard to find (read: hidden). This was, of course, in a society in which even a telephone directory was available only to those in the Party nomenklatura.

Today in the West, however, little political censorship is needed. I know: I have worked in the business for three decades. All the powers that be need to do is to lure masses to "infotainment" and "infomercials" and away from reading and critical thinking, then sit back and watch the marketplace do the rest. Since 2001, according to conservative estimates, as many as 75,000 jobs in journalism have disappeared in the United States alone.

Consider the following:

• The New York Times has lost 60 reporting jobs.
  
• The Washington Post is cutting 80 reporting positions.
  
• On March 14, the McClatchy Company, which owns The Sacramento Bee, bought out for $4 billion the Knight-Ridder newspapers, a chain of 32 newspapers including The Philadelphia Inquirer and the San Jose Mercury. The company plans to close 12.

The reason is easy to find. In the fateful year 2001, for the first time since 1954 circulation declined for publications in every single category except financial advisories. Newspapers have never recovered; the only publications that have come back modestly are niche magazines providing entertainment.

"Will we call this the year journalism in print began to die?" asks journalism.org's The State of the New Media 2006 (read the full report here).

You will be forgiven if you seize on the word "print" and say that you get your news online, or on TV. In fact, however, whatever hard news there is originates in print.

As the report I have just cited shows, the different in the kind of news you get from print and other sources, is not merely a matter of format, but of substance. Television, we all know, only conveys headlines. The Internet originates little or no hard fact, but masses and masses of rumor, innuendo and opinion (you're reading one).

The difference isn't merely the length of the material. It's the reliability and facticity. Newspapers usually get three or more sources for a story; other news outlets rely on considerably less, often second hand and unidentified, without much fact-checking.

There's also a difference is what is covered. Newspapers cover elections and government less than I would like, but TV hardly covers it substantively at all, concentrating instead on crime. And where is there critical and incisive coverage of big business, which influences our lives much more than crime or politics? Hardly anywhere at all.

If you wonder why all this is happening, think two words: the public. People don't read, therefore know less and less about the world around us. The consequences are dire.

Is it any wonder that the collapse of publications began in the first of the George W. Bush presidency, itself ushered in by voters who, inexplicably, could not make up their minds between Bush and Al Gore? Four years later the same thing repeated itself between Bush and Kerry.

To any of us armed with the facts, there was no question what the difference was -- and it was wide -- no matter which one we preferred. A squeaker between the erstwhile center-right Democratic senator Scoop Jackson and the liberal Republican New York governor Nelson Rockefeller might have made some sense: there would have been little choice.

Give Bush credit for hiding just how conservative he was in 2000 with codewords, nods and winks minted by Reaganite neocons. But by 2004, what American could rightfully claim that there was no information about Bush's desire to gut and bankrupt social programs to fund the Pentagon and its ancillary agencies, now fully owned subsidiaries of Halliburton, and prosecute clumsily the struggle against Al Qaeda and manufacturing a war out of whole cloth?

Only those Americans, the increasing majority, who don't read the news. That's why no news is bad news.