Gotham Diary:
The Real Scandal
9 February 2015
Grey, cold Mondays are bad enough, but it’s harder than usual to get through this one because of the Brian Williams scandal. I mean the totality of the scandal, its very existence, not just the fact, as it seems to be, that the news anchor told a lie about his experience in Iraq. That is very bad, of course, but what’s a lot worse is NBC’s failure to deal with that lie, of which it was aware a year ago. It was left to servicemen to make a fuss, which they did at Facebook. The latest move is Mr Williams’s voluntary withdrawal from the public eye, but I doubt very much that it will have been the last one. I doubt that I should have paid attention to any of this if it had not been for David Carr’s column about the matter, in this morning’s Times. It wasn’t what Carr had to say about Mr Williams that bothered me; it was his peroration.
We want our anchors to be both good at reading the news and also pretending to be in the middle of it. That’s why, when the forces of man or Mother Nature whip up chaos, both broadcast and cable news outlets are compelled to ship the whole heaving apparatus to far-flung parts of the globe, with an anchor as the flag bearer.
We want our anchors to be everywhere, to be impossibly famous, globe-trotting, hilarious, down-to-earth, and above all, trustworthy. It’s a job description that no one can match.
This strikes the same note of moral bankruptcy that Carr hammers whenever he comes up against a tough call. Rather than salute the military — “The soldiers who ended up in harm’s way and survived that day are calling him out because their moral code requires it” — Carr ought to emulate it, and do his duty, which is to exercise judgment about media matters. Instead of breast-beating, instead of repenting that we ask the impossible of our news anchors — I certainly don’t; I ignore them altogether — Carr ought to be making suggestions about how we can change our lives and stop fueling a system that inevitably produces Brian Williams scandals.
Sixty years of television have taught us a few things about what it can and cannot do. It can show us things but it cannot explain them. It can share eloquent, but hardly objective, film clips of events as they occur, but it is absolutely impotent when it comes to official responses. All it can provide on that front is what officials wish it to provide. Discussion, negotiation, decision-making — these cannot be broadcast, because they are both incomprehensible and tedious.
A medium that can show what’s wrong with the world but that can’t show what anyone is actually doing about it is bound to generate a climate of cynicism, especially given the lingering aura of civic duty that still clings to the act of “watching the news.” Compounding this cynicism is the passivity inherent in all broadcast systems, which work in one direction only. Television news shows, skewed brainlessly toward the visual, quietly persuade their viewers that there is nothing to be done by people on their side of the camera.
Maureen Dowd wrote about the scandal yesterday, and her column brought me up to speed. It also far outstripped David Carr’s.
Although there was much chatter about the “revered” anchor and the “moral authority” of the networks, does anyone really feel that way anymore? Frothy morning shows long ago became the more important anchoring real estate, garnering more revenue and subsidizing the news division. One anchor exerted moral authority once and that was Walter Cronkite, because he risked his career to go on TV and tell the truth about the fact that we were losing the Vietnam War.
Dowd points out that the comedy shows have become more serious about the news than the network news departments. It is obvious to everyone that “the evening news” has become a decadent, meaningless ritual, incapable of informing a segment of the public that prefers entertainment to information — the same segment that watches the news. Television news in the age of the Internet is a civil toxin, a drug that metabolizes real life into nursery tales.
Walter Cronkite was indeed a man of substance. It is obvious that a replacement has never been sought. Brian Williams doesn’t deserve to be in the news, and the very fact that he is in the news is the indictment precisely.
***
Last night, I made jarrets de veau — veal shanks, or osso buco without the tomatoes. Kathleen and our dinner guest thought that it was great, but I was very dissatisfied. The meat hadn’t been cooked enough, and wasn’t, as I like it to be, falling off the bone. It hadn’t been cooked enough because it was still partially frozen when I started cooking. I had pulled the meat out of the freezer the night before, and stuffed it into the refrigerator; I ought to have taken it out of the fridge and put it on the counter when I made brunch yesterday. I also ought to have prepped it as soon as I came home from the store. I ought to have coated the shanks in olive oil and sprinkled them with an herb or two, and then wrapped them back up in the butcher paper and stored them in the refrigerator for a day or two before freezing them.
Ideally, I shouldn’t have to freeze them; I shouldn’t have had to buy them ahead of time. Ideally, all cuts of meat would be available at my favorite market every day, and, ideally, my favorite market would be across the street, where Fairway is, and not down on 79th Street. Ideally, the weather would be fine for a stroll instead of crushingly unpleasant. Ideally, I shouldn’t have to rely on my developing winter rhythm, which sends me down to Agata & Valentina every Monday with little or no idea of the cooking that I’ll be doing during the week. Hence the need to prep.
Last night’s first course was more successful, if only because I liked it as much as the ladies seemed to. It was a salad of fresh corn and chopped shrimp, tossed in olive oil and oregano before being sautéed togther, and sliced roast beets, which I tossed into the pan at the last minute. (I also tossed in some quartered cherry tomatoes, but they contributed nothing to the dish and will be omitted in future.) This continues my experiments with adding beets to an already established combination of shellfish and corn.
They say that Whole Foods will be opening next week, just around the corner, on Third and 87th. I have never been to a branch of Whole Foods, and I’m not sure that I’ll like it, or like it any better than the wildly expensive Eli’s. But I pray that it will ease up the crush at Fairway.