When something like the downing of the Malaysian airliner or the release of the James Foley video happens, and the media switches on its magnification glass, sanity, let alone perspective, is difficult to maintain. For governments or individuals at the center of such frenzy, about the only hope is that something else will happen to change the story.
.. On Wednesday, the Gallup tracker showed that Obama’s approval rating had risen to forty-four per cent. “It’s certainly possible the president will get a bump from this and it looks like it may be happening because his rating is a bit higher than we’ve seen before,” Gallup’s Jeff Jones told the Fiscal Times. .. I should stress again that I am not suggesting that President Obama consciously responded to the polls by deciding to expand the campaign against ISIS. He is, though, operating in an environment that rewards certain actions and punishes others.
How Gary Hart’s Downfall Forever Changed American Politics
Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were adulterers, before and during their presidencies, and we can safely assume they had plenty of company. In his 1978 memoir, Theodore White, the most prolific and influential chronicler of presidential politics in the last half of the 20th century, wrote that he was “reasonably sure” that of all the candidates he had covered, only three — Harry Truman, George Romney and Jimmy Carter — hadn’t enjoyed the pleasure of “casual partners.” He and his colleagues considered those affairs irrelevant.
.. As America continued to debate the Equal Rights Amendment for women into the 1980s, younger liberals — the same permissive generation that ushered in the sexual revolution and free love — were suddenly apt to see adultery as a kind of political betrayal, and one that needed to be exposed.
.. And what made Woodward and Bernstein so iconic wasn’t proximity, but scandal. They had actually managed to take down a mendacious American president, and in doing so they came to symbolize the hope and heroism of a new generation.
It would be hard to overstate the impact this had, especially on younger reporters. If you were one of the new breed of middle-class, Ivy League-educated baby boomers who had decided to change the world through journalism, then there was simply no one you could want to become more than Woodward or Bernstein, which is to say, there was no greater calling than to expose the lies of a politician, no matter how inconsequential those lies might turn out to be or in how dark a place they might be lurking.
.. As long as it was Hart, and not The Herald, who set the whole thing in motion, then it was he and not they who suddenly moved the boundaries between private and political lives. They never had to grapple with the complex issues of why Hart was subject to a kind of invasive, personal scrutiny no major candidate before him had endured, or to consider where that shift in the political culture had led us.
..
If Nixon’s resignation created the character culture in American politics, then Hart’s undoing marked the moment when political reporters ceased to care about almost anything else. By the 1990s, the cardinal objective of all political journalism had shifted from a focus on agendas to a focus on narrow notions of character, from illuminating worldviews to exposing falsehoods. If post-Hart political journalism had a motto, it would be: “We know you’re a fraud somehow. Our job is to prove it.”
.. Maybe this made our media a sharper guardian of the public interest against liars and hypocrites. But it also made it hard for any thoughtful politician to offer arguments that might be considered nuanced or controversial. It drove a lot of potential candidates with complex ideas away from the process, and it made it easier for a lot of candidates who knew nothing about policy to breeze into national office, because there was no expectation that a candidate was going to say anything of substance anyway.
.. “Well, at the very least, George W. Bush wouldn’t have been president,” Hart said ruefully. This sounded a little narcissistic, but it was, in fact, a hard premise to refute. Had Hart bested George H. W. Bush in 1988, as he was well on his way to doing, it’s difficult to imagine that Bush’s aimless eldest son would have somehow ascended from nowhere to become governor of Texas and then president within 12 years’ time.
“And we wouldn’t have invaded Iraq,” Hart went on. “And a lot of people would be alive who are dead.” A brief silence surrounded us. Hart sighed loudly, as if literally deflating. “You have to live with that, you know?”
Line by Line, E-Books Turn Poet-Friendly
When John Ashbery, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, first learned that the digital editions of his poetry looked nothing like the print version, he was stunned. There were no line breaks, and the stanzas had been jammed together into a block of text that looked like prose. The careful architecture of his poems had been leveled.
.. “The impact of a poem very often comes down to line breaks, which publishers of poetry often don’t seem to find as important as the people who write the poems.”
Save Footnotes
But annotation isn’t an invention of modern scholarship. The Hebrew Bible is, famously, a text that comments on itself, weaving elaborations of its own meaning into its various iterations. Grafton touts the French philosopher Pierre Bayle, whose “Historical and Critical Dictionary,” published in the sixteen-nineties, sometimes used its explosion of footnotes as an intricate and sophisticated form of argument, as an early virtuoso of the form. Noting is old. Yet it’s precisely because of its oldness that, for books, back matter is important—especially given the advent of new reading technologies.
.. At print magazines such as The New Yorker, every word of every sentence is checked (and, where necessary, cross-checked) against original sources, for accuracy and context; if an error somehow slips through the net, it is corrected, and the change is announced. Nonfiction books almost never get such scrutiny, however, so notes are a crucial mark of intellectual good faith.
.. Consider a writer like the nineteenth-century clergyman John Hodgson, whose multipart “A History of Northumberland” included a footnote running well over a hundred pages.