TALKING HEADS GO TO WAR
Looking for Insight, Coming Up Short

BY MICHAEL MASSING

The savage attacks of September 11 caused Americans from all walks to reevaluate their lives. From industry titans to mail clerks, baseball players to truck drivers, people resolved to rededicate themselves to higher purposes. Television's talking heads were no exception. With more than several thousand Americans dead and the Twin Towers turned to ash, their prurient obsession with Bill and Monica, Gary and Chandra, seemed a source of shame. In covering this perilous new era, they determined to do better, to become more serious and thoughtful. Have they?

Since September 11, I've spent countless hours in front of my TV, switching restlessly from channel to channel in search of news and enlightenment. And, in the first few days after the attack, I was impressed with -- even grateful for -- TV's performance. Stunned and terrified by the ferocity of the attacks, I, like so many other Americans, found in TV a source of not only information but also consolation. (A week after the attack, a friend told me of a nightmare she had in which Dan Rather was shot and her TV screen went black, causing her to awake in a panic.)

As the days passed, though, the challenge facing TV slowly changed, from helping the nation heal to helping it figure out how to respond. Marking the transition was George W. Bush's September 20 address to Congress. In it, the president essentially committed the United States not just to getting rid of Osama bin Laden but also to overthrowing the Taliban government. This raised some pressing questions. What would it take to oust that group? Who would take their place? What were the likely repercussions? How would the Islamic world react? Hungry for some insight, I tuned in to the post-speech commentators, a puree of journalists and pols. Alas, they seemed interested in only one thing: Bush's performance. On ABC, I saw Robert Torricelli, Rudolph Giuliani, Dianne Feinstein, and Evan Bayh -- all heaping praise on the president. Larry King had Alexander Haig and Sandy Berger, Fox had Kay Bailey Hutchison and (again) Evan Bayh, and Hardball had George Pataki and (again) Robert Torricelli. "I thought it was an eloquent, powerful speech," NBC's Andrea Mitchell told Hardball's Chris Matthews. "A terrific speech," Al Hunt said on The Capital Gang, "magnificently written, forcefully delivered." As for what to do about the Taliban, Afghanistan, and the broader Islamic world, no one bothered to ask.

My frustration deepened on Sunday morning. On the various talk shows, official Washington was out in force. On NBC's Meet the Press, the lead guest was Colin Powell, followed by Tom Daschle, Trent Lott, Dennis Hastert, and Richard Gephardt -- "the four most important men in the United States Congress," as host Tim Russert proudly observed. In interviewing them, Russert seemed uncharacteristically deferential, as if the scale of the disaster precluded probing questions. "Are you confident that the current Pakistani government can remain stable?" he asked Powell. Yes, Powell said, he was. Next topic. On ABC's This Week, the top guest was (again) Colin Powell. In interviewing him, Sam Donaldson was somewhat more aggressive than Russert, eliciting from the secretary a pledge to release the evidence against Osama bin Laden -- a statement that made the next day's front pages, and which the White House eventually repudiated. Otherwise, though, the show was pretty flaccid. "I can't think of any military better prepared to do it than ours," Richard Hawley, a general turned ABC news consultant, told Cokie Roberts. When she was finished with him, Roberts introduced Jordan's King Abdullah, "a crucial ally in the Arab world." The king was interviewed by George Stephanopoulos, who kept calling him "Your Majesty." "Safe travels to the United States this week," Stephanopoulos said in closing. "Yes, sir," the king answered. "And we look forward to seeing you back in Jordan."

But what did the average Jordanian think? What were the country's columnists saying? What was the mood among students, shopkeepers, and secretaries? Reading The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, I found many fine reports on the complex web of Arab attitudes toward the United States. On television's news-talk shows, though, I found mainly retired generals, former cabinet officials, counterterrorism experts, members of Congress, and professional talking heads, few of whom seemed to know much about Islam, Afghanistan, or the Middle East. The same faces kept popping up: from the Senate, Joe Biden, Chuck Hagel, Joe Lieberman, and Richard Shelby (when do these guys get any work done?); former brass like Wesley Clark and Barry McCaffrey; national security types like Sandy Berger, Tony Cordesman, Frank Gaffney, and (need I say?) Henry Kissinger.

Over and over, interviewers revealed a lack of imagination. The many thorny issues related to Saudi Arabia -- its support for fundamentalism, its government's repressive rule, America's close ties to the royal family -- invariably got boiled down to one: the amount of help it could provide Washington. "Can the antiterrorism coalition really count this time on Saudi Arabia?" Mark Shields asked former Middle East diplomat Edward Walker on The Capital Gang. Wolf Blitzer, the host of CNN's Sunday show Late Edition, seemed the master of the softball question. "Is the American public prepared right now for what's supposedly going to happen?" he asked Trent Lott. Critical distance took a back seat. "In our business, we're supposed to be objective," CNN's John King observed, "but if you look around the country, [it is] a very partisan place." With all the flags on the air and pronouns like "we" and "us" being bandied about, it was hard to tell just where the newscasting left off and government pronouncements began.

Despite the inherent drama and fascination of the story, many of the talk shows managed to be dull. This was true even of those in the business of creating sparks. Every night, for instance, Crossfire offered its usual clash of left and right, but, in light of the intricate array of issues facing the United States, the format seemed unbearably constricting. On October 8, the topic was "Should the United States Target Iraq?" and sitting opposite Bill Press and Robert Novak were Edward Peck, a former ambassador to Iraq, and Bob Maginnis, a retired Army lieutenant colonel. Peck, who adamantly opposed attacking Iraq, said that the United States had "accepted responsibility for the death of 500,000 Iraqi children." If Saddam Hussein believes "that he's still at war with the United States, could it be the daily bombings? . . . If he's upset with us, there may be a reason for it." Maginnis, who just as adamantly favored action, countered, "The fact is, this man has killed his own people, the Kurds . . . . The reason those kids have died is not because the U.S. is bombing in the north and south." Now this was interesting, I thought. In his indictment of the United States, Osama bin Laden had cited its policies toward Iraq, and I had seen little real discussion of this in the press. Just as Peck was about to respond, however, Novak cut him off -- it was time for a commercial. When the show resumed, it was on to a new topic -- "Should the United States send ground troops into Afghanistan?" -- and a similarly unsatisfying discussion ensued.
 
In my channel surfing, I did find some bright spots. One was Ed Bradley. On two successive editions of 60 Minutes, he offered thoughtful programs on Arab attitudes toward America and the nature of Islam. On the latter, I had seen several shows that seemed intent on sanitizing the religion. In one CNN segment, a Muslim cleric attempted to assure us that all jihad means is "to strive . . . in whatever you're doing." Obviously, other Muslims see it differently. Like every world religion, Islam lends itself to many interpretations, including some extreme ones, and for journalists the task is to explain how different groups use it. Bradley, in the fifteen minutes allotted him, did a good job of explaining the rise of some of Islam's more fanatical varieties, including the austere Wahhabi sect promoted by Saudi Arabia and taught in strict religious schools in Pakistan, where many of the Taliban studied. In an interview with four imams in New York, Bradley pointedly asked whether Muslims had a responsibility to police the more fanatic elements within Islam, and they readily agreed that they did.
On a daily basis, I derived much nourishment from The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Far more than most other shows, the PBS newscast sought to grapple with the region's thorny political dimensions. On September 28, for instance, the show featured a spirited discussion on Afghan politics with Ashraf Ghani, an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, and Patricia Gossman, a human rights consultant who has visited Afghanistan frequently. At a time when some reporters were filing glowing reports about the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, Gossman and Ghani described the group's sorry record on human rights in the period it ruled Kabul (1992 to 1996) and told how even many Taliban opponents feared its return to power. What was needed, they argued, was a broad coalition government incorporating Afghan's many ethnic, linguistic, and geographic groups, accompanied by a bold plan to reconstruct the Afghan economy. Every night, The NewsHour seemed to offer at least one fresh segment like this, marred only by the program's determinedly humorless style. (Can't those interviewers ever crack a smile?)

A program that managed to be both informative and entertaining was CNN's Greenfield at Large. Jeff Greenfield seems as hard-boiled as any media insider, but September 11 has clearly left him rattled, and he has used his program as a sort of tutorial on the Islamic world. His attitude toward the extremists seems to be: Okay, these people are nuts, but I need to know more about them, so please educate me. On October 8, the day after the United States began bombing Afghanistan, he spoke with Jeffrey Goldberg, who covers the Middle East for The New Yorker, and Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International and the author of a cover story that week on "Why They Hate Us." Greenfield began by showing a half-dozen clips of George Bush declaring that America's beef is not with Islam but with terrorism. Unfortunately, Greenfield noted, the message did not seem to be getting through, and he wanted to know why. The problem, Zakaria said, was the United States's ongoing association with "regimes that are detested in the Middle East, regimes that are corrupt, tyrannical, repressive." Goldberg cited as an example Egypt, where a leading advocate of democracy is in jail for seven years, and where gays were being rounded up and put on trial in state security court.

Greenfield was skeptical: "I can . . . hear people say, 'Well, if we protest the jailing of homosexuals, is this going to win over Islamic fundamentalists, who, at least in Afghanistan, punish homosexuality by torture and death?' I mean, isn't there a trap . . . here?" Indeed there was, Zakaria said, but, he explained, the terrorists all come from closed societies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, rather than from more open ones like Jordan and Morocco, and only by coming down squarely on the side of democracy, he argued, could Washington ultimately hope to contain terrorism. By the end, Greenfield did not look fully convinced, but his willingness to engage the issue was itself refreshing.

Of all the American analysts to appear on TV, none seemed more astute than Barnett Rubin. As the director of studies at the Center on International Cooperation at New York University, Rubin has devoted much of his life to studying Afghanistan and its neighbors, and whenever he appeared on the air -- which, thankfully, was often -- his mastery of the region showed. On October 7, for instance, as Osama bin Laden's videotaped message was being played for the first time, Rubin was watching it with Peter Jennings in the ABC News studio, and when it was over, he offered some instant insight. "The vast majority of Muslims do not approve of blowing up the World Trade Center," he said in his brisk, no-frills manner. But, he went on, bin Laden "linked it to what he and what many other Muslims view as U.S. aggression against Muslims. Even though most countries are horrified by September 11, they share the views he just articulated . . . . To win over those sitting on the fence, the United States will have to address [those views] without appearing to be giving in to that kind of terrorism." Every time Rubin appeared, he demonstrated the value of actually knowing something about the region -- and underscored the failings of most pundits on that point.

The single most riveting show I saw was on Nightline. The subject was dissent and the place it has at a time of national crisis. In introducing the segment, Ted Koppel said, "There is no particular courage involved in telling the truth . . . . if you know from the outset that what you're saying is widely accepted and almost universally applauded. You should still do it, of course, but it doesn't require courage. It's when you know that there will be hell to pay that telling the truth gets tough." Koppel's guests included Susan Sontag, who had set off a furor with her comments in The New Yorker about the hijackers' courage and America's narcissism; Tom Gutting, who lost his job with a Texas paper for writing a column criticizing the president; and Todd Gauziano of the Heritage Foundation. After some initial bantering, Gauziano lashed out at Sontag, calling her "a very offensive writer." "You are part of the 'blame America first' crowd," he said. "Absolutely not," Sontag replied, adding, "I believe I'm just as patriotic and against the terrorists as you are." "Well," Gauziano countered, "your version of patriotism is rather strange."

Koppel asked Gauziano to specify what it was in Sontag's article that so upset him. Gauziano was prepared: "She said that the terrorist attack 'was a consequence of specific American alliances and actions. How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq?'" Sontag's logic, he argued, "speaks for itself. You are [reveling] in your elitist, liberal outlook to say that we deserved this terrorist attack."

"That's slander," Sontag said.

"Blame America, blame America," Gauziano taunted her.

Overall, Gauziano came across as an obnoxious twit. But his sharp comments, and Sontag's unflinching response, made for excellent television. And Koppel deftly used the exchange to assert that, whatever one thinks of views such as Sontag's, it's critical that they be aired. "There is a tendency, at times like this," he said, "to wave the flag. There is a tendency to equate external expressions of patriotism with genuine patriotism. And sometimes, as I think you'll agree, the expression of dissent is the highest form of patriotism."

Alas, few TV news programs seemed interested in dissent, or even real debate. The Sunday morning talk shows, Wolf Blitzer, The Capital Gang, Crossfire -- all came across as exercises in enforced conformity. All the bad habits that TV talk shows have developed in the last few years -- the arrogant shallowness, the false contentiousness, the endless hours of empty analysis and know-nothing opinion -- have carried over into the current crisis.

In the end, no show more embodied these qualities than Hardball. Every night since September 11, Chris Matthews has hosted a special hour-long edition of the show, and I forced myself to watch a handful of them. Matthews projects a hard-nosed, confrontational style -- he's the scrappy guy willing to ask the tough questions -- but, as I found, it's mostly bluster. His guests all come from a narrow slice of the political establishment (calling Howard Fineman). The only non-American I recall seeing was Israel's consul-general in New York. Arabs and Muslims seemed not to exist. As for those guests who did appear, their views seldom diverged from Matthews's. And Matthews's views seemed those of a cheerleader:

"How do we get rid of Saddam Hussein?"

"If Osama bin Laden leaves Afghanistan, does that score one for us?"
"Saudi Arabia -- we always have to kiss up to them."

Bellowing at Joe Biden, he went off on a characteristic rant: "Do you think there's a plausible scenario whereby we go in, break up the bin Laden forces, demolish everybody in sight, probably kill everybody we get our hands on, get rid of the Taliban while we're at it. Then the international community, it supports the Northern Alliance, the other people in that country, and the world community, through aid and development and encouragement, creates a new government in Afghanistan? We have a nice, clean, sort of Mubarak running that place?"

"Well," Biden stammered, "the answer is yes and no." Clearly overwhelmed by the many complicated issues Matthews had raised, Biden struggled to offer a coherent response. Before he got very far, however, Matthews grew bored and cut him off. "How about Saddam Hussein?" he rasped. "What's his interest in this thing?" Matthews devoted the next forty-five seconds or so to Iraq, at which point he excused Biden for his next guest, Senator John McCain. And the process started up all over again. At one point, as he was about to raise a question that bordered on being sharp, Matthews apologized: "I don't want to play too much the journalist here." At that point, few viewers would mistake him for one.

On September 11, America changed forever. In the heart of TV talkland, however, it's still September 10.
 
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Michael Massing is a contributing editor to CJR.