You Make the Call

There's an interesting Rorschach test up at Slate. John Dickerson's column about the Prez's Katrina briefing video has received mixed (though predominantly negative) reviews. Dickerson presents it as an account of the scales falling from his eyes to see Bush's lackluster and disinterested performance during the briefing. When I first read the piece, I thought that if I didn't know this was a serious column, I'd believe Dickerson could have a great future writing for The Onion. It reads like satire--it's full of setups waiting for punch-lines. (Here’s one: "I call on Paul Lynde for the block"--trust me, you'll know where it goes.) In fact, in an early draft of this post (oh my God, I don't just jot down the first few words I think of and hit the "send" button--yes, I’ve admitted it, and I'm not ashamed), I wrote that the column exposes the fact that Dickerson, despite being on the front lines of political journalism as a White House correspondent for Time magazine, simply never bothered to pay attention. Here's a key passage of his column:

Based on what I'd been told by White House aides over the years, I expected to see the president asking piercing questions that punctured the fog of the moment and inspired bold action. Bush's question-asking talents are a central tenet of the president's hagiography. He may not be much for details, say aides, but he can zero in on a weak spot in a briefing and ask out-of-the-box questions. I have been repeatedly told over the years that he once interrupted a briefing on national defense to pose a 30,000-foot stumper: What is the function of the Department of Defense?

Was Dickerson really stumped by the profundity of that question? Did he believe those White House aides over his own lying eyes? I wasn't the only one who was willing to take this at face value. Weldon Berger at BTC News thought the same thing I did, as did Digby. But then I noticed Berger's follow-up post, "I owe John Dickerson an apology." An e-mail exchange with Dickerson convinced Berger that he was actually being sarcastic, that the column was laced with irony. If you read it with that tone in mind, it works, so I guess I believe Dickerson isn't just trying to save face after being lambasted in the blogs.

But the more disturbing lesson in all this is that the press has so little credibility these days that it's not a leap to think that a White House correspondent is so idiotic as to believe Dickerson's faux position in his column. Digby's post, which is well worth reading no matter how you interpret Dickerson's tone, also adds Newsweek's Howard Fineman--based on a column he wrote last week--into the mix as an example of journalists who suddenly realize maybe Bush isn't all he's cracked up to be. She also mentions Bob Woodward's seminal Washington Post series of early 2002, "10 Days in September," which extolled the virtues of the Prez as commander-in-chief immediately after September 11, and which was instrumental in setting up this mythology in the first place. It's exactly the kind of representation Dickerson is (or isn't) sending up. In his apology, Berger explains, "I concluded that Dickerson must simply have gone round the bend at some point and was in the first stages of recovery, but the more obvious answer is that it isn't possible," and he refers to his "spectacularly bad job of reading" Dickerson. I think he's too hard on himself. He didn't amazingly In the context of the media bubble we live in, it not only is possible, it's true. Woodward and Fineman prove it.