Jack Shafer: Propagandist or Dolt?
Posted by
Kevin
Would it kill Slate to get a real press critic? Because Jack Shaffer obviously isn’t. It seems that the opposition to Bill “always wrong and , hey, lets try the NYT for treason for reporting” Kristol getting a post at the Times is just becasue the lefties are just being big ol’ meanies. It has nothing to do with the fact that Kristol is wrong about everything he talks about (literally. I looked: I could find nothing that Kristol has been right about in the last four or five years) in Shaffer’s mind. But more telling is that Shaffer seems incapable of conducting actual journalism when one of his fellow political travelers is being criticized.
Shaffer pretends that Kristol has been correct about at least one thing:
Oh, you say, Kristol’s journalistic crime is not just that he was wrong about launching the war but that he has been absolutely wrong about every chapter in the war since the shock-and-awe bombs lit up Baghdad. Well, not wrong at every turn. From where I write this afternoon, he looks pretty goddamn prescient about the wisdom of mounting the “surge” and adopting a counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq.
This is, not to put too fine a point on it, bullshit. The surge was sold as a temporary increase in troops designed ot create lull in the violence that would allow Iraqi politicians to create a national government. Even if you want to pretend that the surge worked in terms of decreasing violence (something that is far from clear) it has clearly failed at delivering political progress. In other words, it has been a complete and total failure on its own terms The only way that Shaffer can say Kristol was right about the surge is if he is completely unaware of what it was intended to do, completely unaware of the lack of political progress in Iraq, or simply lying in order to make his political ally look better than he deserves. In other words, Shaffer is a dolt or a propagandist.
But it doesn’t stop there. Shaffer then moves on to proving that he doesn’t have an ounce of understanding of what journalism should be. First, and most telling, Shaffer make sno mention of the criticism of Kristol’s attacks on news organizations that brought us stories of how the Bush Administration has tortured people and disregarded the Constitution and the rule of law. he has tiome to deal with the minor — and un-sourced — complaint that th Times already has conservative columnists but not with the substanial criticism that Kristol has been a force for undermining journalistic integrity and effectiveness. To Shaffer, I suppose, it doesn’t matter if Kristol’s idea of reporting boils down to “repeat what the government says and only what the government says.” An odd position for an actual journalist, especially a press critic, to take.
But Shaffer doesn’t seem to think journalism really matters that much, or, at least, has an odd idea of what journalism is:
Pundits shouldn’t lose or win gigs on the basis of how many of their predictions come true but whether they write interesting copy. Kristol—love him or hate him—writes interesting copy.
That is jaw-droppingly stupid. I am actually having a hard time believing Shaffer actually expected us to take that seriously. The job of a pundit is to use their intelligence, expertise, and connections to give their readership a better of understanding of what is going on in the world and what they can expect the future to hold. No one expects them to get everything right, but if one is constantly wrong then that one is a bad pundit, no matter how interesting they might be as a writer. I cannot believe that Shaffer is this dumb. I also cannot believe that Shaffer would forgive, for example, and environmentalist pundit who consistently over-stated the environmental impact of new development or industries. But Shafer is dedicated to defending this hire any way he can and is so reduced to pretending that a pundit is the equivalent of a circus barker.
So this is what passes for press criticism at Slate: a piece so ridiculous in its assertions and so lacking respect for the craft of journalism that one is left to believe that the writer is either and idiot or a hack. It is depressing that Slate seems to find this state of affairs acceptable, but it tells us quite about Shafer, his integrity, and the quality of his “journalism”.
