This should be the most talked about book this week.
NEW YORK Without much fanfare, a new book by Washington Post and CNN media critic Howard Kurtz is due this week.
It’s called "Reality Show: Inside the Last Great Television News War," and is published by the Free Press. Kurtz’s well-known book, "Spin Cycle," appeared a decade ago.
Amazon.com, which is usually geared up for publication, doesn’t even have cover art, let alone a full description or excerpt. Pub date is listed as October 9. Barnes and Noble online has no listing for the book.
The Free Press web site shows a cover with Katie Couric, Brian Williams and Charles Gibson on it. It says it runs 480 pages.
From the Drudge Report:
Former CBSNEWS anchor Dan Rather pressured CBS to air the failed Bush/National Guard story in September 2004, Howard Kurtz reports in his new blockbuster book: REALITY SHOW: INSIDE THE LAST GREAT TELEVISION NEWS RACE. Rather claims in his lawsuit against CBS that he wasn’t involved in the final decision to run the Memogate story.
After finishing nearly two years of research, Kurtz unleashes his book this week.
Excerpt:
The night before the story was tentatively scheduled to air, Rather was sitting at the anchor desk, with less than half an hour before the start of the Evening News. He called Josh Howard, who had recently been named as executive producer of 60 Minutes Wednesday, and asked what they were doing to promote his story.
“We’re not,” Howard said. “We haven’t gotten the lawyers to sign off. The script isn’t finished. We haven’t even talked to the White House. I’m not going to start promoting a story when we don’t know what we have.” That was not the answer Rather wanted to hear.
“Other people are chasing this story,” he said. “We’re going to lose our exclusive. We have to get our hooks into the story.”
When Howard again refused, Rather raised the stakes.
“I’m going to give one of the documents to The New York Times to run in Wednesday’s paper,” he said. “They’ll have to credit CBS News. That way we can put our stamp on it.”
“You can’t do that either,” Howard said. “We haven’t finished vetting this.” Rather grumbled and hung up. To raise the specter of giving away a scoop to a competing news outlet was practically unheard of.
Howard, who had once been an Evening News producer, had never been subjected to this kind of pressure. He did, however, have a backup plan. They were still in rerun season, so if the Guard story failed to get the green light, he had a previously aired program ready to go.
Developing…
This article is adapted from the book "Reality Show: Inside the Last Great Television News War" by Howard Kurtz, Free Press, New York, ©2007.
Charlie Gibson is a product of the Vietnam War era. When he was a television reporter in Lynchburg, Va., he had driven to Washington on weekends to march in antiwar demonstrations. And he had lost friends in that jungle war.
Now Gibson had friends whose sons were dying in Iraq. His thoughts kept returning to one central question: When you commit kids to war, what are they fighting for? What was the mission in Iraq? How could a family say that the war was worth little Johnny’s well-being?
The ABC anchor was obsessed with this point. If you were president, and you decided to go to war, was there a calculus in your mind, that the goal was worth so many American lives? After all, your generals would tell you that X number were likely to die. What was the acceptable trade-off? Gibson’s threshold would be one: Was the war worth one life?
As the U.S. occupation of Iraq stretched into its fourth bloody year, the media coverage was turning increasingly negative, and the three evening news anchors constantly agonized over how to deal with the conflict.
Their newscasts had become a nightly tableau of death and destruction, and whether that was an accurate picture of Iraq had become a matter of fierce political debate. Certainly the constant plague of suicide bombs, explosive devices, sniper fire and, occasionally, the massacre of large numbers of civilians played into television’s need for dramatic events and arresting visuals. Certainly, by 2006 it was easier for the anchors and correspondents to offer a skeptical vision of the war, now that a majority of the country disapproved of the conflict, than in the heady days after the toppling of Saddam Hussein seemed to strike a blow for democracy in the Middle East. By training their powerful spotlight on the chaos gripping Iraq, the anchors were arguably contributing to the political downfall of a president who had seemed to be riding high when he won his second term.
Through the routine decisions of daily journalism — how prominently to play a story, what pictures to use, what voices to include — the newscasts were sending an unmistakable message. And the message was that George W. Bush‘s war was a debacle. Administration officials regularly complained about the coverage as unduly negative, but to little avail. Other news organizations chronicled the deteriorating situation as well, but with a combined 25 million viewers, the evening newscasts had the biggest megaphone.
Painful Images
When Brian Williams thought about Iraq, he thought about his visits to Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He was tortured by these trips to comfort the veterans being treated there. It was hard to look at their wounds. He remembered one soldier who had five titanium pins sticking out of his toes. His heart ached for these brave men and women who had been to Iraq, on orders from their commander in chief.
For Williams, it all went back to Sept. 11, 2001. As a citizen, he thought on that fateful day, thank God that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell were on the team. How together we all seemed. There was something about the murderous attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that, in the eyes of the White House press corps, gave Bush a stature that could not be violated. And that was no accident. The administration’s deft use of 9/11 against its critics had created an impenetrable shield. It was political magic.
What a pathetic childlike view from these anchors. To evaluate a war, you can’t concentrate on the killed and injured. You have to weigh up the costs with the benefits. The benefit of the Iraq war is that we have removed a brutal dictator and kept control of the country out of the hands of Islamic terrorists. As long as that persists, I’d call the war a success.
