Emphasis on irrelevance

Anyone who wants to understand why the media are held in such low regard by the public — in polls of the most respected professions we usually come somewhere between Nigerian e-mail scammers and serial pedophiles — should consider the following headline from an Associated Press story in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer last week:

“Accused spy is cousin of Bush staffer.”

The accused person is Susan Lindauer, charged with working for Saddam’s intelligence agency. She describes herself merely as an “antiwar activist,” though, as the daily rummage through the Ba’athists’ scrupulous paperwork indicates more clearly every day, being an antiwar activist and on the Saddamite payroll are by no means mutually exclusive.

Before she allegedly became an Iraqi agent, Miss Lindauer spent a decade in Washington working for four members of Congress, Peter DeFazio, Ron Wyden, Carol Moseley Braun and Zoe Lofgren. What do these four legislators have in common?

Answer: They all have a “D” after their names.

But to The Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s headline writer the salient fact about Miss Lindauer is not her 10 years of work for the Democratic Party but the amazing revelation she is a second cousin of Bush chief of staff Andrew Card.

A second cousin. Hold the front page.

Here’s an easy test for the publisher, editor and news staff of the paper:

(1) Name all your second cousins.

(2) Where do they live?

(3) When did you last see them?

It’s one thing for the press to be antiwar and feel Saddam should be given another decade or two to come into compliance with Security Council resolutions. It’s quite another to be so smitten with the old butcher that your copy editors internally absorb Ba’ath Party tribal politics and assume that mere second cousinship with members of the Bush clan automatically puts you in the inner circle.

To be fair to the Associated Press, they sent the story out on the wires with the headline, “Woman named in spy case worked as journalist, congressional aide.”

What’s that? “Worked as journalist”? Well, there’s an angle the Seattle guys unaccountably missed. Before she went to work for the Democratic Party, Miss Lindauer worked for … the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a fact the paper headlined later. Instead of the cousin thing, the original headline writer might more usefully have written:

Story Continues →