Eight: Interview at the Axis of Evil

The whole public journalism episode, which is not by any stretch over, was like a religious dispute within the professional church of journalism. But it almost seems mild, compared to problems of belief that confront journalists at this time in world history. Dan Rather on being a patriot and journalist after September 11th:

What I want to do, I want to fulfill my role as a decent human member of the community and a decent and patriotic American. And therefore, I am willing to give the government, the President and the military the benefit of any doubt here in the beginning. I'm going to fulfill my role as a journalist, and that is ask the questions, when necessary ask the tough questions.

Here is a journalist, prominent in the priesthood, a visible figure in the extreme; here is Dan Rather trying to explain what attaches Dan Rather to the fate of the American people, nation and government. But his religion doesn't really go there. It has tough stuff in it about detachment, but about attachment to the republic little is said. Rather is also attempting to explain what he is for, in the end. But the language is too thin, the politics timid and confused, the belief system sounds exhausted.

This was confirmed for me when I watched Rather's exclusive interview with Saddam before the war in Iraq began. It was the work of a man who did not know what he was ultimately for, or why he was taken in blindfold to the Palace that day. He did know, however, that no one else in the press had succeeded in landing an interview with Saddam since his inclusion in the American President's "axis of evil." No one had done it, so Rather did.

And in the room where his encounter with evil (so declared) took place, Dan Rather, it seemed to me, had come armed with nothing stronger than "ask the questions, when necessary ask the tough questions" of Saddam Hussein-- the mass murderer and tyrant who ruled in terror over a closed society, a republic of dense fear, where question-asking got you killed. "I'm here for my interview."

That was a situation where journalism, the religion, failed the believer. It was the wisdom of the news tribe, and the moral sense it had developed about its methods, but also the questions it never asked itself and had no answers for... all that sent Rather to Baghdad and gave him no better--alas, no deeper--instruction than, "Bring 'Face the Nation' to Saddam Hussein." The anchor man looked lost. Saddam looked happy. I still don't know what Rather thought he was going to accomplish.