When I saw Brian Williams was going to be the guest on last night’s Daily Show, I checked to see if I was watching a rerun — Williams has been on that many times before. The NBC Nightly News anchor is an affable fellow and he and Stewart clearly enjoy each others company. But I was brought to the point of yelling at the screen early on when, on the topic of Haiti, Williams smugly proclaimed:
We beat the military down there. We were on the tarmac when the first prop plane landed with Special Forces guys whose job it was to figure out where everything was going to go.
Stewart followed that up with a lame joke before giving Williams the opportunity to take it down a notch by asking the appropriate follow-up:
Let’s get serious here… At what point do you go, “You know what? I can’t report on this; I have to help.”
Williams gave the formula j-school response that it’s vital to get such an important story out. “If we weren’t working down there… the world wouldn’t know about it… It’s a job and it’s a big job!”
Big enough, one assumes he believes, that it’s equally vital for the usually coiffed anchor to be standing sweating in civvies in front of the horrific suffering. Someone’s got to do it. Lucky us. We’ve got Brian Williams.
Noam Scheiber, a senior editor at The New Republic, acknowledges the vital role journalists play. Still, he offered up a significantly different take on their quick en masse Haiti arrival in a January 22 On The Media appearance:
A few days after the earthquake you had hundreds of journalists there, and it was just hard to believe that they weren’t taxing an already fairly weak infrastructure there. There were constant streams of stories about teams of nurses and rescue workers who were marooned at airports and military bases because of the clogging and congestion at the Port-au Prince-airport.
Once they got into the country, obviously the journalists had to have places to stay, food to eat, flashlights, batteries. Even if they did not think of themselves as directly taking food out of the mouths of Haitians, clearly they were bidding up the prices of these things and making it more difficult for people on the ground there to get access to them. In fairness, some news organizations actually shipped in their own supplies, but then the question arises, well [LAUGHS] why not ship in supplies for relief, rather than to serve journalists who are on the ground.
Scheiber believes journalists have a “Hippocratic-like obligation to at least do no harm.” He was on the show to present his proposal for a disaster pool:
For those unfamiliar with the arrangement, a pool is journalism’s longstanding solution to the problem of stories that attract more interest from reporters than there is room to accommodate them. Most famously, the dozens of news organizations that cover the White House document the president’s daily comings and goings this way. At any given moment, there may only be one or two journalists in the room with the leader of the free world, leaving dozens on the outside. But that doesn’t mean they lack information they need to file their own stories. Instead, one of the reporters with a front-row seat writes what’s known as a “pool report,” which everyone else in the syndicate shares. (Something analogous happens for video coverage.)
A “disaster pool” could work the same way. Just like they do for White House coverage, the major (and some not so major) news organizations could draw up an agreement to send a contingent of print, radio, and television reporters to wherever the next global disaster strikes.
The idea has enough obvious merit that Stewart actually asked Williams about it on last night’s show:
STEWART: Are you down there with other organizations, like ABC, CBS News, competing organizations? Do you guys consolidate your resources and all work together…?
WILLIAMS: Um, no, actually, um…
STEWART: Is that really true?
WILLIAMS: Sometimes in a situation like in Iraq, when you’re under fire, when you’ve become a target…
Oh. To protect yourself, yes. For the good of others, no.
Williams does offer up that “the on-air physicians, that’s a different circumstance.” As it happens, On The Media looked at that genre, too, and found it wanting:
BOB GARFIELD: …While [president of WNET Public Television in New York and a former president of NBC News] Neal Shapiro says he knows of no TV news bosses pushing medical correspondents to look for on-camera hero opportunities, a top CBS news exec told The Washington Post this week, quote, “We’re guilty of the appalling sin of competing.”
Well, no wonder, as Dr. Bob Arnot, former chief medical correspondent for NBC News, well understands.
DR. BOB ARNOT: It’s amazing theater. It’s really the most incredible theater that there is in television today, to have, you know, your correspondent doctor out there treating somebody in the field.
BOB GARFIELD: Yet, when Arnot intervened medically and bureaucratically in Iraq, in Rwanda, in Aceh, Indonesia, he did so almost entirely with the cameras switched off.
DR. BOB ARNOT: Look, the real risk is here that your producer calls up and says, hey we just saw the other network’s doctor deliver a baby, could you do an amputation. There’s a real risk that doctors could be pushed into things they shouldn’t be doing because of the pressure of the suits or the producers, to just get better ratings.
BOB GARFIELD: Things they shouldn’t do, he says, such as treating somebody in the street who can just as easily and more safely be attended to at a clinic or hospital, and such as exploiting the pain of an earthquake victim, not to mention the emotions of the audience, for three minutes of drama, genuine or otherwise.
DR. BOB ARNOT: Absolutely, I mean, look-it. If this happened on the streets of New York, do you think you could do that with the current HIPAA regulations? So, sure, you’re potentially exploiting the patient, and you are becoming more of a showman than you are a medical doctor out there.
Sadly, I am as guilty as anyone of watching Stewart’s slick shtick and seeing journalism instead of comedy. Remember, The Fifth Estate Shines? My first TMV post was an interview with the guy who coined that, Dr. Robert J. Thompson, Professor of Television and Founding Director of the Bleier Center for the Study of Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. Thompson warned that we should not be fooled by the Peabody Awards (they “…recognize distinguished achievement and meritorious public service by TV and radio stations, networks, producing organizations, individuals and the World Wide Web”) that Stewart and his compatriot, Stephen Colbert, have won.
The mistake was mine, but not mine alone. In a July Time Magazine poll asking, Now that Walter Cronkite has passed on, who is America’s most trusted newscaster? Stewart won, beating out Williams 44% to 29%. (For more fun, rollover the state-by-state numbers.)
Watch for lots of blog action around Stewart’s appearance on the O’Reilly Factor tonight. His fans are eager for one of his trademark smack-downs. TV Squad suggests it may not be all that, “but it will likely be entertaining.” A needed reminder. Jon Stewart is now and has always been nothing more than an entertainer. The media criticism a tool of his trade. He is a fine and talented entertainer, but only just.
RELATED: Howard Kurtz’s column in the WaPo Monday, Jon Stewart’s Obama barbs on ‘The Daily Show’ are creating buzz, created quite a bit of buzz of its own. And a shout out to Jezebel’s Irin who suggests Stewart and Williams should just get a room already.