Across The Media Universe: All Ford Edition
Reporters are resorting to clichés because Ford didn't have much of an identity, writes Shafer. Thus the generic platitudes. "When assessing the sons and daughters of that great flyover territory known as the Midwest, the formula suggests pale platitudes about honor, honesty, and being decent, as long as the word means 'adequate' and 'just enough to meet the purpose.'"
Excess Chatter! Washington Post arbiter of conventional wisdom Tom Shales has mostly good things to say about television coverage of the Ford funeral yesterday, though there was a bit of backhandedness in the compliment. "Yesterday's coverage of the funeral of former president Gerald Ford found network correspondents and technicians on their best behavior for the most part, the solemn beauty of the ceremony at Washington National Cathedral virtually forcing them to exercise restraint and good taste," he writes.
Alas, Shales deems CBS' coverage "disappointing." Among his gripes: "[Anchor Katie] Couric and many of her colleagues on the big networks committed the common error of talking over scenes that did not require any talking -- or, to the contrary, called for quiet." Shales also complained that "CBS coverage was marred by a director's or producer's insistence on dividing the screen up in boxes, with a large amount of space taken up by 'The Death of a President,' the title CBS gave its coverage."
Major League A's! As Dana Milbank notes, former anchorman Tom Brokaw eulogized Ford yesterday with a tale about a mock chicken head. (Really.) The story had Milbank wondering which reporter might eulogize President Bush. After all, "[t]he current president would probably have Hugo Chavez deliver his eulogy before he would bestow the honor on a member of the White House press corps."
Still, Milbank asked a number of journalists what they might talk about if charged with the task. Here's Newsweek's Richard Wolffe, recalling a prank the press corps played after Bush was heard calling the New York Times' Adam Clymer a "major league a------": "Halloween of 2000, several of us obtained Bush masks and printed up a series of baseball shirts for a fictional team called the Major League A's. We lined up at the foot of his plane stairs like an honor guard and he posed for photos with us. Chuckled with his shoulders the whole way through."