Scanning Laura Bush

Journalism professionals learn to “see” news.

They are taught that news has definitions and values. These definitions and values give news a dimension that is visible to the trained eye. News dimensions are as useful to journalists as silhouettes are useful to aircraft spotters.

This data about news often shapes itself into tricks of the trade. One such trick is “JDLR.” Just doesn’t look right. A journalism professional will be going along, minding his own business, when he sees something that just doesn’t look right. When he sees that, he looks again. He starts scanning with the definitions and values, looking to see if news is there.

I have started to scan First Lady Laura Bush. Actually I am scanning The White House, but Laura Bush is the focus. I wonder if I should wonder how she sleeps at night.

Mrs. Bush is a champion of teachers and libraries. Both these institutions are purveyors of information. Teachers give information to students, and libraries provide information for both pleasure and business.

It is good, reliable information. In a teacher’s information, two plus two equals four. A student can bank on that and go ahead and use the information for the rest of his life, confident that it will never contribute to his being overdrawn. In a library’s information, the United States will always be north of the Equator, and John Steinbeck will always have written “The Grapes of Wrath.” Men can go out and speak this information in public, confident that they will never be ashamed.

Mrs. Bush appears happy, content and assured in her well-positioned advocacy of good, reliable information. She has also, in her second term, decided to speak in behalf of providing good, reliable information to boys about their role in society and their need for good, reliable information about themselves, their fears, their hopes, their psyches, in helping them fulfill their role. This is a subject that is near to my heart. No boy should have to wait to the age of 50 finally to understand what he was missing as a man.

So in one of those big, airy East Wing rooms, Mrs. Bush presides while a teacher reads good, reliable information from a library book to young people sitting on the floor.

Down the administration hall, meanwhile, people who work for her husband are writing checks to journalists in return for information that they can count on as being what they want to hear. Frank Rich in The New York Times said this has happened at least six times recently, when a “journalist” has been “unmasked” as “a propagandist on the payroll of either the Bush administration or a barely arms-length ally . . . while simultaneously appearing in print or broadcast forums that purport to be real news.”

One of these, Karen Ryan, offered “news reports” explaining the administration’s Medicare drug prescription program. These reports were seen over CNN until the Government Accounting Office pulled them as illegal “covert propaganda.” Another, television commentator Armstrong Williams, was paid $240,000 by the Department of Education to put a favorable spin on administration programs.

The Department of Education? Purchasing slanted information? Does Laura Bush know about this?

Good old reliable Webster’s defines “propaganda” as “any systematic, widespread dissemination or promotion of particular ideas, doctrines, practices, etc., to further one’s own cause or to damage an opposing one; ideas, doctrines or allegations so spread; now often used disparagingly to connote deception or distortion."

And so I wonder if I should wonder. It would be natural to wonder how she could sleep at night, wanting to teach boys to be strong, good, reliable men, when down the hall men are being paid to deceive. But I have to wonder if I should wonder, because it is possible in such a world that Mrs. Bush is not who she seems, or has suspended who she is. Maybe she sleeps just fine. It just doesn’t look right.

The best journalists, those who learn to “see” news the best, get promoted to the highest positions, including working in Washington and covering The White House. The absolute best of these, with their talents and experience, get to sit in the front row at the presidential press conferences. Yet behind them, at the press conferences, sat a fake journalist – Frank Rich calls him a shill – asking “softball” questions.

How did my front-row heroes let him get away with it for two years? Forget Laura Bush; hell, I feel depressed and I don’t even have to sleep with the man.