NEWSWEEK'S DERELICTION OF DUTY
November 6, 2004 --
What did Newsweek know ?- and when did the magazine know it?
Barely 24 hours after the polls closed Tuesday, the newsweekly came out with its special election edition, chock-full of fascinating behind-the-scenes tidbits culled by a team of reporters during the lengthy campaign.
Included with all the little anecdotes (Teresa Heinz Kerry is a royal pain ?- duh!) was at least one major political bombshell.
After clinching the Democratic nomination, Newsweek reports, John Kerry was so desperate to enlist GOP Sen. John McCain as his running mate that he made an "outlandish" offer: He'd expand the role of vice president to include the duties of secretary of Defense.
Moreover, Kerry ?- seeking the presidency in a time of grave international danger ?- promised to put McCain in charge of all U.S. foreign policy should they win.
"You're out of your mind," McCain reportedly told Kerry. "I don't even know if it's constitutional."
John Kerry clearly is not out of his mind ?- and nobody will ever confuse him with a constitutional scholar.
No, one lesson here is that he is so utterly devoid of moral fiber that he'd trade away the heart and soul of the presidency in order to win the office in the first place.
Faustian doesn't begin to describe the rank ambition behind this proposed bargain: Kerry simply had no soul to sell in the first place.
Truly, America dodged a bullet this past Tuesday.
But how close would that election have been had the voters known that such an offer had been contemplated ?- much less made?
Not very, we guess.
So why did Newsweek sit on the news for all those months?
Because the magazine promised the campaigns that anything obtained by this team of journalists during the course of the campaign would go unreported until the election was over.
Promises are promises, but whatever happened to what, under different circumstances, Newsweek and similar publications would herald as "the public's right to know"?
It's not as if rules like this haven't been bent or even broken before ?- when journalists believed there was an important story that could have a dramatic impact on a national campaign.
Back in 1984, for example, a Washington Post reporter who'd enjoyed private ?- and, presumably, off-the-record ?- conversations with Jesse Jackson reported that the candidate repeatedly had made disparaging comments about Jews and referred to New York as "Hymietown."
That story had a sensational impact on the campaign ?- as well it should have. Though Jackson had no shot at the nomination, the idea that a newspaper could sit on a story about a major presidential candidate privately making ethnic insults was unthinkable.
The same holds true here.
True, Newsweek might argue that without having promised to keep it under wraps, its reporters probably never would have learned of the McCain story in the first place.
But journalists ?- whose performance in this campaign set new lows in its partiality and blatant unfairness ?- should think long and hard whether such agreements are in the national interest.
Time was when journalists were taught that as soon as they had a story down solid, they went with it.
Holding off on this story may have been a good deal for Newsweek ?- but it was a disservice to the U.S. electorate.
Voters had a right to know about the depths to which John Kerry was willing to sink in order to win the Oval Office.
And they had a right to know it before they voted, not after.
Keeping the public informed is what journalism used to be about.
Not anymore; not at Newsweek.
