text: I wonder if there is not also some connection between this bizarre belief in the importance of journalists and the sneer directed at Diane Dimond for referring to American troops as “our guys.” The godlike figure of the network news anchor bestrides the petty squabbles of lesser men like a colossus and cannot be seen to take sides. Or, to put it another way, all emotions are welcomed to tabloid-TV save the patriotic. It’s true that Dan Rather cried on David Letterman’s show, but that was from compassion for the victims of September 11th. His subsequent expression of a patriotic willingness to be called to the colors was thought by many to be in rather poor taste. Such are the lengths to which the superstition of journalistic “objectivity” is pursued that, when Gregg Zoroya, a reporter for USA Today, interviewed a Palestinian woman about her planned suicide bombing and subsequently refused to divulge her name to Israeli security forces, hardly anyone noticed, except for Scott Shuger in Slate and Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post — and no one made a fuss about it.
  Miss James’s article, referred to above, went on to make the obligatory tour of the cable channels’ inanities, including the new “Crossfire” on CNN, which she compares to Fox’s “Celebrity Boxing.” I wonder that these critics don’t get tired of their endless laments for the convergence of news and entertainment. It’s not exactly news — in more ways than one — that cable talk shows are deliberately provoked shouting matches, or that there are a high-proportion of lightweight or gossipy stories on their news broadcasts (the networks have a lot of fluff too, she admits, “but their fluff is healthier”). For myself, I say so much the better if news is entertainment. So long as we recognize the fact, we are more likely to put things in their proper perspective and not confuse TV newsreaders and interviewers with genuinely important people — except, of course, for their shared sense of whimsy.
  
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