by Andy Rooney
The journalists I know—and I know a lot of them—are obsessed with being impartial in their reports and when they are not, it is a mistake in execution, not intention. That certainly is true of Rather. The public asks too much of news. People expect news organizations to supply them with the whole truth about everything and news can’t do that. For one thing, there’s too much of it. The other reason is, most important news isn’t interesting. News companies have an obligation, as business enterprises, to make money. To do that, they have to attract a large audience. If editors and producers judge that their audience isn’t interested in an important story, they don’t use it. This accounts for why Americans are so uninformed about what goes on in the rest of the world. They don’t want to know so they aren’t told. If that’s what the NBC anchor is telling them, they’ll turn to CBS. If the World Bank raises interest rates, it may be of significant, long-term importance to the economy, but people won’t read about it because it’s dull compared to the bathtub murder of a blonde bimbo.
The battle in the newsroom of any good news operation every day is how much to give people of what they ought to know compared to what they want to read or see.
News outlets are important whether they’re trusted or not. We all deal secondhand with most of the institutions in our lives. We don’t know our banker because we bank by mail or he’s over behind a window where we can’t get at him. We don’t know the farmer who grows what we eat because we buy food at the supermarket. We buy insurance after reading a sales pitch. We don’t personally know our politicians. We depend on news reports to let us know who’s cheating, who’s good, who’s bad and whom to elect.
People expect journalists to be better at their job than readers and viewers are at theirs. They expect them not to make mistakes when reporting something, but they do. Reporters make mistakes by accident or by observing something through eyes, which, like everyone else’s, are sometimes clouded. Journalists make fewer mistakes than people in most businesses because they’re being watched more closely and they know it. A journalist’s mistakes are out in the open, where everyone can see them.
The public doesn’t appreciate how infrequently news organizations violate their own high and self-imposed journalistic standards.
LIFE IS GOOD . . . OR AT LEAST FAIRLY GOOD
Life is good, but it’s a mess. Mine is, anyway.
Some days, I have so much to do I can’t get anything done because I have something else I have to do first.
I’ve never been able to see my life as a whole and set out to do the right things in the right order by assigning degrees of importance to them. My hours, my days, my years are fragmented. I would certainly get more done if I could put my brain to work on my problems full time, but I cannot. I flit from here to there doing first one thing, then another without paying any attention to which is more important. Invariably, I start one thing, then go to a second before I’ve finished the first. And then I interrupt the second to start a third.
This morning, I started to read the newspaper, but the mail came so I put the newspaper down to read that. There were several bills I should have paid. I decided to write the checks to the phone company and to a store but couldn’t find my checkbook.
It doesn’t take much to put me off writing a check. The phone rang while I was looking and I got talking to Bob about the tennis match I saw last night at the U.S. Open. It was a terrible match, but Andy Roddick set a world’s record by banging a ball at 153 mph, so I was pleased to have been in on that.
I got an ominous call from the American Express Fraud Unit while I was at my desk. They wanted to know if I had recently charged $4,000 worth of stuff to my account from several stores in Brooklyn. I had not. Clearing your account of $4,000 worth of bills you did not incur takes time.
I had a remarkably interesting week but all in small pieces. It was like a puzzle that was never put together. First, the producer of 60 Minutes asked me to do something about the Republican National Convention, so I went to Madison Square Garden looking for an idea. After several hours, I left without ever coming up with an idea for a story.
The next morning, I sat at my typewriter and worried again about what to do for 60 Minutes. I didn’t want to go through the long process of getting past the crowd of cops surrounding Madison Square Garden again, so I read some stories about the convention. One story said New York officials thought the convention would bring $250 million into the city. Business is never any good during a political convention, so I decided to interview some store owners.
There were some things I had to do first, though. I needed a haircut before I did anything on camera, I had to take some clothes to the dry cleaners, the accountant who helps me with taxes needed some stuff I have in a box somewhere, I had a doctor’s appointment because Tums gave me indigestion, I couldn’t find the key to our back door, my car was 3,000 miles overdue for an oil change, and I still had to do that 60 Minutes piece about the Republican National Convention for Sunday.
Have I made my point?
NOT THE RETIRING KIND
People ask me when I’m going to retire.
How about never. Would that be an acceptable answer?
I concede the possibility I might die someday, but I won’t be retired when that happens unless someone retires me—over my dead body. It won’t be an action I take and if I don’t take it, the word isn’t “retired.” The word is “fired.”
When I hear someone say they’re just sticking around at their job for another two years until they can get Social Security, I feel both sorry for them and angry at them. It must be a terrible life for people who hate what they do for most of the hours of their days so much that they can’t wait until they quit working.
There is nothing I could do retired that I don’t do now, working. I make furniture as a hobby and enjoy that. Some weeks in the summer I spend as many as thirty-five hours in my shop. I enjoy it but if I had the opportunity to spend eight hours a day, five days a week in my shop making furniture instead of in my office writing, I wouldn’t take it. You couldn’t pay me not to work.
I like home, I like my family and I like the friends I have outside the news business but the thought of spending seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day resting and without any purpose in life scares me. I’m not tired. I am never happier than when I’m working. There is no question that it is more satisfying to make money than to have it. Having it is just a comfort.
There are about 35 million Americans at or over the age of sicty-five, which is generally considered the retirement age. Of that 35 million, only about 10 percent of the women are working and 18 percent of the men. That means there are almost 25 million people who have no known reason other than having to go to the bathroom to get up in the morning.
Being one myself, I don’t mind being with old people but I dislike the great concentrations of them in retirement communities. Florida is not my dream state to live in. For their own sake and the sake of the rest of the community, retirees should be mixed in, somewhere close to their relationship in percentage, with the whole community. There should be an intermingling of children, young adults getting started and working men and women in a neighborhood with the old.
One argument put forth as a reason for retirement is that it opens up jobs for younger people. This argument presupposes that there is a finite amount of work to be done in the world and that it can be done by a fixed number of people. That’s nonsense. There is more work to be done in the world than could ever be accomplished if everyone worked 100 hours a week. There is no end to work.
There are about 40 million people collecting Social Security and I am one of them. It has always seemed strange and somehow wrong that I am paid handsomely for writing and for doing my commentaries on 60 Minutes and then also receive a subsistence allowance from the government of $28,992 a year. It is obvious that I wouldn’t starve without my monthly Social Service stipend of $2,416 a month. I understand that it would be unfair not to give me back some of
about half a million dollars that I’ve contributed over fifty-five years of employment and I also understand that if the government stopped paying Social Security to people who continued to work, it would greatly increase the number of people who retired. But there’s still something wrong with it.
It’s almost 11 P.M. now and I think I’ll retire—but just for the night.
PART FIVE
The Nation at War
We are not all powerful and we ought to get used to it and stop acting as if we were. It’s no longer possible for us to impose our idea of how people ought to govern themselves in a Muslim country—or any country, for that matter. There aren’t weapons enough on earth for us to force everyone else to be like us.
THOUGHTS ON A PEACETIME WAR
One of the strange facts of life is that wars energize the people who fight them. People get more done when they’re at war than when they’re at peace. It doesn’t seem as if it should be true but the most productive time in the whole history of the United States was the four years of World War II.
When people are at peace, they invent ways of simulating the intense competitive pressures of war that produce such good things in us as courage, invention, endurance, enterprise and bravery. In their own way, all the games we play are tiny wars designed to evoke some of those good elements in our character that only emerge during times of military conflict.
No war can ever be a good thing, but good things have come out of war. It always seems a terrible waste for us to spend $300 billion a year making weapons, supporting our Army, Navy and Air Force and doing weapons research. The fact is, though, most of the things developed for our fighting forces have had a great effect on our lives during peacetime. The technology we’ve developed for building warships, airplanes, helicopters, all-terrain vehicles and a variety of medical procedures have all been used more during peacetime than wartime.
Wars put our brains to the test, too. In a college history course I took, I recall the story about a pass through the Apennines Mountains of Southern Italy where the Roman Army trapped several thousand enemy soldiers. Cato, the Roman leader, couldn’t decide whether to kill all of them to eliminate them as a threat or to let them go unharmed as a way of making friends.
My memory of that history course stops short of recalling what Cato decided to do, but the story of 3,500 former Taliban soldiers being held under cruel conditions by a notoriously sadistic Afghanistan tribal leader put the United States in Cato’s position a few years ago. We could have allowed them to be killed by these unlikely allies or insist that they be treated humanely. Most Americans would have preferred the latter.
The enemy has to be the bad guy but not all Taliban soldiers were responsible for the terrorist attacks on us or even knew about them. They should be treated like human beings. They should be fed, clothed and, of course, interrogated. They should not have been slowly starved, frozen and tortured to death for information they probably did not have.
During World War II, German prisoners were generally—not always—treated humanely and the Germans generally—not always—treated American prisoners humanely. The best reason to treat prisoners according to the rules of war is that if the enemy knows it is going to be killed when captured, it will never surrender. In the process of fighting on after all hope is gone, an enemy kills a lot of the winning Army. If they know they’ll be treated decently, they surrender and it saves lives on both sides.
“Taliban” is a relatively new word in our vocabulary and isn’t in any of our dictionaries. Translated literally, it means “student.” What its members are students of is an ignorant, militant way of life that they find justification for in some corrupt version of their religion that has nothing to do with the religion of the average Muslim.
The Taliban, in a monstrously uncivilized act, wantonly destroyed the treasured 2nd-century Buddhist statues in Afghanistan.
On the other hand, to the great displeasure of Afghan farmers, the Taliban banned the growing of poppies. As evidence of their dysfunctional leadership, they continued to allow the sale of the opium made from poppies.
It’s apparent that wars weren’t meant to be understood—just fought.
DIPLOMACY: LYING POLITELY
There are a hundred places in the world that need the help U.S. power and money can provide. But we have to ask, how much can we do and how much do we have the will to do? How effective would diplomacy be?
The dictionary says of “diplomat”: “one skilled in diplomacy.” Under “diplomacy,” it reads: “tact in dealing with people.”
The dictionary doesn’t say so, but being diplomatic also means not always saying what you think. “Tact” can mean saying something that’s less than the whole truth in order to influence or avoid offending someone.
The diplomats don’t dare tell us the whole truth because half the time we wouldn’t let them do what they think our country should do. They may know best but we don’t want to hear it.
We’ve had a lot of good secretaries of state over the years. Thomas Jefferson was George Washington’s secretary of state. John Quincy Adams and Martin Van Buren were both secretaries of state before becoming president. Daniel Webster was a great one. Henry Stimson, Dean Rusk, Cyrus Vance—a great American who died just recently—were all better than good. Most people thought Madeleine Albright was good at the job. Not everyone thought the same of Henry Kissinger.
President Woodrow Wilson made a speech to Congress right after World War I that became famous because it contained his “Fourteen Points of Diplomacy.”
One of them insisted on “Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind, but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in public view.”
Other points included “Absolute freedom of navigation on the sea,” “Removal of all trade barriers” and “General Disarmament.”
Americans aren’t much interested in diplomacy because it usually means dealing with foreign countries. If a vote were taken and the choice for Americans was between never having any relationships with any foreign country again, or doing everything within our power and wealth for the poor people of the world, we’d vote to curl up and forget everyone else. A great many Americans don’t think we should concern ourselves with the rest of the world’s problems. It doesn’t make our government’s job any easier that Americans are losing their enthusiasm for the Israeli cause.
There have always been a lot of Americans who are isolationists, and sometimes they’ve been right. It seems likely we should never have become involved in either Korea or Vietnam. We were embarrassed about being too slow to enter World War II, so we made up for it by moving too quickly in Korea and Vietnam. When Hitler moved into Poland and started to take over Europe, Americans generally were cool to the idea of going to help. Our policy was indifference. An organization called “America First” had a huge number of supporters who were isolationists.
It took the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to make us realize we were also residents of this Earth and what happened any place on it also happened to us.
UNINFORMED AND MISINFORMED
The restrictions put on reporters trying to tell the American people what’s going on in any war we are involved in is wrong and un-American.
The American public often doesn’t seem to realize it’s not getting anything but government-approved information from the front—or from the back, for that matter. We have to depend on the almostnightly press conference from the bright, engaging, sharp and forktongued Donald Rumsfeld for what little he chooses to tell us. Rumsfeld shares the generals’ belief that it’s easier to fight a war if the people you’re fighting it for don’t know what you’re doing.
Someone said the Pentagon isn’t telling us what its doing because it doesn’t know what it’s doing.
One of President Bush’s best moments in his whole presidency came when he stepped in to close down the new “disinformation” agency. As part of the war on t
errorism, the Office of Strategic Influence was apparently going to spread false information to influence opinion in foreign countries.
President Bush, in indicating he disapproved of the agency, hedged a little when he stated, “We will never misinform the American people.” He left the door open for us to lie abroad.
There has always been animosity between journalists and generals. Generals don’t like being watched. If they bomb the wrong target or alienate several million people in a foreign country by killing innocent citizens by mistake, they don’t want anyone back home to know. They cover their mistakes by not allowing reporters where the action is.
The death of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter, has helped the military. Every time a reporter is killed, injured, or captured it reinforces the Pentagon’s claim that it’s too dangerous to let such factfinders go forward to where the facts are.
Journalists are no more or less brave or heroic than anyone else. There have always been reporters who risked their lives to get a story up front while other reporters waited behind the lines for a handout from the military. Sometimes the reporters went where it was dangerous, not based on any grand vision of informing the American public but to get a story no one else had. Even if it was glory the reporter was after, the story served the American public better than a Pentagon announcement of what happened. You won’t read about any of our military disasters in the bulletins issued by a U.S Army public relations office.
Our current military leaders in the Pentagon would find the press operation in World War II hard to believe. In June of 1944, days after our invasion of France, I joined the First Army press camp. There were about twenty-five reporters there.
The motor pool for the press camp had fourteen jeeps and one Diamond T truck. We shared the jeeps and as the Army pressed forward across France, our tents were packed into the truck and the press camp was moved up nearer the action.