The ‘Better Question’ is …
Why the hell do US journalists go to the political circus?
Patrick Gathara
In an interview on 60 Minutes, American journalist Bill Whitaker asked Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, whether Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a “strong ally” of the United States. Given the humiliations Netanyahu has handed the Biden regime in the past year, it’s a question that must be asked.
Without wavering, Harris responded: “The better question is: Do we have an important alliance between the American people and the Israeli people? And the answer to that question is yes.”
It is a telling exchange that shows how public officials work the media as an arena for performance rather than information. They show up for “media engagements” – not to answer uncomfortable questions, but to regurgitate talking points. US officials are well-practiced at this dance that generates heat rather than light, drama rather than knowledge. Just listen to the convoluted answers offered up by the state department spokespeople when journalists point out the contradictions of US policy in the Middle East.
It makes one wonder why journalists participate in the charade. They are unlikely to come away with a better understanding of any policies.
“People are sick of the bullshit in here,” one frustrated journalist exclaimed during a recent press briefing.
Yet they keep attending. Is it the fear of missing out on a game of “Gotcha”?
Or perhaps they believe that they are serving their audiences by providing the regime’s point of view, regardless of how obscure and unintelligible it is.
In 2003, the newly-elected Kenyan president Mwai Kibaki caused excitement when he called a press conference to announce his cabinet. We thought he was inaugurating a new era of what we imagined to be US-like presidential transparency. It didn’t quite turn out that way. He didn’t hold another press conference until his wife hauled him before journalists six years later to deny that he had another not-so-secret family.
“The better question is: Do we have an important alliance between the American people and the Israeli people? And the answer to that question is yes.”
But Kibaki did create the office of the government spokesperson, which, under Alfred Mutua, now the labour cabinet secretary, initially held regular briefings featuring little more than “official truth”; or, to use modern-day parlance, public disinformation. To report Mutua’s “truth” was to be deeply unserious.
Journalism is meant to be a counterweight to government propaganda, not a platform for it. When the US news media is so deeply unserious about its work, Trumpian insults gain more traction than interrogations of policy: the country’s election now looks less like a competition of ideas than a shouting match, or marketplace for slogans. This can lead to terrible consequences: See Gaza and Lebanon.
There is a famous 1997 interview where broadcast journalist Jeremy Paxman hounds Britain’s home secretary for an answer, posing the same question 12 times in 90 seconds. It is difficult to imagine the news media today being so insistent and refusing to take a non-answer.
Not when the politicians can themselves pose and answer “the better question”, and get away with it.