Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Robert Novak, who died today at the age of 78, was a fairly important figure in the shaping--which is to say, the de-evolution--of American journalism in the latter half of the twentieth century. A Washington correspondent while still in his twenties, he rose to the post of chief congressional reporter for the Wall Street Journal when he was thirty. A couple of years after that, an older, more sedate writer, Rowland Evans, pitched him the idea that they should team up to produce a daily syndicated column, with the understanding that Novak would be the principal leg man and that Evans's name would open doors where needed. The Evans-Novak Political Report made Novak famous in political commentary circles and helped make his fortune; it also made his brand of "inside dope" reporting a hot ticket in Washington journalism. "Inside dope" journalism worked like this: if Senator Bucketass felt that he might be feeling a little heat from a union organizer threatening to challenge him for re-election, then one of the Senator's aides would invite Evans or Novak for lunch and mention that it was sure a shame that the union organizer couldn't feed the ducks in the public park near the playground anymore since the police had advised him that they didn't want to catch him offering any more little girls a nickel if they'd pull up their skirt. The next day, the column would cite "unnamed sources in the nation's capitol" who'd been expressing concern that having a likely pedophile like the union organizer running for office tended to cheapen the whole political process. "There are two kinds of people in this town," Novak once said, "sources ... and targets, and you better make up your mind which you are."

Through the sixties and into the seventies, Novak was, at least, generally considered a dependable reporter whose work was worth sifting for the occasional nugget; it wasn't until the late seventies that Washington insiders and journalism junkies began routinely referring to the column as "Errors and No-facts." By then, Novak's and Evans's conservative political bent had begun coloring the content of their work at least as much as their steady need to reward those who leaked to them and to punish those who held out. But by 1980, with the birth of CNN, Novak had also started whoring himself out to the TV cameras, thus absolving himself of any need to do his job adequately in order to maintain his celebrity status. He and Evans even co-starred together for awhile on CNN, where they had their own weekend interview show. But the old-school, socially comfortable Evans had a TV presence like mist on the lens, whereas Novak, with his growly voice and threatening bulk and Blofeld-like features, was a natural for the role of the cartoon conservative meanie. It turned out to be a role he relished; everyone knows that Novak's nickname was the Prince of Darkness, and the reason everyone knows it is that he wielded it proudly as part of his self-promotion toolkit. (He eventually used it as the title of his memoir.) He was one of the first of the new breed of telepundits to understand that the secret to success in the cable news era wasn't how good your reporting was but whether, in a few minutes of TV time, you could flaunt enough attention-getting mannerisms to deserve the seat of honor at a Dean Martin roast. As Novak became more famous across the country, he could command ever higher speaking fees and charge more for his star-studded "retreats", which meant that it was more important to him than ever to keep track of who was doing him favors by agreeing to appear with him at these things, which made his "this guy is great/this one's a scumbag" inside journalism more a matter of rewarding and settling scores than ever.

If, God help you, you accept the kind of media gamesmanship that Novak saw as his calling, then maybe the worst thing you can say about the man is that, towards the end, he failed to prove that he could take it as well as he could dish it out. Having outed the CIA agent Valerie Plame as part of the Bush White House's war on Plame's husband Joseph Wilson--an implicit warning to anyone who'd dare to tell the truth about any aspect of the race to war in Iraq--Novak spent more than a year sneering at the thought that he'd done anything wrong or that he might get into trouble over it. (a little treason among friends was no big whoop as far as Novak was concerned; during the Clinton years, he used Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent who was found to be padding his income selling information to Russian intelligence, as a primary source for stories he wrote that smeared Janet Reno.) He didn't get into much trouble over it; for instance, he didn't see the inside of a jail cell, as Judith Miller did, and he seemed to resent it when people drew the only logical inference from this (everyone knew that he was in it up to his eyeballs) and deduced that he must have sang like Caruso to the special prosecutor. More damaging to his image was the incident when he threw a hissy fit and stormed out of a live taping of a CNN show, in what looked a lot like an improvised bailing out of the broadcast ao that he could avoid being asked about his role in l'affaire Plame. A few months later he officially "retired" from CNN after an association of a quarter of a century and then announced that, henceforth, he'd be appearing on Fox News, in part because that channel was more congenial to his politics than CNN, even though he issued a statement stressing that "I was never censored by CNN and I said some fairly outrageous things and some very conservative things. I don't want to give the impression that they were muzzling me and I had to go to a place that wouldn't muzzle me." There is, however, a difference between never being muzzled and never, ever, being challenged in the slightest, and he must have known that he could count on getting the latter kind of treatment from Fox.

It's sort of pathetic when a man whose bread and butter comes from promoting his image as a fearless attack dog makes it plain that he himself can't bear to even have anyone look at him cross-eyed, and Novak, like a lot of the conservatives we've seen lately doing their self-exculpation tours, may have been less secure, and most vulnerable to criticism, than he ever wanted to let on. (His statements from his last years, while he was battling cancer and other various ailments, are full of assurances that all those people he knows are gloating sadistically over his suffering would feel pretty small if they knew how much the people who really matter loved the shit out of him.) But his spirit lives on whenever some Bill O'Reilly type who's never had to work hard a day in his life rages about how he's the last true working-class hero, or whenever some pitiful Tucker Carlson character manages to flaunt his utter cynicism in the most self-righteous tones imaginable.

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