September 23-29, 2004

book quicks

Attack Poodles and Other Media Mutants: The Looting of the News in a Time of Terror

by Andrew Milner

Attack Poodles and Other Media Mutants: The Looting of the News in a Time of Terror

By James Wolcott Miramax, 336 pp., $22.95

James Wolcott, as television critic for The New Yorker in 1992, championed Rush Limbaugh's TV show; a decade later, as Vanity Fair's cultural critic, he's changed his outlook somewhat. "I can't bear bullies, and I can't stand cowardly deceivers," Wolcott writes in the author's note, "and in the Bush administration and the conservative media, we have the worst of both combined." His marvelous Attack Poodles—this being Wolcott's general term for "right-wing hacks and liberalish enablers with obedience-school diplomas"—focuses on the media creatures who pounded the drums for war in Iraq.

Wolcott's most effective in showing how conservative pundits collaborate with Bush officials to gang up on unsuspecting liberal or even moderate public figures. After veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas said that George W. Bush was the worst President ever, a comment she immediately apologized for, she was pointedly not called upon in a subsequent Bush press conference, and she was insulted by Fox anchor Brit Hume ("the nutty aunt in the attic") and two New York Post columnists. "Why such a major fuss over such a minor nuisance?" Wolcott asks. "Because to a bully it feels better to punish someone than to finesse them."

The strongest chapter in the book is "Peggy Noonan: Best in Show," Wolcott's delectable takedown of the GOP speechwriter/Wall Street Journal columnist who claimed that the dolphins who escorted Elian Gonzlez were "commanded to protect one of God's children." Wolcott summarizes Noonan's simplistic worldview: "God loves America, America loves God, America loves itself, Bush loves God and America, and Noonan loves God, America and Bush, a holy trinity of positive energy that no national trauma can sunder. She never entertains the unhappy notion that America has accrued a huge overdraft of bad karma with its bombings, monstrous appetites and hubris; it never occurs to her that the gods may not be pleased—indeed, may be ready to teach us an expensive lesson."

Wolcott concludes the book with ways we can help "spay" the Fox News/MSNBC/Weekly Standard poodles ("Quarantine falsifiers and plagiarists"; "Feed attack poodles their own questions"). Maybe the simplest way to reduce the influence of bad punditry is to emulate other types of media folk. Daniel Pearl was no Beltway bloviator but, instead, in the Middle East gathering information firsthand when he was killed. And Seymour Hersh spent the past year not in a think tank or on a cable shout-fest, but busy developing sources and confirming facts for his Abu Ghraib exposés. Opinion-mongering may be entertaining, but we'd be better off with fewer pundits and more reporters.