Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

Ending with a Crash

(Reprinted from the issue of January 20, 2005)

CBS News has fired four top executives after completing its internal investigation of the most notorious story in its history, its pre-election “scoop” about George W. Bush’s truancy in his National Guard days. The key document turned out to be a forgery, but it took Dan Rather several days to admit this.

Rather is not among the axed. He’s retiring in March anyway, and no doubt the network didn’t want to spill any more blood than it had to, even if he was the most conspicuous figure in the scandal. The incident hasn’t just wounded Rather and CBS; it has deepened public distrust of all the news media, to whom it will remain a frightening object lesson in the perils of trusting one’s sources.

I haven’t been able to share the glee of most conservatives at Rather’s ignominy. It’s just a sad way for a long career to end. When I worked at CBS as a radio commentator, I found Rather a pleasant and decent man, mildly but not egregiously liberal. Not that I knew him all that well, but as an anchor man I much preferred him to the man he’d succeeded, Walter Cronkite.

Cronkite was called “the most trusted man in America,” but then, I wasn’t consulted when this title was bestowed. In truth, I thought Cronkite tilted the news sinfully, and every time he signed off with the words “And that’s the way it is” I wanted to yell at my television. Rather seemed to me far more honest. I never thought he was smuggling liberalism into his reports; he merely reflected the liberalism of his environment.

Rather’s big career break came when he happened to be in Dallas the day John Kennedy was assassinated, and he reported the story on the local CBS affiliate. It obviously didn’t take a great feat of reporting to ferret out the story that the president of the United States had been shot, but the solemn, handsome young TV journalist was seen from coast to coast, and soon he was working for the network in New York.

He attracted his biggest notice when he exchanged edgy sarcasms with Richard Nixon at a press conference during the Watergate uproar. During the Reagan years he had a similarly sharp interview with Vice President George H.W. Bush. These moments of friction with Republicans caused conservatives to perceive him as far more left-wing than he really was.
 
Ideology at Work

CBS now says that the four fired executives were guilty of undue and uncritical haste, not ideological bias. This is a bit hard to swallow. I enjoyed my years at CBS, but you couldn’t walk into the newsroom without feeling the heavily liberal atmosphere. It was palpable. Pleasant people, but there were only two figures there you’d describe as conservative: the aging Douglas Edwards, Cronkite’s predecessor, and Peggy Noonan, who wrote Rather’s daily radio commentaries before achieving fame as Ronald Reagan’s brilliant speechwriter. If you’d known Rather only from those short radio broadcasts, you might have taken him for a Reagan Republican.

I knew Peggy well, and she was very fond of Rather. I gathered that he never asked her to revise her work for ideological reasons. She managed to write pieces that were so reasonable that he was quite comfortable with them. That’s why I was never able to see him as a liberal ogre. He was liberal because he was in a place where everyone was expected to be liberal, and he didn’t want to be disagreeable. If he’d been in a conservative milieu, it’s hard to imagine him rocking the boat with defiant disagreement.

But the bogus Bush story offered him another chance to make a splash at a president’s expense, and he couldn’t resist it. Again, we should note that the story didn’t originate with him. It was handed to him, and he didn’t inspect the package too closely before running with it. What he really showed was something more embarrassing than partisan bias: mere professional incompetence. He didn’t even seek a tough expert judgment of the explosive document he was relying on, despite the danger to him and the network if it turned out to be phony. So his career will be remembered chiefly for the disaster with which it ended. Meanwhile, Walter Cronkite is still thriving in retirement.
 
The Root of the Problem

President Bush has big ambitions for his second term, beginning with Social Security reform. “We have a problem,” he says, “and the problem is America is getting older and that there are fewer people to pay into the system to support a Baby Boomer generation which is about to retire.”

Very true. But he should have thought of that before adding generous new Medicare benefits that will be available to the 77 million Boomers who will soon stop adding to federal revenues and start draining them. Moreover, their life expectancy will be considerably longer than that of the earlier recipients of retirement benefits. Old people are not only getting more numerous, they’re getting ... well, older.

Do the math — if you can. Imminent budget problems defy calculation. Semi-“privatization” of Social Security, which Bush seeks, would relieve only part of the pressure. The economist Robert Samuelson cites a projection that “Medicare’s costs will exceed Social Security’s in 2024 — and then the gap only widens.” Economists surveying the future seem to differ only in degrees of pessimism.

“In 1935, when Congress passed Social Security,” Samuelson notes, “life expectancy at birth was 62; now it’s 77. In 1965, when Congress passed Medicare, the 65-and-over population was 9% of the total; by 2030, it’s expected to be 20%.” And so on.

In all these discussions, one fact goes unmentioned: that the Baby Boom happened when Americans wanted babies. The birthrate plunged as they increasingly resorted to contraception and abortion. Add the tens of millions of children killed before birth to the much larger but unknown number prevented from being conceived at all, and you begin to see the political result of combining the welfare state with what Chesterton called “birth prevention.”

How can the government be expected to solve a problem it has itself caused? “Big-government conservatism” is an empty, self-contradictory slogan that only evades and disguises the root of the problem. Socialism is a shortsighted principle that always ends in ruin, and the degree of it that “capitalist” America has adopted is enough to be ruinous.

The only question is when the day of reckoning will be upon us.


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Joseph Sobran