What We Talk About When We Talk About…

Slate’s Michael Brus picked up on an interesting exchange between President Bush and Jim Lehrer during last week’s interview and offered some poignant insight into the code words and phrases used by journalists when asking pointed questions. Brus also commented on the play various news stories receive.

Here’s the interview clip:

JIM LEHRER: I mean, [the wiretapping story is] on the front page of the New York Times, the Washington Post, every newspaper in America today, and it’s going–it’s the main story of the day. So–

PRESIDENT BUSH: It’s not the main story of the day.

JIM LEHRER: Well, but I mean in terms of the way it’s being covered–

PRESIDENT BUSH: The main story of the day is the Iraqi election.

JIM LEHRER: Right, and I’m going to get to that.

And Brus’ spot-on analysis:

What interests TP about this exchange is that Jim Lehrer is not really saying what he means. President Bush is certainly right about the Iraq election being the biggest story of the day. The NYT, which broke the domestic-spying story, gave the election a four-column lead on the same day. Even Lehrer would probably admit that a 70-percent voter turnout in a country just emerging from 40 years of totalitarian rule means more, in historical terms, than a revelation of domestic civil-liberties abuses. What Lehrer really means is something akin to this: “The Iraqi election may be the biggest story of the day, but it’s not my job as a journalist to let you bask in a policy victory. It’s my job to hold your feet to the fire, so I’m going to hammer you on domestic wiretapping.” This is a perfectly respectable position for a newsman to take, of course; TP might act the same if he were in Lehrer’s shoes. But it’s worth noting that journalists, like politicians, sometimes feel the need to rationalize their agenda.

Ah code words…kind of like how it’s hard to shake that feeling that, when a journalist begins a question with “Some people have expressed concern…”, “some people” may really just mean “me.”

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