is the great one right?
Broder blasts press nouveau

In my mind, there is no more respected political writer in town than The Washington Post’s David Broder. That sensible man gathers his information the old way — by phone and conversation. He is truly a reporter first, an opinion-maker second.

Which makes his recent broadside in the Post’s “Outlook” Sept. 25 so important. “The media, losing their way,” was the headline.

The drum he is beating is celebrity journalism, “babe” journalists, gossip, “sham events” and “the big story.” These trends, plus newsroom scandals wrought by reporters who falsified stories at The New York Times and USA Today, led Broder to confess: “I certainly feel a sense of shame and embarrassment at our performance.”

He points out in specifics how reporting on this presidential season’s big issues — war, the budget, healthcare, terrorism — has been smothered by phony partisan issues such as President Bush’s National Guard service and Sen. John Kerry’s Vietnam service. He blames news executives who have brought politics into the newsroom by hiring politicians and political operatives to write and opine on television about daily events.

The usually clear-eyed Broder writes as if there had been some pure and shining day for Washington journalism — perhaps the Watergate era — now gone. And he is partly right. Yet crusading young journalists like Bob Woodward and his peers, who came into journalism as defenders of the little guy, have themselves become the people they used to write scathingly about.

Washington’s news reporters now own the big houses in Cleveland Park, vacation in the Hamptons or Martha’s Vineyard, wield huge influence in business and politics.

In this town, the top journalists are among the fat cats.

Journalism was ever moving up or down the moral scale. Politics was never far from the copy desk. Any study of Civil War journalism reveals excesses far worse than any practiced today for pure partisanship and lying to the reader.

The fact is that political journalism is exploding today in so many different directions — via the internet, blogging, alternative media, radio talk, comedy,
supermarket tabs and other means — that there is no center left. The media are no longer the networks and the half-dozen dailies of record but a bewildering barrage of voices struggling in Darwinian fashion for the attention of an audience. And this audience, in many ways like a willful child, would rather be amused than educated or challenged.

Broder describes a journalism in decadence. He may well be right. But history shows reaction nearly always follows excess. And it will again.

cirque du soleil
Big-top Starbucks: Leave it to the French

The circus was once a familiar sequence in Washington: a trainload of diverse animals arriving in Northeast, an obligatory feature story about Barnum & Bailey and their derivatives, and a sticky-fingered evening of colored lights and dusty, redolent air in the Stadium-Armory.

But now Cirque du Soleil has stolen into town, infinitely brighter, shinier, more French, more sophisticated, expensive and better, one imagines, than ever.

The campus of the highly regarded Montreal show has set up in the Robert F. Kennedy Stadium parking lot, its blue and yellow tents a cartoon against the swelling concrete and steel of the old stadium. Cirque du Soleil has become more than a circus — it is a franchise, a big-top Starbucks.

There are Cirques playing all over the world. A show named “Saltimbuco” tours northern Europe. “Dralion” tours southern Europe. “Allegria” plays in Tokyo, “Quidam” in Australia. “Varekai” is the version parked in RFK Lots 6 and 7.

The word means roughly “wherever” in the tongue of the Romany gypsies, and the theme is a loose plot about the death and reawakening of Icarus, the boy whose ambition led him to fly too close to the sun on manufactured wings.

When Cirque du Soleil arrived first in Washington a decade ago, people could talk of little else — the elegance, the magic and the color. Now it has become expected, yet good crowds are still attending.

Cirque shows are opera to the old circus’s brass band, ballet to the old circus’s vaudeville, highbrow Cirque to lowbrow circus. Critics have raved about the color and the vision and the music.

The Cirque is here through Oct. 24, with ticket information at www.cirquedusoleil.com.

It’s an expensive evening, with the cheapest seats going for $55 for adults, $38.50 for children under 12 and $49.50 for seniors and students. Curiously, when Verekai move on to Dallas, prices will average more than $10 less per category.

METRO