The Cobra Lectures Austin

The late editorial writer for the Austin American-Statesman, Mary Alice Davis, was fearless. Her family endowed a lectureship at UT-Austin in Davis' name and the inaugural lecturer was The Cobra. Dowd was more than up to the task. If this is (fair & balanced) truth-telling, so be it.


[x Austin Fishwrap]
We can't be afraid to tell it like it is
By Maureen Dowd

The following is a text of Dowd's comments she delivered on November 18, 2005:

I'm honored to be giving the first Mary Alice Davis Lecture.

I've been learning all about Mary Alice today, and I know I would have loved her. She never hesitated to tweak power-brokers. She enjoyed seeing young women compete and succeed — in basketball and in life. She loved to have fun and to work hard. And she loved telling stories. Now we have to tell stories for her.

OK, first a confession. I don't have an iPod. Don't even have any idea how an iPod works. Worst of all, I don't want an iPod — even to get iPorn, which is apparently the latest thing to download on an iPod.

I agree with the New York businessman who wrote an op-ed piece in the Financial Times saying that he wanted to hear the soundtrack of his life, from crickets in the summer to the guy on the street who might call out a warning about an impending terrorist attack.

I'm not a Luddite. I'm not as bad as Mary McGrory, the late, luminous Washington Post columnist who used to write her columns on the campaign bus on a pad in longhand, as close to a Jane Austin quill pen as she could manage. She called laptops "fiendish little gadgets."

I confide this by way of telling you that I don't know anything about technology and where it's taking journalism.

I'm not worried about blogs overtaking print journalism. If it weren't for print journalism, what would bloggers have to write about? I say, the more the merrier. Competition makes everyone sharper.

As Amanda Bennett, the editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote in an article recently, the myth is that the Internet is eating our lunch. "Actually," she said, "the Internet IS our lunch. And our dinner, too. We are the Internet. Our site, philly.com, is the No. 1 local Web site in our area."

In September alone, NewYork Times.com achieved record traffic of 21.3 million visitors worldwide. The New York Times generated 561 million page views, whatever that means. But it's good. Ms. Bennett wryly noted that, as Mark Twain said of himself, "Reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated."

I was on Larry King the other night with my old friend, Andrea Mitchell, a fantastically dogged reporter — who, by the way, is the only woman who can get her TV eye makeup put on while she's reading the paper with one eye and her TV lipstick put on while she's reporting on a cell phone.

Anyhow, she said something that was meant to be encouraging about journalism. She told Larry that the NBC evening news would survive, even if it ended up being delivered by Brian Williams to individual cell phones.

I've read the Jetsons prediction that we'll have a newspaper on a coffee table that will instantaneously change every few minutes to update the news, like something out of a Philip K. Dick novel. But I've never paid much attention to these futuristic scenarios. I'm such a technological creton, I can't even figure out how to get onto Times Select, and I've paid my $49.95 with my Mastercard. (Paying to read yourself: Priceless.)

But I'm an optimist about the future of journalism. Because, in the end, it isn't the form that matters. It's the function. It isn't the medium, it's the message.

And here's my message: From time immemorial, from the Roman Senate, which we're vividly reliving on HBO on Sunday nights, to Shakespeare's royal courts to Dick Cheney's House of Pain, power leads to abuse of power. Power, as you can see with King Lear and the Boy Emperor, W., makes people deaf. The pursuit of power, as you can see in MacBeth and with Paul Wolfowitz and the neocon cabal, makes people blind.

Fawning, as you can see with Othello and the Harriet Miers fiasco, poisons judgment and makes those fawned upon behave in ways contrary to their interests, and the interests of the nation.

Maybe it's because I'm Irish and our tradition is storytelling. But, to me, the most important thing is narrative. What is the story arc? What is the fascinating tale to spin for your readers orviewers?

In my decades as a journalist, I've always been drawn to the human stories that compelled me, not necessarily the one judged most important by the paper or my colleagues, and certainly not the narrative the White House tried to push.

The elements of a compelling story don't change from Greek mythology to Greek tragedy to Shakespeare to the farcical Clinton impeachment to the grandiose drama of these last Bush years.

The story of a young man torn between a good father and a bad father, the forces of light and the forces of darkness, is an old one, but it is just as fascinating when you see it in Star Wars or the White House. With the President as Luke Skywalker and Cheney as Darth Vader, the only thing missing from W.'s "Star Wars" drama are the light sabers.

Primal human instincts, tragic flaws, profiles in courage, driving people to do great things and self-destructive things. Sometimes, as with Lyndon Johnson, simultaneously. In my new book, the historian Michael Beshloss tells me that LBJ said that the two things that made politicians more stupid than anything else are sex and envy.

What could be more Shakespearean than that?

At a time when journalism is considered an endangered species, our profession is more necessary than ever. The Bush Administration has done everything it could to kill the system of checks and balances, even as Tom DeLay — or "Hot Tub Tom," as he was known in his salad days here — was pushing to get rid of an independent judiciary.

Bush officials tried to mau mau the press corps by acting as though any tough questioning about their tactics in going to war in Iraq was unpatriotic. They tried to replace the skeptical press corps with a more malleable, Potemkin press corps, giving access only to favored, fawning court reporters, Fox TV and Robert Novak; secretly paying columnists like Armstrong Williams to push the administration line, and spending hundreds of millions on self-aggrandizing covert propaganda and puffery, fashioned like fake newscasts with faux anchor people that were peddled to local news outlets. They even tried to shift PBS to the right. The president's pick to head the corporation for public broadcasting, Kenneth Tomlinson, paid a Republican operative to monitor the political leanings of guests on Bill Moyers' show. Big Brother on Big Bird — doesn't get much weirder than that.

My press pass was taken away, and I was told I'd have to undergo a six-month FBI check to get it back, while a male prostitute writing for a conservative Web site was allowed daily access to the White House press room and presidential press conferences. They thought they could create an alternate reality, and for awhile it worked disturbingly well.

As a Bush official chillingly told Ron Suskind in the New York Times magazine, they considered journalists "the reality-based community." The official added, "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."

That's what you call a narcissistic explosion.

Their alternate version of reality, which I called Bushworld, worked because 9/11 created a situation where Americans wanted to support and believe in their President. In turn, this White House played on Americans' fear and misled them into war on false pretenses. Their actions, from ginning up evidence for war to outing one of their own spies to creating CIA black torture sites across the globe, have changed the American identity in terrible ways, and left us wondering what our value system is, what it means to be American.

As John McCain says, we're losing our moral authority. Hurricane Katrina allowed reality to flood in, and underscored the incompetence of the administration in Iraq. The Democrats were reduced to stomping their feet and turning out the lights in Congress to force the Republicans to even consider giving answers about whether we misused intelligence leading to war.

Things are going so badly for W. he's reverted to attacking John Kerry and Democrats who are complaining that the administration snookered them and the country with flawed intelligence as unpatriotic, because that's the last time he won one.

Swift boat ads at 11.

Of course, we have to ask why Democrats like John Kerry and Hillary Clinton allowed themselves to be so easily snookered. And the answer is: they both wanted to seem manly, not wimpy, because they planned to run for president. Even now, with its approval ratings plunging faster, as Dave Barry would say, than a pig dropping out of a helicopter, the administration is still attempting to get rid of checks and balances, with Cheney, the lord of the underworld, pushing to find ingenious new ways to make sure that Congress doesn't ban torture, as an appalled John McCain fights back.

Democracy depends on us. It depends on our ability to be patriots, to fulfill the founding fathers vision of keeping a check on power. We can't leave it to male escorts, fake anchors and professional fawners. It doesn't matter how you tell the story — with hieroglyphics, with a royal typewriter, with an IBM think pad, with a cell phone, with a Blackberry, with a carrier pigeon.

Just tell the story.

Make Mary Alice proud.

Pulitzer Prize winner Maureen Dowd recently inaugurated the Mary Alice Davis lectureships at the University of Texas. Davis, who died in 2004, was an American-Statesman editorial writer and a fan of Dowd's. So it was more than appropriate that the New York Times columnist and author was the inaugural speaker for the series.

Copyright © 2005 The Austin American-Statesman

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