The following is an email I sent to C-SPAN today (9/3/06), following an interview and call-in questioning of Victoria Clarke on this morning's "Washington Journal."
Dear Washington Journal and C-SPAN,
I tried to call this morning on the Independent Line, as I listened on C-SPAN radio, to make the following point.
An earlier gentleman asked a very good question. Though offering a reply of some length, Ms. Victoria Clarke, former Asst. Secretary of Defense, completely avoided the gentleman's question. The moderator was not Brian Lamb, but another gentleman. And he will remember this question, I suspect, if you bring it up with him.
The question went something like the following [tone and content best as I can recall]: "When is the administration going to grow up and start acting like adults. They hold stubbornly to a strategy which is not working, instead of getting more troops in there to protect the people on the street and to finish the job. President Bush should replace Secretary Rumsfeld, and put in General Shinseki, who told the administration before the war that it would need over 200,000 troops to complete the mission."
Ms. Clarke answered by agreeing that people need to act like adults, and answered that just "getting out of Iraq" is not the way to go. Now, getting out of Iraq was not the man's point! In fact, it was quite the opposite, rather, in his view, changing course and sending in enough troops to do the job. She also reiterated that the best course is to trust the generals on the ground, like Gen. Abizaid, who so far has not asked for a dramatic increase in troops. But again, to the gentleman's point regarding replacing Secretary Rumsfeld with Gen. Shinseki, if our policy once engaged is to trust the generals on the ground, then the key policy decision becomes deciding who is on the ground! And the person who makes that decision is Secretary Rumsfeld.
Now, I love C-SPAN. I listen whenever I can on C-SPAN radio. You all do the best job, in my view, among the others out there, and it's why I listen. But you, too, must be vigilant, and watchful, and grade yourself. Part of your mission statement is:
"To provide the audience, through the call-in program, direct access to elected officials, other decision makers and journalists on a frequent and open basis."
If all you do, and all your moderators do, is provide "direct access", without holding and pressing your guests - many of whom, as you know, have political aims and biases even if C-SPAN does not - for answers as direct as the direct access you are pledged to provide, then once again your guests have been given but one more easy platform for spreading and promulgating what may well be an intentionally political, partial, flawed or distorted view; and your listeners once again, without direct answers, have no tool but their own intuitions for determining if what your guest said was correct or not, substantive or not, well-argued or not.
In short, what service do you provide to your audience and to public affairs programming if your call-ins succeed in spawning trenchant questions which are evaded or heavily temporized by your guest, without recognition of this by your moderator, and an attempt to press your guest for a "direct answer" worthy of your "direct access" and larger public affairs mission?
To do this advances partisan affairs programming over public affairs programming. In making public figures more available to the public, it emphasizes availability over usefulness, access over answers. It measures your success based on whom you are able to get on your shows, rather than the information you are able to get from them.
You must be who you are or you will cease to be. Better still, as Eleanor Roosevelt said, " When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die."
If you let your guests temporize on C-SPAN, then C-SPAN is temporized.
Limiting your stated mission to just access and not answers does not differentiate C-SPAN from many other stations, networks and media outlets. You can't force anyone to answer, but I will suggest you add that answers are indeed part of your mission, and add something to that effect to your mission statement. You will have revolutionized public affairs programming! - I hope you realize - if you do just that.
Sincerely,
Joseph F. Intili
www.independentcaucus.com
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