This article was prepared for the June 29, 2005 issue of U.S. 1 Newspaper. All rights reserved.
Republicans think the news media are too critical, and Democrats think the media are not critical enough. A survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press showed that 67 percent of Republicans believe news outlets should “stand up for America” and 54 percent of Democrats say that reporters are not sufficiently critical of the Bush administration.
As a reporter, it is not easy to strike a balance and be fair as well as “critical,” especially when you consider that synonyms for critical include acerbic, caustic, corrosive, and sarcastic.
Comedians, of course, don’t need to worry about being fair. It’s fine for them to be acerbic, caustic, corrosive, and sarcastic.
But when a reporter and a comedian appear on the same stage, and both of them are adlibbing for laughs, fairness can get forgotten. That’s what happened at the live broadcast of the public radio show “Whad’Ya Know” last Saturday at the Patriots Theater in Trenton.
For the first 112 minutes of the two-hour show, Michael Feld had the audience (a near-capacity crowd of more than 1,300) in the proverbial palm of his hand. He teased Tom and Averil Moore (Tom’s the former CEO of Nelson Communications), who hosted a party in the barn at their Princeton Township estate, Tusculum, saying “maybe next time they’ll let us into the house.
He bantered with historian Marc Mappen and novelist Janet Evanovich, who held up their end of lively conversations without trying to be the stars. To play the trivia game, he chose Audrey Mainzer, a Trenton native who works at Princeton University, and a livewire named “Grumpy.” Everyone was having fun.
Then Feldman introduced Charles Webster of the Trentonian, and the atmosphere at the Patriots Theater went from ebullient to embarrassed and then to angry. Webster repeatedly lambasted everyone in state government for dishonesty, tarring all with the same brush for “Pay to Play” schemes.
When Feldman brought up Hamilton’s proposed pedophile-free zones, it became painfully obvious that the subject of child molestation does not lend itself to comedy. When Feldman admitted he did not know Megan’s Law had started here, Webster gratuitously described how the six-year-old was raped and murdered.
By the time he finished, no one was laughing.
Some might say Webster was arrogant in his criticism, but as the Pew report shows, others define media arrogance as failing to be critical.
When should the media mince words? On last week’s cover we used the term “grease monkey,” as in “When the Aston Martin needs repair, no ordinary grease monkey will do.” Some would say this denigrates blue collar workers, yet reader Tom Wojczak, in an E-mail, objected to the practice of mincing words. “I’m not opposed to you calling a mechanic a ‘grease monkey.’ When will I see a cover calling a terrorist something other than an ‘insurgent’”
At least newspaper reporters have editors, and sometimes they think twice about what they write. Those in live radio don’t have that option.