Outrageous Fortune
Outrageous Fortune
What a coincidence! The Feb.
2 issue of Fortune magazine initiates a feature called the "Fortune 40."
It is, of all things, a list of the 40 Americans who, by the magazine's
calculation, gave the most to charity last year. No doubt the editors of
Fortune were completely unaware of a remarkably similar feature, the
"
Slate
60," which this magazine has been publishing at intervals
for a year and a half. ( Fortune published an unbranded list of 25 a year
ago.)
To be sure, the whole idea
of a list of the biggest givers originated with Ted Turner, vice chairman of
Time Warner, which publishes Fortune . And of course it's a variant on
the venerable Fortune 500 list of biggest corporations (via the Forbes 400 list
of richest Americans, the Animal Husbandry Quarterly 375 list of most prolific
rodents, and so on). Still, we did get there first. If Fortune couldn't
resist ripping us off, a bit of credit might have been nice.
Fortune 's list is on the Web, but we're not even going to link to it. So
there. Our
Slate
60 list from 1996 plus a couple of interim
updates are here. Our
Slate
60 for 1997 will be out next
month: 50 percent more charity than the Fortune 40.
Hot
Mail
A couple of minidialogues in
"E-Mail to the Editors" are worth calling to your special attention. Paul Cameron, originator of
the statistic (publicized by virtue expert William Bennett) that gay males have
an average life expectancy of 43 years, defends and explains his calculation in
response to a
Slate
article by Walter
Olson debunking it. Olson redebunks right back.
And the
editor of Business
Week , Stephen Shepard, responds to a recent
Slate
column by Paul Krugman criticizing an essay by Shepard in
Business
Week about the "New Economy." Anyone who follows Krugman
at all will not be surprised to know that Paul responds, unrepentant (except
for having misspelled Shepard's name, which we guess is our fault too. Sorry,
Steve). In fact, Shepard and Krugman have been going at it in e-mail since the
exchange we published, and it's pretty darned interesting. We're working on
persuading them to let us share the subsequent mail messages with you as
well.
In
Defense of Crossfire
The editor claims a few
cyberinches of this column, on a point of privilege, to defend his former
employer.
Geraldine Ferraro's
resignation as co-host of Crossfire , to run for the Senate from New
York, has occasioned the usual pokes at CNN's nightly political
interview-cum-debate program. In just the past few days' New York Times ,
Walter Goodman characterized Crossfire as "the CNN shout show," and
Maureen Dowd summarized Ferraro's duties as "blathering night after night with
political hacks."
As
co-host of Crossfire for six and a half years (1989-1995), I am familiar
with the rap: It's uncivilized, it's just show biz, it's not serious, you all
talk at the same time, no one gets to finish a sentence, Pat Buchanan is a
monster, Bob Novak is a monster, John Sununu makes me ill (and they hear
similar complaints, apparently, about the liberal hosts). In the family of
political talk shows, Crossfire is considered the ne'er-do-well cousin.
In my Crossfire days, I was patronized even by Sam Donaldson.
Crossfire deserves more respect. To start, it is honest in
a way the other shows are not. Virtually all the political talk shows require
journalists to adopt one of two dishonest postures: agnosticism or omniscience.
On traditional Q&A shows like Meet the Press , journalists must
pretend that they are neutral observers who have no opinion about the subject
at hand. This is not only dishonest, but it also limits their ability to frame
sharp questions and to pursue evasive answers. On opinion-spouting shows like
The McLaughlin Group , by contrast, journalists (often the same
journalists) are free to have a point of view. Indeed, they are required to
have, or to pretend to have, a passionate and fully informed viewpoint on every
subject that comes along. How many of those opining solemnly on the Indonesian
financial crisis this past week know (or care) squat about Indonesian
finance?
Crossfire 's basic fuel is the tendentious question. As a host, you
needn't pretend to be impartial or pretend to be all-knowing. This is more
honest, and it's also more effective in getting at the truth. Or at least, that
is the premise of Anglo-American jurisprudence, which uses the same model. (For
the neutral-interrogator approach, try France.) One thing this method is not is
easy. Walter Goodman smirks in the Times that Ferraro's Crossfire
job was "no doubt profitable and not arduous as these things go." But it's a
heckuva lot more arduous to conduct, in effect, a nationally televised
cross-examination than to spend night after night droning, "So Ms. A, what do
you have to say about what Mr. B just said?"
Talk-show guests these days often have had
formal training in how to avoid answering questions, and every 3-year-old knows
how to deliver a prepackaged sound bite. Guests are less likely to get away
with that on Crossfire than on any other show. Crossfire hosts
not only are freer to ask more pointed questions, but they're also free to
point out that a guest hasn't answered them, to follow up two or three or four
times, and ultimately either to extract an answer or to make vividly clear that
the guest is ducking.
There is
not nearly as much shouting on Crossfire as its reputation would
suggest. But the show does get cacophonous, sometimes to the point of making
the discussion unintelligible. That's not on purpose. It's the price of
Crossfire 's approach. The opposite approach has a price, too. Other
interview shows may retain a smoother veneer of Socratic dialogue, but the
emphasis on maintaining a civilized atmosphere actually dulls the intellectual
rigor of the discussion. Many politicians who are regulars on the other shows
decline to appear on Crossfire , blaming the shouting. It's not the
shouting that scares them. It's having to face a Pat Buchanan who will puncture
their postures and snare their sound bites.
For the hosts, too, Crossfire is a more
intellectually rigorous experience than the other shows--or, in a way, than
print punditry. Where else does a pundit face one or more people dedicated to
demolishing his or her arguments on the spot and making him or her look like a
fool? Not on The McLaughlin Group , where opinions are flung into the
Mixmaster and issues race by like movie credits. Not in the sedate and
agreeable discussions on Washington Week in Review . And not in the pages
of the New York Times , where you may opine away with nothing more
immediate to fear than a distant letter to the editor or, at worst, a politely
dissenting op-ed piece.
To be sure, Crossfire
can be aggravating. There's the strain of finding something to argue about in
every big news event, the artifice of dividing every controversy into two sides
labeled "left" and "right." There are the many points of argument and fact that
flit past undigested. And of course, there's the "overtalk" (the producers'
term for two, three, or four people talking at once). Like all these shows,
Crossfire often falls for spin, serves the establishment, legitimizes
phonies, and in general misses the point completely. But it's no worse than the
others, and in some ways it's better.
Anyone wanna argue with
that?
--Michael Kinsley
