Who's Jimmy Stewart?

I received a comment today from a reader (and thank you for reading and the kind words!) regarding my last article, It's The Press Stupid, asking who Jimmy Stewart was.

I keep forgetting that in my head I'm barely out of my twenties, but in dog years I'm really ancient. So I hereby apologize for taking for granted that everyone would get the reference because they were as old as I am.

Jimmy Stewart was an American film and stage actor. During his heyday, the thirties and forties, he was considered one of the Brad Pitts of his time. He starred in too many classic films to list here but you may have seen him in, It's A Wonderful Life, since it's shown every year around this time.

The film I was thinking of though was Mr. Smith Goes to Washington which was made in 1939. For it's in that movie he plays a man naive enough to think that politics should be an honest profession and pay an honest man an honest wage.

The point I was making in my piece was a sad lament that none of the journalists of our pop culture today has the courage or guts or maybe it's just a lack of intelligence? to stand up to a person of political authority and point a finger and say, "Now just hold on a minute sir! the way Jimmy Stewart did in that movie. Youtube has clips of the movie's critical scenes.

My piece in fact, though it was written nearly two months ago, was just crystallized last week when Charlie Gibson (there he is again missing the whole point!) interviewed President Bush and neglected to bring up Scott Ritter's name when he asked Bush if he would have done anything different if he knew there were no WMD's in Iraq before invading. Bush got away Scott free again!!! Pun intended!

Then again, this past weekend when George Stephanopoulos was speaking with Condolezza Rice on his Sunday ABC show, This Week, he also brought up invading Iraq, and would she have thought twice if she knew there were no WMD's and she practically chewed his head off! From there he went to a clip of Rice playing the piano for the Queen of England. Nice segue George.

Neither man presented the question correctly to begin with, but even so, both men either forgot or did not do their homework sufficiently before coming on the air. But on both programs, when the same question was brought up by two supposedly well respected news men, both men failed big time to follow up with the obvious lobe question. Both men failed to do their jobs as respected news journalists. Both men were paid the big bucks for doing a very poor job.

And the consequences of that ineptitude, their incompetence or downright lack of courage, only helps add to the number of families in this country as well as in Iraq who still bury their dead loved ones because our press corp lack the most basic, essential skills to do their job.