Editorials

It’s often hard, when it comes time to write editorials, to decide what readers are most interested in thinking about. Editorial departments in many newspapers seem to believe that their job is to tell readers what to think. In Berkeley, and particularly at the Berkeley Daily Planet, that’s definitely not our job. Our readers can make up their own minds, thank you. What we hope to do is to point out what’s going on, in case someone’s missing something, so that readers know when it’s their duty to form opinions on important topics of the day. 

This week, events which might lend themselves to editorial scrutiny have ranged from the ridiculous to the even more ridiculous. Like many Berkeleyans, we’ve made a conscientious effort to follow the proceedings of the 9/11 commission. (And thanks as usual to KPFA for making this possible.) The president’s press conference, only the third in the current reign, was impossible to miss, particularly since the KQED tape loop re-ran it many times. In our household, as in many Berkeley houses, national broadcast news is mostly radio, listened to while doing home tasks, since we often can’t bear to look at the faces of the national newsmakers. But this week, I found that I couldn’t even stomach the radio version, not even in the car where there’s not much else to entertain. So the bulk of my perception of what happened at the 9/11 commission and the press conference is second-hand reports from stronger souls.  

I’ve gotten the impression from friends and print reports that a lot of the Condoleezza Rice part of the program revolved around what was or was not part of the President’s Daily Briefing, which was abbreviated PDB in news-speak. [As I typed my coined word “news-speak,” the spellchecker tried to change it to “newspeak,” a slightly different word coined by George Orwell which seems to have come to mean almost the same thing.] What catches my attention about this account is not what was in the PDB at issue, but the tragic irony that the current president seems to be unable to process more than a short page of predigested copy at a time, and there’s no guarantee he’s able to read it without moving his lips.  

The American presidency is an office which used to be held by men who got the job by being able, at some level, to read, write and think for themselves. It has been occupied by the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Woodrow Wilson, even Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, who for all their manifest faults were no slouches in the brain department. Now it’s become a kind of monarchy, where a show figure is occasionally put on display to read a message crafted by the powers behind the throne, much as Queen Elizabeth sometimes reads an address written by Britain’s parliamentary majority. George Bush II read the message from Halliburton on Iraq at his press conference last week. 

I turned off three successive re-broadcasts of the press conference, because I couldn’t bear even the three sentences I heard each time. I happened to call my sister while she was watching excerpts on the eleven o’clock news, and I asked her what she thought of it. “I’m deeply, deeply embarrassed,” she said. That comment will do for me, and I suspect for most readers of this paper. But it’s your duty, now, to form your own opinion about what’s going on in the nation, and even more important, to act on it as you see fit. The Daily Planet’s only here to let you know that you should be very, very worried. 

Becky O’Malley is executive editor of the Berkeley Daily Planet.