Flushing Out the Story

"'Law & Order' creator/executive producer Dick Wolf fired back, 'Up until today, it was my impression that all of our viewers understood that these shows are works of fiction . . . but I do congratulate Congressman DeLay for switching the spotlight from his own problems to an episode of a TV show.'"

Those godless Hollywood heathens will stop at nothing!

I haven't blogged on the House passing the stem-cell bill--Is Bush really going to use his first veto against that popular measure?--but

Walter Shapiro has some thoughts, starting with the president posing with babies:

"As warm and cuddly as these adoption stories may be, nobody is claiming that the countless embryos in the freezers of fertility clinics will somehow all produce new Tanners and Noelles to gambol at a White House photo-op in some future conservative administration. The stem-cell issue does not present a zero-sum choice between childbirth and research. Unless Bush wants to demand that all residents of China and Korea start adopting American embryos, there inevitably will be a huge mismatch between the number of available frozen cells and would-be parents.

"With more than 18 months to go in the congressional session, it will be near-impossible for Bill Frist to block Senate passage of stem-cell legislation until the 2006 election. Congressional approval will confront Bush with one of the most far-reaching political decisions of his second term. Does he wield the veto pen? Presumably, Bush would stand firm on what Tuesday he called 'the grave moral issues at stake.' That stance is perhaps comforting if you are a frozen embryo, but it offers fewer tangible benefits to those who happen to be living. And as Richard Nixon might point out from the Other Side, the living tend to be the most active voters, even after factoring in the political traditions of Chicago.

"The House vote illustrated the growing fissures in the Republican coalition between anti-tax libertarians and religiously motivated conservatives. Now that the Bush tax cuts are virtually permanent, free-market zealots may begin to wonder what they continue to gain from their oddball alliance with politicized evangelicals. . . . As for Bush himself, his legacy may be to have presided over the transformation of the GOP from the party of the War on Cancer to the party of the War on Medical Research."

Columbia Journalism Review weighs in on survey findings that are "flying directly in the face of conventional wisdom. Mainstream journalists exert much energy and angst -- not to mention gnashing of teeth, rending of garments and wringing of hands -- trying to keep their copy both resolutely non-partisan on the one hand, while nonetheless exposing charlatans, fakes, knaves and churls wherever they find them on the other. It's a balancing act that has given more than one editor ulcers.

"Turns out maybe they should loosen up a little.

"The Annenberg poll found that the public is far more sympathetic to the idea of a partisan press than journalists are. Whereas only 16 percent of the journalists polled said it was 'a good thing if some news organizations have a decidedly political point of view in their coverage of the news,' 43 percent of the public thought it sounded like a swell idea.

"Among the journalists, 80 percent thought a partisan press was a 'bad thing,' but only 53 percent of the public thought so."

So much for the idea that news consumers want a no-spin zone.

BTW, I'm off for a few days. You media critics are on your own.