…and gets some career advice himself. The interview will run on 60 Minutes Sunday.
Mike Wallace in 2006:
Of Ahmadinejad, Wallace said, “He’s an impressive fellow, this guy. He really is. He’s obviously smart as hell.”
Wallace said he was surprised to find that the Iranian president was still a college professor who taught a graduate-level course.
“You’ll find him an interesting man,” he said. “I expected more of a firebrand. I don’t think he has the slightest doubt about how he feels … about the American administration and the Zionist state. He comes across as more rational than I had expected.”
[emphasis added]
You know I’m going to bring this back up, don’t you?
Mike Wallace in 1987:
Didn’t Jennings have some higher duty, either patriotic or human, to do something other than just roll film as soldiers from his own country were being shot? “No,” Wallace said flatly and immediately. “You don’t have a higher duty. No. No. You’re a reporter!”
Some things speak for themselves, don’t they?
This isn’t just “journalism.” Tomorrow, Wallace interviews a neo-nazi leader:
bq. “You’ll find him an interesting man,” Wallace said. “I expected more of a firebrand. I don’t think he has the slightest doubt about how he feels … about the Zionist Occupational Government of the USA – not to mention the niggers, wetbacks, etc. He comes across as more rational than I had expected.”
As long as they echo one’s hatred of the US government, and those damn Jews who control it through their neocon cabal, they can’t be all bad. Right, Mike?
On another note, Ahmanubar wouldn’t even win a prize as the most insane college professor in America. I’m sure there are at least 5 institutions in America that would happily grant him tenure to rant about the evils of world Jewry and the need for an apocalypse – beginning with Yale (obviously), Columbia, and Berkeley.
What Joe said. Really, Mike Wallace’s own commentary says everything one needs to know about Ahmadinejad, and Wallace.
“Such as refreshing conversationalist. I’ve interviewed Despots and Thugs from all over the world, and he was smart, and intelligent, and obviously had very rationally considered the state of the world before arriving at his fascists ideology. Not like that moron Bush.”
Which is really what left leaning journalists are thinking when they talk up our enemies…
Here’s the potential good news:
The last time a gerontocrat from See BS interviewed a despot, that despot fell from power.
Wally may have just jinxed Ahmanutjob.
I’m just curious, why bold the “zionist state” part?
Wow. “Zionist State”. Davebo, that’s Imam-approved Correct Speech for what to call the government of Occupied Palestine. (Although “Zionist Entity” is the preferred form, I think.)
Mike Wallace really has drunk the kool-aid, licked the toad, chewed the button, and jumped the shark, hasn’t he?
Amusingly, the exactly same incident occured to me when I posted on this one this morning. Great minds and all that.
It’s also what Israelis consider themselves to be. The word has a meaning ya know.
Have you ever had a jew get mad at you for calling him or her a zionist? Maybe. But just so you know, I’m not jewish and I’m a proud zionist.
We folks in America generally refer to the “Zionist State” as “Israel”, especially when we’re talking to other Americans. Americans, as a rule, call it “Israel” when the subtext isn’t the assumption that “Israel” is a fundamentally “racist” entity.
Words have connotations too.
As a side note, when I talk to Jews, I generally call them things like “Doug” and “Steve” and “Jon” and “Aya”.
But that’s just me, maybe.
Me, too. Only if I were at, say, a cocktail party in Georgetown would I say, “This is my friend Dave, a Zionist entity from Baltimore.”
Israelis have no right to call themselves Zionists anymore anyway. They seem to keep giving back peices of Zion. Anyway, im looking forward to my vacation in Transjordan one day soon.
Before the war Wallace interviews Hitler and says good things about him….
P.S:Actually worse than Hitler, he at least didnt tell everyone loudly that he wanted to exterminate jews.
Drudge is reporting that Wallace, responding to the controversy, has claimed that Ahamdinejad is not anti-Jewish, and that there are “many” Jews in the Iranian parliament.
There is, of course, one Jew in the Iranian parliament, “Morris Motamed.”:http://www.volokh.com/posts/1148157975.shtml
In Wallace’s defense, he may have been shown a photo of the parliament with a bunch of Hassidics Photoshopped into it. People are always playing jokes like that on CBS.
I’m sorry but somebody who is “smart as hell” does not play nuclear chicken with superpowers or even small Middle-Eastern states with sizeable nuclear arsenals.
But yes, his statements when taken in their entirety are yet more proof that many reporters are not neutral, they’re actually on the other side…
Even leaving aside Jew Hatred for a while (Wallace like nearly all reporters shares this, if only because Bush backs Israel’s right to exist) …
Ahmadinejad is the leader of a state that hangs rape victims, gays, etc.
By all rights a man like Wallace should flay him in interviews, not kiss his behind.
That he fails to do so shows his fundamental lack of decency and hatred of the West not to mention his own country.
Why didn’t he press him on Natazin (then 17 year old who stabbed her rapist-assailant and is sentenced to hang)? Or the sixteen year old girl forced into prostitution and hung in the public square? Or the thirteen year old raped by her brother and hung for the “crime?”
Why?
Because Wallace stands for nothing but hatred of the West (he would surely weep for Tookie).
You guys know that Mike Wallace is Jewish, right?
Now for something completely different.
I was sent this site by someone I know. I am excited by the idea. I haven’t look at it yet but I trust this person. If you use it it sends a thank you to military personnel.
http://www.letssaythanks.com
“You guys know that Mike Wallace is Jewish, right?”
And that gets him a free pass for singing the praises of a thug who wants to blow Israel off the map how exactly?
[Comment deleted by A.L.]
Hey, Robert – this isn’t the way we do stuff here. You’re welcome to stick around and join the discussion; or you’re welcome to keep making comments like this one and get yourself banned.
A.L.
Why? Is there a Noam Chomsky Award for Journalism?
I heard Chamberlain – er, Wallace – interviewed on Hannity’s radio show today and kept expecting him to declare that Ahmadinejad is “someone with who we can do business.”
#18:
You know what would be great? If people attacked me for things I actually said, and not for things they conveniently assume I meant.
I thought it was interesting that Wallace is Jewish in the context of a discussion where we are wondering whether he is an anti-semite. Didn’t say it gave him a pass. Didn’t say he couldn’t be an anti-semite. Just wanted to add the interesting and hardly off-topic point that Wallace is himself Jewish.
Now. Here’s the way we do this. When we find ourselves all bubbling over with rage, (too much caffeine, perhaps?) we wait patiently until someone actually says something to which we can justifiably react with rage. We don’t fly off the handle for no reason. Otherwise we look deranged.
Personally, I thought the “Mike Wallace is Jewish” angle had already been covered. I must have read that somewhere else though.
Still, being Jewish and referring to Israel as the “Zionist State” says a lot in-and-of itself, doesn’t it?
Mark Poling,
Excuse me in advance for being a pedant. 🙂
Well, wasn’t Israel founded on Zionism? And didn’t Israel get the UN to backtrack from its earlier finding that Zionism was a form of racism?* Doesn’t the Israeli flag reflect Zionism?
So the question becomes this: is calling the state of Israel Zionist an epithet, or is it an accurate and positive description of Israel? I guess that depends on whether you view Zionism as a legitimate ideology. Anyway, I don’t think using the word Zionist is per se a condemnation of Israel.
*To me that at least intimates that Israelis (at one time at least) viewed the term in a positive light.
Castillon, the different is between adressing the nation called Israel, which is a Zionist state (or even, the Zionist state) as “Israel” or “Israel, the Zionist state” as opposed to “the Zionist state”
Kind of like saying “the Jew” as opposed to saying “Moische the Jew”.
In practice, the people who use that term … much like those who use the term, say, “negroes” instead of the more commonly accepted “black” or “African American” tend to come to the issue with a pretty clear agenda.
The term is for lack of a better term, a signifier.
A.L.
A.L.,
I have nothing to say re: your other comments.
What terms aren’t signifiers (at least from the perspective of Saussure)?
well, from that POV, none actually. I tend to think that the mistake he makes is to treat all words essentially equally; i.e. not making a big enough distinction between “helium” and “kike”.
But that’s another story.
A.L.
Well, if you’re going to say that any word or phrase with socially dependent connotations is morally equivalent to any other such word or phrase, I’ll just start saying to my neighbors “Good morning, niggers!”
Practically speaking, though, I’m not sure that would go over so well, considering my pigmentation….
Mark Poling,
Well, all words are socially constructed (indeed, it is an area where “hard” social construction is probably triumphant). That means that why some words are offensive and others are not depends on their history, etc. Of course it is also the case that human society considered some words to have talismatic effects, and sometimes I wonder whether there is a still a holdover of such when it comes to “obscene” words.
I’m a big fan of _Ethics in America_ for exactly the kind of dilemmas that were mentioned in the link. I’ve seen this exchange many times and remember it well.
Some qualifications are in order, however:
After being further pressed, Wallace did not continue his claim and ultimately stated that he wasn’t sure what he would do (at which point, Jennings made a remark to Wallace about how maybe his initial decision wasn’t so stupid). It’s dismissed as merely indecisive in the Fallows article, but when watching it all the way through it’s pretty clear that Wallace completely backs off his initial position. Whether he would have actually do something different in reality is another question, but his condemnation was completely nullified by his later comments.
In the segment regarding Connell’s comment about feeling “utter contempt” for having to potentially rescue the journalists after they would have filmed such a thing, there’s a segment cut out of the conversation that is highly relevant. Connell asks Jennings and Wallace whether his contempt would have been a fair reaction, because clearly they cannot have it both ways. They both shake their heads yes, and Wallace says, “That’s a fair reaction.” That is explicitly deleted in the article quoted — it scans forward to Gingrich’s comments about them.
This isn’t so much to defend Wallace’s comments about Ahmadinejad, which I think are somewhere between hilarious and shameful. And there’s plenty of reason to not be pleased with Wallace’s first reaction to the hypothetical questions on the show. But as a blanket condemnation, the details are woefully incomplete in that Fallows article.
Castillon:
Maybe this will help.
There was a time, not long ago, when no editor of any serious print or broadcast media would have accepted “Zionist state” as a synonym for “Israel”.
Not because Israel is not a Zionist state. The sentence “Israel is a Zionist state” would be perfectly acceptable. The sentence “The President will meet with the leader of the Zionist state” is not.
This might seem like a subtle difference, but the power of words makes subtle differences huge, and good journalists understand that. “Zionist state” is a preferred label of those who deny Israel’s right to exist and hate to even utter its name: Jihadists, Neturei Karta extremists, conservative bigots, liberal bigots, leftist blackshirts, and Nazis.
Journalists are also supposed to understand the importance of context. The use of this term in the context of a cheerily benign assessment of the world’s most dangerous anti-Semite comes close to open provocation.
I wouldn’t agree with jumping all over a commenter who used the term, but Wallace is supposed to be (as he angrily reminded Jennings) a REPORTER above all else. “Jew” and “American” come second or third at best. Granted, Wallace isn’t the most brilliant reporter that ever lived, but it isn’t exactly his first day on the job, either.
Eric Max Francis:
It’s been some years since I saw the (excellent) Ethics in America, but the Wallace episode made a most memorable impression on me. You may be correct, but I don’t remember it that way. I do remember Jennings being cowed by Wallace’s lecture. I remember some of the military men on the forum (who had given very good presentations) reacting very angrily, with one remarking that even if reporters didn’t consider themselves Americans, American troops risked their lives to protect them in combat.
I don’t remember if Wallace backed down after that. If he did, it hardly speaks highly of him. As one commenter at the forum remarked, the military had obviously given far more thought to the problems of journalists in war zones than the journalists themselves had. Wallace and Jennings were making it up as they went, and badly.
Glen Wishard,
Help with what? I think that it is rather obvious from my post that I understand that the term can be used as an epithet.
Interesting, do you have a link to a transcript which shows Wallace backing off from his initial remarks?
Glen:
I have the episode on tape :-). Jennings says he’d warn the Americans, and Wallace slaps him down by saying it’s wrong. Jennings capitulates, but as Wallace continues to be grilled (Ogletree and Scowcroft both bite into him pretty good), Wallace becomes indecisive, even explicitly saying that he can see both sides of it, and then finally says he doesn’t know what he’d do. Jennings then says he doesn’t feel so bad for his decision, and then they move on to the next hypothetical.
You are quite correct that Connell displays utter “contempt” for their little dilemma, and that comes across very clearly. As I said, Jennings and Wallace both admit it was a fair reaction — something that was left out of the above article.
Like I said, I’m not really defending Wallace here, but the article quoted makes his case sound a lot more hard-pressed than it is. In fact he capitulated.
And yes, _Ethics in America_ is a truly excellent series (pretty much all of the Fred Friendly seminars are). You can still catch EIA run intermittently on PBS, by the way. It was filmed in 1987-1988, but in many ways it’s relevant today.
It looks like you can view these online. I just signed up and will try and watch this over the weekend.
Go “here”:http://www.learner.org/view_programs/view.programs.html and then “here”:http://www.learner.org/resources/series81.html – look for ‘Under Orders, Under Fire pt1’…
Re #36:
Erik Francis can correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the Jennings-Wallace incident happened in Part 2.
Fans of “classic” Barney Frank should check out the seminar on The Politics of Privacy. Here’s Barney before his big media make-over, complete with rumpled suit, tangled hair, and horn-rim “birth control” glasses. Fans of Mondo-egghead video, this is the tape you’ve been looking for!
BTW, I was googling for a link to the seminars, and I was amazed at how many people remember the Jennings-Wallace incident and have written about it. Oh, if there had been blogs back then …
I believe it’s Part I, though I could check if someone wanted. I usually watched them back to back, so it’s blurred in my mind which is on which.
The series is absolutely excellent. I really can’t recommend it strongly enough.
Since it came to mind again, I just watched both episodes again in their entirety (the Jennings-Wallace discussion is indeed in Part II).
I strongly stand by my original assessment. Wallace very clearly acquiesces. The context, remember, is that American reporters, embedded with an enemy unit, come across an American unit which they are preparing to ambush. The question is whether the American reporters warn the Americans. A subtext is that the obvious end result of that would be they are killed by the enemy. Both Jennings and Wallace separately explicitly acknowledge that, so there’s no question on the stakes here. This isn’t just an abstract question of whether you cover the incident, it’s whether you, as an embedded journalist, sacrifice yourself to protect the lives of American soliders.
A point I didn’t mention (and which I don’t believe is in the original article) is that Jennings initially gives his response very calmly and starts by saying you’re a reporter first and an American second. As he’s giving his response, he stops in the middle, takes a long pause, and then backs off the “correct” answer and says that he would do his best to warn the Americans.
That’s when Wallace objects, and as the discussion goes on, Wallace begins to back off, saying “I don’t know.” It continues further, with Brent Scowcroft pressuring him on the value of getting the footage vs. the benefit of saving the American platoon (which even then both acknowledge that it means _sacrificing_ yourself for the American soliders, not just neglecting to take the footage). Here’s the crucial, final quote on the subject from Wallace: “I’m going back and forth as I sit here. I understand the stresses and strains that are going … going on. It’s a hell of a dilemma to be in. I think … I don’t know what the hell I think.” He then leans back in his chair, and Jennings makes a remark about his maybe his initial choice wasn’t so stupid after all.
Again, this is clarifications on the specific claims made of him. I’m profoundly unimpressed with his remarks about Ahmedinejad in pretty much all senses, but the context over their exchange was incomplete.