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Partisan Style

Washington Post columnist Tom Shales on the ABC miniseries "The Path to 9/11":

The impression given is that Clinton was spending time on his sex life while terrorists were gaining ground and planning a nightmare.

It would have made as much sense, and perhaps more, to cut instead to stock footage of a smirking Kenneth Starr, the reckless Republican prosecutor largely responsible for distracting not just the president but the entire nation with the scandal.

Ooooooh! That dastardly Ken Starr! The way he commandeered the TV cameras and took over the newspaper presses was unconscionable. The fact that he was able to distract this nation while the media attempted to wrestle our attention back to The Real Issues was absolutely criminal. Why, if he hadn't distracted President Clinton, then 9/11 might have been prevented!

Mr. Shales is out of his element. He is a Style Columnist and a media critic. If he would like readers to know that the historical accuracy of the ABC docudrama is somewhere between questionable and nonexistent, then that's legitimate. But I'm already getting that message from thousands of other sources (which may be recklessly distracting President Bush from stopping the next 9/11 - who knows?). What I want from a WaPo Style Columnist is simply an assessment of whether the acting and production are any good. Hell, I'm not going to watch the thing anyway, so even that information is purely academic for me. But if I want a partisan hack's opinion on Mr. Starr - a man who has long had a reputation as a moderate judge and a staunch defender of the First Amendment - I'll check in at Kos.

Mr. Shales attacks Mr. Starr simply for the sake of the never-ending game of bullshit partisan tit-for-tat. Shame on any journalist who can't see that. It deserves to be pointed out that the paragraph on Ken Starr was completely pointless and irrelevant, and should have been left on the floor - like most of "The Path to 9/11", from what I gather.