Bucket Brigade
November brought a profile in the Columbia Journalism Review, and it was clear Warren didn’t need us anymore. The stress was placed on Warren’s “Cokie Watch,” his vigil over Cokie Roberts and other media celebs so eager to prove no sum of money can buy them that they won’t make a speech for less than $10,000. But CJR did note in passing that Warren “has also assailed the Gridiron Club . . . as a hoary relic of the bad old days when reporters cozied up to pols.”
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Or let’s put it this way–if in two years another brash young face, Newt Gingrich, has as little new product to back up his scorn as Warren now does, the Democrats will be running Congress again in 1997.
What? we asked. In the Times Warren had cited a page-one story on the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s crusade to produce a safer five-gallon bucket. Is that it? we asked Tyner. A bucket story? We spoke at the end of week one of the Republican Congress, a historic week we hadn’t noticed the Tribune revealing in any uncommon way.
We asked another Washington bureau chief what he thinks. “Warren’s a strange duck, and I don’t know what the Tribune is thinking of, frankly,” he said. “His predecessor [Nicholas Horrock] had a pack of problems, but he was a serious journalist and ran a serious bureau. Now I don’t know what they’re doing.”
Dumpster: “That thick black thing is exactly what you think it is. And it is on our boot because under the old regime we were ordered to eat, sleep, and root for vile sensation in the murk of putrescent slime. I must add that I fought this policy at every turn, and much of the time I had no idea what was going on.”
There’s time for one more call.
