Andy Rooney– The Last Real Reporter?

Most of us know Andy Rooney from his endpieces on 60 Minutes, CBS’s long-running news show on Sunday nights.  Rooney would expound on some topic that tweaked him that week, be it canned goods, doors or politics.  On occasion he crossed the line and got his butt suspended, but overall, he tried to bring some kind of enlightenment to the world around us. 

Rooney was one of the first six WWII correspondents who flew with the Eighth Air Force on their second bombing run over Germany in 1943.  He was also one of the first journos to visit a concentration camp during the invasion of Germany, as well as being one of the first to enter Paris during the liberation of 1944.  Like Walter Cronkite, or Harry Reasoner, he was a reporter, who went places and told the story of what he found, trying to put things in perspective for us regular folks.

Which leads us to the question; who does that now?  Where are the old school reporters who take the time to investigate, think, then present?  As best as can be determined, Rooney was the last of them who had legitimate journalistic chops.  Today’s crop of talking heads are nothing more than meat puppets whose sole existence depends on someone else putting words in their mouths, using the IFB line to make their jaws move and their brows furrow at appropriate times. 

Yes, they can get their approximate facts somewhere near truthiness, but the talking heads are unwilling to give us perspective.  As an exercise this morning, we watched three news networks cover the same story:  Greece political instability as regards the European Common Market. 

The story has a number of facets:  First, if Greece pulls out the EU and returns to the drachma, then a likely result would be the bankrupting of just about every business in Greece as well as most levels of government.  Business loans were done in Euros, not drachmas, so every loan would have to be recalculated on how many drachmas to the Euro?  Nobody knows, but you can be assured it won’t the favourable to the business that took out the loan.  Banks could rightly claim their loans are now due and payable.  Greece doesn’t have that kind of cash sitting around loose, be it in dollars, drachmas or dinars.  On paper Greece is already upside down, so pulling out of the EU would accelerate the process. 

Secondly, if Greece does take a fiscal leap into the unknown, what happens to the EU?  Italy is borrowing money at payday loan rates to stay afloat.  Rumour has it that they’ve already sold Milan and Turin to Rick Harrison of Pawn Stars.  Italian PM Berlusconi only got $2,500 for Milan and $2,200 for Turin.  Chumlee is going to be mayor of Milan and The Old Man is going to run Turin in a future episode. 

Would Germany and France, the two big wallets of the EU put up with Greece and then Italy going under?  Or, would Merkel and Sarkozy toss everyone under the bus with a hearty “Thanks for playing European Economic Union:  We gone!” 

That leaves most of the banks in the world holding big bags of worthless debt that they can’t recover and can’t write off because the world banking industry doesn’t have that kind of money either.  It would make the Great Depression look like you inadvertently blue-boxed an empty stubby, instead of taking it back to the Beer Store for the 5 cent refund.  Think Weimar Republic kind of global inflation.   

But the story on all three news outlets covers none of this.  There isn’t even a hint that the EU is in deep trouble.  All we see is the same repeated 45 second clip of the Greek parliament voting to create a new coalition party under Papandreou and applauding.  There’s no context, no appreciation of how far-reaching these problems could be and no sense of the future impact of Greece going under.  Just the same clip, over and over again.

He may have been crusty, a curmudgeon and quite possibly out of touch, but Andy Rooney would have made sure we understood that the stories we face today are important and will have an effect on our lives to come.