Filed under: Journalism, Scandals, Celebrities, Movies, Valerie Plame, Judith Miller
And its reporting, we hear, will be just as solid as that of the Washington Times. We kid, of course, since the Washington Capital Sun is a completely imaginary paper dreamed up by the creators of a new movie based on the outing of Valerie Plame and the wacky world of former New York Times reporter Judith Miller. But that’s not the only trickery doing down! “[W]hile the real Judith Miller may be remembered as a stylish, slightly scary reporter of 59, headed off to jail in a quilted black jacket and tortoise-frame sunglasses, in the movie she is a sizzling Kate Beckinsale, 34, dressed in a, shall we say, form-fitting skirt,” reports WaPo. Miller has got to be flattered by that casting. Meanwhile, the editor of the Capital Sun is none other than Angela Bassett, most famous for her star turn as Tina Turner. Another bit of Hollywood magic, indeed, since diversity in real Washington newsrooms, especially at the top, is lean at best. As Anne Schroeder might say, “Not sayin’, just sayin’.”
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Graceful writing takes a distant second place to neutrality. The language of the “Plame affair” article, like a lot of Wikipedia, is flatly declarative, not particularly quotable and occasionally afflicted with wobbly construction. (A typical sentence: “It is the only indictment brought by the grand jury, and Fitzgerald has stated that he does not expect to be indicting anyone else, citing repeatedly Libby’s obstruction of justice as a main impediment to finding out what happened in investigating the leak of Valerie Wilson’s classified, covert CIA identity.” ) And so the entry is an obstacle course of little infelicities and colorless clots of subclauses, from the first paragraph’s factual but pace-dragging citation of Joe Wilson’s memoir The Politics of Truth to the concluding section, headlined “Other perspectives on the CIA leak scandal,” which reads (following a link to “Alternate theories regarding the CIA leak scandal” ) in its entirety: “Since the CIA leak scandal became public knowledge, commentators began presenting multiple and often highly-contested perspectives on it in various media.” You don’t say.