The Mechanic & the Muse: It's delightful, it's delicious, it's delay-less

Reporting

"Made in the Shade"
A package on Southern writers: profiles, interviews and an 11-state directory of writers you may never have heard of but are worth your time. Appeared in Creative Loafing chain.
"Mass Appeal"
A day-in-the-life profile of a telegenic parish priest in Miami. Published in Catholic Digest, reprinted in the St. Petersburg Times
"The Liberation of Tam Minh Pham"
How the first West Point graduate from South Vietnam disappears after the fall of Saigon, only to be rescued by his classmates two decades later. A cover story in The Washington Post Magazine

Came in from lunch and on our mega-screen in the Poynter lobby, MSNBC had a talking head with this caption running at the bottom of the screen. I know TV folks use the term Chyron for such video text inserts; I vote for a new term: footline.

In any case, it said "Delayed Reaction."

At first, I took it literally and waited for something that would explain what reaction was being delayed.

D'Oh. It was wordplay, a punnish reference to the resignation from Congress of former House majority leader Tom DeLay, Texas exterminator turned Washington power broker.

In print, I think I would have gotten the joke and wondered why I was slow on the uptake when Chyron editors were having fun with language. I couldn't hear the audio, which would have provided the context, just as a lead would in a newspaper, or for that matter, a web site.

But I'm burying the lead. If you want an intimate view of the deposed Delay, at 3:10 p.m. today, tune into newly-launched Washington Post radio to hear Peter Perl, who filleted DeLay in a Post magazine profile that revealed him so nakedly that House colleagues couldn't believe DeLay would let a reporter, especially one from the Post, get that close. Peter, who has had a distinguished career at the Post, just did what he always did, even in 1974-75 when he was my first bureau chief at the Manchester (Conn.) Journal Inquirer: All the stuff that most reporters would regale each other with at the bar, Peter put in the paper. He earned the trust of DeLay and other subjects by immersing himself in their worlds, and then reporting what he saw and heard, without fear or favor.

You can hear him deconstruct DeLay @ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/wtwpradio/listen.html

I guarantee it will be worth your time.

Comments

I missed this magazine piece on DeLay. I must read it.
Your post got me to thinking about Oriana Fallacim, the Italian journalist big in the 1970s.
Remember that Fallaci interview with Henry Kissinger, in which the Big K unraveled himself as a preening narcissist to even his friends and allies? Fallaci has gone kind of batty in recent years, but she was once the best interviewer around, doing her homework and asking the kind of questions that offered heavy revelations.

Posted by: Joanna | April 05, 2006 at 03:23 AM