When Worlds of Journalism, Art and Politics Collide

Jess Bravin’s story about Mike Love’s disaffection with his old friend George Bush was well written and interesting (“Laws of Nature Transcend GOP Ties for Beach Boys,” Sept. 12). Unfortunately, it illustrated what many people consider the systematic failure of American journalism to inform.

On the basis of Love’s prepared cover story, we are told that the Beach Boys want to make the world safe for bikinis and are therefore dissatisfied with Bush’s relatively passive performance on environmental issues. Dan Quayle’s attack on the environmental writings of his vice presidential rival, Al Gore, seemed to incense Love particularly. What the article did not tell us was anything about the relationship between Mike Love and Al Gore.

I have long had the impression that Mike Love has been a close friend of the Gore family, at least since he endowed Mrs. Gore and Mrs. James Baker with $5,000 to establish an organization (the Parents’ Music Resource Center) devoted to restricting access of teen-agers to rock ‘n roll. Although I fully agree that environmental issues are a perfectly good reason to vote against President Bush, it seems quite misleading to attribute Love’s abandoning of an old friend to beach-related issues if he in fact did so in favor of an even older and closer friend. One wonders whether Love would take the same position had Baker, instead of Dan-O, been the GOP vice presidential candidate.

Somehow, American journalism often seems to take the position that to quote what a public figure says, no matter how absurd, is “objective” news, while to put it into perspective with relevant contextual data or analysis would be “editorializing” and out of place in a news story. The long-run effect of such a policy, of course, is to devote the “news” pages to the editorial opinions of those with the highest public-relations budgets. Although it may seem to some that such a generally conservative political bias is of little threat to entertainment news, I think it’s potentially even more dangerous in Calendar, and I am saddened to see cultural reporting infected with the vice of the news writers.

JEROME KIRK

Laguna Beach

Editor’s note: The final paragraph of Jess Bravin’s story read: “(Mike) Love has also been one of few rock figures to support another cause championed by the Gore family: the campaign by the senator’s wife, Tipper Gore, to require that controversial records bear warning labels