A New Kind of War of Words

On Sept. 11, terrorists caused the deaths of thousands in New York, Pennsylvania and the Washington, D.C., area, rocking Americans like no event in recent history and pushing this nation toward what President Bush would call “a new kind of war.”

Yet a commentary in The Times did “more damage to our USA than the terrorists did,” one e-mailer wrote this week.

She meant my Sept. 14 column assessing Bush’s skills on television, the primary medium through which our president speaks not only to the U.S. but to the entire globe.

I praised Bush’s heart, his compassion and “depth of feeling” for the victims and those grieving for them. I also wrote, however, that he “lacked size in front of the camera when he should have been commanding and filling the screen with a formidable presence as the leader of a nation standing tall under duress.” I ranked him far below Presidents Reagan and Clinton as a TV communicator, however well he may have been performing behind closed doors.

His public tears, I added, “softened the toughness of his words” when he was addressing those fomenting the terrorism. I concluded by writing that Americans now “need a president they can look up to, not just one who will share in their mourning.”

I appreciate the 50 or so e-mails, letters and calls expressing support for my comments. As for the other 950 ....

In other words, the response to my column was instantly torrential (and even now still trickling in), the near universal outrage a stinging reminder of what can await writers and other communicators who walk on raw wounds with spiked shoes, especially when Americans are staggering from a crisis.

Do I have second thoughts? Absolutely.

The column’s timing stunk. I deserve full blame for responding badly to the kind of competitive pressure that I frequently fault TV newscasters for buckling under. At the very least, I should have waited another day and mentioned the president’s trip to New York, where he visited the twin towers rubble and related warmly to rescue workers. There’s no question, also, that in subsequent days his public appearances have inspired many Americans.

Do I regret what I wrote, though? Absolutely not.

Some of my critics were thoughtful. Very smart readers, very teed off.

The vast bulk of them, however, wanted my head. Some of them wanted my life, assuming their death threats reflected their level of anger. As one man warned: “You’d better watch your back.”

In e-mail after e-mail, an epithet was attached to the word “Jew.” I was ordered by many e-mails to leave the U.S. and, as one put it, “go live with the Arabs.” My patriotism wasn’t just questioned, it was assaulted, and many e-mailers equated my column with terrorism, in effect renaming me Osama bin Rosenberg.

Again and again, I was denounced as a “Bush basher” who was promoting my “liberal agenda” at the expense of the nation. And many e-mailers (and some local talk radio hosts) insisted that I be booted out by The Times before, as one writer put it, my “stench infiltrates the whole organization.”

U.S. journalists walk a tightrope. We’re Americans first, of course. If we’re in trouble in another country, we turn first to the stars and stripes, not the Swiss, Japanese or Russian embassy. As Americans, moreover, we are as obliged as other citizens to never knowingly compromise national security.

But “my country right or wrong?” If that myopic dictum is followed, the U.S. media might as well pack away their megaphones and allow their 1st Amendment liberties to atrophy. If it had been followed by journalists reporting about Vietnam, My Lai and other excesses from that debacle would still be interred along with the bones of victims.

It may seem a big jump from that to a commentary about a president’s competency on TV, and this is no attempt to narrow the gap. Yet the flag now being waved proudly by Americans all across the nation is a celebration, too, of the 1st Amendment, without which this democracy would falter.

It’s one thing to label someone a miserable jerk, another to advocate stilling the jerk’s voice just because you find it strident.

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Howard Rosenberg’s column normally appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted by e-mail at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.