Dick Cheney and Evergreen Headlines

During my long and now doomed love affair with newspapers, I have become a connoisseur of evergreen headlines billboarding stories so predictable and so repeatable that the reader is immediately overcome by deja vu. The ultimate example: JERSEY OFFICIAL INDICTED; MOB TIES ALLEGED. Back in the summer of 1999, the New York Times came close to matching this gold standard with a headline so earnest and so futile that it easily could have been published in 1959: PEDIATRICIANS URGE LIMITING TV WATCHING.But never underestimate journalism's capacity for progress in creating new evergreen themes. The lead story in the print edition of Sunday's Times is ballyhooed: CHENEY IS LINKED TO CONCEALMENT OF C.I.A. PROJECT. This is the latest development in a story about the CIA hiding from Congress since 2001 the existence of a hush-hush program that Leon Panetta, the spy agency's new director, has now terminated. Sunday's new element is the role of Cheney in ordering the CIA to keep this still-unspecified program secret.

What a stunner! Of course, Cheney (the vice president for black-bag operations, enhanced interrogation techniques and snarling disdain for Congress) was responsible for the cover-up. Now there might be an element of retrospective surprise if the Times headline had been: COLIN POWELL IS LINKED TO CONCEALMENT OF C.I.A. PROJECT. Or even: CHENEY URGES "OPEN GOVERNMENT." But by the time all the journalistic histories of the covert side of the Bush administration are finished, headline writers will get bored with constantly having to type these three tell-tale words: CHENEY IS LINKED.

The new administration, of course, is fast on its way toward creating its own collection of timeless headlines. Beyond the obvious (BIDEN CLARIFIES REMARKS) and the cliched (OBAMA OFFERS MESSAGE OF "HOPE"), there always is the current White House talking point (PRESIDENT URGES 'PATIENCE" ON ECONOMY). And we are only six months into the Age of Obama -- which promises to produce enough evergreens to reforest newspaper journalism.