SPOTLIGHT
Tipping at Windmills
If hubris can topple a Times editor, is anything possible?
Howell Raines was certainly not the first New York Times editor to be accused of arrogance and poor management. But he was the first to be undone by it. Why Raines and not, say, A.M. Rosenthal, whose two-decade run at the top of the Times was marked by persistent charges that he could be cruel and vindictive? The answer is complicated. Obviously Jayson Blair had something to do with it, as did the fact that along with "cruel" and "vindictive" Rosenthal was also described — by friend and foe alike — as a genius. But in the outpouring of vitriol that dogged Raines in the aftermath of Blairgate, there was a sense that his l'état, c'est moi management style had crossed some line, had alienated one too many in the newsroom, had reached a tipping point.
If the "tipping point" has become cliché since Malcolm Gladwell's 2000 book by the same name injected the phrase into common parlance - William Safire made the case in a July 27 column that it has - the idea behind the phrase remains useful, both as a way of thinking about some shifts in recent journalism history and of dreaming about the future. And, as Safire concedes, finding a fresh way to convey the idea ain't easy.
Journalism is full of trends or situations that, for better or worse, seem permanent or inevitable. But are they? Or are they possibly heading for a tipping point of their own? If the "impossible" can happen — a Times editor toppled for, in essence, abusing his power — then maybe other permanent fixtures are not so permanent. Could, for instance, the seemingly bottomless hunger for ever-higher media company profits one day reach a tipping point? Is the trend toward ever-greater consolidation of media ownership nearing the end of its gilded rope?
Things, after all, do change, and sometimes for the better. Consider that for years USA Today was ridiculed for its lack of substance. Then, in the 1990s, it tipped. The paper finally turned a profit in 1993, and executives realized that to sustain that profitability they needed regular readers, not just the millions of travelers who get it slipped under their hotel doors. To get those readers, they resorted to better journalism.
Similarly, when Mark Willes became CEO of Times Mirror in 1994, he set about dismantling the wall between editorial and business. This was the dawn of the Internet age, and many in the newspaper business — where readership has been in steady decline — wondered if the old wall of integrity was a liability. Willes had his supporters, even in the newsroom, and his ideas were hyped as a way to save a dying industry. Now he is journalism's bad joke. The Staples Center debacle was Willes's tipping point, the culmination of all that chipping away at the wall.
More recently, the relatively easy ride given President Bush by the press has begun to tip toward rougher terrain now that "yellowcake-gate" is out of the bag. Ideologues and their mini-movements can tip, too. Ann Coulter, who has long sounded the shrillest note in the media-bias chorus, has hit the wall with her latest book, Treason, which attempts to reconstruct Senator Joseph McCarthy into an American hero. Even some of her natural comrades-in-arms are at a loss about what to do with this one (witness the tepid review in the July 7 Wall Street Journal).
Things can tip in the wrong direction, too. It seems possible — after a summer of acrimonious labor disputes at newspapers around the country in which management was often seen as playing very rough (training replacement workers in Baltimore, for instance) — that subsequent management "victories" could come at a price, as newsroom morale tips from relatively happy to relatively hostile. "They may have won a battle," Sun sportswriter Candus Thomson told Editor & Publisher, referring to her Tribune Company bosses, "but they lost the goodwill war."
September 11 was held up as a major tipping point in terms of the press's steady retreat from serious news in general and foreign news in particular. The verdict may still be out on this one (see page 7), but when you consider that even as the country pitched toward (and through) war with Iraq, Laci Peterson managed to rack up OJ-esque numbers, it's hard to be optimistic. Early returns from Kobe-land are equally depressing.
Yet, couldn't the public finally turn away from this frantic,
mile-wide, inch-deep nonstop news cycle, the handmaiden to dumbed-down
news? Do we dare to hope that the next megastory — the next
OJ, Diana, Chandra Levy, or shark attack — could provide
some kind of tipping point? Could we see a groundswell from people
who want more news in their news? Or a bit of nuance and complexity
in their cable talk shows? Or some investigative muscle on their
local TV news?
A guy can dream, can't he?
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