By Douglas McCollam
Chances are if you’re reading this magazine, then you already know that the recent pummeling of Newsweek was just the latest in a series of beat-downs administered to the American press corps. For a while, journalists were bearing up (let’s face it, we were never that popular to begin with), but of late the accumulation of blows seems to be taking a toll. Like a boxer who has caught too many body shots, journalists are bent over gasping for air. We need a new strategy for the coming rounds.
Watching mild-mannered Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker dutifully make the rounds to get mauled by cable-news bullies in May was particularly dispiriting. In most of his appearances, Whitaker looked like a truant who’d been frog-marched into the principal’s office. Obviously chastened by the loss of life caused by rioting in Afghanistan after the short item about desecration of the Koran was pumped through the Arab press, Newsweek issued a retraction and promised that the magazine would reevaluate how it reports stories, most notably by curbing the use of anonymous sources.
Poor “Anon.” Once he was the journalist’s trusty sidekick, one who helped midwife vital stories that might otherwise have been stillborn. But now everywhere you look, civic-minded editors and consultants have the broom out and are swatting at “anonymice” (Jack Shafer’s well-coined word). Much of this extermination effort, it appears, is driven by surveys showing that some readers dislike stories that rely on anonymous sources. And “gaining reader trust” is the flavor of the month in American newsrooms.
But the current obsession with sourcing misplaces focus on the process rather than the product. Just as people don’t care whether they got a piece of news from a newspaper or a cable box or the Internet, they ultimately don’t care if it came from a quoted or anonymous source. They care whether it’s right or wrong (see Mark Felt and the Watergate scandal). Newsweek was forced into its humiliating atonement not because its source for the Koran-flushing allegation was anonymous but because he went wobbly and his information couldn’t be verified. Perhaps there would be less of that if all sources were on the record, but there would also be a whole lot less important news broken. It would be a poor trade-off.
In the larger scheme, though, the attack on Newsweek amounted to shooting fleas with a shotgun. Prior substantiated charges of Koran desecration had appeared in the press without riots breaking out and, in any case, are but a small subset of a disturbing litany of abuse against Muslim detainees in American military prisons. The administration’s claim that Newsweek was to blame for street rioting in Afghanistan is sort of like a company that spills 10,000 barrels of gasoline in a river blaming the subsequent fire on the bystander who dropped a lit cigarette. Doesn’t that guy know how to use an ashtray? He should be more careful!
The sustained campaign against the mainstream press has left even the once haughty crew at The New York Times pensive and tentative. The paper’s internal report, “Preserving Our Readers’ Trust,” issued in May, is one of the more depressing reads about journalism in recent memory. Not because of any revelations or the report’s bland remedies (fewer anonymous sources, more openness to readers), but rather that the whole exercise is drenched in the kind of numbing consultantitis from which journalism served as a last refuge. The report dutifully outlines how a twenty-person “Credibility Group” (sob) divided into five subcommittees, met ten times for an “extensive discussion” of how to preserve readers’ trust. Reading through the report’s neatly organized sections and subsections, the alternating Roman and Arabic numerals, I couldn’t help but think of the raucous editorial meeting portrayed in the movie version of All the President’s Men, in which the assembled editors playfully spit and scratched over what should go in the paper. When someone suggests that young Woodstein’s Watergate reporting, replete with anonymous sources, might lead the paper to ruin, Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee cocks his head and looks down the table, saying: “Then it’s our asses, and we’ll all have to go out and work for a living.”
That kind of joie de vivre (even allowing for fictional enhancement) seems distant from today’s newsrooms. Nowhere is the loss of élan more apparent than in the dearth of undercover work. Once, going clandestine was an accepted tool in a newsroom’s reporting kit. It often produced spectacular results, going back to Nellie Bly’s blockbuster indictment of mental hospitals in the late nineteenth century. Even smaller publications got in on the act. When Steve Brill started The American Lawyer, where I used to work, he’d send out reporters with phony slip-and-fall stories to test lawyers’ ethics, or enroll them in dodgy law schools to expose fly-by-night diploma mills. Both investigations yielded illuminating exposés.
Today the swashbuckling spirit that once encouraged such subterfuge is flickering. Recently when The Spokesman-Review was investigating reports of sexual misconduct by Mayor Jim West of Spokane, it hired a computer expert to pose as a minor trolling for sex in an Internet chat room. Sure enough West asked to get together. But when the Spokesman-Review published that fact as part of a larger story on West’s misconduct, a Greek chorus of editors appeared to condemn the paper. “I don’t permit deception; I would not allow it,” Amanda Bennett, editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, told Editor & Publisher. The editors of several other papers piled on as well. “This is a form of undercover journalism that, thankfully, went out of vogue in the early 1980s,” Tim Franklin, editor of the Baltimore Sun, told the magazine. Really? Why is that? Dennis Ryerson, editor of The Indianapolis Star, made the subtext explicit, noting that there were other ways to get information and “with everyone challenging our credibility, we have to think about how we represent ourselves when we pursue the truth.”
Of course, also contributing to the demise of undercover work has been an increasingly hostile legal environment. Ever since the Food Lion supermarket chain successfully sued ABC News over reporters’ lying on their job applications as part of an undercover story about sales of rotten meat, cautious news executives have shied away from any secret snooping that might produce a lawsuit. Often forgotten is the total amount of damages ultimately awarded to Food Lion: $2. No matter. The prospect of defending the case is deterrent enough for many a penny-pinching publisher. These are the same corporate cost-cutters who are constantly justifying their penury by citing hemorrhaging circulation. Declining readership and sagging newsstand sales have fed a general malaise in journalism, and combined with increasing corporate insistence on profit margins of 20 percent to 30 percent, have put a big squeeze on print news. Staff cuts mean less enterprise journalism and promote the sense among reporters that a lot of important stuff doesn’t make it into the newspaper. Things are hardly better in television, where viewership of the evening network news is in a free fall and many cable television news shows draw fewer eyeballs than a typical midweek edition of The Wichita Eagle.
Meanwhile, the same technological forces that have shrunk viewership and subscriber lists have also created a new wolf pack to nip the flanks of the press herd. Increasingly, every utterance of the so-called MSM (mainstream media) is scrutinized by cadres of bloggers who have combined excess downtime with a ready distribution network. At their best, such blog-swarms represent a welcome antidote to sloppy journalism and ensure that important information is vetted and disseminated. At their worst, they become a gigantic amplifier for cranks and malcontents.
The bleeding center of this battle pits conservative bloggers against the MSM they so despise. Let’s dispense with pleasantries — the bloggers are correct that working journalists, as a group, are more liberal than the general population (the more interesting question, which no one ever seems to ask, is why). For instance, a recent survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center showed that only 9 percent of journalists describe themselves as politically conservative, as compared with 38 percent of the public at large. Much of the ambient energy of the conservative blogosphere is dedicated to forcing the MSM to concede a liberal bias. It is, at heart, a sustained attack on the idea of objectivity. It’s as if, being partisans themselves, the right-wing bloggers can’t abide even the concept of objective assessment of fact. Nor can they imagine professionals who mistrust their own leanings, and try to report past them.
Objective journalism is nurtured by the assumption of shared values. It was the common burdens of depression and war (world and cold) in the last century that reinforced the idea of an objective press, a high-minded model adopted in response to excesses of the earlier “yellow” journalism. That societal consensus was put to the test, needless to say, during the Vietnam and Watergate eras. Since then, the notion of consensus itself has come under increasing pressure both in and out of journalism, and many of those who’ve tried to stay in the middle of the road have gotten squashed — on the bench, in the media, and in Congress (studies of voting trends in Congress, for example, show that it is twice as polarized as it was thirty years ago). The separation of the polity into two evenly divided camps has left precious little room for moderation in any walk of public life, and the press is among the institutions feeling the ideological squeeze.
There is no question that malefactors like Jayson Blair, Jack Kelley, and a multitude of others have damaged the standing of the press, and legitimately so. The list of sins of commission and omission by journalists is long. But that is also true of cops, doctors, corporate presidents, and accountants. It doesn’t mean that a hangdog press should stand mute in its own defense. In law there was once an idea known as the “clean hands” doctrine. It stated that a party who bore even slight responsibility for an injury was barred from arguing his claims regardless of the negligence of others. That notion has largely disappeared from the law, but press critics still invoke a similar standard, suggesting that mistakes by some journalists call into question the entire journalistic enterprise. In their meek defense of the profession, journalists too often are complicit in that dangerous idea.
Reporters often seem perplexed by the venomous attacks directed at them. They have a hard time seeing that it is not so much the idea of bias that infuriates their critics as the refusal to admit any bias at all. That line is getting increasingly hard to toe, so I’ll suggest an alternative that most reporters, of whatever political camp, might find acceptable: go ahead and admit an obvious bias — a bias against power. It is a presumption in keeping with the profession’s tradition of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. Some may still call it liberal, and to the extent that it is suspicious of the status quo, they would be right in a way. But I am advocating admitting to an active suspicion of concentrated financial and political influence and those who stand to benefit from it, not the promotion of any particular ideology, cause, or agenda.
This stance puts journalists directly in the crosshairs of any ruling cadre, which is just where they should be. It is no coincidence that the two institutions most reliably opposed to entrenched power in the last century — journalism and the judiciary — are today under tandem assault. Both institutions have made a habit of raising prickly objections to the will and beliefs of the majority, often on behalf of the despised or disenfranchised. And both institutions have been labeled “elitists” by those who view such interference as antidemocratic or unpatriotic, or at least pretend to.
From the founding, the American press was meant to be oppositional. There is a reason Thomas Jefferson, no stranger to bad press coverage, said that if forced to choose, he’d rather have newspapers and no government than government and no newspapers. In the aftermath of the Afghan riots, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stepped to the microphones at the Pentagon to admonish that, in these dangerous times, the press should be “very careful” about what it said and printed. Of course, the opposite is true. In turbulent times, the press should be more outspoken, not less. Rumsfeld’s comment recalls another old legal theory, that freedom of speech does not extend to falsely yelling “fire” in a crowded theater. Journalists should never be false about anything. But for too many in the wake of September 11, 2001, the whole world has become a crowded theater, and the press is too often being told to ignore the gathering smoke. It shouldn’t.
Douglas McCollam is a contributing editor to cjr.
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