Sneer When You Say ‘Journalist’

Like most habits, this one took hold without any conscious choice. I only realized I had been doing it--hiding my occupation--when a stranger caught me off guard. His name was Phil, and he had joined my group on a public golf course. In a quiet moment on the 17th hole we had an exchange. As I recall it:

“So Mike, what do you do for a living?”

“I’m a writer.”

“Really, what kind?”

“Nonfiction. You know, journalism.”

“Wow. The perks must be great.”

“What?”

“You know, the things that people give you--trips and stuff--so you will write what they want.”

“I don’t do that.”

“Yeah, right.”

I don’t believe that Phil winked, but he didn’t have to. The inference was clear: Of course I take bribes. I’m a journalist. That’s what we do. For good measure he also told me that he doesn’t believe much of what he gets from the press in general. It’s all biased and deceptive.

Taken alone, his comments might mean little. But at the time, journalists were taking a beating. The New York Times had just fired reporter Jayson Blair for a pattern of lies and fabrications in his articles. (Eventually the paper’s two top editors also would be forced out.) Weeks earlier, the Salt Lake Tribune had dismissed two reporters for secretly shoveling material on the Elizabeth Smart story to the National Enquirer, taking cash as a reward and then lying about it.

With these scandals, every Phil in America could feel justified in his low opinion of journalists. A national survey last year by the Pew Research Center for the Public and the Press found that just 21% of respondents said they believe “all or most” of what they read in their local papers. In fact, the public’s level of trust in journalists has been going south for 14 years, as illustrated in a sidebar to the Blair fiasco. It turns out that some of the people he betrayed never complained because they didn’t expect a reporter, even one from the New York Times, to get it right in the first place. One of them, a teacher in Ohio named Carol Klingel, explained to a Los Angeles Times reporter: “You expect people are going to get misquoted, or quoted out of context.”

Such comments appall my colleagues and make me embarrassed about my trade. The professionals in my circle of devoted and veteran (read middle-aged and older) editors and writers are working as diligently as ever. Yet in the span of their careers, they have gone from respected to ridiculed. They feel overmatched by forces beyond their control, like firefighters in a howling wind.

What happened?

When I took my first college newswriting course, in the fall of 1973, remarkable reporting on Vietnam, the civil rights struggle and Watergate had confirmed the aggressive role the press could play in uncovering truth, and cutting through partisan propaganda. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who led the Watergate coverage for the Washington Post, gained a level of recognition rarely seen for reporters. Journalism became a calling for young idealists, which explains why the class taught by professor Donald Murray at the University of New Hampshire was filled to overflowing.

A Pulitzer Prize winner, Murray had been at Time magazine and published several books before turning to academia. He also was a consultant for several big East Coast papers and the author of a series of texts on writing, reporting and editing. At 48, he seemed to me a great eminence grise.

Murray taught that serious journalism is not so much a talent as it is a craft, like carpentry. Of course, some carpenters make fine cabinets and others rough out the frames of houses. But all of it can be respectable work. The hard part is adhering to the trade’s values, which apply in every setting. For journalists the most central of these values are fairness, honesty and independence. Bias is impossible to eliminate, but you can police it and compensate for it. And there is no substitute for skepticism. True believers have faith that provides answers. Journalists ask questions and challenge assumptions.

The only problem with journalism by the Murray rules is that it takes a great deal of hard work, and the results are not always scintillating. Balanced stories rarely get the blood boiling. But what good reporting lacks in sizzle is made up for in authenticity. Deep down we all know that reality is muddy. This is why a little alarm goes off in our heads when a piece blazes with drama from beginning to end. We just know it is out of balance.

A case in point was Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke’s infamous series, “Jimmy’s World,” which was about an 8-year-old heroin addict. I was working as a reporter in Washington when it was published in 1981, and was so struck by Cooke’s portrait of depraved despair that I put down the morning paper and said to my wife, “This is unbelievable.”

It turned out that it was unbelievable. Days after she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Cooke admitted that Jimmy was a fabrication. The Post gave the prize back, and Cooke left Washington and journalism.

I left Washington in 1983 and spent the rest of the decade at Newsday, the large daily newspaper headquartered on Long Island. Despite the Cooke scandal, the 1980s were good for the press in terms of public perception. The decade ended with 54% of respondents to a national Pew poll saying that they trusted the media’s ability to get the facts right. I felt good about my trade.

In hindsight, I shouldn’t have. As so often happens with fashions and trends, changes are well underway before we notice them. Looking back, one in particular stands out today: The short-circuited 1988 presidential candidacy of Gary Hart, a Colorado Democratic senator whose campaign was derailed in a scandal over an extramarital affair. Hart’s campaign began to unravel as supermarket tabloids reported on his alleged infidelity. In years past, the mainstream media had largely ignored the tabloids. At a minimum, the press wouldn’t report what the tabloids were saying without first confirming the underlying facts.

This wasn’t the case with Hart. As the tabloids pursued him, television networks began reporting secondhand what the tabloids were saying--and newspapers soon followed suit, long before they had established underlying facts. The rationale that many network and newspaper executives used was they were simply taking a step back and covering the dust-up of the tabloids versus Gary Hart. This was legitimate, they said, because the buzz was affecting his candidacy.

Eventually, the mainstream press, led by the Miami Herald, did confirm the hard facts independently. But by the time Hart withdrew from the race, a new journalism conduit had developed. Television and newspapers would report what the tabloids were saying if their news executives thought those tabloid reports were affecting their subjects.

By 1994, that conduit was well used, with the New York Times and Los Angeles Times quoting the National Enquirer’s reporting on the O.J. Simpson criminal and civil cases--and for good reason, given the tabloid’s involvement with certain figures in the cases. Whether those decisions amounted to good or bad journalism is somewhat beside the point. The issue is how readers interpreted this blurring of the lines. They could hardly be faulted if they found it more difficult to distinguish between reporters for major dailies and those writing in the tabloids about two-headed space aliens.

Something else changed in the 1980s as well--television began developing more “news” programs devoted to celebrities, lifestyles and other soft features. As television exploded across the cable spectrum, it produced fluffy shows ranging from “Entertainment Tonight” and “Access Hollywood” to network newsmagazine programs packed with dramatic but hardly earthshaking segments about domestic violence, consumer concerns and inspiring achievements. “Dateline” gave us the Timeline quiz and “20/20” presented frequent updates on the Dilley sextuplets. This stuff was cheap and easy to produce, and it had a certain mass appeal.

Partly in response to competition from the airwaves, print journalists went on their own non-news binge. With stagnant or declining circulations, newspapers and magazines trimmed the number of pages devoted to hard news and expanded feature sections.

In the early years of the shift to soft news, press insiders argued over the extent of the change, but they lacked real data to measure it. The numbers were finally produced in 2000 by a group at Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. It examined the content of mainstream print and broadcast outlets from 1980 to 1998 and found that soft news had risen from about one-third of all stories to roughly half. At the same time, pieces colored by sensationalism rose from a quarter to nearly 40%.

This new agenda not only shaped what the public thought of the journalists producing it, but also tended to distort reality. For example, as sensational stories about crime pushed other stories aside, a reasonable person might have thought that crime rates were rising in the 1990s. In fact, they were going down.

Viewing this trend, many serious journalists see something ominous. “The values of entertainment have taken over, replacing public service,” says Richard Reeves, author, columnist and former chief political correspondent for the New York Times. “That makes me worry not just about the press, but about the survival of something as basic as the truth.”

If only it had stopped there. It didn’t. Instead, soft and sensational coverage married their cousins, Buzz and Shrill.

In the 1990s I was working as a freelancer when the drift toward infotainment began to affect my editors at book publishers, magazines and newspapers. Where once I was asked to write about the effects of atomic bomb factories on local communities, now I was sent to explore the life and influence of Tommy Hilfiger. Besides advising me to lighten up, editors told me that they wanted a little more attitude and a lot less earnestness. Most of all, they wanted buzz.

Buzz is the publicity and chatter that hovers around a hot book, article, film or TV program. Buzz can raise newsstand sales, get your article optioned by a film company and turn a journalist into a hot commodity. One of the best ways to generate buzz is to write with edge, with an attitude. “We adopted the costumes, the noise and the feathers of TV,” says Sydney Schanberg, whose New York Times reporting on Cambodia inspired the film “The Killing Fields.” “The sharpest tack, the one who could make the most wisecrack remarks, was rewarded because he could get attention.”

Edgy writers are exhibitionists who make sure that readers get a big dose of their fabulous personalities along with whatever subject they happen to be writing about. One master of edge and buzz was Stephen Glass. He produced dozens of highly entertaining (but made-up) anecdotes in articles published by the New Republic, Rolling Stone, George and Harper’s magazine. His lies were eventually uncovered and, like Janet Cooke before him and Jayson Blair after, he was disgraced. One of his editors would say that Glass always had stories that were “incredibly vivid or zany.” But the editor never suspected that Glass was lying, and when he was found out, he was written off as a single young journalist gone bad.

When the Boston Globe got into similar trouble in 1998, it also was considered a matter of individuals who had sinned. Two of the paper’s columnists, Mike Barnicle and Patricia Smith, rose to star status and then were forced to resign when their efforts to put style over substance led them to mislead readers. Barnicle wrote stories that couldn’t be verified about people who couldn’t be found. He also appeared to plagiarize others’ work.

Smith invented people who appeared in her columns. While Barnicle offered little explanation, Smith, in a farewell to her readers, confessed, “I wanted the pieces to jolt . . . So I tweaked them to make sure they did. It didn’t happen very often, but it did happen.”

Schanberg, a witness to this transformation in print journalism, says a byproduct has been that his colleagues became “a lot more reluctant to speak truth to power,” and a lot more interested in becoming celebrities. The humility that once guided many journalists--you were never bigger than the story--was replaced by the rush to become noticed. “It never used to be about the individual or how many Pulitzers you’ve won,” says Schanberg, who has one. “But now journalists are turned into brand names themselves.”

Radio and television’s brand of buzz became shrill, in the form of news talk radio or loud television disputes that sought to entertain not with fluff but with fury. Beginning with the ubiquitous Rush Limbaugh, hyper-aggressive, politically driven white males gradually commandeered much of the AM band with programs that were a hybrid of entertainment and political advocacy. Dominated by nationally syndicated talkers who have replaced local programming, this format has turned much of the medium into a clubhouse for listeners who share the same views and has reduced radio’s role as a source of straight journalism.

The success of conservative radio hosts inspired cable networks to copy them. The result--especially on the talk shows that reign at night--may look like journalism, but it falls short, Schanberg says. “What those [cable talk-show hosts] like Tucker Carlson, Chris Matthews and Bill O’Reilly do might be journalism if they did real research. But they don’t have the time, and that’s not the purpose of the shows. They are not journalists but performers. And a lot of people have begun to mistake performers for journalists.”

The success of opinionated fast-talkers has led TV news departments to hire a parade of glib political figures as analysts and show hosts, including Pat Buchanan, Peggy Noonan, George Stephanopoulus, Mary Matalin, James Carville and Jesse Ventura. Few of these people have ever spent a day gathering straight news. But all of them are skilled at spinning issues to present their point of view in a startling way.

One big example of this paradigm is the Fox News cable network. Since it debuted in 1996, Fox has openly mixed conservative opinion with news to create what might be called a 24/7 Report from the Right. Tapping the same core audience that is devoted to conservative talk radio, the network has built a loyal following and surpassed CNN in the ratings last year. While it has been a boon to its owner, Rupert Murdoch, the success of Fox News has caused such consternation among some journalists that the New Yorker’s media writer, Ken Auletta, recently spent four months investigating the network’s controversial practices.

As Auletta documented, rather than attempt independence or neutrality, Fox is plainly political. During the Iraq war the network adopted the Bush administration’s catch phrase--Operation Iraqi Freedom--to introduce its reports. (CNN termed it “War in Iraq.”) Fox also allowed its news anchors to add pointed political opinions to their reporting. For example, anchor John Gibson described war protesters as “hundreds of knuckleheads,” while colleague Bob Sellers dubbed France part of the “axis of weasel.” One journalistic transgression not noted by Auletta occurred after Baghdad was captured. In an opinion segment at the close of his news report, anchor Neil Cavuto said of those with antiwar opinions, “You were sickening then; you are sickening now.”

Although the war gave Fox the chance to be more political than usual, it was hardly out of character. For years the star of the network has been Bill O’Reilly, host of “The O’Reilly Factor.” Though he calls himself a “newsman,” the show is mainly a platform for his opinions and confrontations with guests. In its promos Fox trumpets: “We report. You decide.” But O’Reilly confessed to Advertising Age magazine that a more accurate description of the network’s programs is probably: “We report. We decide.”

With the Fox formula working well in the ratings competition, imitation was inevitable. MSNBC, the third-rated cable news network, recently hired aggressive conservative talk-show hosts for its nighttime lineup, one of whom, Joe Scarborough, is a former congressman. MSNBC also joined Fox in calling the Iraq war by its Pentagon slogan.

But the most disturbing evidence of the Fox effect has taken place off the air. It happened when NBC reporter Ashleigh Banfield questioned the tenor of the media’s war coverage and raised doubts about the value of reporting under heavy Pentagon influence. When her remarks were aired, Banfield was admonished by her superiors.

The final blurring of the lines, it seems, has come from the Internet. This powerful new tool is a bulletin board for rumor and innuendo, as well as fact. The mainstream media seem to have learned this lesson painfully. Perhaps the most obvious example of this confusion is Matt Drudge, who peddles scandal on the radio and the Internet with a persona crafted to recall the gossip columnists of the 1930s, right down to the Walter Winchell fedora. During the Clinton administration, many of the most outrageous claims on Drudge’s Web site found their way into newspapers and on television.

Drudge defended his reporting as an accurate reflection of what he heard--which is to say, nothing more than rumor. As with the tabloids, news executives often defended their decisions to repeat Drudge’s claims as simply reporting on what was forcing public officials to react.

Today, however, some major news outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, are drawing firm lines to distinguish themselves from questionable Internet and television reports. The Times, for example, is refusing to publish the myriad rumors circulating on the Internet, in tabloids and on some television stations about the rape case against Los Angeles Laker basketball star Kobe Bryant.

“Newspapers should be more conservative than they were 10 years ago,” explains Times Managing Editor Dean Baquet. “The Internet, the Matt Drudges, Web sites--people can’t tell the difference anymore between rumor and fact.”

Media people can be brutal with insiders who make public critiques. Even talking about journalism as a serious enterprise is risky. The word “journalism” itself has a hoity-toity ring in some people’s ears, including those of Roger Ailes, creator of Fox News. Ailes has said that he detests “elite” journalists who treat the craft as a “from-the-Mount profession.” (Ailes’ network uses the slogan “Real Journalism” in its advertising.)

If Ailes had ever done it, he would know that there’s nothing elitist about the street-level reporting and independence that mark serious journalism. It’s the work of people who ask questions instead of spouting opinions, and it is much grittier than pontificating from a talk-show set.

Traditional journalists worry that the public doesn’t know the difference between talking and reporting. “People are going to develop the attitude that they don’t have to pay attention to journalists because it all comes with an agenda or it’s all made up,” says Christopher Scanlan of the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit journalism education center. Scanlan, who declares that talk-show hosts such as O’Reilly are “not journalists,” blames them, in part, for diluting the power of the serious press. “Ultimately, it could make us irrelevant to people because they won’t trust us . . . and irrelevance is a very bad fate for journalists.”

Scanlan’s concern is well-placed. Public interest in every form of journalism, save the cable networks, is declining. Local and network TV news have fewer viewers. Newspapers and news magazines have fewer readers. A recent Shorenstein Center survey of consumers of journalism found that most--a 5 to 3 ratio--think the quality of the news media has declined. “This opinion is more pronounced among people who follow the news regularly and those who have followed the news long enough to recall a different news era,” concluded the researchers.

How much does it matter? Auletta, author of the report on Fox, notes that those who drafted the Constitution felt that an independent press was important enough to cite free speech in the 1st Amendment. “The founders were very concerned about abuse of power, and the free press was supposed to be a check on that,” Auletta says. “But if voters don’t feel that we are fair, and they don’t know what to believe, we can’t do that job.”

A stark example of journalism’s failure, he adds, can be seen in the current terrorism crisis. “People ask, ‘Why didn’t we know about this before?’ The answer is that the media were afraid of being boring, so they cut back on international news.”

Among serious print journalists who are still scraping for old-fashioned stories, the rise of politically biased, high-profile analysts only adds to the unease about the blending of entertainment, news and opinion. But it’s not easy to declare one mutation acceptable and another out-of-bounds. Journalism isn’t a licensed trade. Anyone can hang a shingle, and that’s not something we want to change. This attitude helps explain why many journalists are slow to complain about what is happening to their profession.

“I would never be so arrogant as to draw a line and say, ‘Journalism ends here and what you guys are doing over there is not journalism,’ ” says Eric Nalder, who began work as an investigative reporter 25 years ago and has won two Pulitzer Prizes. Nalder argues that local newspapers, the least flashy of journalism’s many genres, produce a great deal of solid, serious work--what he would call Real Journalism.

“Real journalism doesn’t distort the truth for effect, and it isn’t hyped to the point where it is no longer a reliable representation of the world around us,” Nalder says. “The trouble is, that line is crossed in a lot of mediums all too often.” Most journalists seem to agree. In 1999, a Pew survey of people in the industry found that 69% believe the distinction between commentary and reporting has been “seriously eroded.”

Journalism professor David Weaver of Indiana University says that he finds a lot of worry among journalists, who see growing confusion “over the distinction between news and entertainment. A lot of people are calling themselves journalists when they are not; they are celebrities.” Weaver says that the most painful symbol of what is wrong can be seen on TV whenever one reporter turns to another to ask his opinion about a story. “When journalists interview each other instead of legitimate news sources, something serious has changed,” he says.

Many people, like the guy I met on the golf course, assume that journalists are crass manipulators who buy into the lowest-common-denominator trends. Some of us are. But many more are distressed by what has happened to our trade.

When you fear that something you love is in trouble, it’s natural to look for reassurance. On the morning when the two top editors at the New York Times resigned because of Jayson Blair, I went to see my old professor Donald Murray. Now 78, Murray continues to write a weekly newspaper column as well as books and occasional articles. He welcomed me into an office that was organized to a pitch that would have pleased any obsessive-compulsive. Hundreds of books lined the walls, in sections for various topics, along with an equal number of classical CDs sorted by composer. A quote from Isaac Bashevis Singer--”The wastepaper basket is a writer’s best friend”--decorated the trash can beside his desk.

I discovered that Murray didn’t have much reassurance to offer. He too is troubled by the decline of traditional, independent journalism and the rise of opinion and infotainment. He seems irritated by the idea that journalists can be high-dollar, widely celebrated personalities. “Is Katie Couric a journalist?” he asked. “She’s a pretty good interviewer. She’s also an entertainer and a celebrity. I’m not sure that those add up to being a journalist, though.”

The lack of independent reporting on the Iraq war, where some “embedded” reporters discussed Army units in terms of “we,” bothered Murray deeply. “We made heroes out of guys sitting on ships and put out a lot of human-interest stories that made America look good,” he said. “The fear of being called unpatriotic led to a lot of self-censorship.”

I had come to Murray looking for a broader perspective--his experience goes back to the 1940s--and he was able to point out that in the long history of journalism, credibility often has been a problem. The high-water period that I recall, from the late 1960s to the 1980s, may have been an aberration when you look at a record that includes more Hearst and Winchell than Woodward and Bernstein.

As examples, Murray recalled an editor in the 1940s who simply put quotes around his words and attributed them to sources, just to give the stories he wrote a ring of authenticity. Then there was the crime reporter who carried a pair of pink panties and dropped it at crime scenes so he could write an exclusive on the sex angle in the case.

The truth is that a lot of what journalism does today is very good when compared with the more distant past. At least no one I know carries panties in his pocket.

I understood Murray’s point, but it didn’t make me feel better.