My local paper of late has been the (Raleigh, NC) News &
Observer, and although one neighbor calls it the “Refuse &
Disturber,” I have a soft spot for its opinion page, if only
because the opinion section is run by an editor who, like me, grew
up in Hawaii.
Last Sunday, the N&O devoted most of its opinion
section to a remix of presentations given by news industry bigwigs
to the North Carolina Press Association, which met recently in
Charlotte. NCPA convention-goers were hot to find out whether this
is the end of news as we know it, and whether public service
journalism will survive.
Assuming that it would be impertinent to argue that all
journalism is “public service journalism,” my answers to those
questions are yes and yes, but I am not a professional journalist.
The NCPA does not care what I think. More distressingly, the people
speculating about the future of journalism in Sunday’s pastiche do
not appear to have read Randall Hoven, either.
Writing recently for the American Thinker website, Hoven hit on
the idea of cataloging known misdeeds for the benefit of anyone
wondering why journalists are not as admired now as they were in
1897, when a famous editorial in the New York Sun settled
the question of whether Santa Claus exists for an eight-year-old
reader who trusted the answer because her father had said, “If you
see it in The Sun, it’s so.”
Hoven compiled two lists. His first list had 62 incidents of journalistic
malpractice, and his second list had 21. As he wryly noted in
part two, he stopped counting at 83 for lack of time, not lack
of material.
When I covered some of the same ground in an essay (“Citizens’
Arrest”) that The American Spectator online published
in 2004, I was calling attention to the way that bloggers had found
dishonesty in reports by CNN, the New York Times, and
Harper’s magazine. Sadly, there is no overlap between the
examples I used then and the much bigger set that Hoven just
compiled.
TRUE TO THE SAYING that you should never pick a fight with someone
who “buys ink by the barrel,” journalists often downplay their own
image problem to point fingers at other damaged professionals.
Priests and teachers take it on the chin, but politicians, personal
injury lawyers, and car dealers have been journalistic adversaries
for so long that many reporters would rather dance with them than
spar with them.
A press convention would have been an ideal time to address the
reasons why journalism lacks the cachet it once had (former CBS
newsman Bernard Goldberg wrote Bias six years ago, for
crying out loud). But if the essays published by my local paper
represent what passes for self-examination in the news business,
then we’re left with a textbook example of missed opportunity.
Rather than tackle mistrust and its origins head-on, the five
worthies quoted by the N&O offered either bland
reassurance or maudlin nostalgia. From the paper’s Pulitzer
Prize-winning executive editor, we got “the beast struggling for
footing isn’t the news side of newspapers; it’s the business
structure that for several decades has supported newsrooms and
public-interest journalism.”
Tell it to the Marines.
The dean of the journalism department at a local university
offered — wait for it — an ode to continuing
education: “News outlets will have to learn how to perfect their
sites, how to offer information that readers want online versus
what they want in print,” she predicted.
A Poynter Institute fellow from Mississippi wrote emotively about journalism in the aftermath of
Hurricane Katrina, when “men and women at the Sun Herald in Biloxi
and the Times-Picayune in New Orleans put aside their own pain,
their own losses, their own tears to create a place for all of us
to come together.” Moreover, he said, “they did it in print and
online, and they did it with courage and honor.”
Some did. Others were delusional enough to give Ignatius J.
Reilly and his Big Chief tablets a run for the money. In the case
of the Times-Picayune, the Poynter panelist was talking
about a newspaper that admitted afterward that it had published
unverified and provably false stories of “rapes, sniper attacks,
and inflated body counts” among scores of other myths about
post-Katrina conditions in the Louisiana Superdome and Convention
Center (this is incident #14 on Hoven’s second list).
Think tank director Tom Rosenstiel came a little nearer the mark when he
suggested that a journalist’s job is now to help other citizens in
our “quest” to find the information we want, “and not be threatened
by the fact that journalists are no longer in control,” but even he
ducked the question of why journalists are not regarded as the most
reliable of guides.
THE BEST ILLUSTRATION of why journalism is too important to be left
to the professionals came from Rem Rieder, a veteran of six newspapers who now runs
the American Journalism Review. Rieder was more downbeat
than his colleagues. You can practically hear him sobbing into his
beer with lines like, “An informed electorate is critical to
democracy. And providing that information properly is expensive. It
requires a lot of reporting firepower. And large reporting staffs
tend to be fielded by newspapers.” Worse, said Rieder, “until that
elusive new economic model for the news media emerges, the American
people will be the losers.”
Uh, Rem. Are we talking Nighthawks here, or
Boulevard of Broken Dreams? Step away from the paintings,
dude. If I’m a loser and I read one of your papers, just what is it
you’re editing, anyway?
While there’s no denying the usefulness of a big news budget,
I’d take Michael Yon and his shoestring reporting from Iraq and
Afghanistan over Christiane Amanpour and her politically correct
analysis any day. Losers like me trust combat reporting from
correspondents who served honorably in Special Forces.
Even with all the resources of CNN at her command, not to
mention her piercing eyes, no-nonsense bangs, and safari jacket,
Amanpour makes laughable mistakes in her depiction of subjects like
“God’s Warriors.” She is by no means alone.
When the media does not make mistakes egregious enough to
warrant placement on a list like Randall Hoven’s, it lapses into
self-congratulatory soliloquies like Rem Rieder’s. The problem with
that kind of dinner-theater Hamlet is that it ignores the newsroom
culture that still allows an old CBS hand like Bob Schieffer to misattribute Senator John McCain’s
fading popularity to his support for war in Iraq — and never mind
that Senator McCain himself cites “the immigration issue” as the
reason for his abysmal poll numbers.
If you want to talk whitewash, what Walter Duranty of the
New York Times did to win his Pulitzer Prize in 1932 is no
different from what Vladimir Putin is doing now. And there is no
excuse for the way the once-storied BBC permits anti-Christian and
anti-Semitic slurs on its Internet message boards, but instantly
removes anything that might be construed as anti-Muslim.
What journalism needs (if I may make so bold as to prescribe) is
an examination of conscience, not a smooth-talking entrepreneur who
can lead newspaper executives into the promised land of publicly
subsidized websites.
Analysis that too often boils down to “my child is an honor
student, but my president is a moron” deserves neither eyeballs nor
subscription dollars. Professional journalism will rebound only if
journalists can regain the trust they started squandering even
before Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford granted the American
branch of the profession a stay of execution by playing Woodward
and Bernstein as larger-than-life.
