Winter 2021: The Anniversary Issue by Columbia Journalism Review

winter 2021

The Voice Th of Journalism J urnal sm

60TH ANNIVERSARY

The Voice of Journalism

CJR

Table of Contents

7 EDITOR’S NOTE

Onward Kyle Pope

Witness to History

Identity

Amy Davidson Sorkin on the moments when trust is tested

June Cross on the problem with “objectivity”

WINTER 1964

MAY/JUNE 1972

The Reporters’ Story Journalists at the scene of JFK’s assassination

What Do Black Journalists Want? Dorothy Gilliam

FALL 1961

FALL 1968

News vs. Security The Editors

Journalism and the Kerner Report Woody Klein

24 FALL 1969

On Understanding Society Fred Friendly in conversation with Walter Lippmann 30

“The more they try to intimidate me, the more certain I am that I must keep fighting.” — Maria Ressa

53 FALL 2018

Missing the Story Jelani Cobb 56

WINTER 1968/1969

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1993

Corridor of Mirrors Thomas Whiteside

Degrees of Sleaze Victor Navasky

MAY/JUNE 1997

MARCH/APRIL 2006

The Making of a Publisher Gloria Cooper

The Stringers Paul McLeary

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2001

SPRING 1984

Witness Nick Spangler

Getting There Terri Laxton Brooks 66 FEBRUARY 2019

Truth-Telling Alexandria Neason

WINTER 2021

Technology

Economics

Threats

127

Nicholas Thompson on how technology transforms media

Sewell Chan on the journalism industry’s persistent struggles

Joel Simon on defending journalists’ freedom

100

130

MARCH 2016

MARCH/APRIL 1988

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2006

Facebook Is Eating the World Emily Bell

The Baby Bind Mary Ellen Schoonmaker

The Death of Supply Column 21 David Halberstam

104

133

FEBRUARY 2007

JULY/AUGUST 1982

JULY/AUGUST 2010

Beware the Bloggers Gal Beckerman

A Daily News Diary Mary Ann Giordano

A World of Trouble Shahan Mufti

110

136

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1996

SUMMER 1970

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1988

Gimme That On-Line Religion Laura Italiano

Balance of Power An interview with Jean Schwoebel

Life on a Leash Ellen Cantarow

113

138

SUMMER 1965

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1991

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1974

Indictment of Broadcasting Edward R. Murrow

The Pain of Being Terminated Cassandra Tate

The FBI and Me Daniel Schorr

116

143

MAY/JUNE 2001

JULY/AUGUST 2009

MAY/JUNE 1980

Reporting with Computers Margaret Sullivan

Build the Wall David Simon

120

The Bodies Counted Are Our Own Jacobo Timerman

JULY/AUGUST 2010

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1976

The Trouble with Experts Alissa Quart

What E.B. White Told Xerox E.B. White

146 SUMMER 2019

Targeted by Duterte Maria Ressa

CJR

EDITOr’S NOTE

Onward BY KYLE P OPE

1961

IXTY YEArS AGO, the columbia journalism review debuted, tucked beneath a plain white cover. In an opening essay, “Why a review of journalism?,” the editors felt obliged to explain to readers what wasn’t at all obvious: the need for an outlet to critique the press. “There exists,” they wrote, “a widespread uneasiness about the state of journalism. The review shares this uneasiness, not over any supposed deterioration but over the probability that journalism of all types is not yet a match for the complications of our age. . . . The urgent arguments for a critical journal far outweigh the hazards.” The complications of our age. If only those editors could have known what was to come, from the cultural upheavals of the sixties to Watergate to the Cold War, economic downturn to the war on terror, to the dawn of the internet and social media. Given all that has transpired since, it is remarkable that the arguments CJR’s editors laid out six decades ago, and indeed much of the tenor of the magazine’s earliest coverage, resonate today. This anniversary issue of CJR puts on display how much the news of the day operates within a much longer timeline. The same stories persist. CJR’s inaugural issue offers an assessment of the 1960 Kennedy–Nixon presidential campaign, raising many of the questions that animate our pages today: about perceived bias in reporting and difficulties covering a vote-counting process that’s drawn out and opaque. It considers a book called The Fading American Newspaper—a hint of the local-news crisis that was, decades

later, to come. And it criticizes television reporters for showboating at press briefings with President Kennedy, noting that the average question had grown to fifty words long since the briefings became televised, from an average of fourteen words under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In this issue, we have sought to convey the scope and ambition of CJR over the course of its life. The stories are organized thematically, rather than chronologically, to help connect the dots from one age to the next. In these pages, you’ll find Walter Lippmann; David Simon; assessments of the Kerner Commission’s findings, fifty years apart; and wariness of bloggers’ citing Jenny McCarthy as a vaccination expert. You’ll also find Katharine Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, referring to this magazine as “the fucking columbia journalism review.” Our obsessions, of course, have shifted over the decades; CJR’s coverage has matured and expanded in print and online. Yet our mission remains the same. On the occasion of CJR’s tenth birthday (there’s no news peg like an anniversary), editors published a foray into the archives called Our Troubled Press. In an opening essay, Elie Abel, who was then the dean of the Columbia Journalism School, made this pledge: “We are determined to carry on,” he wrote, “raising questions that others do not raise, discussing problems that are not elsewhere discussed at length or in depth. We propose to do more.” As do we. Onward to the next sixty years. cjr KYLE P OPE is the editor in chief and publisher of CJR.

1971

1981

1991

20 01

2011

WITNESS TO HISTOrY

Witne Hist TK crEDIT

AUTHOr TK

TK crEDIT

ess to tory

HE rE AN D N OW

How Do You Know? Amy Davidson Sorkin on the moments when trust is tested

‘I

KE, HOW DO YOU KNOW? ” Bob Johnson, the AP’s Dallas bureau chief, asked James “Ike” Altgens, one of his photographers, on November 22, 1963. There were scattered reports that President John F. Kennedy, who was visiting the city, had been shot, but they hadn’t been confirmed. Johnson had begun typing a bulletin but got only as far as the dateline. His fingers were poised, waiting for information. Altgens had an answer: “I saw it. There was blood on his face. Mrs. Kennedy jumped up and cried, ‘Oh, no!’ ” The exchange between Altgens and Johnson appears in “The Reporters’ Story,” which ran in the columbia journalism review in the winter of 1964, a collection of firsthand accounts from journalists who covered the assassination as it was happening—before anyone was sure it was an assassination. It is in many ways a period piece, beginning with a description of reporters “clawing and pummeling” one another for access to a radiophone and a reference to those journalists as “men who were in the Presidential party in Dallas.” There were, in fact, women there, including Marianne Means, of Hearst Headline Service, who delivered her colleagues the

information that Kennedy had been shot and was at Parkland Hospital. “When Miss Means said those eight words—I never learned who told her—I knew absolutely they were true,” Tom Kirkland, the managing editor of the Denton record-chronicle, said. “Everyone did. We ran for the press buses.” The riposte to “How do you know?” is another question: Whom do you trust? To look back at the coverage of crises in the pages of this magazine is to be reminded that trust is the product of a never-ending negotiation between the press, the public, and those in power. In November 1963, White House aides pulled reporters onto Air Force One as it was about to depart from Dallas, to witness Lyndon Johnson being sworn in as president—a recognition that legitimacy could not be separated from transparency. In the winter 1968/69 issue, Thomas Whiteside looked at protests and police violence surrounding the Democratic National Convention in Chicago; a piece of evidence that the mayor, Richard Daley, had engaged in “a deliberate policy” of suppressing coverage was how hard it was for journalists to book spots in private parking lots (“usually the owners are delighted to cooperate

with television networks”). It wasn’t natural; the fix must be in. Still, cameras were rolling when police started beating up demonstrators—and journalists—in Chicago’s Lincoln Park. When James Strickland, a Black cameraman, tells police he is with NBC, the reply, as rendered by CJR, is “You black mother------, we’ll kill you before the night is over.” (He lived, after being hit in the face.) And yet, a producer tells Whiteside, “whenever we put our lights on, we reduced the amount of violence in front of us.” Many events of the past few years—notably the response to George Floyd’s murder— have supported the belief that documenting makes a difference, even if the larger ecosystem of public trust is in a precarious state. Protesters now have their own cameras; there’s hardly agreement about what journalism is. Questions of identity and purpose are not new, however; when Walter Lippmann was asked, at a seminar at the Columbia Journalism School in 1969, how the “mass media” should lay out complex issues to the public, he said, “First of all, I don’t know enough about the mass media. I know something about journalism, but I know very little about broadcasting.” What he did see left him “utterly dissatisfied almost always”; everything seemed too “dramatic.” Journalists haven’t sobered up; maybe they never should. When the government and press face off, each makes a bet on what the public will think. In 1961, after the Bay of Pigs debacle, Kennedy lashed out at the press for not keeping quiet in the name of national security. That tension—over not just what reporters know but what they should reveal—is a constant, as is the government’s confusion of security with its own embarrassment. In 1971, the Nixon administration got a restraining order to stop the New York Times from printing excerpts of the Pentagon Papers, whose crucial revelation was the extent to which successive administrations had lied about what was happening in Vietnam. While the Times was still fighting the order, which the Supreme Court would overturn, the Washington Post began printing excerpts. As Gloria Cooper notes, reviewing the memoir of Katharine Graham, the Post’s publisher, in 1997, that decision— with its mixture of collegiality, defiance, and sound news instinct—elevated the Post to the national stage, even before Watergate

WITNESS TO HISTOrY

did. Cooper argues that what differentiated Katharine Graham from her husband, Philip, who had been publisher until his suicide, in 1963, was not that she had less experience but that Philip was too close to JFK. Access had distorted his understanding of his job. His wife was not, as he was, strategizing with Kennedy at the 1960 convention. But she was the better journalist. In its November/December 2001 issue, CJR ran a piece by Nick Spangler, a Columbia Journalism School student who was a few blocks from the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11. (He’s now a reporter at Newsday.) Its title is “Witness,” and, as with Altgens, there’s a lot that Spangler can testify to, including the sound of a blond woman in a sea-green skirt striking the ground. (“I could not see her face. I would not say I wanted to see it but I thought it was important.”) Much of the story, though, is about Spangler’s search, through clouds of dust, for members of the public who have seen more than he has. Lippmann, in his conversation with journalism students, was skeptical of the public’s ability to handle complexity. One hopes he wasn’t completely correct about that. But he appeared to have a deep faith in the public’s ability to, as he put it, “say yes or no.” And, on a key concern of that period, the war in Vietnam—the reason protesters had gathered in Chicago—Lippmann identified how trust is ultimately tested: “Public relations was unable to do anything about the Vietnam War,” he said. “They tried to. Johnson tried all the techniques he could to hide that war, and then to make it acceptable. And it didn’t work.” When you know, in other words, you know. cjr

AMY DAVIDSO N SOrKIN, a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2014, joined the magazine’s editorial staff in 1995.

A M Y DAV I D S O N S O r K I N

Trust is the product of a never-ending negotiation between the press, the public, and those in power.

WITNESS TO HISTOrY

A roundtable of journalists at jFK’s assassination

The reporters’ Story

On November 22, 1963, while riding in a presidential motorcade through Dallas, John F. Kennedy was shot and killed. Suddenly, the press was responsible for covering the story, under tremendous pressure and emotional distress. CJR collected accounts of journalists on the ground.

TK crEDIT

WINT Er 1964

TK crEDIT

R O U N DTA B L E

WITNESS TO HISTOrY

ON THESE PAGES the Review reproduces the words of men who were in the Presidential party in Dallas on November 22. The words are offered in a connected narrative as a case study in the reflexes and conscious actions of professional journalists under the heaviest kind of pressure and emotional stress. Several of these narratives have been widely distributed, but they have not been previously collaged. They emphasize again how little there was for reporters to see and how much, after the first phases, they depended on each other to complete their information. MErrIMAN SMITH, United Press International

I was riding in the so-called White House press “pool” car, a telephone company vehicle equipped with a mobile radio telephone. I was in the front seat between a driver from a telephone company and Malcolm Kilduff, acting White House press secretary for the President’s Texas tour. Three other pool reporters were wedged in the back seat. MALcOLM KILDUFF I had just finished say-

ing to the representative of UPI, “Would you mind telling me what in the name of heaven the Texas School Book Repository is? I never heard of a school book ‘repository.’ ” With that we heard the first report. jAcK BELL, The Associated Press There was a loud bang as though a giant firecracker had exploded in the cavern between the tall buildings we were just leaving behind us. rOBErT E. BASKIN, Dallas Morning News

“What the hell was that?” someone in our car asked. Then there were two more shots, measured carefully. BOB jAcKSON , photographer, Dallas TimesHerald First, somebody joked about it being a

firecracker. Then, since I was facing the building where the shots were coming from, I just glanced up and saw two colored men in a window straining to look at a window up above them. As I looked up to the window above, I saw a rifle being pulled back in the window. It might have been resting on the window sill. I didn’t see a man. BELL The man in front of me screamed, “My God, they’re shooting at the President!” rONNIE DUGGEr, The Texas Observer “What happened?” a reporter called out inside the bus ahead of me. Through the windows we saw people breaking and running down Elm Street in the direction of the underpass, and running to the railing of the arch at the foot of the downtown section and leaping out of our sight onto the grass beyond and below. . . . We speculated someone might have dropped something onto the motorcade from the overpass. I saw an airplane above the area and wondered if it might have been dropping something. jErrY TEr HOrST, Detroit News There was a great clamor in the bus, “Open the doors. Let us out,” but the bus speeded up, and it was

r O U N DTA B L E

impossible. The doors were not opening, and obviously the driver was staying with the police escort. SMITH Everybody in our car began shouting at the driver to pull up closer to the President’s car. But at this moment, we saw the big bubble-top and a motorcycle escort roar away at high speed. We screamed at our driver, “Get going, get going.” We careened around the Johnson car and its escort and set out down the highway, barely able to keep in sight of the President’s car and the accompanying Secret Service follow-up car. TOM WIcKEr, The New York Times Jim Mathis of The Advance (Newhouse) Syndicate went to the front of our bus and looked ahead to where the President’s car was supposed to be, perhaps ten cars ahead of us. He hurried back to his seat. “The President’s car just sped off,” he said. “Really gunned away.” . . . The press bus in its stately pace rolled on to the Trade Mart, where the President was to speak. SMITH I radioed the Dallas bureau of UPI that three shots had been fired at the Kennedy motorcade. LEONArD LYONS in the New York Post The other reporter kept demanding the phone, and tried reaching over Smith’s shoulder to grab it. Smith held on, telling his desk, “Read the bulletin back to me.” The other pool reporter started . . . clawing and pummeling Smith—who ducked under the dashboard to avoid the blows. Smith held on to the phone, dictating and rechecking the bulletins. Just before the car pulled up at the hospital, Smith surrendered the phone. BELL I grabbed the radiophone, got the operator, gave the Dallas bureau number, heard someone answer. I shouted that three shots had been fired at the President’s motorcade. The phone went dead and I couldn’t tell whether anyone had heard me. Frantically, I tried to get the operator back. The phone was still out. BASKIN We began to suspect the worst when we roared up to the emergency entrance of Parkland Hospital. The scene there was one of sheer horror. The President lay face down on the back seat.

BELL We were turning into the emergency entrance to the hospital when I hopped out to sprint for the President’s car. The first hard fact I had that the President was hit was when I saw him lying on the seat. Because he was face down, I asked a Secret Service man, to make doubly certain, if this was the President, and he said it was. He said he didn’t think the President was dead. SMITH I knew I had to get to a telephone immediately. Clint Hill, the Secret Service agent in charge of the detail assigned to Mrs. Kennedy, was leaning over into the rear of the car. “How badly was he hit, Clint?” I asked. “He’s dead,” Hill replied curtly. . . . I raced down a short stretch of sidewalk into a hospital corridor. The first thing I spotted was a small clerical office, more of a booth than an office. Inside, a bespectacled man stood shuffling what appeared to be hospital forms. At a wicket much like a bank teller’s cage, I spotted a telephone on the shelf. “How do you get outside?” I gasped. “The President has been hurt and this is an emergency call.” “Dial nine,” he said, shoving the phone toward me. It took two tries before I successfully dialed the Dallas UPI number. Quickly I dictated a bulletin. Litters bearing the President and the Governor rolled by me as I dictated, but my back was to the entrance of the emergency room about 75 or 100 feet away. I knew they had passed, however, from the horrified expression that suddenly spread over the face of the man behind the wicket. SAUL PETT in AP Log In the AP Dallas bureau, Bob Johnson was just returning to his desk. Executive Editor Felix McKnight called from the Times-Herald newsroom: “Bob, we hear the President has been shot, but we haven’t confirmed it.” Johnson raced for his typewriter. Staffer Ronnie Thompson told him: “Bell tried to call a minute ago but he was cut off.” Johnson wrote the dateline of a bulletin. He had just reached the dash that follows the AP logotype when the phone rang again. It was staffer James W. Altgens, a Wirephoto operator-photographer known to everyone as “Ike,” on duty as a photographer several blocks from the office. . . . “Bob, the President has been shot.” “Ike, how do you know?” “I saw it. There was blood on his face. Mrs. Kennedy jumped up and grabbed him and cried, ‘Oh, no!’ The motorcade raced onto the freeway.” “Ike, you saw that?” “Yes. I was shooting pictures then and I saw it.” With the phone cradled to his ear, Johnson’s fingers raced. rOBErT DONOVAN, Los Angeles Times We went to the Trade Mart, and the first thing we wanted to do was look for the President’s car, and we didn’t find it. But even then it didn’t raise any positive proof in my mind, because there were a number of entrances to this Trade Mart. . . . Then it became obvious something had happened. We ran into this merchandise mart, which is an utter maze. We filed into the corridor of this hall, and the waiters were bringing out filet mignon to an utterly unsuspecting audience, and they told us, to make matters utterly worse in our haste, that the press room was on the fourth floor. So, of course, what were there but escalators? So up we go, and we ran

WITNESS TO HISTOrY

“We talked anxiously, unbelieving, afraid.”

into the press room and it was sort of like air currents. We were all going around in a pattern of least resistance. DUGGEr In the alarm and confusion, the reporters were full of doubt, and some were a little panicky. No one wanted to say what he was not sure of. Reporters had their editors on the phone and nothing definite to tell them. SID DAVIS, Westinghouse Broadcasting company I phoned to Washington saying, “Some-

thing has happened.”

DUGGEr I went from reporters at telephones who did not know and asked me frantically what I knew—I went on a run to a group of four or five who were gathered around M. W. Stevenson, chief of the criminal investigation division of the Dallas police. “The President was hit, that’s our information at present.” He had been taken to Parkland. How badly hurt? “No, sir, I do not know.” WIcKEr At the Trade Mart, rumor was sweeping the hundreds of Texans eating their lunch. It was the only rumor I have ever seen; it was moving across that crowd like a wind over a

wheatfield. A man eating a grapefruit seized my arm as I passed. “Has the President been shot?” he asked. “I don’t think so,” I said. “But something happened.” TOM KIrKLAND, managing editor, Denton record-chronicle The rumor started spread-

ing here (at the Trade Mart) about 12:45 p.m., but nobody believed it. Everyone just stood around in disbelief. At about 1 p.m. it was announced that there had been a mishap during the parade. Everybody had finished eating. He told them that the mishap was not serious, but there would be a delay in the President’s address.

WIcKEr With the other reporters—I suppose 35 of them—I went on through to the upstairs press room. We were hardly there when Marianne Means of Hearst Headline Service hung up a telephone, ran to a group of us and said, “The President’s been shot. He’s at Parkland Hospital.” One thing I learned that day; I suppose I already knew it, but that day made it plain. A reporter must trust his instinct. When Miss Means said those eight words—I never learned who told her—I knew absolutely they were true. Everyone did. We ran for the press buses.

r O U N DTA B L E

DONOVAN A man I took to be a Dallas radio station man said to me that the President had been shot and may be dead. Well, it was stupefying, utterly stupefying. We had just seen him in the bright sunshine with his wife. . . . Then there was a great clamor of “Where is he? Where is anybody? Where is the President?” This Dallas radio man went to a policeman and came back and said he was in Parkland Hospital. I said, “How can we get there?” and he said, “I have a station wagon. Come on. I will take you.” By this time we were all running back through the dining hall before the startled diners, and Tom Wicker, of The New York Times, was grabbed by the head waiter, who said, “Here, you can’t run in here.” Wicker just ran over him. WIcKEr I pulled free and ran on. Doug Kiker of the Herald Tribune barreled head-on into a waiter carrying a plate of potatoes. Waiter and potatoes flew about the room. Kiker ran on. He was in his first week with the Trib, and his first presidential trip. KIrKLAND At 1:07, Eric Johnsson announced in a very, very trembling voice: “I’m not sure that I can say what I have to say. I feel almost as I did on Pearl Harbor day.” At that point his voice broke. Then he announced that the President and the Governor had been shot. . . . It was quiet. DONOVAN Peter Lisagor, of the chicago Daily News, and I and some other reporters got into a station wagon with his radio man and we went out of the Trade Mart at a breakneck clip with his horn blaring, through traffic, through lights. It was a horrifying ride. WIcKEr I barely got aboard a moving press bus. Bob Pierpoint of CBS was aboard and he said that he now recalled having heard something that could have been shots— or firecrackers, or motorcycle backfire. We talked anxiously, unbelieving, afraid. DAVIS I went to a policeman and said, “You’ve got to get me to Parkland Hospital,” and he said: “Buddy, all the cars are gone. We have nothing available here to get you anyplace.” I said, “You have got to get me there. I am a member of the White House Press,” or something of that sort. I insisted. He stammered that he had no vehicles for me, but he

stood out in the middle of the freeway and stopped a car. It was about a 1948 Cadillac driven by a Negro gentleman, and the policeman said, “Get this man to Parkland Hospital right away.” This fellow said, “Yes, sir.” . . . He hit the accelerator on that car, and I nearly went through the back end, and I shouted up front to him and said, “Sir, we both want to get there. Take it easy.” DONOVAN As we approached the hospital on a double-lane highway, the radio-station man saw traffic piling up ahead of him, so he turned in and went against the approaching traffic, some of it approaching at high speed, horn blowing. Well, the police had seen this station wagon coming up the wrong end of the street with its horn blowing, assumed it was full of officials, and stopped all traffic and waved us into the hospital grounds. WIcKEr At its emergency entrance stood the President’s car, the top up, a bucket of bloody water beside it. Automatically, I took down its license number—GG300 District of Columbia. DUGGEr In the hospital I heard people who work there saying, “Connally, too.” “It’s a shame, I don’t care who it is.” No one knew who was alive or who was dead. At the emergency entrance, Senator Ralph Yarborough, terribly shaken, gave the first eyewitness account that I had heard. He had been in the third car, with the Vice President and Mrs. Johnson; removed from the President’s car by the one filled with Secret Service men. WIcKEr The details he gave us were good and mostly—as it later proved—accurate. But he would not describe to us the appearance of the President as he was wheeled into the hospital, except to say that he was “gravely wounded.” We could not doubt, then, that it was serious. I had chosen that day to be without a notebook. I took notes on the back of my mimeographed schedule of the two-day tour of Texas we had been so near to concluding. Today, I cannot read many of the notes; on November 22, they were as clear as 60-point type. DUGGEr Because I had reached Yarborough first before many of the reporters came up, I then told a group of them what he had said from the first. This was a common scene the rest of the day, reporters sharing what they had learned with their colleagues. WIcKEr Mac Kilduff came out of the hospital. We gathered round and he told us the President was alive. It wasn’t true, we later learned; but Mac thought it was true at that time, and he didn’t mislead us about a possible recovery . . . Kilduff promised more details in five minutes and went back into the hospital. We were barred. Word came to us secondhand—I don’t remember exactly how—from Bob Clark of ABC, one of the men in the press “pool” car near the President’s, that he had been lying face down in Mrs. Kennedy’s lap when the car arrived at Parkland. No signs of life . . . I knew Clark and respected him. I took his report at face value, even at second-hand. It turned out to be true. KILDUFF At 1:04 they were still trying to work on him, as . . . Dr. Perry’s statements have subsequently indicated. It was only a few minutes later, however, that in talking to Kenney O’Donnell (White House

Appointments Secretary) that we knew the President was, in fact, dead. . . . About 10 or 15 minutes after 1:00 I got hold of Kenney and I said, “This is a terrible time to have to approach you on this, but the world has got to know that President Kennedy is dead.” He said, “Well, don’t they know it already?” and I said, “No, I haven’t told them.” He said, “Well, you are going to have to make the announcement. Go ahead. But you better check it with Mr. Johnson.”. . . His (President Johnson’s) reaction was immediate on that. And he said, “No, I think we better wait a minute. Are they prepared to get me out of here?”. . . By this time it was about 1:20. I went back and talked to President Johnson, and I said, “Well, I am going to make the announcement as soon as you leave.”. . . Then the two of us, President Johnson and myself, walked out of the emergency entrance together, and everyone was screaming at me, “What can you tell us?” It was a scene of absolute confusion. DUGGEr Reporters trying to make phone calls found that all the hospital phones had gone dead. I chased across the street to find a phone in a filling station to call the paper I was working with. While I was standing in the storeroom where the phone was, waiting to get through, I heard it announced on the radio, “The President is dead.” I told the editor and rushed back to the hospital. I first believed and comprehended that he was dead when I heard Doug Kiker of the Herald Tribune swearing bitterly and passionately,

FALL 1961

News vs. Security Excerpts from a debate between Kennedy and the press

jAMES rESTON, The New York Times The trouble with the press during the Cuban crisis was not that it said too much, but that it said too little. It knew what was going on ahead of the landing . . . but it had very little to say about the morality, legality, or practicality of the Cuban adventure when there was still time to stop it. . . . Instead, it was encouraged to put out false information and was actually putting it out.

WITNESS TO HISTOrY

“Goddam the sonsabitches.” Yes, he was dead. But who had announced it? In the press room that had been improvised out of a classroom, no one seemed to know. WIcKEr When Wayne Hawks of the White House staff appeared to say that a press room had been set up in a hospital classroom at the left rear of the building, the group of reporters began struggling across the lawn in that direction. I lingered to ask a motorcycle policeman if he had heard on his radio anything about the pursuit or capture of the assassin. He hadn’t, and I followed the other reporters. As I was passing the open convertible in which Vice President and Mrs. Johnson and Senator Yarborough had been riding in the motorcade, a voice boomed from its radio: “The President of the United States is dead. I repeat—it has just been announced that the President of the United States is dead.” There was no authority, no word of who had announced it. But—instinct again—I believed it instantly. It sounded true. I knew it was true. I stood still a moment, then began running. . . . I jumped a chain fence looping around the drive, not even breaking stride. Hugh Sidey of Time, a close friend of the President, was walking slowly ahead of me. “Hugh,” I said, “the President’s dead. Just announced on the radio. I don’t know who announced it but it sounded official to me.” Sidey stopped, looked at me, looked at the ground. I couldn’t talk about it. I couldn’t think about

r O U N DTA B L E

it. I couldn’t do anything but run on to the press room. Then I told the others what I had heard. Sidey, I learned a few minutes later, stood where he was a minute. Then he saw two Catholic priests. He spoke to them. Yes, they told him, the President was dead. They had administered the last rites. DUGGEr Then it was that Hugh Sidey of Time came in and, his voice failing with emotion, told the assembled press that two Catholic priests had told him and another reporter or so that the priests had given the President the last rites. TEr HOrST I had just paid somebody in the hospital, a nurse’s aide or somebody, $15 to keep a line open to Detroit. . . . I ran down through the corridor and Hugh Sidey . . . was saying, “I have just talked to Father Huber and he said, ‘He is dead, all right.’ ” I ran back down the corridor to the telephone, to relay this to my office in Detroit, and I couldn’t talk. The girl who had kept the line open for me went and got a little paper cup of water. When I said over the telephone what Father Huber had said, my rewrite man on the other end dissolved. He couldn’t go on. They had to put another rewrite man on. AP Log Bob Ford held an open line to the office.

Then Val Imm, society editor of the TimesHerald, came bursting through a mob of newsmen, grabbed an adjoining phone, shouted into it. Ford relayed her words . . .

THE PrESIDENT We intend to accept full responsibility for our errors; and we expect you to point them out when we miss them . . . government at all levels must meet its obligation to provide you with the fullest possible information outside the narrowest limits of national security. DAVID KrASLOW, Miami Herald What happens when the Administration thinks something is in the national interest but the press doesn’t? THE PrESIDENT Every democracy recognizes the necessary restraints of

SMITH Telephones were at a premium in the hospital and I clung to mine for dear life. I was afraid to stray from the wicket lest I lose contact with the outside world. My decision was made for me, however, when Kilduff and Wayne Hawks . . . ran by me, shouting that Kilduff would make a statement shortly in the so-called nurses room a floor above and at the far end of the hospital. I threw down the phone and sped after them. We reached the door of the conference room and there were loud cries of “Quiet!” KILDUFF I got up there and I thought, “Well, this is really the first press conference on a road trip I have ever had to hold.” I started to say it, and all I could say was “Excuse me, let me catch my breath,” and I thought in my mind, “All right, what am I going to say, and how am I going to say it?” I remember opening my mouth one time and I couldn’t say it, and I think it must have been two or three minutes. DUGGEr Kilduff came into the classroom and stood on the dais before the bright green blackboard, his voice, too, vibrating from his feelings. “President John F. Kennedy—” he began. “Hold it,” called out a cameraman. “President John F. Kennedy died at approximately one o’clock Central Standard Time today here in Dallas. He died of a gunshot wound in the brain. I have no other details regarding the assassination of the President. Mrs. Kennedy was not hit. Governor Connally was hit. The Vice President was not hit.” Had President Johnson taken the oath of office? “No. He has left.” On that, Kilduff would say no more. As Kilduff lit a cigarette, the flame of his lighter quivered violently. DONOVAN There was a brief flurry of questioning among the reporters themselves in the press room as to whether Johnson would take the oath there or take it in Washington, and the consensus immediately prevailed, of course, he would take it in Dallas, because in the kind of world we are living in, you can’t have the United States without a President, even in the time it takes to get from Dallas to Washington.

national security. . . . In times of clear and present danger, the courts have held that even the privileged rights of the First Amendment must yield to the public’s need for national security.

WILLIAM rANDOLPH HEArST, jr., The Hearst Newspapers He makes clear that we are in a war. Having been a war correspondent, I can well understand the need for security.

New York Herald Tribune In days of peril especially, the country needs more facts, not fewer.

THE PrESIDENT Should the press of America consider and recommend the voluntary assumption of specific new steps or machinery, I can assure you that we will cooperate wholeheartedly with those recommendations. . . . Perhaps there will be no recommendations. Perhaps there is no answer to the dilemma faced by a free and open society in a cold and secret war.

Milwaukee journal President Kennedy’s insistence upon full, voluntary concern for national security by the nation’s press in these times, no less than in a hot war, is reasonable and proper.

SMITH I raced into a nearby office. The telephone switchboard at the hospital was hopelessly jammed. I spotted Virginia Payette, wife of UPI’s Southwestern division manager and a veteran reporter in her own right. I told her to try getting through on pay telephones on the floor above. Frustrated by the inability to get through the hospital switchboard, I appealed to a nurse. She led me through a maze of corridors and back stairways to another floor and a lone pay booth. I got the Dallas office. Virginia had gotten through before me. WIcKEr The search for phones began. Jack Gertz, traveling with us for A.T.&T., was frantically moving them by the dozen into the hospital but few were ready yet. I wandered down the hall, found a doctor’s office, walked in, and told him I had to use the phone. He got up without a word and left. I battled the hospital switchboard for five minutes and finally got a line to New York. . . . The whole conversation with New York probably took three minutes. Then I hung up, thinking of all there was to know, all there was I didn’t know. I wandered down a corridor and ran into Sidey and Chuck Roberts of Newsweek. They’d seen a hearse pulling up at the emergency entrance and we figured they were about to move the body. We made our way to the hearse—a Secret Service agent who knew us helped us through suspicious Dallas police lines—and the driver said his instructions were to take the body to the airport. That confirmed our hunch, but gave me, at least, another wrong one. Mr. Johnson, I declared, would fly to Washington with the body and be sworn in there. We posted ourselves inconspicuously near the emergency entrance. Within minutes they brought the body out in a bronze coffin. . . . Mrs. Kennedy walked by the coffin, her hand on it, her head down, her hat gone, her dress and stockings spattered. She got into the hearse with the coffin. The staff men crowded into cars and followed. That was just about the only eyewitness matter that I got with my own eyes that entire afternoon. Roberts commandeered a seat in a police car and followed, promising to “fill” Sidey and me as necessary. We made the same promise to him and went back to the press room. DAVIS Jiggs Fauver, of the White House transportation office, grabbed my arm and

WITNESS TO HISTOrY

said, “Come with me. We need a pool. Don’t ask any questions.” I grabbed my typewriter and left. SMITH I ran back through the hospital to the conference room. There Jiggs Fauver . . . grabbed me and said Kilduff wanted a pool of three men immediately to fly back to Washington on Air Force One, the Presidential aircraft. “He wants you downstairs, and he wants you right now,” Fauver said. Down the stairs I ran and into the driveway, only to discover Kilduff had just pulled out in our telephone car. Charles Roberts . . . Sid Davis and I implored a police officer to take us to the airport in his squad car. On the way to the airport, the young police officer driving said, “I hope they don’t blame this on Dallas.” I don’t know who it was in the car that said, “They will.” The Secret Service had requested that no sirens be used in the vicinity, but the Dallas officer did a masterful job of getting us through some of the worst traffic I have ever seen. As we piled out of the car on the edge of the runway about 200 yards from the Presidential aircraft, Kilduff spotted us and motioned for us to hurry. We trotted to him and he said the plane could take two pool men to Washington; that Johnson was about to take the oath of office aboard the plane and would take off immediately thereafter. I saw a bank of telephone booths beside the runway and asked if I had time to advise my news service. He said, “But for God’s sake, hurry.” Then began another telephone nightmare. The Dallas office rang—busy. I tried calling Washington. All circuits were busy. Then I called the New York bureau of UPI and told them about the impending installation of a new President aboard the airplane. WIcKEr In the press room we received an account from Julian Reed, a staff assistant, of Mrs. John Connally’s recollection of the shooting. . . . The doctors had hardly left before Hawks came in and told us Mr. Johnson would be sworn in immediately at the airport. We dashed for the press buses, still parked outside. Many a campaign had taught me something about press buses and I ran a little harder, got there first, and went to the wide rear seat. That is the best place on a bus to open up a typewriter and get some work done. On the short trip to the airport, I got about 500 words on paper—leaving a blank

r O U N DTA B L E

space for the hour of Mr. Johnson’s swearingin, and putting down the mistaken assumption that the scene would be somewhere in the terminal. SMITH Kilduff came out of the plane and motioned wildly toward my booth. I slammed down the phone and jogged across the runway. A detective stopped me and said, “You dropped your pocket comb.”. . . Kilduff propelled us to the President’s suite two-thirds of the way back in the plane. . . . I wedged inside the door and began counting. There were 27 people in this compartment. DAVIS The Judge, Mrs. Sarah Hughes, of Dallas, told the President to raise his right hand and repeat after her. Then he repeated the oath. At that moment, I started the second hand on my watch and I clocked it at 28 seconds. SMITH The two-minute ceremony concluded at 3:38 p.m. EST and seconds later, the President said firmly, “Now, let’s get airborne.” Col. James Swindal, pilot of the plane, a big gleaming silver and blue fan-jet, cut on the starboard engines immediately. Several persons, including Sid Davis of Westinghouse, left the plane at that time. The White House had room for only two pool reporters on the return flight and these posts were filled by Roberts and me, although at the moment we could find no empty seats. At 3:47 p.m. EST the wheels of Air Force One cleared the runway. WIcKEr As we arrived at a back gate along the airstrip, we could see Air Force One, the Presidential jet, screaming down the runway and into the air. DUGGEr The details were given to us by a pool reporter, Sid Davis. . . . I shall not soon forget the picture in my mind, that man standing on the trunk of a white car, his figure etched against the blue, blue Texas sky, all of us massed around him at his knees as he told us what had happened in that crowded compartment in Air Force One. WIcKEr He and Roberts—true to his promise—had put together a magnificent “pool” report on the swearing-in. Davis read it off, answered questions, and gave a picture that so far as I know was complete, accurate and has not yet been added to.

The reporter In Washington, reporters at a loss to “cover” the event hung around the White House pressroom and concentrated partly by habit and partly by duty on trivial details. Lyndon Johnson, they were informed by a briefer in Pierre Salinger’s office, had left Dallas at 2:47 Central Standard Time. Was that 2:47? Yes, 2:47. He had been sworn in to office aboard the plane by U.S. District Judge Sarah T. Hughes. Could the briefer spell that? Yes, Sarah had an “h.” In midafternoon Senator Hubert Humphrey stopped in at the White House and consented to an informal chat with newsmen. There was almost nothing to ask him. Did he see any significance in the fact that it had happened in Dallas? came one idiotic try. Humphrey was taken aback. He shook his head abruptly and he left. Those White House aides familiar to reporters were too stricken to be questioned, even if there had been questions to ask. “I’m sorry,” was the most anyone could say. Everywhere there was silent unease at the inability to locate the source of government, to know even where government was. It was reflected in the compulsive scuttling of reporters from one place to another where they could only observe arrivals and departures. WIcKEr Kiker and I ran a half-mile to the terminal, cutting through a baggage-handling room to get there. I went immediately to a phone booth and dictated my 500-word lead, correcting it as I read, embellishing it too. Before I hung up I got Harrison Salisbury and asked him to cut into my story whatever the wires were filing on the assassin. There was no time left to chase down the Dallas police and find out those details on my own. Dallas Love Field has a mezzanine running around its main waiting room; it is equipped with writing desks for travelers. I took one and went to work. My recollection is that it was then about 5 p.m. New York time. SMITH It was dark when Air Force One began to skim over the lights of the Washington area, lining up for a landing at Andrews Air Force Base. The plane touched down at 5:59 p.m. EST. I thanked the stewards for rigging up the typewriter for me, pulled on my raincoat and started down the forward ramp. Roberts and I stood under a wing and watched the casket being lowered . . . we were given seats on another ’copter bound for the White House lawn. The reporter It was not quite relief but at last a sense of location, of

reality, that came on the South Lawn of the White House later in that strangely balmy evening. With terrific noise and lots of wind, resembling a monstrous wasp, the brown army helicopter bearing President Johnson bore down on the White House, hovered a moment, and then came to rest on the floodlit lawn . . . almost at once the exchange of gossipy desperate questions among reporters was altered. The known, manageable Washington seemed to return with Johnson. Where was he going? reporters now demanded. Who was he seeing? What was the President going to do? cjr

WITNESS TO HISTOrY

Thoughts from America’s founding media critic

On Understanding Society FrED FrIENDLY INTErVI EWS WALTE r L IPPMANN

“FOr WHEN THErE WAS PANIc in the air, with one crisis tripping over the heels of another, actual dangers mixed with imaginary scares, there is no chance at all for the constructive use of reasons, and any order soon seems preferable to any disorder.” So wrote Walter Lippmann in Public Opinion in 1922. Some weeks before his eightieth birthday, at the invitation of Prof. Fred W. Friendly of the columbia journalism faculty, Mr. Lippmann held a seminar with a small group of graduate students to discuss the contemporary applicability of this and other observations from his long and distinguished career. The text below is excerpted from the three-hour dialogue which resulted.

FA LL 1969 In 1922, Walter Lippmann, known as the father of American journalism, wrote Public Opinion, on the subject of government, mass communication, and societal perceptions. Late in his life, during the Vietnam War, the book—and in particular Lippmann’s idea of “the manufacture of consent”— drew renewed interest.

WA LT E r L I P P M A N N

Public opinion has been the third force that really changed American policy on the Vietnam war. How did that come about? Well, the war was very distant, nobody was interested in it, and the Johnson method of handling the war was to conceal it from the American people. In the first year of the fighting, this was the Johnson escalation, because before that it was not really a war in the sense that it is now. It was concealed by the fact that the Army which was sent to Vietnam to do the fighting was really a professional army. It was not a drafted army. What Johnson did was to cannibalize the American forces all over the world, and build up probably the best army the United States has had in the world. But that army could last only about a year, until its term expired. During the next year or two Johnson more and more couldn’t hide the fact that we were drafting men to fight that war. Now, drafting men to fight a war 10,000 miles away is something that no sensible great power has ever attempted. The British, in all their period of imperial rule in the nineteenth century, never conscripted Englishmen to fight in Asia. They always relied on volunteers, professional soldiers, and on mercenaries. They hired the Indians, the Gurkhas; regiments of Iranians and other people from the Middle East, and so on; but there were no Englishmen conscripted to fight around the world. Johnson, who knows no history, didn’t realize what a thing he was doing when he began to conscript an army to fight a war that nobody believed in particularly anyway—nobody had ever had it explained to them, nobody could explain the reason for it—10,000 miles away. It was that that began to arouse the American people to realize what this was. And Johnson kept getting one general after another to come forward and say we were winning it when we were not winning it. Finally the Tet Offensive came, and he tried to get generals to say we would only take 35,000 men. But finally it was leaked out from Washington that Westmoreland wanted 206,000 men. And that figure broke Johnson’s back. That was when public opinion revolted. That’s why Johnson had to retire. One of the reasons for all the turmoil in the country the last few years has been the feeling of a lot of young people that our governmental institutions are not responsive to

WITNESS TO HISTOrY

the needs and feelings of the people. But apparently you do believe that at least in an informal way our government is responsive to public opinion? Well, it’s responsive to the kind of thing that I was talking about, which is being for the war or against it. The fact that the country came to be against the war is very important. Whether you can get a public opinion sharpened and attuned and made accurate to more specific reforms, I’m not sure. And I think that one of the difficulties—the difficulty with television, the difficulty with this turmoil—is that you cannot refine public opinion and educate it to very detailed and complicated things. I don’t expect that any large audience, for instance, could ever really understand the problem of decentralizing the schools in New York City. I think it’s just too complicated and difficult. It just won’t catch in the net. So I don’t want to sound too optimistic about public opinion. How many problems do you think this country can digest at one time without breaking at the seams? We have Vietnam, the cities, the race problem. Are these likely to create a permanent cleavage? Well, that’s a problem I’ve been worried about all my life, but I have begun to realize, since I wrote Public Opinion and also while I was writing it, that the capacity of the general public—on which we’re dependent for votes—to take on many problems is very limited. I wrote a book called The Phantom Public [1925], arguing that really what public opinion in the end could do was to say yes or no. It couldn’t do anything very much more complicated than that. It couldn’t say threequarters or five-sixths but not two-sevenths— it isn’t able to do that. That’s what a scientist has to do. That’s what an administrator has to do, what a public servant has to do. But public opinion as a mass can’t do that. And it’s one of the great unsolved problems of democracy: how are you going to make popular government—because it’s always going to be popular, in the sense of involving a great many people—how are you going to make that work in the face of the problems which have become infinitely complicated even in the last twenty years? In that regard, how do you see the role of the mass media, if in fact public opinion is not responsive to very sophisticated and

WA LT E r L I P P M A N N

“Broadcast journalism has not only a terribly simplifying effect, but a distorting effect.”

very subtle problems? Is the role of the media to oversimplify them in the hopes of mobilizing some force? Well, undoubtedly the mass media oversimplify. The American people are very simplistic, they want to be told that things are absolute, that they’re black or white. They don’t want to be bothered very long. So what should the mass media do? That is the question, I admit, but first of all, I don’t know enough about the mass media. I know something about journalism, but I know very little about broadcasting. I listen to broadcast journalism, but for the news at night; I don’t get the news from it. I feel utterly dissatisfied almost always. Of course, I’m very interested to see a picture of something happening. That’s very interesting—a splashdown, that’s wonderful. But as for the problems which are very difficult, urban problems and all, you can’t find out about them. You can get a smell of them. You know a little bit about what they’re like, and then you can read about them, or somebody can lecture to you about them. But broadcast journalism has not only a terribly simplifying effect, but

a distorting effect, I think, because it makes everything more dramatic than it should be, more interesting, more amusing. And the world of life isn’t that. It’s prosaic. The current controversy over advertising of cigarettes seems to raise a central question about the relationship between public opinion and social policy. If the scientists and doctors who have no economic involvement in the industry are correct, and they seem to be, then there should be some public outcry about this; it’s not just a problem of public opinion’s not getting to the legislators. But there’s a good deal of feeling. You see, this pressure has worked. Public opinion doesn’t always work through big mass meetings or demonstrations. How much do you think public opinion has become synonymous with public relations? Well, these professionals at public relations are too much for me. There is an awful manipulation of public opinion going on all the time, no doubt about it. It’s not the whole thing,

though. Public relations was unable to do anything about the Vietnam war. They tried to. Johnson tried all the techniques he could to hide that war, and then to make it acceptable. And it didn’t work. How is public opinion best measured? Is the Gallup Poll, for instance, an effective measure of public opinion? The Gallup Poll is pretty good, if it’s very broadly taken. But 96.3 percent, that’s foolishness. The taxicab poll that most people take when they ride in a taxi and find out what the driver thinks—that has some validity. My wife comes home and tells me about the hairdressers and what they think. Very reactionary, I assure you. They’re afraid to go out at night. If you’re a public man—say, a President or a candidate or a good journalist—you suddenly know what the public feeling is. Why did Johnson retire, do you think? He knew that he was beaten. And where did he get that? He got it from polls, a little bit, but mostly he just knew, as a public man very well trained in public affairs—he assumed it. I don’t think you can measure everything. Public opinion isn’t instantaneous. You can’t take flashlights of public opinion and get it right every time. But a man like Johnson, who is made to hear an awful lot, and the representatives in Congress who are representative in the sense that they’re like the others—you talk to them and you know what people in his district are thinking or feeling, and what they’re prejudiced against or for. You once wrote that the hardest thing to report is chaos, even evolving chaos. That was in 1922. Now, 1968 was a very chaotic year; how do you think journalism performed then? Well, if I remember what I said in 1922, the world actually—and I think I used the phrase of William James—is a “blooming, buzzing confusion,” and the mind’s eye has to form a picture out of really a very chaotic thing. And that’s done by the creation of stereotypes, which are ways of looking at things; and then after a while when you have these, that’s all you see—what the stereotype says to you. That’s all that comes through. Now, I think that today the good reporters, both electronic and newspaper, are much more sophisticated and educated men than reporters were in 1922 when I was writing. They’re much more aware of the dangers of superficiality and so on. And they strike me as extremely intelligent. I think on the whole 1968 left us rather confused. Everybody was confused, including the newspapermen, because they were dealing with a situation for which they had no preparation. Does it seem to you that political writers of the country are swinging to the right? If so, how far to the right do you think they will go? Well, there’s no doubt that—whether that’s age or personal ambition or what—men do that. It’s a rule any journalist would know: it’s always safer to be conservative than not. You’re much less on the defensive. You have much less to explain yourself for. The Left has recently done some very vicious things, I think. But on the whole, in the lifetime of most men who are now fifty or more, the Right is the one that’s done the vicious things. Fascism was very vicious. I don’t think anybody can predict how far it will go, because it’s action and reaction, how the Left acts and how the Right acts.

WITNESS TO HISTOrY

How would you compare the social rebelliousness of the generation coming of age now with the social rebelliousness of the one that came of age immediately after World War I? And why, in the seven decades we have had in the century, have these two produced the greatest generation gaps, when they seem to be such dissimilar decades? First, of course, there was rebellion and disillusion at the end of the First World War, and that produced the Twenties, in which a lot of the people who now are extremely Left just expatriated themselves. A whole colony formed in Paris of people who just couldn’t stand this country. It was too awful for them. Hemingway belonged to that generation, Archibald MacLeish belonged to it. But what is new that I never knew then is the violence and disruption. They were rebellious, they made speeches, they wrote books, but they didn’t come into the classroom and say, “By God, you’re not teaching what we like, you’re not going to teach.” That didn’t exist. This man Herbert Marcuse has written a book, as you know, about the limits of toleration, and he doesn’t want to tolerate people who don’t agree with him. He says you mustn’t tolerate people who are wrong. Those are the people he doesn’t agree with. You mustn’t tolerate the Right or the middle, you must only tolerate the Left, and the Left must decide whom to tolerate. Now, that philosophy, that is new. That is a revival of a thing that started quite differently about the middle of the nineteenth century and became anarchism, with people like Bakunin, who was the great antagonist of Marx. Bakunin was a Russian nobleman who had a romantic view of the Russian serf, and if only he were in charge of things all evil would disappear from the world. But it was an amiable and decent thing. It was impracticable, of course, and it disappeared, and now it has revived, and that is the significant and dangerous thing about the recent times. We saw it abroad. We saw it in Berkeley. We see it all around: this feeling that you must stop things from happening that you don’t agree with, and that liberalism is the great enemy. But the power of the economic system is so vast, and yet so destructive and unaware of its destructiveness, that the people who

WA LT E r L I P P M A N N

see that power and that destructiveness are frustrated, and feel they can’t work within traditional lines to counter the power, and so the question really is: is the society capable of change? It is changing all the time. It is changing much more rapidly than we know how to understand it. But can it be remade to your heart’s desire? I would say no, it cannot. And that isn’t because the Right is in control, it is because this is the way of life in which we are embedded. Just as primitive man was embedded in his system of tribes and so on, we’re embedded in this, and we can’t get out of it. It’s like jumping out of your skin. It is possible that the rebellion of the young may be a product of technology’s getting out of our hands, so that we really have produced a generation that is more different from their parent generation than ever has been the case before. Could you point to a time in history, perhaps, when you believe the same thing happened? I think you’re absolutely right, and I think it’s fundamental. The technological gap and the generation gap are the same thing. And the young people today are coming into a world for which there was no preparation in custom. There never was a world like this. Not that any revolutionist made it. It was created by technology and science. They don’t know what to do about it, and the older people don’t know what to do about it, either. They don’t understand it themselves. That is absolutely the core of our problems. How will we be able to create a capacity to govern this enormously new and enormously complicated and very rapidly changing social environment? That is the problem. And there’s no answer. We may not solve it in a generation. That’s the problem today. The revolutionary—all that business—is of no importance except as a byproduct of that. Of course, one of the most revolutionary technological inventions of our time—much more revolutionary I think than people realize generally—is contraception: The Pill. It absolutely knocked the family to pieces. The old reasons for creating and holding families together have been knocked out by this technological interference in the relationship between procreation and sexual life. And that is felt everywhere. There’s no family, there’s no neighborhood, there are no clans.

But how do you get around the problem of being ruled by a generation brought up in a time of slower change? Really, the problem seems to be re-educating Congressmen and Senators and the like, and this is the media’s responsibility. But how do you get at them? Well, this is an autobiography for me. I have lived through this. I feel it. I have felt it for years. And I have lived right in the midst of this change, never really understanding it very well and knowing I didn’t understand it very well, not knowing what to do about it. I don’t feel able to say what I’m going to tell a Congressman to do. I myself don’t know what to do. We might as well be honest about it with ourselves: we are not in a position yet to re-educate the masses because we don’t know what to teach them. And that is one of the critical conditions of our time. Is it more important for us to educate the Congressmen or to educate the Middlewestern farmer? First of all, it’s most important to educate ourselves. And that is really absolutely fundamental. We know what to do about a particular thing, but about the general situation we don’t know. And the fact that we don’t know is perhaps the beginning of wisdom. We’re going to have to create the general knowledge that we don’t know. cjr

WA LTEr LIPPM AN N, the founding editor of The New republic, was the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes. He is considered a father of modern American journalism; his 1922 book Public Opinion was formative to the field of media studies. Lippmann died in 1974. FrED FrIENDLY, a former president of CBS News, was a longtime professor at the Columbia Journalism School, where he helped establish the broadcast program. With Edward R. Murrow, he created See It Now, a show credited with changing the tide of public opinion on Senator Joseph McCarthy, leading to his fall from power. Friendly died in 1998.

WITNESS TO HISTORY

An excerpt from Whiteside’s convention dispatch

corridor of Mirrors BY THOMAS WH IT ESI DE

WINTER 19 68/1969 The Democratic National Convention of 1968, held in Chicago, was surrounded by protesters and bloodied by police violence. Whiteside, on the scene following along with CBS News, observed the coverage—and the extent to which television could capture reality.

s the convention got under way, I found the CBS people in Chicago expressing increasing dismay over what they felt was a deliberate policy on the part of the Richard Daley administration to hamper television coverage of any civil disorders, of any demonstrations taking place within the city against the Lyndon Johnson administration and American involvement in Viet Nam, of the discussions taking place at delegation headquarters in the downtown hotels, and of the convention itself. The Chicago police were reported to be taking a tough and uncooperative attitude toward television crews working outside the convention hall. The Department of Streets and Sanitation refused to give permits for the networks to park their mobile units on the streets outside the major hotels; when the CBS people attempted to rent space for their mobile units in parking lots adjacent to the hotels, they encountered an extraordinary reluctance on the part of the lot operators

to let them have space, even at fees amounting to several hundred dollars a day. Alvin Thaler, the producer in charge of the mobile unit, reported that parking in some places, such as service stations along a projected line of march of a demonstration scheduled for August 28, in several cases could not be obtained at any price mentioned, although usually the owners are delighted to cooperate with television networks and to turn an easy dollar. At the Amphitheatre, the CBS people were informed that “for security reasons” they would not be allowed to put cameras in the windows at the front of the building to photograph any action going on outside; and even at the Conrad Hilton, where on the fifth floor CBS had set up a newsroom to cover the candidates’ and delegations’ headquarters, the head of the newsroom operation, Ed Fouhy, was warned by security people that the network would not be allowed to use the windows of its suite to photograph events

THOMAS WHITESIDE

outside—even to train its cameras on Grant Park opposite, where Yippies were expected to gather. At the convention itself, neither CBS nor any other network could obtain any assurance from the Democratic National Committee until the night before the convention as to how many cameras would be allowed on the floor during the proceedings. (In Miami Beach, the Republicans had let the networks know as far back as the beginning of June just how many floor passes they would be allotted.) When at the last moment the decision on floor coverage was made in Chicago, CBS, like the other networks, was allowed passes for only two television correspondents and one miniature portable television camera; the network had been asking for passes for four correspondents and two cameras. (In Miami Beach, CBS had been allowed passes for four correspondents and two miniature cameras.) Eventually, and after many protests, accommodations were made with the authorities over some of these difficulties—for example, parking and the number of floor correspondents, which was increased to four, with the other correspondents getting on to the convention floor with messenger passes. But the CBS people, who in Miami Beach had had the run of the place and had enjoyed quite full cooperation from the Republican National Committee, the city administration, and the police, and had even had a minimum of difficulty with local unions, continued to feel, in Chicago, a sense of official reluctance and resentment. As for the convention itself, the atmosphere was an almost palpably oppressive one, with barbed wire entanglements, masses of helmeted police around the Amphitheatre, the Potemkin-village quality of the approaches through the stockyard slum areas—along which, on block after block, the Daley administration had erected redwood screens that concealed rubble-strewn lots and dingy entrances—the countless security checkpoints, the magnetically coded passes, and the swarms of unrelentingly suspicious plainclothesmen with hips and armpits bulging with weapons. With all this around them, the CBS people, who at the Republican convention had mounted a most elaborate live communications system between Republican headquarters, the delegation hotels, and Convention Hall, were now reduced to keeping in touch with their newsroom downtown by having secretaries continuously dialing the switchboard at the Conrad Hilton Hotel in the hope of getting a line that wasn’t busy, so that they could then be connected with the newsroom. On Tuesday, during the cBS Evening News, I had seen on the screen pictures relayed by satellite from three different continents, showing in turn scenes of the Russian occupation of Prague, the visit of Pope Paul to Colombia, and the results of Viet Cong rocket attacks on Saigon. From Chicago that same day, a satellite was relaying to Europe with equal efficiency television coverage of the Democratic convention. The big communication problem seemed to be making a telephone call from the Amphitheatre to a downtown hotel. All these frustrations had to be coped with by people who had been working for eighteen or twenty hours a day, seven days a week, during the frantic preparatory period at the Amphitheatre. (Casey Davidson remarked to me that the people in his Remote Control unit had “volunteered for service in Czechoslovakia to a man.”) But the CBS men had their first really ominous signs of deteriorating relations between the Daley administration and the news media when, on the first night of the convention, at Lincoln Park, Chicago police

began beating Yippies and also began to pay physical attention to television cameramen, still photographers, and reporters. One of the cameramen was Delos Hall, of CBS, who had been filming a crowd of young people who were being dispersed on Division Street near Wells by three policemen. “As far as I knew, three policemen were doing a fine job of dispersing the crowd,” he later reported. “Then, apparently, a larger group [of police] arrived, running from behind me toward the marchers. Then, without warning, one of the first officers to pass me swung at me and hit me on the forehead with his nightstick, knocking me to the ground. When I got up I continued filming and was pushed and shoved from policeman to policeman, especially when they saw me filming them clubbing or arresting marchers.” The clubbing of Hall was witnessed by Charles Boyer, a cameraman for WBBM, the CBS-owned television station in Chicago, who himself had just been beaten by police, and who, at about the same time as he saw Hall being assaulted, saw police attack a third television cameraman, James Strickland of NBC, who is a Negro. Strickland, he said, kept telling two officers who grabbed him that he was from NBC, “but they kept telling him, ‘You black mother------, we’ll kill you before the night is over.’ He got rapped in the mouth a couple of times and I understand he had a tooth busted off.” Besides the scores of young demonstrators and onlookers attacked, about twentyfive newsmen were beaten, maced, or otherwise severely harassed by the police in or around Lincoln Park that night. Thaler strongly believes, he told me, that “whenever we put our lights on, we reduced the amount of violence in front of us. You have to realize that cops are far less eager to break heads right out there in front of the TV cameras than they might be somewhere back there in the dark.” cjr

THOMAS WHITESIDE was a staff writer at The New Yorker focused on the subject of mass communications. Shortly after this piece was published, he began to investigate Agent Orange, which the US military was deploying in Vietnam; his reporting led to Senate hearings and a ban on its use domestically and in the Vietnam War. In 1986, Whiteside was named a MacArthur Fellow. He died in 1997.

WITNESS TO HISTORY

On The Washington Post’s Katharine Graham

The Making of a Publisher BY G LORI A COOPER

MAY/JUNE 1997 In 1997, Katharine Graham, having recently completed an extraordinary tenure as publisher of the Washington Post, wrote a memoir called Personal History; the following year, the book won a Pulitzer Prize.

n the interest of full disclosure, it must be noted at the outset that in the course of her number-one best-selling memoir Katharine Graham makes a passing reference to “the fucking columbia journalism review.” The inspiration for that sentiment, expressed by the great lady publisher of The Washington Post in her annual letter to executive editor Ben Bradlee at the end of the momentous year of 1974, is not entirely clear, but it seems to have had something to do with a vague anticipation of unwelcome articles in the aftermath of the stunning climax to the paper’s coverage of the Watergate affair. Other publications, in particular The New republic and The Washington Monthly, get slammed more specifically for their “demonstrably wrong” and “outrageous” pieces on her handling of the long and painful pressmen’s strike in the mid-1970s. A similar fate befalls the renowned Ben Bagdikian, a national editor for the Post who, since leaving the paper, Graham explains to her readers, has “made a cottage industry of criticizing us.” Never mind that Bagdikian had been a prime mover in helping the paper catch up to The New York Times on the Pentagon Papers story—an achievement that finally managed, as Graham quotes Bradlee as saying elsewhere in the book, “to get the world to refer to the Post and The New York Times in the same breath.” Having had the bad judgment to write the offending Washington Monthly piece, Bagdikian, KG observes in a memo to BB, is now an “ignorant biased fool.”

TK crEDIT

GLOrIA cOOPEr

Clearly, Graham, who turns eighty in June, does not suffer critics gladly. And fortunately— at least as far as her book is concerned—she doesn’t have to. The reviews have been universally favorable, the book-tour profiles flattering, the talk-show interviews fawning. No wonder. Everyone’s a sucker for transformation stories, and the makeover of an insecure, dowdy, poor little rich girl into The Most Powerful Woman in America, framed within the parallel tale of how a puny third-rate daily changed into a fearsome giant, is not to be resisted—certainly not by news junkies like you and me. What becomes this legend most—and what appeals most to reviewers—is Graham’s confession of inadequacy, the deeply rooted belief that she could not quite measure up, planted by Agnes Meyer, her egocentric, harddrinking, depressive, demoralizing mother, and cultivated by Philip Graham, her egocentric, hard-drinking, depressive, demoralizing husband, to whom Katharine’s father, the fabulously successful entrepreneur Eugene Meyer, handed the paper on a silver platter a few years after their marriage. True, the family portraits were by Steichen and the birthday music was by Serkin and the childhood camping trips were accompanied by seventeen pack horses and a staff of five. But there was also what she still remembers bitterly as the “first lavish compliment” her mother ever paid her, bestowed when the grown-up Katharine was planning a coming-out party for her own daughter Lally: “Darling, you are very good with lists.” And true, there were breakfasts with Felix Frankfurter and parties with the Alsops and Restons, trips to the ranch with Lady Bird and Lyndon and picnics with Jackie and Jack; there was even laughter and love between Kay and Phil—Phil, who “was the fizz in our lives.” But there were also his demeaning jokes at her expense, the conspiratorial put-downs by Agnes and Phil, his inhibiting stares when she ventured an opinion, and that cruelly amusing gift, the head of a pig, a sign from a French butcher-shop: his reminder to the mother of his four young children that she should watch her weight. Afraid of being boring, eager to please, Katharine soon became, by her own account, a “second-class citizen,” a “doormat wife,” “the drudge” who “liked to be dominated” by the “brilliant, charismatic, fascinating”

WITNESS TO HISTOrY

Phil—in short, the most unlikely person in the world to succeed him as publisher of the increasingly influential Washington Post. If low self-esteem combined with high achievement—a paradoxical condition not unheard of in the twentieth-century American female—is an accurate headline here, it is also misleadingly incomplete. Even before her husband’s suicide in 1963, Katharine had begun to show her stronger stuff. When he announced his intention to divorce her and marry an Australian Newsweek reporter (not the first of his affairs) and to buy out Katharine’s 49 percent of the company’s stock— the majority had been given by Eugene to his son-in-law because “no man should be in the position of working for his wife”—Katharine vowed to fight him for control. “I was not going to lose my husband and the paper,” she writes. “My intention to dig in was total.”

he contest was settled, of course, by Philip Graham’s death. Still, had he lived to fight for the paper they both cared about so much, the smart money would have been on Kay. That she moved in fast— instinctively rejecting advice that she assume the title of president but leave the role of chairman to someone else—was not really so astonishing. After all, she was the daughter not only of Agnes, but also of Eugene. From the moment of her inauspicious introduction to the paper in 1933—home for the summer from Madeira and puzzled by a chance remark, she was breezily told by her mother, “Oh darling, didn’t anyone tell you? Dad has bought the Post”—it was the centerpiece of her life. It became at once an intense and unwavering bond between father and daughter, the subject of what she describes as a “constant conversation over the years about newspapers in general and the Post in particular.” In one of their many cross-country correspondences, Eugene wrote to his young daughter, “You ought to be in on the job of putting it to the top.” Katharine wrestled with that possibility in a letter to her sister Bis: Putting aside an unanswerable question at this time, my ability to be a good reporter, which is a gift given by God to a very few, I mean GOOD reporter, the fact remains that what I am most interested in doing is labor reporting, possibly working up to political reporting later. As you can see,

GLOrIA cOOPEr

“I was not going to lose my husband and the paper. My intention to dig in was total.”

that is no help to Dad. He wants and needs someone who is willing to go through the whole mill, from reporting, to circulation management and problems, to editorial writing, and eventually to be his assistant. This presents the payoff in problems. . . . One, I detest beyond description advertising and circulation. Two, there is a question of point of view. . . . And three, I doubt my ability to carry a load like The Washington Post. . . . From Dad’s point of view, I think it would mean something, such as companionship, a living connection with the next generation, and the knowledge that all that he was slaving to build was not going to stop with him . . . It was 1937. She was all of twenty years old.

eanwhile, she was learning to be a journalist. At a summer job on the Mount Vernon Argus in suburban New York, she wrote a bylined story on women doctors (“Quite professional,” judged

Eugene). At Vassar, she worked on the Miscellany News; later, as a student at the University of Chicago, she helped a stringer for the Daily News cover a strike at Republic Steel. A fan of “Terry and the Pirates,” she proudly persuaded Eugene to pick it up for the Post. After college, there was a job at Scripps Howard’s San Francisco News, where her assignments included the Warehousemen’s Union (and where she got involved quite unprofessionally, she realizes now, with the union’s very attractive negotiator). In 1939, it was back to the Post, to write light editorials and handle letters to the editor. During the early days of her marriage, while Phil was in the army and planning a career in law, she kept her hand in, writing stories and helping Eugene with the off-the-record stag dinners that brought the paper’s editors and reporters together with administration bigwigs and visiting dignitaries. On a special assignment from her father, she compared a number of papers for ideas and newsplay, adding to his list on her own initiative PM and The New York Times. In 1947, shortly after Eugene appointed her husband publisher, she began an eight-year run as the writer of a weekly column on magazines. A stint in the paper’s circulation department taught her how to handle “enraged subscribers.” She was closely involved with developments on the business side. She accompanied her husband everywhere, and when the acquisitions were being made—the broadcast stations, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times–Washington Post News Service—she was in on them. Here is

WITNESS TO HISTOrY

her account of a “supreme moment in the history of The Washington Post Company”—the day in 1954 that the family achieved its longsought goal of acquiring the rival Washington Times-Herald from Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribune Company: We were in Phil’s office waiting for news. . . . We all took turns talking to keep the line occupied. At last the board approved the deal, the check was delivered, and Colonel McCormick signed the agreement of sale. . . . We were terribly moved, and excited beyond all imagining. We now had the morning field in Washington to ourselves. . . . Daily circulation jumped immediately. That afternoon and evening, however, before we hit the streets with our combined papers, were a real challenge. We were running a more-thandouble press run of a larger paper. Combining news and editorial was difficult, since we had two very opposite cultures to meld. We started that night by running two equal sized names on the masthead. The perception Phil and I shared was right. . . . This was the best short route to the future. At last we could believe that the Post was here to stay.

n truth, Katharine Graham knew more about running the paper—both sides of the paper—than Eugene and Phil put together when they first took the job. And, all the “quaking in my boots” notwithstanding, when crucial decisions needed to be made— to hire or to fire, to buy or to sell, to publish or not—she made them. Whether Phil would have decided those critical matters in quite the same way, whether journalism and politics would have come to intersect at quite the same place and time, are obviously unanswerable questions, though the record suggests that the answer is no. Politically, Katharine and Phil had already diverged in 1952, when Phil, with his usual unbridled passion, threw the entire weight of the paper behind Eisenhower, while Katharine was “swept away with excitement by Stevenson.” Professionally, they played by different rules. Time and again, in recounting Phil’s actions as publisher—working feverishly to persuade Kennedy to pick Johnson as his running mate; convening a private meeting at which Phil and Supreme Court

Justice Frankfurter managed to persuade civil-rights activist Joe Rauh to postpone the drive for school desegregation in favor of the more immediately attainable goal of voting rights; arranging a dinner for Senator John F. Kennedy to “sell himself ” to New York Times publisher Orville Dryfoos and Washington bureau chief Scotty Reston; recommending presidential appointments to JFK; burying a story about a summer riot in Washington in exchange for a private promise of integrated community swimming pools from Truman’s top advisers—Katharine feels obliged to point out that while such close relationships between newspapers and government were usual, even common, in those days, they are unquestionably out of bounds now.

hilosophically, Phil viewed the paper as a means to a political end; Katharine was guided by Eugene’s conviction that “the American people could be relied upon to do the right thing when they know the facts.” They differed, too, in basic loyalties. Alone in their room after a latenight drinking session with Johnson, during which the senator from Texas had expressed in no uncertain terms his contempt for journalists—“You can buy any one of them with a bottle of whiskey,” the future president had said—Katharine rebuked her husband for letting him get away with it. Indeed, when all is said and done— after the talks with Adlai and the walks with McNamara and the dances at Truman Capote’s grand masked ball; after the tragedy and comedy, the gossip and glamour, the humiliations and heroics—what lingers longest is the echo of that straight appraisal of herself half a century ago: “I wanted to be a journalist and my father had a newspaper.” One closes the book marveling anew at the forces that shape our history, and that made this woman one of them. cjr

GLOrIA cOOPEr was CJR’s deputy executive editor. For three decades, she wrote the magazine’s “Darts & Laurels” column.

POrTFOLIO

cHUrcH AND STATE

A fundamentalist pastor praying for Roy Moore, chief justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama, in Montgomery, November 12, 2003. (Photo by Abbas/Magnum)

What a student reporter saw on 9/11

Witness BY NIcHOL AS SPAN GL Er

WITNESS TO HISTOrY

N I C H O L AS S PA N G L E R

NOVEMBER /DECE MB ER 2001 Spangler, a student at Columbia Journalism School, described his experience reporting in Lower Manhattan on September 11, when the World Trade Center was attacked.

was outside P.S. 89 tailing a city council candidate on election day when I heard the plane. It made a heavy rasping sound. That was at 8:46 a.m. I watched it fly above my head and into the north side of WTC 1. I could see only smoke and a hole. I started running toward it. It took me perhaps two minutes to get to the great square off Church Street that was then still bounded by those two massive towers. Millions of documents floated in the sky. I got under a ledge and ran out as far as I could. Fist-sized chunks of concrete and long strips of steel and tiny pieces of glass were hitting the ground beyond the ledge. Three building maintenance men and a cop came out. We told each other what we had just seen and when we saw the bodies falling we were rendered inarticulate. Jesus Christ oh Jesus Christ, someone said. At a distance falling debris can be mistaken for falling bodies but I can say this with certainty: I saw two bodies fall and I saw four lying on the ground. One fell on the opposite edge of the square, arms out and legs straight. I heard it tear through the roof of a bandstand and I heard it hit the ground. Closer to me another woman struck the ground. Both times I heard a sound that, had I not seen the impact, I would have taken for an explosion. I knew the body in front of me was a woman because she was wearing a skirt (sea-green) and I could see her legs. She had blond hair but I could not see her face. I would not say that I wanted to see it but I thought it was important. I thought if I could edge around the corner I could get closer to her and still be protected by the ledge, but when I made the turn I became terrified and backed up. At 9 a.m. the other plane crashed into WTC 2. When the glass fell, I pressed myself against the wall and covered my face with my left arm. I heard the glass tinkling around me and soothing music coming from speakers embedded in the ledge above me. I went back to the street and around the corner to get into the complex from the south side. I ran through the deserted farmer’s market and got under the ledge on Liberty Street. Debris was still falling. Something bounced off a stoplight. It was getting hard to breathe. A policeman across the street started yelling at me. At 9:25, I saw fifteen to twentyfive firemen cross the Liberty Street walkway to WTC 2. Two policemen came to get me. We all walked back east, then they went inside WTC 2 and told me to leave. I showed them my press pass. They told me to leave again. I waded through ash, rubble, and paper to the east side of Church, to what looked like a medical staging area. I ducked under the tape and was accosted immediately. I showed the pass. This time it worked.

WITNESS TO HISTOrY

It looked too perfect, an artist’s project, life-size in papier-mâché.

I spoke with a man named Reyher Kelly who had been on the seventy-eighth floor, the sky lobby of WTC 2, when the plane hit. “We saw people fall out. I was getting into the elevator when it hit us,” he said. “The explosion just knocked us down.” Bill Hay was in WTC 1 on the fifty-fifth floor giving a lecture at the World Trade Institute when the first plane hit. “The building started to rock,” he said. “I looked out the window, saw all the debris falling and just left my laptop, my billfold, passport, plane tickets. They’re all gone.” Allan Mean was in the WTC 2 elevator at impact. The elevator dropped. “My leg is tingling,” he told an EMT. Then I ran into the same policeman who’d been yelling at me before, and I was escorted out. The area was flooded with police trying to funnel all the civilians uptown. I figured I’d turn onto Vesey and go a few blocks east before heading downtown and then doubling back. I didn’t make it very far. There was a roar that sounded like being next to a jet engine, which I first took for another crashing plane. I was wrong: WTC 2 was collapsing, around 10 a.m. People started to stampede. I joined

them. The cloud rolled out toward us; we were actually racing it up Park Row, heavy, suffocating dust, grains of something hard. It caught me finally. I tried to hold my breath and find a doorway while I could still see. Somebody opened the door to a Starbucks. About twenty people were inside. The manager told us all to drink water and handed out bottles, telling us to take juice instead if we wanted it. The windows turned opaque and we heard things bouncing off the glass. The manager told us all to get into the basement. “Does anybody need anything? Is everybody all right here?” he asked. We crowded into the basement. A woman in a Starbucks apron was sobbing uncontrollably; someone she knew named Aaron worked at the towers. The phone rang. The manager answered. “Hello, Starbucks Coffee.” I walked back down Park Row. I was talking to a policeman at the Broadway intersection at 10:27 when WTC 1 came down. I heard the roar and saw the cloud swell out again. This one carried more debris. We watched it get dark again, then sprinted back to Starbucks. The front window shattered and the

N I c H O L AS S PA N G L E r

store filled with dust. We retreated to an upstairs bathroom and washed out our eyes and nostrils. Half an hour later the sun was still barely visible. People were moving in twos and threes toward the river; we were shadows, soundless. I passed bubbling fountains, phones dangling on their cords. A man in a bandanna and sunglasses was photographing an abandoned stand of dusty bananas and plums and nectarines.

hat is chaos? WTC 2 blown to bits, ripped apart. An eggshell-thin frame above a mass of rubble covering most of a city block. Steel girders three feet thick obscenely contorted. FDNY, NYPD, ATF, Customs, Secret Service, EMTs, Parks Department, men in camouflage, canine units. Smashed and upended trucks, engines, ambulances, police cruisers. Sirens, more machinery. A crushed Mercedes-Benz convertible in flames. Reams of documents layered evenly over everything. I took a photograph for four men who wanted WTC 2 as a backdrop. Everybody was doing it. Kodak disposables were popular. I saw a piece of somebody’s leg get wrapped in burlap and left beneath a defoliated tree. This had been the staging area for the first response team. It was annihilated when WTC 2 collapsed. Many of the men who had arrived within minutes of the first explosion were missing, buried sixty feet down. Rescue 1 and 2 were gone. Nobody could find the EMTs who had been first on the scene. The 279 Company truck was relatively intact but 279 Company was missing. When a team formed to clear one of the adjacent World Financial Center buildings, I followed. The massive dome of the foyer was intact; the marble floor was slick under the ash. The windows on the west were blackened; those on the east were blown out. I explored the second floor. Reception: phones off the hook, milkshake on desk, computer monitor on floor. Vase of flowers upright and intact. Gym: rows of treadmills and StairMasters, heavy bag, dumbbells, all uniformly beige with dust. It looked too perfect, an artist’s project, life-size in papier-mâché. I caught up with the firemen on the fourth floor. They split up, working in pairs, keeping in constant voice contact. In fifteen minutes,

those ten men checked every single room, closet, and cubicle. They finished by four. For the next three hours I watched the work outside. WTC 7 collapsed around 5:25. I tried to call my editor on a payphone and watched a man next to me hang up and start crying. I got my eyes flushed out twice. I talked to a man from Ladder Company 134 in Queens. He had begun his day getting his son dressed and packed for his first day of pre-kindergarten. “You know what?” he said. “Fuck this. Just fuck this.”

carried home with me three things that I’d snatched at random from the site: a memo from Matthew to Jeff about Karen’s secretary, the front page of a report on Telecom Strategies for the New Decade, a photograph of a mustachioed man in a tuxedo at a podium. They stink of burnt rubber and there’s still enough dust on them to make my skin itch if I handle them. I carry some other things as well. There is the psychologist who believes that if I am not in shock I must be in denial, after seeing so many people die. There is the girl who called me a vulture. Vultures profit from disaster. When I ran to, and not from, the square, was I not on my way to exploiting this holocaust? Did I sense that the magnitude of the event could be made to magnify me? I cannot altogether refute this charge. But something larger propelled me. I felt an intense passion in those hours, an exaltation. I felt alone at the center of the world. All details became iconic and crucial. I tried to record everything. I believe that our present way of life ended in those hours. That is the dressed-up, smoothed-over analogue of seeing planes vanish into buildings and people coming down from the sky. I think it is proper and honest to say I wanted to experience that for myself and communicate it with as many others as I could. I have no ambivalence about that. cjr

NIcHOL AS SPANGLEr has been a staff writer at Newsday since 2010. Prior to that, he was a reporter for the Miami Herald. On September 11, 2001, he was a student at the Columbia Journalism School, reporting in Lower Manhattan.

IDENTITY

Iden TK crEDIT

AUTHOr TK

TK crEDIT

ntity

HE rE AN D N OW

Whose View june cross on the pitfalls of balance, fairness, and objectivity

N 1972, DOrOTHY GILLIAM, a trailblazing Black reporter at the Washington Post, wrote a piece for the columbia journalism review asking: “What Do Black Journalists Want?” It was a few years after the Kerner Commission had released its landmark 1968 report—which, among other things, identified the failure of white-run outlets to cover race in America and called on newsrooms to diversify. Reporters recruited from the Black press to the mainstream suddenly found ourselves in unfriendly situations; our work was often second-guessed by a white editor, as Gilliam writes, and read by a white man at the copy desk. The experience was similar to that later described by Paul McLeary in his CJR piece on Iraqi stringers— accused of being spies by our own people, then asked to think “like an American guy” when pitching stories. We were strangers in our own land. Many of us had gotten into the journalism business because, like Ida B. Wells, the antilynching crusader, we wanted to make the world a better place. When we arrived at major newsrooms, though, we were told that doing our job right meant upholding a standard of “objectivity,” an ideal that emerged in the

1920s. Gaye Tuchman, a sociologist and the author of Making News: A Study in the construction of reality, has defined objectivity as a system of verification, of presenting conflicting possibilities, supporting evidence, and quotes, offered in a certain sequence. Writing in the seventies, Tuchman called objectivity a “strategic ritual” designed to shield newspapermen from libel lawsuits and editors’ criticisms. In 1986, Thomas Nagel, the American philosopher, identified the objective perspective as “the view from nowhere,” and Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, later applied that phrase to the press. But who decides what the public views, which facts need to be verified and which should be accepted? Who chooses the voices that will be quoted? Working for PBS NewsHour in the early eighties, I remember walking into an editor’s office one day to complain about the dearth of Black and Latino guests on our program. He fixed his gaze on me and explained that the NewsHour’s job was to enlighten the public about policy conversations that took place behind closed doors, where important decisions were made. Since minorities weren’t in those rooms, I recall him saying, they couldn’t appear on our air.

I argued that there were other important conversations going on outside Washington, DC. But I did not persuade him. A few years later, I left the NewsHour for a young upstart magazine show at CBS, West 57th. Out of about a dozen segment producers, two of us were African-American, as were two associate producers; all were women. After hours, we would huddle in one office or another. At the time, the days of the Black Power revolution had passed, and then, as now, skin color formed an invisible barrier between us and our white sisters on staff. Still, we could see the problems Terri Laxton Brooks writes about in her CJR piece on equal rights for women in the newsroom. I remember my rage at discovering that one of my male colleagues, someone with less than half my experience, made a salary 60 percent more than mine. When I complained, I was told that I had to wait until my next contract negotiation. I was at CBS when the Central Park Five case broke. New York’s newsrooms, led by the Post and the Daily News—and abetted by a fullpage ad taken out by Donald Trump—promoted the idea that five teenage boys, deemed a “wolf pack,” had been “wilding” and chosen as their “prey” a Wall Street banker, who had been beaten and raped. These boys were convicted in the press long before the case was heard in a court of law. At one point, I walked into my executive producer’s office and asked what had happened to the idea of innocent until proven guilty. “Shouldn’t we at least raise the question in our reporting?” I wanted to know. The producer suggested that I go out and prove them innocent. None of the evidence that eventually became public was available then; the actual rapist was years away from coming forward. Still, I have always blamed myself for not trying harder to report against that tide, knowing full well that police could sway facts to make an innocent person appear guilty. AfricanAmericans have always understood this problem—and the tendency of the mainstream press to accept false narratives disseminated by police. There is not, as Nagel suggests, “a view from nowhere”; Alexandria Neason writes, in her profile of Lewis Raven Wallace, who started a thought-provoking podcast called The View from Somewhere: “For reporters from underrepresented communities—reporters of color, queer and transgender reporters, disabled reporters, poor reporters—taking a

IDENTITY

neutral stance on their own humanity isn’t an option.” When Wesley Lowery appeared on Wallace’s podcast, speaking about the shooting of Michael Brown, he said: “As someone who has been pulled over only because I am Black before, I can entertain and envision a world in which perhaps this was racial profiling. If you’re someone who has never in your life ever had to think about it before, what is your framing and your perspective?” By the early nineties, I went back to PBS to work for Frontline. I was the sole Black producer on the staff, and one of two women in an editorial position. I felt relief, however, upon hearing the executive editor say that objectivity was an impossible standard. Everyone had a point of view, the editor told us, and the best we could do was maintain balance over time. Still, as Victor Navasky’s CJR essay on coverage of the New York Senate race between Al D’Amato and Robert Abrams makes clear, even the idea of balance can distort reality. Which gets to the dilemma now facing journalism: reality has become a debatable proposition. The methodological foundation underpinning our industry’s concepts of “balance,” “fairness,” and “objectivity” have, over the years, shown their cracks. We have nonstop news cycles that defy efforts at verification; a collapsing news business model; and an online ecosystem that has, along with a democratization of information, brought a form of anarchy that threatens American democracy. We now have Black men running major dailies and Black women running network news divisions; a Black man, Lester Holt, holds the anchor seat at the NBc Nightly News, one of the country’s most-watched nightly news programs. And yet, despite these symbols, minority-controlled media remains the most vital source of information for nonwhite communities. The conclusions of the Kerner Commission remain relevant today. How will the United States live up to its ideals, and what role will we, as journalists, play? cjr

jUNE crOSS, the director of the documentary program at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, has spent her career highlighting stories of the dispossessed and the intersection of race, politics, and public health. Previously, she was a television producer for PBS’s Frontline and the cBS Evening News. She has twice won the Alfred I. duPont– Columbia Journalism Award and a national Emmy; she is also a recipient of the 2020 Peabody Award.

jUNE crOSS

TK crEDIT

There is not, as Thomas Nagel writes, a “view from nowhere.”

IDENTITY

On the sluggish employment and slow promotion of nonwhite media workers

What Do Black journalists Want? BY D OROTH Y G ILLI AM

MAY/JUNE 1972 In 1968, the Kerner Commission report highlighted failings of the American media in covering the fight for racial equity. Gilliam, one of two Black graduates in the Columbia Journalism School class of 1961, reported for CJR on the struggle to address racism in newsrooms.

hey sat shoulder to shoulder in the crowded Congressional Black Caucus hearings, those black reporters, nodding affirmatively if the brother who was speaking was voicing their belief. They shifted restlessly if the witness bogged down in rhetoric. For their standards are high, these black men and women in the white media, and they have a high degree of frustration. At the March 6-7 session the reporters heard Rep. William Clay (D-Mo.), chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus’ hearings on the mass media, saying the media were “acting to perpetuate institutionalized racism.” No one knows more than these reporters that what they say or do not say in the media has ramifications for black people far beyond the utterances of blacks in some other white institution. For the media help determine the self image of blacks—and how does a bright, sensitive person reconcile getting his bread from the same source that keeps its foot on his brother’s neck? Like the black community, the black journalist is excluded, mishandled, and exploited by the media. Of course, it rarely comes down as blatantly as that. Few outand-out bigoted media managers exist, but as Warren E. Howard, an international vice president of the Newspaper Guild and the first black to serve on the Guild’s International Executive Board in the union’s thirty-eight-year history, testified:

DOrOTHY GILLIAM

We most often face publishers tied to a system which they cannot or will not recognize as racist in its employment practices and procedures. It is the system that says, “who me? I don’t discriminate. I hire without regard to race, sex, creed, color, etc. In fact, I’ll hire the first graduate of a properly accredited journalism school who walks in the front door the next time there’s an opening and asks for a job. And I’ll do it without regard to race, sex, etc.” In fact, from some publishers that . . . would come out, “I’ll hire the next person with a master’s degree and one semester toward his doctorate that walks in the door and convinces me that he or she is qualified to be the next chairman of the board, without regard to . . . ” The fact is that for editors and publishers, the bloom is off when it comes to hiring and promoting nonwhite reporters. For some, it never was otherwise. The history of the

media up to the black rebellions of the midSixties indicates where most publishers stood on the issue. Before 1954, there was near-total neglect of the black community—as well as black journalists—unless the story dramatized some sensational aspect, by and large crime. After the 1954 Supreme Court decision, when the struggle for civil rights equality escalated, the white media helped to make known the wrongs, although they often misinterpreted what they heard and misrepresented what they saw. Then came the riots, and rebelling blacks—fired with the pentup injustices of long years—roamed their neighborhoods, burning largely the whiteand black-owned businesses that had bled them economically. Here was a new phenomenon: white reporters were chased away when they showed up. Obviously newspapers had to have some black faces. Black copyboys and messengers, even, became instant reporters during that period. And

IDENTITY

most metropolitan newspapers, wire services, and TV stations started taking the hiring of black professionals seriously—more or less. In the wake of those rebellions, in 1968 the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Kerner Commission) reported that its “major concern with the news media is not in riot reporting as such, but in the failure to report adequately on race relations and ghetto problems and to bring more Negroes into journalism.” It added: In defining, explaining, and reporting this broader, more complex, and ultimately far more fundamental subject, the communications media, ironically, have failed to communicate. They have not communicated to the majority of their audience, which is white, a sense of the degradation, misery and hopelessness of living in the ghetto. They have not communicated to whites a feeling for the difficulties and frustrations of being a Negro in the United States. . . . If the media are to comprehend and then to project the Negro community, they must have the help of Negroes. In the intervening years, white illiberalism has grown, the civil rights movement has died, and large segments of the population are in a touchy mood. And newspapers—reflecting this conservatism as well as the economic recession—have lost their enthusiasm for hiring blacks. Some have delayed fulfilling promises to upgrade blacks already on their staffs. And the press has continued to concentrate primarily on conflicts at a time when black power and unity have become black-community themes, and antibusing and Law and Order, whites’ themes. Caught in the dilemma is the black professional in the general media. However you view it, he has problems. He is penned into a situation where whites, refusing to see that they have as great a stake as he in racial harmony in the U.S., push all “racial” stories upon him, all the while doubting his “objectivity.” Or, on the other hand, he shies away from these stories altogether and festers quietly, seeing himself—literally—misrepresented. Further, the black community, which has been burned so often that it is crusty,

often doesn’t trust him. Nor does it grasp the hierarchical gamut the black reporter must run to get news about the black community into print. I can identify readily with the dilemma, although my own case spanned only part of that developing period of the black journalist on the white newspapers. I came along before the urban insurrections but the handwriting was already on the wall. When I graduated cum laude from Lincoln University at Jefferson City, Mo., in 1957, I applied at my hometown daily, the Louisville Times. I was told no vacancies existed or were anticipated, and I was not encouraged to apply for future reference. So I went to work for the black press until I could get “white” credentials: a degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. I was one of two black people in the School’s Class of 1961. Within a month, after a trip to Africa, I had two offers from major papers, one of them the Louisville Times. I chose the Washington Post, which then had a couple of other black reporters on the city staff. Before long, two of us were stacked up behind a lone white reporter writing about welfare and poverty. The senior black reporter on the staff endured being passed over for the Planning beat five times, then left. Today, eleven years later, the number of black reporters at the Post has risen to thirteen—highest of any U.S. daily—yet frustrations have not subsided. In March, in fact, seven black members of the Post’s metropolitan reporting staff filed suit with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, charging the paper with racial discrimination. Before the seven did so, nearly all the newspaper’s black staff members signed a letter to the newspaper’s management, saying in part: Nine members of the editorial staff . . . wrote you with a list of twenty questions concerning the qualitative and quantitative contribution that black people are being allowed to make in the newsroom and on the pages of the Washington Post. They asked why . . . so few black journalists have been given the opportunity to advance to some of those positions from which key decisions are made regarding the day-to-day handling of the news. We write now because we wish to make certain the heart of the

DOrOTHY GILLIAM

issue is not obscured by a debate around the narrower question of precisely what that numerical participation ought to be. . . . . . . black Americans are painfully aware of the lack of participation in the writing of the story of America in a time of change. We could not insist that all matters relative to blacks be written and reported by blacks, anymore than we could countenance the writing of all stories about women by women, all Catholics by Catholics, or all whites by whites. But the lack of black participation in the shaping of the news about the society in which they play so vital a role has led to unfortunate distortions of the basic posture of the community on such vital questions as crime in the streets and the busing of schoolchildren. The complexity of those issues has been masterfully distorted by politicians for political ends in ways that reflect almost nothing of the stake of the black community in those vital questions. What they might have added—or spelled out more clearly—is that they are, in effect, party to the media’s distortion. “They use you, man!” one top black reporter remarked in an outburst before a group of black journalism students recently, “and when you get out there—way out there—they often don’t back you up.” These were some of the intensifying aggravations which—combined with the idealistic conviction of some that blacks must be black and unified first and communicators second— prompted a group of Howard University students to organize a National Black Communications Conference in March. So it was with some disgruntlement that they heard Muhammad Speaks editor Joseph Woodford caution them not to naïvely think that communicators create revolutions. Throughout the Howard conference, March 3-4, the question whether one could work in the “white” media and at the same time contribute to black progress was a major concern. But at Black Caucus hearings, working professionals engaged much harder issues. Nearly all echoed the line taken by Chairman Clay that “the black media worker and the black movement are grossly excluded, distorted, mishandled, and exploited by the white-controlled news media.”

FA LL 1968

journalism and the Kerner report

As part of a special section responding to the Kerner report, Woody Klein produced a portrait of American news media and race relations. Upon the release of the Kerner Report, the columbia journalism review, in partnership with the Anti-Defamation League, conducted a survey on racism in the American press. The questions included: “What do you think is wrong with the news media’s coverage of Negro life in America, including civil rights, race relations and Negro social life?,” “What role do you think the news media should play, if any, to alleviate racial tensions?,” and “What is the total number of Negroes on your staff?” Replies were received from 388 outlets (43.6 percent of those polled). The responses varied widely. Some were strongly critical, as in the case of Bob Ulrich, of KNTV, in San Jose: “We have acted as press agents for the racists.” Others attempted explanations: “There is still a void in covering ‘Negro life’ because it is largely segregated,” Charles A. Sprague, of the Oregon Statesman (Salem), said. “Our need is for continuing contact with the black community, not contact only at the time of explosion.” (Sprague reported no Black people on a staff of thirty-two.) A number of respondents were defensive, such as John E. Kreuger, of WTMJ, in Milwaukee: “Nothing is wrong with the broadcast news media’s coverage of civil rights and race relations.” The Associated Press replied that it did “not care to participate.” “The survey has shown that the media have become aware of shortcomings after decades of neglect,” Woody Klein wrote, summarizing the results. “There are definite signs of progress. But only when coverage of Negroes in the United States, as well as stories about the relationship between blacks and whites, becomes an every-day phenomenon and not just a ‘special’—only then will this country have arrived at a point where prejudice will no longer exist in the mass media.” —The Editors

Tony Brown, dean of Howard University’s School of Communications and executive producer of Black journal, charged that “the traditional use of mass communications in this country has been for the purpose of oppressing nonwhites and entertaining whites.” The result, he said, was the perpetuation of present racial attitudes. “Racism in television has grave ramifications in psychological terms,” he added, and he cited statistics that more than 95 percent of 60 million U.S. homes have TV sets, 55 percent of 200 million Americans depend on TV for their news, blacks watch 33 percent more TV than whites, and more than 40 percent of black children believe what they see on TV. “These statistics merely point out the rapid rate of self-hatred rained upon blacks by television,” Brown said. Ethel Payne, Washington correspondent for the Sengstacke Publications, criticized the “inaccessibility” of the President to black reporters, charging that President Nixon has “favorites” among the Hill regulars who are given exclusive interviews and that “no such privilege has ever been given a black or minority reporter; nor has the opportunity to question him during a formal press conference arisen.” Rep. Shirley Chisholm (D-N.Y.) strongly criticized the Federal Communications Commission for its apparent lack of concern over the hiring policies in the broadcast industry. She cited Equal Employment Opportunity Commission figures that in the newspaper industry, only 4.2 percent of employees are black. In the professional class—the reporters—only 1.5 percent are black. The FCC still has not compiled the reports submitted last May on racial and sexual composition of work forces in radio-TV. William Wright, national coordinator of Black Efforts for Soul in Television (BEST), called upon the Black Caucus to support legislation that would both decentralize media ownership and abet ownership by groups broadly representative of the communities in which they would operate. He noted that blacks currently own none of the 906 TV stations, and only 2 percent of the 7,000 radio stations in America. Wright also noted that there now are thirteen bills in the House of Representatives that would make it virtually impossible for blacks

IDENTITY

or community-oriented groups to challenge stations seeking license renewals. Ironically, the FCC, which is responsible for overseeing the broadcast industry, also favors such legislation. He charged that the FCC’s “proposed rules would have the effect of racially restricting the media,” and concluded that blacks must move now toward cable TV in order to express their views and culture. Ernest Dunbar, writer and former senior editor of Look, detailed the case of Earl Caldwell, the black New York Times reporter who is currently fighting a subpoena obtained by a California federal grand jury that was to investigate the Black Panther Party. “Since it was obvious to black newsmen,” said Dunbar, “that Mr. Mitchell, Mr. Kleindienst, and other Nixon aides seemed to feel that the Constitution was but a frail impediment to implementing what the Administration was ‘hustling’ as Law and Order, and since so-called media radicals were clearly a Nixon target, we expected that black reporters would soon be feeling the heat.” But it was the continuing stereotyped sensation-negative-criminal image that upset L.F. Palmer Jr., Chicago Daily News columnist and commentator. “It’s easier to get a piece in on the Panthers or a street gang than on a block club or community news,” he said, adding that there was little opportunity for black reporters to deal in depth and detail with basic issues which affect black people. “There’s no commitment to put the black man in honest perspective.” By the time a story runs the gamut of white editors, he said, often it is “laundered if not eliminated.” The Caucus was told of more than one top reporter who, refusing to be “laundered,” was eliminated. Take the case of Samuel F. Yette. Yette was hired on Jan. 1, 1968, by Newsweek as a Washington correspondent. He had already worked on four newspapers and two magazines. Yette had appeared on Meet the Press several times while on Newsweek. Last Christmas Eve he was fired, six months after publication of his book, The choice: The Issue of Black Survival in America. In it he documents how and why he feels the Government has, in the Seventies, acquired the psychic capability for mass black repression—even genocide. Yette has filed racial discrimination suits against the magazine with both the District of Columbia Human Relations Commission and the U.S. Equal

DOrOTHY GILLIAM

Employment Opportunity Commission. The case is now pending. Cases like Yette’s often grow out of accumulated small aggravations—and they are what finally send many black reporters packing. One example is the taping that Don Alexander wanted to do. Alexander was an award-winning reporter for WTTG-TV, the Metromedia station in Washington. He coanchored the weekend news and helped to conceive and concurrently co-anchor Black News, a shoestring operation for which, as one staff member said, “We can’t get camera crews to cover things we feel are relevant to the black community.” An incident during the same week Yette was fired was the proverbial straw. Alexander had reserved a time to taperecord an interview with Yette and Tony Brown of Howard University. Less than three hours before the men were due at the studio, however, a news executive told Alexander that the taping time he had reserved had been preempted. The news executive also asserted that the blacks-and-media story had been overdone on Black News. Alexander said it was either the taping or him. Management refused to yield. Alexander is now with WCBS in New York. Ironically, these long-simmering frustrations are surfacing at a time when increasing numbers of young blacks are being trained in journalism. Howard University’s School of Communications alone plans to graduate 200 each year by 1976. What is to be their future, given today’s discontent? Obviously, severe discontent with the news media is not limited to blacks. Many white reporters, editors, and publishers share it. But several elements make the position of black journalists especially perilous—and this is at the heart of the rash of suits and openly voiced frustrations. It seems intolerable that still, in 1972, blacks are so grossly underrepresented numerically in American news media and coverage of the black community is so sketchy and negative; that white editors apply standards to news of blacks that they do not apply to whites; that the story is assigned by a white assignment man, judged by a white editor, and read by a white copy desk and news editor. If it is “hot,” it goes to the managing editor; if “red hot,” it goes even higher. All these decisions are made almost totally by whites.

FA LL 2018

Missing the Story

In a special issue on race and racism fifty years after the Kerner commission called on the American press to diversify, jelani cobb described a weak progress report. Conversations around diversity in media have tended to focus on cozy niceties. “Diversity” is often partnered with the word “inclusion” in our racial vocabulary. Since the conflicts of the 1960s, it has been increasingly apparent that our political, educational, and media institutions should not appear to be monochromatically white. But appearance is not the real problem. A democratic media is. A half-century ago, members of the Kerner Commission—an advisory board formed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in response to a series of race riots—spelled out the role of a mostly white media in failing to cover the cause of unrest. It called on news outlets across the country to diversify. In the decades since, including “diverse” perspectives in media and elsewhere has become broadly acceptable—eight out of 10 Americans view ethnic diversity as “at least somewhat important” in the workplace. Yet 50 years after Kerner, we still see chronic underrepresentation of racial and ethnic minorities in print and broadcast media. In 2017, only 16.6 percent of journalists at daily newspapers were people of color; in the US population, more than 37 percent of people are nonwhite. According to a 2015 poll, more than three-quarters of the guests on Sunday morning shows were white. There is currently only one person of color, CNN’s Don Lemon, hosting a weeknight primetime show on the three biggest cable news networks. This underrepresentation of minorities is a more polite way of saying that there is an overrepresentation of white people in media—79 percent of people working in the publishing industry are white. —jelani cobb

IDENTITY

Whites have a stake in perpetuating the racial status quo and usually have just as intense a commitment to their perspective as Black people do.

It is true that a black newsman sometimes must assume the added burden of weighing the loyalty of the black cause against his professional commitment. Yet if there were more black reporters reflecting not only the broad spectrum of views in the black community, but also “conveying the truest picture” of what transpires, such tragic stances as those described in a recent Wall Street Journal article would not prevail. In an essay entitled THE BLACK REPORTERS’ DILEMMA [March 23], WSJ correspondent Jonathan R. Laing lamented that many black reporters feel inhibited from “telling it like it is” about black leaders. That certainly is true of some of them. But Laing is from Chicago and should know that one problem is that last year there were only sixteen black editorial employees among 487 in Chicago, so the spotlight is glaringly on them. If the percentage of black reporters and editors more nearly matched the percentage of the nonwhite Chicago population, such a situation would be less likely.

Let me emphasize, however, that I do not think black reporters should cover only “black” stories; white reporters should be sent into black neighborhoods, too. When publishers discuss not hiring or assigning black reporters and editors because of their “intense commitment to the black movement,” they overlook the fact that whites, just as much as blacks, are involved in the racial struggle. They are the other, necessary, part of the equation. Whites have a stake in perpetuating the racial status quo and usually have just as intense a commitment to their perspective as do blacks. As Lu Palmer told the Howard student conference, two things must happen to black reporters on white media. First, they must move through the media as advocates for black people. “We must find a way to advocate for blacks as whites have and continue to advocate for whites in the press,” he said. Second, activist black reporters and black congressmen must establish a formal liaison to

DOrOTHY GILLIAM

“hammer out together methods by which we turn white-controlled media into instruments for the advocacy of human rights for all people.” Above all, as Earl Caldwell reminded a group of black students at Columbia, despite the psychic costs of working on the white media, blacks should remember one thing: “It’s important that you be there . . . that is where the power is.” Caldwell and Palmer are correct; black journalists must continue to fight daily the battles and frustrations built into their jobs. This means sensitizing editors to elevate blacks into positions at every notch of the hierarchy, and pushing to change the behavior and attitudes of their colleagues and the quality of their product. Yet realistically, there is a point beyond which the white-owned media will not venture. And for those black reporters whose ideology won’t permit them to work for the general press, there must be a role in the black press. By and large, the black press also leaves many blacks disenchanted. As Ernest Dunbar told me, “Black newspapers are subject to the same economic pressures from advertisers as are whites, and they can’t pay reporters.” Then there are the traditionally conservative publishers who, while sensing the need for change, have not found the tools to become more relevant. Now, however, advertising is opening up and a few top-quality magazines have shown that the $30 million Black Market can be tapped. This offers an unprecedented opportunity to remodel and renew the black press. I would like to see a group of bright, young black journalists acquire a fading black newspaper anywhere and dedicate it to tough, interpretative, in-depth reporting. If blessed with sophisticated techniques, it would be read. But the line need not be drawn at newspapers. Public TV also offers an opportunity for trained men and women to develop a top station and use it as a powerful instrument. Ben H. Bagdikian, writing recently in the Washington Post about the black reporters who are now suing that newspaper, emphasized that remedying the disproportionately small share of blacks in institutional and social decisionmaking in American society will require an acceleration of hiring, promoting, and on-the-job training—not a new concept. He added:

And there is no question that to this degree it diminishes the chances for the black’s white counterpart. It is, in a sense, unfair to this generation of whites, the same kind of unfairness that was visited on young blacks for ten generations. But sooner or later someone is going to have to pay the moral dues of 300 years of a racial caste system that is destructive of the heart of this society. This is the generation that has been chosen to pay those dues. But let no one think that it is only whites who pay; the young blacks engaged in the struggle pay emotional costs that destroy some of them. He is right. But one wonders how long white reporters of our generation or any other would stand idly by while blacks are given what has been narrowly construed as preferential treatment. Some black journalists like Yette who feel that the very survival of blacks is threatened in this technological age have given up on the white-owned press and feel the only hope is the black press. If he and the other top black journalists who concur are correct, then the Kerner Commission’s forecast of a break between the two societies will become reality. Now more than ever, it is imperative that publishers look hard at this problem in the broader light of social justice, and make hiring and promoting of blacks a top-priority objective. Only in this way can their perspective on writing the story of America in a crucial time of change be duly recorded, and, more important, their influence be more widely felt. cjr

DOrOTHY GILLIAM was the first African-American female reporter, columnist, and editor at the Washington Post. She began her career as a reporter for the Memphis Tri-State Defender, a Black weekly, where she covered the integration of Little Rock Central High. A former president of the National Association of Black Journalists, she was inducted into the Society of Professional Journalists’ Hall of Fame in 2002.

IDENTITY

TK crEDIT

V I C T O R N AVA S K Y

The problematic presumptions of “narrative neutrality”

Degrees of Sleaze BY VICTOR NAVASKY

n the aftermath of New York Senator Al D’Amato’s 51-49% victory over Attorney General robert Abrams, who started with a 15-20% lead in the polls in a state where Democrats outnumber republicans three to two and most voters agree with Abrams on his two key issues—health care and choice—the punditocracy weighed in: Abrams lost because he ran the all-time abysmal campaign (he did); because an embittered Geraldine Ferraro, angry at Abrams’s primary attacks on her alleged links to organized crime, waited until seconds before election day to endorse him (she did); because four out of ten jews defected from traditional Democratic ranks to support the ItalianAmerican senator who billed himself as Israel’s and the crown Heights Hasidim’s best friend (they did); because for better or worse many blacks were still upset with Abrams over his 1984 handling of black teenager Tawana Brawley’s charge that she had been raped (they were); because D’Amato’s television budget was $5 million richer than Abrams’s (it was); and because D’Amato managed to persuade a respectable number of Italian-Americans that an Abrams throw-away line about his being a fascist was in fact an anti-Italian slur—a feat semioticians if not campaign strategists and spinsters will be scrutinizing for years to come (or at least they should).

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1993 Following the reelection of Alfonse Marcello D’Amato— the last republican to represent New York in the US Senate, a politician known as Senator Sleaze—Navasky questioned the role that journalistic “objectivity” may have played in the success of D’Amato’s campaign.

Let us stipulate all of the above. But let us consider another factor—one frequently overlooked in campaign post mortems—the influence of journalism on the events journalists are supposed to be covering. I’m not talking about journalistic bias, but about its supposed antidote: the convention of traditional journalism (print and broadcast) that is supposed to insulate a reporter’s reports from any bias or prejudice he/she might harbor: narrative neutrality. According to this convention, editorializing is for editorialists, interpretations are for writers of essays labeled “News Analysis,” and opinions are for columnists or journals of opinion. Reporters are supposed to stick to reporting. But what if this universally accepted convention has a hidden impact? Suppose, for example, that in the New York senate race it accounted for a shift in, say, 1 percent of the vote (and I think it did), then we have an embarrassing situation. Mainstream journalists, who pride themselves on their noninvolvement and would be the first to declare their commitment to balance, fairness, and the ideal of objectivity, may have literally determined the outcome of the race they were reporting. What’s worse, by adhering to apparent narrative neutrality they may have unintentionally deprived their readers/viewers of critical data, and thereby helped elect the “wrong” man (wrong in the sense that, had the voters but known, many of them would have gone the other way). Let me explain. Going into the campaign, Senator D’Amato had one overriding vulnerability. It was generally believed that, while he might or might not be Senator Pothole (a champ at constituent services), he had earned the epithet Senator Sleaze. Journalists knew that while an investigation by the Senate Ethics Committee (itself a significant smoke signal) did not find him guilty of lawbreaking, his colleagues did conclude that he had conducted his office in an “improper and inappropriate manner.” They knew that he had testified as a character witness on behalf of one mobster and spoken with a U.S. attorney on behalf of another; that he had received illegal campaign contributions from the notorious Wedtech corporation, from another company whose payments to his brother Armand led to his brother’s indictment, and from a group of Puerto Rican HUD

IDENTITY

He-said, he-said coverage—day in, day out, in print, on radio and television—created and reinforced an image of moral equivalence.

developers, whose case went to court even as the campaign was commencing. In fact, they knew by campaign time that there were five investigations of the senator pending, two of them criminal. As The New York Times, which had endorsed D’Amato last time out, put it in its editorial endorsing his opponent, “By his moral indifference . . . he has forfeited his claim to a third term.” By contrast, Attorney General Abrams entered the race free of campaign finance scandal. The so-called Feerick Commission had criticized Abrams—along with every other top state official, including the governor—for taking campaign contributions from parties with business pending before state offices, but the working press consensus on the attorney general, who voluntarily changed his practice after the report came out, was that, although Abrams might be wimpy, he was “squeaky clean.”

V I c T O r N AVA S K Y

The press well understood the moral, political, and factual difference between the granting of wholesale favors to shady and other characters in exchange for political contributions (the charge against D’Amato) and permitting the appearance of conflict of interest while granting no favors (the charge against Abrams). Nevertheless, by the time election day rolled around, voters who understood how the candidates differed on such matters as the death penalty, abortion, and government intervention in the economy, may be forgiven if they saw that, when it came to the issue of improper campaign funding, the candidates posed a Hobson’s choice. Since this issue was by common consent originally thought to be D’Amato’s Achilles’ heel, he deserves credit for neutralizing it through aggressive paid advertising and other campaign techniques. That he was able to get away with it, however, was at a minimum facilitated by the press convention of narrative neutrality. Newsday’s accurate report of a heated exchange between the candidates on the Don Imus radio show was representative: Both men have been hammering at each other’s character in negative ads and public statements throughout the campaign and the charged atmosphere continued yesterday as the two candidates refused to stop mudslinging unless the other did first. D’Amato slammed Abrams for taking money from real estate developers involved in co-op conversions which he regulates. Abrams slammed D’Amato for using his Senate office to help contributors get government largesse . . . Under the strictures of narrative neutrality it would have been unusual for either the Newsday reporter or Imus to pick and choose among competing allegations and try to set the reader/listener straight on who was lying about whom, not to mention more subtle matters of context, especially if it required the reporter/host to come down on behalf of one candidate or the other. The result of this hesaid, he-said coverage—day in, day out, in print, on radio and television—created and reinforced an image of moral equivalence between the two candidates on one of the few issues on which there was a clearcut moral (as distinguished from political) difference. Although there are no data on the matter, one suspects that this infelicitous impression was not overcome by the rare editorial or “news analysis” which undertook to evaluate the competing claims of the candidates on the matter. For example, a pretty fair New York Times analysis of the claims, facts, distortions, and goals of the candidates’ paid advertising appeared on the Sunday before the election and included a section called “Muddying the Waters: Fund-Raising and Personal Ethics,” which took D’Amato to task for implying that the Feerick Commission had singled out Abrams for criticism and even added that one of the commissions members had later said that “it would have criticized Mr. D’Amato most harshly of all, but did not have the authority to review the conduct of federal officials.” But such critiques, buried deep in the rare papers in which they appeared, couldn’t be expected to compete with the message-barrage contained in each day’s campaign coverage, perhaps best symbolized by WNBC-TV Gabe Pressman’s handling of the debate which closed the campaign on that same pre-election Sunday. “This will be a free-flowing debate,” Pressman announced. “I shall try to limit your

responses with a stopwatch when necessary. You’ll be given the opportunity to rebut your opponent’s statement.” Pressman played the umpire, the referee, the moderator. He raised the campaign finance issue, framing it in the best traditions of balanced, fair, neutral journalism: “Gentlemen, you have both been charged with taking money from people who do business before your agencies. . . . ” The candidates took it from there. Now, of course, it is always possible that a stronger candidate than Abrams would have hammered home the fact that D’Amato’s dubious fund-raising tactics bore little resemblance to his own—a fact that Pressman clearly understood (as his later interventions suggested) but couldn’t press without violating the ground rules of the occasion. And it is even possible that a Donahue format with an aggressive moderator could guarantee that the viewers would at least know what he knows. Maybe if D’Amato’s record had been highlighted a majority would have still voted for D’Amato because they didn’t care about the ethics of campaign funding, and preferred him on the other issues. Maybe not. But this much I know: in the New York senate campaign a critical difference between the candidates was blurred, not because the reporters fell down on the job, but because they did their job according to the rules of the game. Perhaps it’s time to have another look at the rules of the game. cjr

V I cTO r N AVAS K Y is publisher emeritus of The Nation and George T. Delacorte Professor Emeritus of Professional Practice in Magazine Journalism at Columbia University. He served as publisher and editorial director of The Nation; before that, he was the magazine’s editor. Previously, he was an editor at the New York Times magazine. His 1980 book Naming Names won a National Book Award for nonfiction. While on the Columbia Journalism School’s faculty, Navasky was a guiding force of the columbia journalism review.

IDENTITY

Local reporters covering the Iraq War for Western outlets

The Stringers BY PAUL MCLEARY

ust days before I met Salih in Iraq this past January, he became a wanted man. A stringer for The Washington Post in Tikrit, he had helped report a story that ran on January 13, fingering local Tikriti officials who the story said had looted a complex of palaces built by Saddam Hussein. The story, like so much else that has gone wrong in Iraq, has its roots in what was supposed to be a sign of progress. Last November, the American military in Tikrit made a big show of handing the palaces over to the Iraqis. Some time later, after hearing that the palaces had been looted, Salih was one of several Post stringers assigned to cover the story. After seeing the destruction firsthand he sent word back to the Post, which ran a piece that named local Iraqi forces and the head of the local security force, Jassam Jabara, as the culprits. Jabara, who had a history with Salih from an earlier story, was not pleased. As a result, according to Salih’s sources, Jabara placed a $50,000 bounty on his head. Salih fled Tikrit and has yet to return. Salih’s troubles, while extreme, are echoed in the lives of many Iraqi stringers working for Western news outlets across this unlucky country. As Iraq slips further into what seems an endless spasm of bloodletting, many Western reporters have been forced to hunker down, only leaving their guarded compounds for short periods and only then with a translator, a driver, and at least one bodyguard in tow. As a result, they have come to rely more and more on Iraqi stringers to

MA RC H/AP RIL 200 6 From the start of the Iraq War, in March 2003, to the time this article was published, more than twothirds of the journalists killed on the ground were native Iraqis.

PAU L M c L E A rY

“It’s dangerous to go out there and get the story.”

gather information. This isn’t to say Western reporters don’t get out—they do, as much as possible—but given the violent reality of Iraq, there are times where it’s just not feasible for them to travel. For the Iraqi stringers who risk their lives and often are forced to hide what they do from friends and family, typically without even the glory of a byline in return, the answer to the question of why they do it is complicated. In a country impoverished by decades of war, criminal dictatorship, and international sanctions, money was often the principal draw, at least initially. Drawn from the ranks of college-educated professionals— accountants, professors, doctors, computer experts—the stringers can sometimes more than double what the average Iraqi earns in postwar Iraq. But for many, after months, and now even years of working in their new profession, this blunt economic incentive seems to have given way to a deeper—even passionate—appreciation for journalism’s ability to tell important stories and, sometimes, make a difference. As Yousif, a twenty-four-year-old stringer who asked me not to include his last name or his employer, put it, “Americans have to know how the Iraqis are suffering. There are millions of stories out there, but the problem is the safety. It’s dangerous to go out there and get the story.” Yes, it is. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, of the sixty-one journalists killed in Iraq from the beginning of the war in March 2003 through February 2006, forty-two were native Iraqis. In addition, twenty-three media workers—drivers, translators, and so forth—have been killed in Iraq. One of the most recent casualties was Allan Enwiyah, who worked as a translator for Jill Carroll, the christian Science Monitor freelancer, and who was shot to death during her kidnapping on January 7. Yousif and Enwiyah were friends.

he Post’s Salih is the only Iraqi stringer I met who had worked as a reporter before the war. A thickset man of thirty, with a shaved head and large, expressive eyes, he came to the Post a little over a year ago. At the time he was working at one of the numerous papers that sprang up in the wake of the invasion, and heard the Post was looking for local help.

IDENTITY

Speaking through a translator in a fortified house with armed guards out front, he told the story of his ongoing struggle with Jassam Jabara. It started in August 2005, when Salih helped report a story about a man who died in custody, only five hours after being arrested by Jabara’s security forces. According to Salih, a day before the story ran, Jabara’s cousin visited him and urged him to pull it, suggesting that otherwise, “Jassam has the ability to make you disappear.” The story ran the next day, and Jabara complained to the governor of Tikrit, urging him to have Salih arrested. The governor refused. Three days later, Salih said, “a black BMW stopped in front of me and two men jumped out, one holding a pistol and one holding a metal bar, and tried to force me inside the car. I kept pushing back and they beat me with the gun and the metal bar.” He showed me thick scars behind his ear and on his back, which he said came from the beating. Luckily, some locals who knew him came to his aid, and the men fled. Just a few days later, he says, while he was walking near the governor’s office, a man jumped out of a car and opened fire on him with an automatic pistol. Salih ducked, and the shooter’s aim was high. Because of stories like this, the Iraqis who report for Western news outlets are forced to lead painful and dangerous double lives. One woman, whom I’ll call Salama, told me that although she has been working for American newspapers for over three years, her friends and neighbors don’t know about it. “My colleagues here don’t tell their neighbors they work for an American news agency either,” she said. As we sat in one of the hotel rooms that her news organization occupies in Baghdad—there are armed guards in the lobby and security in the room next door—she told me that she explains her long days at the office to neighbors and friends by telling them she works for a financial company with branches around the world, so she has to work late because of the time differences. The strain of this dual life has taken a toll on Salama and her family, and while she was rather soft-spoken and polite, her frustration was obvious. “To get a story you have to risk your life,” she said matter-of-factly. “Sometimes I wonder if the people in the U.S. really understand how much we go through in order to write the story.” To underscore that, she

PAU L M c L E A rY

told of being pushed from behind by an Iraqi man while covering a story with a Western reporter, of being caught in a firefight in Sadr City, Baghdad’s sprawling and violent slum, and of being threatened by a group of insurgents while out reporting. Yet in a country with few opportunities, journalism is a way to make a living, and to stay involved. “We never know when something could happen to us,” she said. “But then at the same time, I cannot stop living.” Like Salama, Yousif is discreet about his work. “Ninety-five percent of my friends— close friends—don’t know I work with journalists,” said Yousif, who is fluent in English and began working for his American employer as the bureau’s IT manager. “It’s very dangerous to tell people you’re doing this. I tell them I’m working for a computer company.” It’s widely accepted that the insurgents know the handful of hotels and compounds where many journalists stay, and Yousif said he takes precautions on the way to and from work. Typically, he walks a good distance from the compound before hailing a taxi, and when coming to work he asks to be dropped off in different places and then walks the final blocks to the compound. But he is always wary, and pays close attention to the drivers. Once, a taxi picked him up near the compound, he said, and the driver seemed very interested in the neighborhood and who was staying at nearby hotels. A few days later, the same taxi driver picked Yousif up near his home, far from the compound, and started asking the same questions, so Yousif told him to take him somewhere else entirely, and got a new taxi. Beyond matters of life and death, the Iraqi stringers face more mundane frustrations. Yousif, for instance, is hungry to do more writing, but says that “They’ve only mentioned my name in about five articles, because most of the journalists want to do their own stories.” Western journalists do give him plenty of advice, however, “about how to look at the stories from a different angle, what is important, and what the people outside Iraq are concerned about.” That last part is sometimes the hardest. One of the biggest challenges, Yousif said, has been “trying to think like an American guy, and think what Americans might be interested in.” Especially at first, he said, he would pitch stories to the reporters that he gleaned from conversations he overheard on

Joan Cooke, a metro reporter for the New York Times, in 1984

S PrING 1984

Getting There

After a series of discrimination suits, cjr surveyed the status of women in newsrooms. Thirty-six years ago, when Pauline Frederick was hired by ABC as the first woman network correspondent, she was assigned not only to interview the wives of presidential contenders at a national political convention, but also to apply their on-camera makeup. Today, on most large papers, 30 to 40 percent of the hard-news reporters are women. In television, 97 percent of all local newsrooms had, by 1982, at least one woman on their staffs, as compared to 57 percent in 1972. But serious barriers do remain. Top management jobs in large media corporations are nearly as closed to women now as they were twenty years ago. The situation at The Washington Post is fairly typical. The Post has beefed up the number of women on its news staff considerably since it reached an out-of-court settlement in 1980 with more than one hundred women there who had filed a complaint of sexual discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; it has even appointed a woman, Karen DeYoung, as editor of foreign news, and another, Margot Hornblower, as chief of its coveted New York bureau. “The number of qualified bright female candidates has never been higher,” says executive editor Benjamin C. Bradlee. But there are currently no women staff foreign correspondents, and “there aren’t many of us in power jobs,” says Claudia Levy, editor of the Post’s Maryland Weekly section and head of the women’s caucus that negotiated the settlement. While Bradlee says he “sure as hell” plans to move women into top editing jobs, they don’t include his. “I’ve seen ten thousand stories on my possible successor, and none has mentioned a woman,” he says. —Terri Laxton Brooks

He would pitch stories to American reporters, only to be told that his ideas were probably only interesting to Iraqis.

the street or things he read on insurgent Web sites, only to be told that his ideas were probably only interesting to Iraqis, and not necessarily to an American audience. Another common thread in my conversations with the stringers was the immense distrust, bred of fear, that Iraqis have for one another these days. One evening, while we sat in the living room of Yousif ’s employer’s guarded compound, he told of the time he bumped into a friend at Baghdad University while he was there with an American reporter. Since his friend thinks he works for a computer company, Yousif quickly made up a story about being there to broker a deal with the university to supply computers. “He didn’t buy it,” Yousif said with a laugh, “but he didn’t see the journalist, so I escaped.” The friend, he explained, thinks journalists are spies for the Americans. “Iraqis always think that there is a conspiracy against them.”

ritics of the press’s coverage of the war in Iraq often grumble that American journalists are obsessed with reporting “bad news,” while ignoring the “good.” To many of the Iraqis working for the U.S. media, this seems irrelevant, even absurd. Ahmed, an owlish thirty-one-year-old who taught poetry at a local university before the war and who now works for an American newspaper chain, shrugged and said, “It’s true that journalists here are mostly writing about the bad. But when you have a hotel being built in Najaf and a kidnapping of a female journalist in Baghdad, what are you going to do? The bad news eclipses the good news.” Assad, who works for an American magazine, has an even darker view. “There is no peace, there is no reconstruction, there is no rebuilding to write about,” he said, over lunch at his employer’s compound. “I have only seen the reconstruction of the Green Zone, and that is for the Americans.” An amiable matter-of-fact guy, Assad was an accountant and an English teacher before the war, and has worked for a handful of European and American publications, beginning with a Danish newspaper just before the war began. He said he would like to go back to being an accountant—preferably in the United States—but for the moment, his work as a journalist pays better.

IDENTITY

Of the Iraqi stringers I met, Assad might be the exception in that he doesn’t necessarily see his future in journalism. Despite the danger, the secrecy, the frustration at both the muddled U.S. occupation and the desire for more autonomy in their work, most of the stringers seemed intent on sticking with their new careers, even if that means leaving Iraq. Yousif and Ahmed both told me they had come to see journalism as the only way to properly tell the story of their country, and both are applying for journalism scholarships overseas. For now, neither would consider working for Iraqi publications, which they dismiss as little more than mouthpieces for specific political or religious groups. Yousif said he would like to start his own magazine in Iraq one day, using the tools he has learned from Western journalists, while Ahmed takes a more expansive view. “I think journalism that is independent and objective can promote democracy and can promote a solid political standing in Iraq,” he said. “If we can obtain these conditions, I would work for an Iraqi publication. That’s the main target for me, to work for such a place.” Even Salih, who goes to work every day knowing that people want to kill him, said journalism is the only way he can help the world understand what is happening to his country. But he is frustrated by the danger, and by what he says is the lack of interest on the part of American and Iraqi officials in investigating the crime and corruption that pervades so much of postwar Iraq. In a startling statement, he said that even under Saddam, if a journalist wrote something accusatory about a government official, the allegations would be investigated. “You used to be able to write about, say, smuggling, but now if you do, you may be killed,” he told me. “Is that the right way to tell the truth in this country? The American forces are supporting such people as Jassam Jabara, and when stories like mine run, they never investigate, and these guys are becoming worse—they’re becoming untouchables.” cjr

PAUL McLEArY, a former CJR staff writer, has since 2008 covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.

POrTFOLIO

cAPTIAL KINGS

Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who broke the Watergate story and wrote All the President’s Men, in Washington, DC, 1974. (Photo by Wayne Miller/ Magnum)

IDENTITY

A new journalism podcast looks to history to counter “objectivity”

Truth-Telling BY ALEXAN Dr IA NEASON

FEBrUArY 2019 In 2017, Lewis Raven Wallace, then a reporter at American Public Media’s Marketplace, wondered on his personal blog about being “objective” as a transgender journalist during the presidency of Donald Trump. Days later, Wallace was fired, supposedly for violating Marketplace’s ethics code.

he American journalism community fancies itself a completely neutral estate, the poster child for objectivity. But this conceit is, at best, ahistorical. Like all things, the modern press corps was born into an inequitable society, and its strictures show up in the industry everywhere from hiring practices to how certain communities are covered, if they get coverage at all. Whether complete objectivity is possible while reporting inspires heated debate. A new podcast, The View from Somewhere, aims to push this important ethical conversation again to the forefront, this time with a deep look into the archives. Hosted by reporter Lewis Raven Wallace, thirty-four, whose book of the same name is slated for release late this year, the podcast will dig into the history of objectivity in a journalistic context, featuring stories about reporters whose work has poked holes in the myth of its infallibility. “Part of [the goal of ] this book and this podcast is to tell a whole different story about what journalism has been and what it could be,” says Wallace. In early 2017, Wallace, then a reporter at American Public Media’s Marketplace, published a piece on his personal blog in which he considered the role of an “objective” press as the country transitioned into a new presidential administration, one that had brought with it transphobia, racism, and regular attacks on the press. “Some argue that if we abandon our stance of journalistic neutrality, we let the ‘post-fact’ camp win,” he wrote. “I argue that our minds—and our listeners’ and readers minds [sic]—are stronger than that, strong enough to hold that we can both come from a particular perspective, and still tell the truth.”

Wallace was fired when he refused to take down the post, and has spent the months since immersed in research about truth-telling journalists whose strength was their refusal to cling to supposed neutrality, the old defender of the status quo. “A lot of great journalism in the United States and all over the world has been journalism that stood for something,” says Wallace. “Standing up to power requires standing for something. Standing for nothing at all in the Jim Crow era is like, well, we accept segregation.” Wallace notes the long history of the Black press—coined “a fighting press” for its track record of pursuing stories that challenge white racism, reporting on issues and people who have been traditionally ignored by other news outlets, and of openly advocating for human and civil rights. Newspapers by and for other marginalized communities have done similar work. “You had LGBT papers doing the preeminent investigative coverage and human interest coverage of AIDS for years and years before mainstream papers covered it,” adds Wallace. “And those are papers that have

ALEXANDrIA NEASON

been written out of official journalistic history as niche, or as advocacy journalism.” The podcast, which will be produced by Ramona Martinez alongside Wallace, will feature a range of episodes about how seminal eras of American history, such as lynching and the spread of AIDS, were reported. It will also tackle contemporary issues, including the Black Lives Matter movement, coverage of transgender people, the #MeToo movement, and coverage of both overt and what Wallace calls “status quo” white supremacy. Growing distrust in journalistic institutions has led news organizations to take steps to reassert their worth. Outlets have tried everything from community town halls featuring reporters to $10 million Super Bowl ads. But this doubling down might reveal the industry’s blind spots. “I was really stricken while working in public media by the extent to which the conversation was about how to appear objective rather than about how to be as fair or as impartial as you could in your reporting,” says Wallace. “And those are obviously really different things, right? Appearing objective kind of inherently has to do with how people react to the story that you tell.” Wallace adds: “Some people might not see it as fair or objective if in the morning you said Trump lied and at noon you said Trump lied and at 6pm you reported again that Trump lied. But if Trump lied in the morning and at noon and at 6pm, and you were reporting the facts, then it doesn’t really matter if somebody perceives that as unobjective.” Wallace says it will cost about $40,000 to produce a single season of the podcast. As of Sunday evening, the pair had raised $9,864

from 237 supporters. As concerns about the media industry’s shameful, perpetual lack of diversity continue to percolate, it stands to help contextualize why, for reporters from underrepresented communities—reporters of color, queer and transgender reporters, disabled reporters, poor reporters—taking a neutral stance on their own humanity isn’t an option. “Undoing the myth of journalistic objectivity, that’s one goal,” says Wallace. “The other goal is helping to create a new canon of diverse journalists who did or are doing work that changed the world, and making space for those voices to be seen as a part of the story of journalism.” cjr

A L E X A N D r I A N E AS O N , previously CJR’s staff writer and Senior Delacorte Fellow, is now an editor and producer at WNYC’s Radiolab.

T EC H N O LO GY

TK crEDIT

Techn

AUTHOr TK

TK crEDIT

nology

HE rE AN D N OW

Speeding Ahead Nicholas Thompson on how technology transforms media

‘O

NE YEAr ON THE

Web is like seven years in any other medium,” a newsroom leader named Kevin P. McKenna told Laura Italiano in “Gimme That On-Line Religion,” her 1996 piece for the columbia journalism review about the pope’s journey into cyberspace. It’s a marvelous quote for many reasons, one of which is that McKenna’s job title at the time was “editorial director for the New York Times Electronic Media Company.” It wouldn’t take long for those last three words to become superfluous. More important, the quote conveys a key reality for the media business: Change never stops or slows down. One year is always seven years; time speeds on without a moment when transformation ends, the work is complete, and you can put your feet up. Consider how quaint McKenna’s comment feels now. Back then there was “the Web”; now we have Twitter, Facebook, Clubhouse, NFTs, and whatever form of information-sharing pops up next. And note that, when Italiano wrote her article, it was astonishing, as she reported, that 343 emails had been sent to a generic address

connected to the pope. Now we’re five years past the time a fake story about the pope endorsing Donald Trump registered nearly a million engagements on Facebook. As shown in this collection of pieces from the CJR archives, digital technology continuously shakes up media in at least three ways. First, there is the business of journalism. It’s hard not to feel a little wistful reading Edward R. Murrow’s entreaty from the 1950s: TV news, he argued, had become an “endless outpouring of tranquilizers” aimed at pleasing advertisers. He didn’t hope to “turn television into a 27-inch wailing wall where longhairs constantly moan about the state of our culture and our defense,” he continued. “But I would just like to see it reflect, occasionally, the hard, unyielding realities of the world.” Now the problem is the opposite. The vagaries of algorithms push the news business to become an infinite wailing wall, crowding out in a different way the reflection and sincerity that Murrow sought. Emily Bell, in 2016, described media companies as ships sailing along with, or against, the pernicious winds cast down by the gods of social networks. More recently, prestige journalism

outlets have shifted toward subscription models—which seemed, at first, to take us in the direction of quality and originality. (Why else would someone give you their money?) But as it’s turned out, there are still reasons to worry. Good information is becoming more expensive, while bad information will always be free. The second profound force is the mode of distribution. In 1958, Murrow had vastly greater influence than any journalist today; the media industry has since splintered. First came the rise of cable news. Then came the Web, which dramatically reduced startup costs for publishing. Social media followed, shifting power from newsrooms to individuals who could use Facebook and Twitter to build their own brands. And now we have newsletters, where people can turn those brands they built one tweet at a time into profitable fiefdoms. Alissa Quart’s essay is a keen look at that phenomenon. An expert used to be someone with a credential, she observed; now an expert is anyone who’s claimed the crown. The same could be said about journalists. You used to need a credential to call yourself a journalist, and you certainly needed one to make it your life’s work. Now you can just put the title in your Twitter bio. Which model is better? Quart was wise not to tip the scales. Things were a lot simpler and smoother when Murrow called his correspondents and colleagues to set the agenda of the cBS Evening News. They are a lot more complicated and interesting now that Norah O’Donnell, his distant successor, has to pore through hundreds of Substacks—any one of which might get more attention than she does on a given day. And third, there is the work itself. Every year, the skills required to be a successful journalist change. You have to competently report and write a draft, as has always been the case, but now you must also understand how to present your story on social media, optimize it for search, and perhaps transform it into a newsletter. Moreover, the act of reporting has evolved; journalists must navigate the vast, choppy ocean of information (and rumors and lies) that is the internet. Journalists have learned to sleuth the dark Web and find secrets buried in online data. They reverse-image-search to factcheck the origin of a photograph. They meet

T Ec H N O LO GY

sources not on park benches, but on Signal. When Margaret Sullivan interviewed Philip Meyer, the father of “precision journalism,” for CJR, in 2001, he argued that all journalists needed to get over their phobias of math and machines and learn how to use a computer. We’ve finally done that, at least. But if you want a journalism job in five years, it’ll sure help to understand artificial intelligence, too. It’s easy to read these pieces, particularly Murrow’s, and feel a certain defeatism. But that’s the wrong emotion for the moment. Better to feel excitement and curiosity about what’s to come for the media industry, and what has yet to be built. That journalism is a profession in constant reinvention is intimidating; it’s also what makes what we do beautiful. Bell wrote energetically about three new media entrants: BuzzFeed, Vox, and Fusion. At the time, they all seemed similar, and similarly promising. Two are now worth about a billion dollars, and one is totally gone. Media is a roller coaster: the downs make you queasy; the ups are thrilling; the ride is never boring. “I’m not doubled over by ‘this computer stuff ’ just yet,” Italiano concluded. But, she added, “I am smiling.” cjr

NIcHOLAS THOMPSON is the CEO of The Atlantic. Previously, he was the editor in chief of Wired, a contributor to CBS News, and the editor of The New Yorker’s website. Thompson cofounded The Atavist, a multimedia publishing company, and is the author of The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the cold War.

NIcHOLAS THOMPSON

Time speeds on without a moment when transformation ends, the work is complete, and you can put your feet up.

T Ec H N O LO GY

The end of the news as we know it

Facebook Is Eating the World BY EM ILY BELL

With the arrival of Facebook’s “like” button, in 2009, journalism’s digital advertising market collapsed and publishers entered a desperate race for clickbait. By 2015, when Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president, Facebook had some 1.5 billion users; that year, the company introduced Instant Articles, soon available to all publishers—making them more beholden to social media than ever.

TK crEDIT

MArcH 2016

TK crEDIT

E M I LY B E L L

omething really dramatic is happening to our media landscape, the public sphere, and our journalism industry, almost without us noticing and certainly without the level of public examination and debate it deserves. Our news ecosystem has changed more dramatically in the past five years than perhaps at any time in the past five hundred. We are seeing huge leaps in technical capability—virtual reality, live video, artificially intelligent news bots, instant messaging, and chat apps. We are seeing massive changes in control, and finance, putting the future of our publishing ecosystem into the hands of a few, who now control the destiny of many. Social media hasn’t just swallowed journalism, it has swallowed everything. It has swallowed political campaigns, banking systems, personal histories, the leisure industry, retail, even government and security. The phone in our pocket is our portal to the world. I think in many ways this heralds enormously exciting opportunities for education, information, and connection, but it brings with it a host of contingent existential risks. Journalism is a small subsidiary activity of the main business of social platforms, but one of central interest to citizens. The internet and the social Web enable journalists to do powerful work, while at the same time helping to make the business of publishing journalism an uneconomic venture. Two significant things have already happened that we have not paid enough attention to: First, news publishers have lost control over distribution. Social media and platform companies took over what publishers couldn’t have built even if they wanted to. Now the news is filtered through algorithms and platforms which are opaque and unpredictable. The news business is embracing this trend, and digital native entrants

T EC H N O LO GY

like BuzzFeed, Vox, and Fusion have built their presence on the premise that they are working within this system, not against it. Second, the inevitable outcome of this is the increase in power of social media companies. The largest of the platform and social media companies, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and even second order companies such as Twitter, Snapchat and emerging messaging app companies, have become extremely powerful in terms of controlling who publishes what to whom, and how that publication is monetized. There is a far greater concentration of power in this respect than there ever has been in the past. Networks favor economies of scale, so our careful curation of plurality in media markets such as the UK disappears at a stroke, and the market dynamics and anti-trust laws the Americans rely on to sort out such anomalies are failing. The mobile revolution is behind much of this. Because of the revolution in mobile, the amount of time we spend online, the number of things we do online, and the attention we spend on platforms has exploded. The design and capabilities of our phones (thank you, Apple) favor apps, which foster different behavior. Google did recent research

E M I LY B E L L

through its Android platform that showed, while we might have an average of 25 apps on our phones, we only use four or five of those apps every day, and of those apps we use every day, the most significant chunk of our time is spent on a social media app. And at the moment the reach of Facebook is far greater than any other social platform. The majority of American adults are Facebook users, and the majority of those users regularly get some kind of news from Facebook, which, according to Pew Research Center data, means that around 40 percent of US adults overall consider Facebook a source of news. So let’s recap: People are increasingly using their smartphones for everything. They do it mostly through apps, and in particular social and messaging apps, such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Twitter. The competition to become such an app is intense. Competitive advantage for platforms relies on being able to keep your users within an app. The more your users are within your app, the more you know about them, the more that information can then be used to sell advertising, the higher your revenues. The competition for attention is fierce. The “four horsemen of the apocalypse”— Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon (five if you add in Microsoft)—are engaged in a prolonged and torrid war over whose technologies, platforms, and even ideologies will win. In the last year, journalists and news publishers have therefore unexpectedly found themselves the beneficiaries of this conflict. In the past year, Snapchat launched its Discover App, giving channels to brands like Vice, BuzzFeed, the Wall Street Journal, Cosmo, and the Daily Mail. Facebook launched Instant Articles, which it recently announced will be opened up to all publishers in April. Apple and Google quickly followed suit, launching Apple News and Accelerated Mobile Pages, respectively. Not wanting to be left out, Twitter also launched its own Moments, an aggregation of trending material on the platform to tell complete stories about events. It is very good news that well-resourced platform companies are designing systems that distribute news. But as one door opens, another one is closing. At the same time that publishers are being enticed to publish directly into apps and new

systems, which will rapidly grow their mobile audiences, Apple announced it would allow ad-blocking software to be downloaded from its App store. In other words, if as a publisher your alternative to going onto a distributed platform is to make money through mobile advertising, anyone on an iPhone can now block all ads and their invidious tracking software. Articles that appear within platforms, such as Discover on Snapchat or Instant Articles on Facebook, are largely, though not totally, immune from blockers. Effectively, the already very small share of mobile digital advertising publishers might be getting independently from mobile is potentially cut out. Of course, one might add that publishers had it coming from weighing down their pages with intrusive ads nobody wanted in the first place. There are three alternatives for commercial publishers. One is to push even more of your journalism straight to an app like Facebook and its Instant Articles where ad blocking is not impossible but harder than at the browser level. As one publisher put it to me, “We look at the amount we might make from mobile and we suspect that even if we gave everything straight to Facebook, we would still be better off.” The risks, though, in being reliant on the revenue and traffic from one distributor, are very high. The second option is to build other businesses and revenues away from distributed platforms. Accept that seeking a vast audience through other platforms is not only not helping you but actively damaging your journalism, so move to a measurement of audience engagement rather than scale. Membership or subscription are most commonly considered in this context. Ironically, the prerequisites for this are having a strong brand identity that subscribers feel affinity towards. In a world where content is highly distributed, this is far harder to achieve than when it is tied to packaged physical products. Even in the handful of cases where subscription is working, it is often not making up the shortfall in advertising. The third is, of course, to make advertising that doesn’t look like advertising at all, so ad blockers can’t detect it. This used to be called “advertorial” or “sponsorship,” but now is known as “native advertising,” and it has grown to nearly a quarter of all digital display

FEBrUArY 20 07

Beware the Bloggers

By 2007—when the first iPhone shipped, ushering in a new level of obsessive online media consumption—the days of blogging were in full swing. It’s kind of disconcerting—or should be—to see Tony Snow, the president’s press secretary, sitting snuggly, legs crossed, hands daintily on his knees, next to one of the more prominent (and pugnacious) members of the Washington press corps, the preternaturally gray David Gregory (or “Stretch,” to the president). But as the saying goes, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. In this case the enemy seems such a great overpowering threat, rocking their world so hard, that Stretch and Tony the Tiger have teamed up. The enemy, you ask? Why, bloggers, of course. At an evening roundtable last week at the National Press Club, the press secretary and the journalist discussed the impact the Internet has had on the coverage of Washington. Gregory took the first stab: “It’s the Internet and the blogs that have really used this White House’s press conferences to somehow support positions out in America, political views. And they will clip and digitize portions of these briefings to fit into their particular argument.” Snow then ripped off his own piece of meat. “I’m glad you raised the blog issue,” he said, then looked around at the other panelists, all print journalists, and inquired, “Do any of you guys look at blogs much?” Well, it turns out Tony does. “You’ve got this wonderful, imaginative, hateful stuff that comes flying out.” What blogs bring is scrutiny. And this is what unites Gregory and Snow. They are being watched and picked apart by that many more millions of eyes. And this means journalists have to be more careful, choose their words more wisely, make their questions smarter and more aggressive. Press secretaries, for their part, have been forced to more quickly address criticism, answer questions more clearly than they have in the past, and be more accountable for flip-flops and lies. —Gal Beckerman

T Ec H N O LO GY

advertising in the US. In fact, digitally native companies like BuzzFeed and Vox, and hybrids like Vice, have disrupted the failing publishing model by essentially becoming advertising agencies—which are themselves in danger of failing. What I mean by this is that they deal directly with advertisers, they make the kind of viral video films and GIFs we see scattered all over our Facebook pages, and then they publish them to all those people who have previously “liked” or shared other material from that publisher. The logical answer reached by many publishers to much of this is to invest in their own destination apps. But as we have seen, even your own app has to be compliant with the distribution standards of others in order to work. And investing in maintaining your own presence comes at a time when advertising (particularly in print) is under pressure, and online advertising is not growing either. The critical balance between destination and distribution is probably the hardest investment decision traditional publishers have to make right now. Publishers are reporting that Instant Articles are giving them maybe three or four times the traffic they would expect. The temptation for publishers to go “all in” on distributed platforms, and just start creating journalism and stories that work on the social Web, is getting stronger. I can imagine we will see news companies totally abandoning production capacity, technology capacity, and even advertising departments, and delegating it all to third-party platforms in an attempt to stay afloat. This is a high-risk strategy: You lose control over your relationship with your readers and viewers, your revenue, and even the path your stories take to reach their destination. With billions of users and hundreds of thousands of articles, pictures, and videos arriving online every day, social platforms have to employ algorithms to try and sort through the important and recent and popular and decide who ought to see what. And we have no option but to trust them to do this. In truth, we have little or no insight into how each company is sorting its news. If Facebook decides, for instance, that video stories will do better than text stories, we cannot know that unless they tell us or unless we observe it. This is an unregulated field. There is no transparency into the internal working of these systems.

E M I LY B E L L

We are handing the controls of our lives to a very small number of people, who are unelected and unaccountable.

There are huge benefits to having a new class of technically able, socially aware, financially successful, and highly energetic people like Mark Zuckerberg taking over functions and economic power from some of the staid, politically entrenched, and occasionally corrupt gatekeepers we have had in the past. But we ought to be aware, too, that this cultural, economic, and political shift is profound. We are handing the controls of important parts of our public and private lives to a very small number of people, who are unelected and unaccountable. We need regulation to make sure all citizens gain equal access to the networks of opportunity and services they need. We also need to know that all public speech and expression will be treated transparently, even if it cannot be treated equally. This is a basic requirement for a functioning democracy. For this to happen, there has to be at least some agreement that the responsibilities in this area are shifting. The people who built these platform companies did not set out to do so in order to take over the responsibilities of a free press. In fact, they are rather alarmed that this is the outcome of their engineering success. One of the criticisms thus far leveled against these companies is that they have cherry-picked the profitable parts of the

publishing process and sidestepped the more expensive business of actually creating good journalism. If the current nascent experiments such as Instant Articles lead to a more integrated relationship with journalism, it is possible that we will see a more significant shift of production costs follow, particularly around technology and advertising sales. The reintermediation of information, which once looked as though it was going to be fully democratized by the progress of the open Web, is likely to make the mechanisms for funding journalism worse before they get better. Looking at the prospects for mobile advertising and the aggressive growth targets Apple, Facebook, Google, and the rest have to meet to satisfy Wall Street, it is fair to say that unless social platforms return a great deal more money back to the source, producing news is likely to become a nonprofit pursuit rather than an engine of capitalism. To be sustainable, news and journalism companies will need to radically alter their cost base. It seems most likely that the next wave of news media companies will be fashioned around a studio model of managing different stories, talents, and products across a vast range of devices and platforms. As this shift happens, posting journalism directly to Facebook or other platforms will become the rule rather than the exception. Even maintaining a website could be abandoned in favor of hyperdistribution. The distinction between platforms and publishers will melt completely. Even if you think of yourself as a technology company, you are making critical decisions about everything from access to platforms, the shape of journalism or speech, the inclusion or banning of certain content, the acceptance or rejection of various publishers. What happens to the current class of news publishers is a much less important question than what kind of a news and information society we want to create and how we can help shape this. cjr

E M I LY B E L L , a frequent CJR contributor, is the director of Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism. Previously, she oversaw digital publishing at The Guardian.

Gimme That On-Line religion BY L AUrA I TALI AN O

T Ec H N O LO GY

L AU R A I TA L I A N O

Producing coverage for the Web when just 6 percent of Americans looked to the internet for news

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1996 The World Wide Web became available for public use in 1991; within a few years, news outlets were starting to explore its potential. The New York Times debuted its site in January 1996—but a beta version appeared in the fall of 1995, when Pope John Paul II was visiting the United States. New jersey Online, the first Advance Publications news site, launched around the same time.

early until his red eye flight back to Rome, John Paul II remained blissfully unaware of all this, but throughout his visit to the Northeast in early October his holiness was thoroughly digitized. His encyclicals were transubstantiated into hypertext. His portrait was converted into papal pixels, suitable for framing by computer screens anywhere in the world. And, more to the point for journalism, his trip was trailed by the largest digital press corps ever set up to report a live event competitively. The New York Times, Newhouse New Media, and News Corp./MCI, owned in part by Rupert Murdoch, all covered the pope’s visit for multimedia projects that appeared on the Internet’s World Wide Web. Their audience—variously called “users,” “accessors,” and “consumers” in a medium whose advances in lexicon have failed to keep up with those of its technology—was a small one, probably numbering well below 100,000. The digital papal press corps itself was also small, numbering about twenty, mainly freelancers and “shared” reporters whose first fealty was to file for their newspapers. Outside of the occasional use of digital cameras, their methods hardly blinked and buzzed in any hip, day-glo cyber-sense. These new-media reporters still phoned rewrite with their notes from the papal mass at rainy Giants Stadium. Runners still fought through crowds on foot to relay rolls of film back to traditional darkrooms. Still, this was a watershed event for news reported and published specifically for access on-line, a medium where, as yet, nearly all of the available journalism consists not of original reportage at all, but of “repurposed” text and photos, of news that previously ran elsewhere in print, broadcast, or on the wires. As a freelance Web consultant, I played a part in this group baptism for the infant medium of original on-line journalism. I launched the pope into cyberspace for the first news project of New jersey

Online, itself the first and flagship Web site of Newhouse New Media. For an atheist print reporter who still vaguely fears computers, this was a rather novel experience, one that raised more questions than I could answer at the time. And in talking afterward with the journalists and editors who are also involved with this medium—members of a growing but still tiny group—I’ve found that the most intriguing questions about original on-line journalism, or new media, as the genre is being called, still linger unanswered.

he very least of my own questions arose as I grappled with the unfamiliar, unforgiving codes and protocols of multimedia on-line publishing, working with equipment far more complicated than computer systems I used in newspapering. Should I telnet or FTP to access a papal JPEG? What technical and spiritual transgressions are revealed in error messages received while DeBabelizing his encyclicals? I knew I had come into my own the night I cooked dinner while downloading soundbites recorded from the archbishop of Newark—as the archbishop’s voice traveled digitally from a mainframe in Jersey City into the Macintosh in my Brooklyn apartment, I sedately sauteed chicken cutlets. But I’m still wondering how I managed to mismanage a programmer’s scripted algorithm, thereby accidentally sending his holiness hurtling backward in time through cyberspace. During the pope’s first nineteen minutes on the tarmac of Newark airport, my Web site’s “Hours To Arrival” countdown read “-1.” The professional questions arising along my pope-escorted pilgrimage from print to on-line media were more serious and more interesting. As what’s called a Web site “producer,” I wore many hats (the last of which, as I’ll describe in a bit, was a miter—the papal millinery of the tall, pointed variety). New jersey Online’s pope staff was tiny, and, while delegating where I could, I still had to buy photographs, oversee publicity, be interviewed about the site by The Associated Press, and forward advertising queries to the in house ad department, all on a project I also did some reporting for. Did I manage to handle a corporate checkbook and reporter’s notebook without conflict? I hope I did, but I know I came close to crossing some lines I’d never been asked to approach as a print reporter.

T EC H N O LO GY

Other print journalists who are forging ahead into the Wild West frontier of new media tell me they also ponder numerous questions concerning ethics, standards, and method, and discovering answers as we go along is part of what makes the field so interesting. Graham Rayman, senior editor of the new on-line magazine called Word, wonders how the objective journalistic voice will change on-line, where attitude and opinion have always suffused story-telling. Ezra Palmer, new editor of The Wall Street journal Interactive Edition, wonders whether on-line editions should scoop their print and broadcast affiliates, and how long corrections should stay on-line—as long as the error did? Longer? And we’re all wondering what happens to accuracy and clarity in a medium that is immediately updatable and has a limitless news hole. “At this point, it’s still about learning,” says Kevin P. McKenna, editorial director for The New York Times Electronic Media Company, who led the Times effort to cover the pope on the Web. The learning is happening at breakneck speed, leading McKenna to compare Web years to dog years: “One year on the Web is like seven years in any other medium.” Finally, there is the most basic question: What is this stuff called new media? How is it different, for better or worse, from old media? The question was rephrased often as I worked on the project, in identical quizzings from archdiocesan spokespeople, my own mother, and a diminutive lady I tried to interview for a papal reaction story, before realizing that her candle- and saint-strewn Newark shop was actually a Botanica, where items are sold for a religion, Santaria, that is far removed from Catholicism. “What is it, exactly, that you’re doing to the pope?”

ome history and overview may be of help to print and broadcast folks who have only just heard of what one print editor I know still snarlingly calls “this computer stuff.” The new-media critic and author Jon Katz traces the birth of on-line news coverage from January 1994, when a subscriber to the Prodigy service noticed that Los Angeles was shaking and used a wireless modem to post news of the earthquake onto the Internet. Katz, who covers media for Wired magazine, notes that within minutes, and well ahead of CNN or the wires, Internet users

L AU r A I TA L I A N O

No other medium offers its audience the chance for such active and immediate participation in a news story.

were trading information on the quake’s location and damages, and offering detailed information to a pinpointed audience, notifying survivors’ distant relatives and even helping organize rescues. Speed, niche marketing, freedom from the limits of a news hole and deadlines, and audience interactivity: this early event demonstrates all the elements that, when combined, remain today what can elevate online journalism above its print and broadcast brethren. This is what those techno-geeks in your newsroom are so excited about. Now, though, when there’s talk of on-line journalism, the reference is primarily to what’s happening on the World Wide Web. The Web is the section of the Internet where stories can be told in pictures, sound, video, and text, and where clicking on highlighted pictures and text—“hypertext”—carries you section to section. In the papal visit site I produced for New jersey Online, for example, users could click on the hypertext words “Sacred Sounds” to get a new screen that offered a selection of downloadable holy noises—the organ processional that would greet the pope at Sacred Heart Cathedral in Newark, for instance. Another click, and you could download a papal blessing: “The peace of the Lord be with you always,” in the pope’s

own voice. I ignored the warnings of a priest who, during a discussion on our mutual cyber papal projects, told me, “Don’t use him in English! He sounds like a vampire. If you quote me on that, I’ll deny it.” The Web also allows users to interact with each other, and even with the journalists themselves, by typing their comments and opinions onto a blank form and hitting the “return” key. The comments either go straight to the journalist or site producer, as e-mails, or feed a larger “forum” that becomes a continuing record of what people are saying about the site or the topic at hand. News Corp.’s pope site, and my own, each hosted such a forum. The New York Times site hosted nine. In these virtual meeting places, pro-choicers argued with prolifers. Women and gays criticized the pope’s stands on homosexuality and the ordination of women and were criticized in turn. Religious scholars, Christian clergy, even a few rabbis talked about the pope’s impact on their faith. No other medium offers its audience the chance for such active and immediate participation in a news story. My own site took interactivity to what I thought at first was a bizarre extreme. Clicking on “E-mail the Pope” brought up a blank form where users could type a message and send it to New jersey Online for forwarding to the Vatican. It was here that my virtual miter came in. Every day from the last week in September through the first week of October, my personal Newhouse e-mail account filled with messages prefaced “Your holiness,” “To the pope,” or simply “Dear Papa.” I started out calling myself Keeper of the Holy E-mail. But the experience quickly overcame my cynicism about these electronic reachings-out. I received 343 papal e-mails, from across the U.S. and from Canada, Mexico, and Europe, their text spanning five languages. Only a few were bizarre or off color, like one from a woman who wanted the pope’s advice on getting an abortion, except she realized she needed to get pregnant first, or another from a gay couple at Princeton University

who politely begged to be excommunicated: “Please send documents (one for each of us please).” Aside from these few—and one bomb threat against the Vatican—every message was one of praise or encouragement for the pope, or a personal plea for papal intercession for everything from failing marriages to dying children. One came from a woman who said she was crying as she wrote. A tenyear-old midwestern boy asked the pope if he liked hockey. The Vatican fired up its holy modem and responded via e-mail. O magnum modem mysterium! “Pope John Paul II wishes to express his gratitude to all those who sent him greetings and have supported him with their prayers,” wired Dr. Joaquin NavarroValls, director of the Holy See press office. I’ve posted the response verbatim at http://www. nj.com/popepage/e-mail.html. E-mail the pope. Download a blessing. Chat in our Papal Forum. I defend these kitschy gadgets blushingly, but resolutely. They weren’t traditional journalism—that happened elsewhere in the site—but user feedback told us they were the site’s most popular features. People wanted to interact, to hear the pope and hope the pope could hear them. Again, no other medium could offer them this. “The Holy Father on-line!” one user wrote New Jersey Online. “My grandmother still doesn’t believe me.” A look at pope coverage throughout the Web demonstrates the range of publishers putting news on-line. At least a dozen Web sites, from Time Warner’s massive Pathfinder site to the tiny one run by the Archdiocese of Newark, offered special sections on the pope’s visit. The commitment to original journalism also varies along a wide spectrum. Pathfinder covered the pope’s visit with wire-service news briefs and material from the Time magazine archives— convenient content that is nonetheless derisively called “shovelware” by many new-media proponents—and then added a forum and links to the pope’s writings. Most of the pope sites on the Web published something comparable, content drawn from print sources, with a few bells and whistles like sound bites and forums. The sites that went beyond the routine were limited to News Corp., Newhouse’s New Jersey Online, Pope TV (an experiment in live video feeds sponsored by a national Catholic foundation), and The New York Times, for which the pope’s visit became the inaugural

T EC H N O LO GY

effort for bringing the gray lady to the Wild West Web. “Our site was named Cool Site of the Day by Editor & Publisher Interactive,” McKenna of the Times boasted after the laboratory smoke cleared. “It was just something for both the pope and The New York Times to be called cool,” says McKenna, a former foreign desk editor and deputy news editor at the paper. “That’s something neither the pope nor The New York Times is accused of very much.” The Times’s pope site was worthy of the accolade, and offered an idea of what to expect when the full NYT site launches sometime soon at http://www.nytimes.com—not only the paper’s content as an authoritative foundation, but also regular updates on breaking news, a heavy focus on celebrity or newsmaker-moderated forums, and searchable access to the paper’s vast archives. The News Corp./MCI site, at http://www. delphi.com/news/pope/index.htm, offered the most ambitious papal package: biographical background on the pope, a delightfully irreverent, illustrated tribute by the cartoonist Doug Marlette, and a forum where users could match wits against the prose of celebrity commentators who included Ted Kennedy and Molly Yard. Stories from half a dozen reporters from the site’s own newsroom were published on-line the following morning. During the pope’s two days in New Jersey, New Jersey Online, at http://www.nj.com, also published original news, although relying, as did the Times’s on-line offerings, on the work of reporters from outside our own offices. News editor Joe Territo wrote briefs and relayed feeds of photos and field notes he gathered from the newsroom of our Newhouse affiliate, The Star-Ledger of Newark. Free-lance designer Kevin Walker and I published this material on the Web as quickly and prettily as possible, working from New Jersey Online’s offices in Jersey City. It worked well—except when I was told, on deadline, that photos sent over by The Star-Ledger needed to be “opened” by a program called Graphic Converter. All I could find in searching the Internet was Graffik Konverter, the original German version. What to do with the pictures of soggy nuns in Giants Stadium? Do I abbrechen? Do I anlegen? And if I employ the zwischenablage einblenden tool, who would clean up afterward?

L AU r A I TA L I A N O

But for all our work, our on-the-scene coverage, and that of the Times and News corp., were ornaments to the larger packages. right now, digital journalism fares poorly against television in competitively reporting a major event like a papal visit. For two hours on October 4, New jersey Online users could log onto a page that told them, in text, that the pope was currently saying mass at Sacred Heart cathedral. click here to hear the bells and organ procession that greeted him. But TV viewers could watch real-time footage of the mass itself. real-time, TV-quality video streams may not be available to the average home computer system for ten years, and at least until then, TV will remain the best way to cover a real-time, national or international event.

ew media will succeed by focusing instead on what they do best, as demonstrated in that early Prodigy earthquake coverage. It’s quicker than print, and can be more local than the networks. Its bottomless news hole allows more depth than either print or broadcast, through searchable archives, databases and transcripts. And neither print nor broadcast has access to the killer application of on-line journalism: interactivity. I have my own favorite new-media inventors, sites that are on the forefront of recreating journalism for on-line. From mainstream outlets, I thought ESPN’s Web site covered the World Series in ways no other medium could—to me the best reason to bring original reporting to the home computer. reporters staked out every pre-game batting practice, took questions from users logged into a forum, posed the questions to the players, then reported the answers back to the forum. In essence, ESPN’s audience—described by the network as the largest audience of any on-line news site—could sit at home at their computers, interview players and see the responses almost in real time. (The ESPN site is at http://espnet.sportszone.com.)

nfortunately—and of great interest to anyone who, like myself, is looking at on-line journalism as a career option—there’s hardly anyone out there yet to tell stories to. At press time, 580 newspapers and 425 broadcast stations were publishing on-line editions. But a recent Times Mirror survey reported that only 6 percent of America’s wired population goes on-line

SUM ME r 1965

Indictment of Broadcasting After Edward R. Murrow died, this text was reprinted from an October 1958 speech he gave on radio and television.

The top management of the networks, with a few notable exceptions, has been trained in advertising, research, sales, or show business. But by the nature of the corporate structure, they also make the final and crucial decisions having to do with news and public affairs. I am frightened by the imbalance, the constant striving to reach the largest possible audience for everything, by the absence of a sustained study of the state of the nation. Heywood Broun once said: “No body politic is healthy until it begins to itch.” I would like television to produce some itching pills rather than this endless outpouring of tranquilizers. It can be done. Maybe it won’t be. But it could. Let us not shoot the wrong piano player. Do not be deluded into believing that the titular heads of the networks control what appears on their networks. They all have better taste. All are responsible to stockholders, and in my experience all are honorable men. But they must schedule what they can sell in the public market. I do not advocate that we turn television into a twentyseven-inch wailing wall, where long-hairs constantly moan about the state of our culture and our defense. But I would just like to see it reflect occasionally the hard, unyielding realities of the world in which we live. I would like to see it done inside the existing framework, and I would like to see the doing of it redound to the credit of those who finance and program it. Measure the results by Nielsen, Trendex, or Silex—it doesn’t matter; the main thing is to try. The responsibility can be easily placed, in spite of all the mouthings about giving the public what it wants. It rests on big business, and on big television, and it rests at the top. Responsibility is not something that can be assigned or delegated. And it promises its own reward: good business and good television. Someone once said—I think it was Max Eastman—that: “That publisher serves his advertiser best who best serves his readers.” —Edward R. Murrow

to get news every day. Thirty-seven percent go anywhere from twice a week to every few weeks, 28 percent less often than that, and 29 percent not at all. Likewise, there are few staff reporting jobs available in on-line newsrooms, jobs where writers compose anything beyond such scintillating reportage as “<a href=“listing.html”>Click here for our complete listings!</a><p>.” “We do not foresee having a separate reporting staff for the electronic version,” McKenna of the Times said recently. “We’ll use stringers and New York Times reporters. It just doesn’t seem efficient to have a separate staff.” His point is well taken. Why should companies like the Times, Time Warner, News Corp., or Gannett reinvent the wheel, when their Web editions can be easily and cheaply fed by photos and text from their print and broadcast affiliates? But there’s an opposing argument, which I find more compelling: the money and authority of the mainstream giants positions them perfectly to do the reinventing, and they ought to do it. When New jersey Online recently offered me a full-time staff position, I balked. Newhouse also plans to feed its first Web news site with photos and text from affiliate papers. I would be a producer, not a reporter. And yet. And yet. The medium itself is seductive. Manipulating graphics and sound for the first time reminded me of the childhood thrill of discovering crayons. I looked through photos of antique Oriental Christian carpets for background graphics. Instead of planning the site using numbered outlines and flat page layouts, I drew nonlinear “content maps,” drawing layers of circles to chart the numerous ways a user might click around to navigate through the material. I’ve never had to think about telling a print story in this way. My storytelling toolbox is now brimming over with hypertext, clickable graphics, multimedia, and interactive databases. Another attraction is the largely democratic nature of Web publishing. Jaron Lanier, an originator of virtual reality, once noted that on the Web, the American Defecators Society and Time Warner publish on equal footing. The power of the press belongs to anyone with the necessary equipment and software, which would put you or me back about $2,500, starting from scratch with the purchase of a computer. In putting the pope in cyberspace, I competed, and I hoped held

T Ec H N O LO GY

my own, against the goliath staffs of The New York Times and Rupert Murdoch. And the new media still need journalists. “I think our role as arbiters and guides of news value really hasn’t changed,” says Palmer of The Wall Street journal Interactive Edition, which is staffing with editors. “We’ve just stepped into this new medium, and are expected to do the same job.” My managing editor at New jersey Online, Susan Mernit, ultimately made me a better offer—I could be associate news producer for four days a week, with full benefits. I’m going to tell her I’ll take the job. I won’t be reporting—New jersey Online will focus instead mostly on reformatting news, nurturing numerous “discussion” communities and constructing databases on everything from elections to recycling schedules. But the job will give me three days a week to build a freelancing career in print while learning the tools of Web journalism at a company that’s caught on to the secret of niche marketing, and will therefore probably survive. I think I’ve found the perfect compromise: one foot in print, one foot in new media. Besides, Web years are like dog years. Who knows what new media will ask of their journalists seven years from now, in 1997?

ames Mulholland is publisher/editor of the Catholic Information Center on the Internet and a board member of the Manhattan-based, nonprofit Catholic organization Path to Peace Foundation, sponsor of Pope TV, which posted a live video stream of the pope’s visit onto the Internet for the tiny population with the equipment to receive it. He described to me a private audience he had with John Paul II during the American visit. Mulholland showed him some of the on-line coverage and told the pontiff that he intends to build Web sites eventually for each of the world’s 2,500 Roman Catholic dioceses. The pope responded, “This is very, very good,” Mulholland remembered. “He was smiling there, but he’s a little inscrutable. He was smiling, but he wasn’t doubled over.” I think I know how the pontiff feels. I’m not doubled over by “this computer stuff ” just yet. But just like the pope, I am smiling. cjr

L AUrA ITALIANO is a Manhattan-based freelance reporter and writer.

P AO UT rH T FOOrL TI O K

THrILLA IN MANHATTAN

TK crEDIT

Don King on the floor of the Republican National Convention in New York, 2004. (Photo by Larry Towell/Magnum)

T EC H N O LO GY

Speaking with Philip Meyer, a true precision journalist

reporting with computers BY M ARGAR ET SU LL IVAN

hilip Meyer is seventy years old, fond of professorial bow ties and known as the father of computer-assisted reporting. He holds the Knight chair in journalism at the University of North Carolina. But his elder-statesman status doesn’t mean that he has lost his edge. His talks still pack the halls whenever investigative reporters and editors meet, and the attendees include plenty of twenty-something computer experts. Meyer’s ahead-of-the-curve reputation began with his contribution to a Detroit Free Press study of that city’s deadly 1967 race riot. Wielding a then state-of-the-art IBM 360 mainframe, Meyer—then a national correspondent for Knight Newspapers—analyzed reams of survey data. His work revealed that, contrary to popular belief at the time, the college-educated were as likely to riot as high school dropouts. Thus began computer-assisted reporting—now all the rage. But Meyer scoffs at that term, preferring “Precision Journalism,” the title of his 1973 book, reprinted this year. And he thinks reporters have a long way to go if they’re to become true precision journalists. Meyer spoke about all this with Margaret Sullivan, editor of The Buffalo News. How has your view of “precision journalism” changed in the era when newsrooms have a Pc on every reporter’s desk? It hasn’t changed at all. It’s still a novel idea that I’m trying to sell and having great difficulty doing it. Pieces of it have been accepted. At first, it appeared that precision journalism was computers and if you used computers you were a precision journalist. But the computer is just

a tool. You can be a precision journalist and not use computers; and you can certainly use computers and not be a precision journalist. You think the phrase “computer-assisted reporting,” then, is invalid? I was critiquing a couple of prominent investigative projects that used computers, and one of them said—very high up—that this is a computer-assisted reporting story. It just shows how naïve journalists are to think that using computers is a big deal and we ought to tell everyone about it. My cousins in Michigan use a computer to manage their farming operation, but when they go to market they don’t pull up to their unloading dock and say, “Hey, I’ve got these computer-assisted soybeans.” What are the biggest mistakes you see in computer-assisted reporting today? What makes you cringe? Computers make it possible to screw up on an even larger scale. For example, in The Kansas City Star’s series on the high incidence of AIDS among priests, the most obvious flaw was that it compared priest deaths from AIDS with the general population. But all Roman Catholic priests are males, and males have a much higher death rate from AIDS than females. The Star did report the male-tomale comparison, but it was buried deep in the story. Sure, it’s a journalistic tradition to give scary but misleading information in the lead and then backpedal, but the backpedal was way too late, and the spurious comparison was beyond the range of reasonable exaggeration. The computer is a wonderful tool

MAY/J UNE 2001 In the early aughts, personal computers were ubiquitous; the internet was gaining prominence; and Philip Meyer, a pioneer of computerassisted reporting, was teaching journalism students about statistical analysis as an investigative method.

M A r GA r E T S U L L I VA N

programming, a heavy dose of statistics, and how to apply scientific reasoning to investigative projects. Some minimum level of competency in quantitative methods ought to be an entry-level requirement. What work comes to mind as embodying the best of the new techniques? I’m afraid I’m like a musician with perfect pitch. Even in the best stuff I can find flaws. For example, a wonderful example of precision journalism is work by Steve Doig at The Miami Herald showing the relationship between the year that a house was constructed and the amount of damage done by Hurricane Andrew. The theory he was testing was that houses were strong when the hurricane code was first passed in the 1950s, but then enforcement became careless and corrupt over time. Recent houses were less able to resist the hurricane than older houses. What he didn’t do was apply statistics to control for wind speed in order to show, to a finer degree, how damage increased with recency of construction. He made the basic point, which was the important journalistic thing, but I would have loved to have seen it done with even greater precision. but it greatly increases the need to start thinking like a social scientist in approaching a topic—knowing when to sample, when to run field experiments, where to apply statistical controls. I don’t cringe so much at misuse as at missed opportunities, things done halfway. As you look back over several decades of technological change in newsrooms, what have we learned? Computers can be useful to large numbers of reporters and therefore reporters ought to learn how to use them. Instead it’s become a specialty where one person in the newsroom does all the heavy-duty computing. I think journalism deserves better than that. I think we need to raise the ante on what it means to be a journalist. So a different kind of training is necessary? For too long, journalism has been a refuge for people who have a math phobia. In the information age, it takes greater skill to collect, manage, and interpret data than a typical journalist’s training can provide. They need knowledge of survey research, field experiments,

What can your approach bring to the future of investigative reporting? It depends on a broader definition of investigative reporting than putting somebody in jail or getting somebody out of jail. It involves looking at structural problems in society that public policy isn’t dealing with effectively. Journalism is very good at covering events, fairly good at finding patterns or trends, and not so good at looking at structure. This is where a social science approach can help. You can see how a system operates and look at the causes of the problems. Doig’s hurricane story was an example of going beyond event and pattern to structure. There was a societal problem, corruption in the buildingcode enforcement, and it led to more hurricane damage than was necessary. Only when we think like that can we do the kind of investigative journalism we really need. cjr

MArGArET SULLIVAN, a former editor of the Buffalo News and public editor at the New York Times, is now a media columnist for the Washington Post.

T EC H N O LO GY

ALISSA QUART

The Web allows us to question authority in new ways

The Trouble with Experts BY ALISSA QUART

JULY/AUGUST 20 10 In 2007, Jenny McCarthy, a former Playboy model, announced that her son had been diagnosed with autism; she published a book on the subject. Over the next few years, she appeared everywhere from The Oprah Winfrey Show to Frontline, claiming that vaccines can trigger autism—and her voice was amplified by the rise of first-wave mommy bloggers.

ctress Jenny McCarthy’s favorite line is, “My son is my science.” She’s an autism activist who insists that vaccines caused her son’s neurological disorder, a claim that has near-zero support in scientific literature. Years ago, she might have been dismissed as another irrational celebrity or passionate crank. But in the brave new world of “experts” online, McCarthy is more than that. In some corners of the world, she defines a debate, blotting out scientists who completely debunk her claims. And then there’s Orac, McCarthy’s opposite number. Orac is the nom de blog of someone who writes that he is a “surgeon/scientist.” He’s another self-appointed autism expert but, unlike McCarthy, Orac attacks the vaccines-cause-autism set. He recently delighted in the downfall of a telegenic anti-vaccine doctor in England, for example, who finally lost his license. We, the audience, don’t know who Orac really is, although he has taken on a leading role as a debunker of the autism-vaccine link. As long as I can remember, “the expert” arrived through news articles, inevitably a guy at that smart-sounding think tank, a famed professor of social science, a renowned author. The expert quote arrived toward the second half of most pieces, wafting out of some glorified institution, as iconic and predictable as Colonel Mustard in the board game Clue. Structurally, the expert quote is supposed to act as the inarguable voice of reason, getting rid of any doubt left in our minds or splitting the difference between extremes. As the poet Philip Larkin writes of such

voices, “Ah, solving that question / Brings the priest and the doctor / In their long coats / Running over the fields.” But the mystique around expertise has always troubled those who bothered to think about it. The philosopher John Dewey expressed irritation over the unquestioned expert a long time ago, chiding that experts were but “a class” with “private interests and private knowledge.” As the British critic Adam Phillips writes in his book on the nature of expertise, Terrors and Experts, expertise carries with it some troubled assumptions—that “because a person has done a recognizable or legitimated official training they are then qualified to claim something more than that they have done the training.” Phillips points out that it is almost always a feeling of uncertainty that drives the non-specialist—the reader, the patient, the investor—into the arms of experts. For journalists, this uncertainty is at the center of every traditional news story. Journalists have long gathered expert quotes, secretly hoping to have our angles confirmed and our fears of imposture put to rest. But also because many journalists believe there’s a Platonic truth out there, a definable explanation for everything under the sun—and the experts can tell us what that is. But with the rise of the Web, as well as changing ideas of authority in general, “the expert” has come to mean something different from what it once did. There’s the rise of what the Brits call “experts by experience”—people like Jenny McCarthy, and also like Orac—who have emerged online because they write well and/or frequently on their subjects, rather than becoming an expert by acclamation of other experts or because of an affiliation with a venerated institution. The worst part of all of this is the thicket of false expertise available on the Web, mistaken by Google-search enthusiasts or, sometimes, naïve reporters, as real expertise. These fauxperts are not entirely new, but not many years ago they had a somewhat harder time getting their point of view presented as coming from an “expert.” This change in the way we think about expertise stems from a few sources. The first is a weakened trust in institutions or companies or government. Some contend this started in the 1980s and 90s, though, as measured by the Edelman Trust Barometer, trust took a serious dip in 2007. The second is due to what Net brainiacs call “disintermediation,” or the

T EC H N O LO GY

disappearance, due to the Web, of the grinning middlemen who previously connected one institution to another. In the case of journalism, a perfect example of “disintermediation” is that experts used to be mediated and selected by journalists, but now experts themselves may well present their expertise online, like Orac, or the twenty-three-year-old hurricane blogger Brendan Loy, a self-described “weather nerd” in Indiana who predicted Hurricane Katrina days before it occurred, yet another “expert” emerging from the crowd without the usual vetting or filtering.

his is a two-sided thing. On one hand, it’s great that an expert can go straight to the people. On the other, if that expert is an autism-vaccine connector or a climate-skeptic blogger like Anthony Watts, whose claims have been disputed by scientists, it’s pretty clear that mediation is needed. But who should the mediator be? Dave Winer, a visiting scholar at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, would say no one. He has argued that experts and amateurs with expert-level knowledge should go directly to readers rather than relying on journalists as mediators. He calls it “Sources Go Direct.” (So direct that Winer dislikes being quoted by journalists, as an expert or otherwise.) “The sources who no longer trust the journos, or aren’t being called by them . . . are going direct,” he has written. “This is what replaces journalism.” I see Winer’s logic. If people want expert opinions on film, they might well look to the Internet Movie Database’s flock of amateur reviewers. These IMDBers are true film buffs. Their often expansive, obsessive reviews should be part of a new definition of expertise, a place beyond the ordered (and American-centered) ornamental gardens of New Yorker reviews. I spoke to some people who are trying to make sense of this dilemma—call them experts on expertise or institutional authorities on the end of institutionalized authority—and they were helpful, as experts often are. Most of these people were interested in making more space for a kind of expert-journalist who improves upon our previous incarnation as jolly generalist. (For an insightful essay on the need for journalists to report their way toward their own expertise, click through to Brent Cunningham’s “Rethinking Objectivity” from the CJR archives and fork over the $1.99 to download it.)

ALISSA QUArT

I imagined that many of the up-to-theminute digital journo types I knew would cast a cold eye on experts and the need for journalists as intermediaries, choosing Web-enabled amateurs over the authorities that have so damaged themselves in the last decade— the experts championing failing wars, for instance. Nicco Mele, who once ran Howard Dean’s Internet campaign and is a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School, sounded happy when he said that “classic institutions are fading as arbiters of expert reputations” and Google, Twitter, and Facebook are taking their place. But Dave Cohn, the founder of Spot.us, had a more complicated take. A Web community may revolt against traditional experts and anoint its own, based on a different criterion of expertise, he says. But this Web community can be even more capricious in how long a person gets to be a community expert. It can “redact a positive opinion of you. It’s sort of like getting fired,” says Cohn. I expected Jonathan Zittrain, author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It and a professor at Harvard Law School (Harvard expert, natch!), to be another specialist who might support specialists going direct. But Zittrain also expressed a concern over the unsorted expertise on the Web. That problem is the “epistemological paralysis,” as he put it, or the entropy that sets in when we aren’t guided by filtering voices on the Web—what others have called “filter failure.” One unsatisfactory cure to this problem is the emergence of filtering voices that only speak to the most fragmented audiences—“getting silo-ed,” as Chris Mooney, the science blogger and coauthor of Unscientific America, put it, or “broken into little partisan herds.” “A reader wants some trusted source to break it down for her: a domain expert with a blog and a Rolodex, who happens to be eager to draw upon further experts,” says Zittrain. “Cacophony cries out for intermediaries, to hold politicians accountable or to give readers the sense of an environment that they can’t personally see or touch.”

of the area’s debates and politics. Hyperspecialization of most subject areas has made this guileless, mediating journalistic model somewhat uncomfortable. But maybe journalists can get better at locating experts. “Journalists have to understand the difference between expertise and authority, and to question the categories,” says Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and author of Cognitive Surplus. He offers a dark example: “A lawyer knows just as much the day after he is disbarred as the day before, but his authoritative status has changed. Journalists need to separate credential-based expertise from actual authority.” Journalists might “try for a richer set of calculations” about authority, Shirky suggests. By abandoning the assumption that goldplated credentials equal expertise, the press might even change history. Could journalists have helped to take down, say, Bernie Madoff before the feds did if they had questioned the SEC’s experts more? Shirky wonders. And then there’s the chance that authentic experts (not necessarily credentialed experts) could become journalists of some kind. It’s happening already. Take the flock of professor-bloggers masticating the news on the Foreign Policy Web site or economist bloggers like Tyler Cowen. There are journalists who have become experts via either peer or crowd review—like Laurie Garrett, a reporter who focused on public health and foreign policy until she became a Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations, or the omnipresent Nate Silver, who combines his knowledge of polls and statistics with a journalistic role as generalist information curator with star-making aplomb. To cheaply paraphrase Isaiah Berlin, journalists can’t all be clever hedgehogs, but perhaps some generalist foxes can start growing some quills. cjr

ALISSA QUArT, a former CJR columnist and contributing editor, is the executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a journalism nonprofit devoted to covering inequality. The author of four nonfiction books and two poetry collections, she has also contributed to the New York Times, The Guardian, and the New York Review of Books, among other publications.

hen journalists are generalists, they rely, often uncritically, on outside experts for specialized thinking. They are famously able to immerse themselves in a fresh subject and report back. But they carry with them their ignorance

ECONOMICS

Econo TK crEDIT

AUTHOr TK

TK crEDIT

omics

HE rE AN D N OW

Tough Business Sewell chan on the journalism industry’s persistent struggles

Or THE PAST quarter century, digital transformations in how news is produced, distributed, and consumed have upended the business of journalism. A few newspapers—namely the New York Times, the Wall Street journal, and the Washington Post—have managed to attract millions of online subscribers, some of them outside the United States, who are willing to pay for quality reporting and for whom the deadtree edition is an afterthought. But, particularly at the state and local levels, many outlets have suffered acute losses or shuttered altogether. Between 2008 and 2020, according to a recent Pew Research Center analysis, the number of reporters, editors, photographers, and videographers in America fell by more than 25 percent, from 114,000 to 85,000. There are now more fast-food workers in Indiana than newsroom workers in the entire country; public relations specialists outnumber journalists by more than three to one. What’s striking, when reading through the archives of the columbia journalism review, is that this has always been a tough business. Journalists are fond of narratives

of decline, trading nostalgic memories of “the good old days,” and yet the truth is that the old days weren’t all that good—or at least they weren’t very good for very many people. Sure, there were a few decades when being a correspondent at one of the most prestigious publications meant taking first-class flights and enjoying fully subsidized housing (not to mention three-martini lunches for the editors). But those gigs were relatively rare, and—let’s face it—we all know who got those plum positions and who didn’t. Much more common were fears of layoffs and bankruptcy, combined with anxietyinduced paralysis. In 1982, my friend Mary Ann Giordano, a pioneering New York City beat reporter at the Daily News, suffered night after night of anguished worry when the paper went up for sale and became consumed by turmoil. “It has been more than seven weeks since I menstruated and there seems no logical reason for this,” she wrote in her diary. (She took a pregnancy test that came back negative; her doctor told her the cause was likely stress.) Nearly four decades later, the Daily News once again faces reports of its imminent demise,

among many other local outlets. In 1991, at the age of fifty-three, John Long lost his job when NBC News closed its Miami bureau. “The people who own NBC don’t really care about their obligation to the American people, to the viewers, to their own affiliates,” he lamented. Publishers and network executives are probably no more or less selfish than other employers; the postwar promise of a long, stable career with a pension as a reward for decades of loyal service began to erode in the seventies. Work has only become more precarious, and incomes and wealth more unequal, since then. Nevertheless, women and people of color have often—justifiably— expected better from their workplaces, including newsrooms. Reading Mary Ellen Schoonmaker’s 1988 examination of the dilemmas female journalists face when they have kids infuriated me; even now, some newsrooms remain inhospitable to employees (including dads) with childcare or elder care duties. “The United States is the only major industrialized nation that does not have some form of national, partially paid maternity-related benefits,” she wrote. More than three decades later, that is still the case. Are other models possible? Speaking in 1970 about the distinctive ownership structure of Le Monde, which is partly controlled by its employees, Jean Schwoebel, who was an editor at the paper, mused about the radically different journalism cultures in France and the US. “It is much more difficult for American journalists than for us because in such a society as yours it is not regarded as a scandal that economic processes control the press,” he observed. Perhaps he was simply ahead of his time. In recent years, a wave of unionization has taken hold in newsrooms across America. The NewsGuild has organized journalists at publications such as the Los Angeles Times and the Dallas Morning News—both historically anti-union. Digital media outlets including HuffPost, Slate, and Vox, once thought to be immune from pesky labor– management conflicts, have seen editorial employees organize with the Writers Guild of America, East. Many new union demands go beyond pay and working conditions to address discrimination; diversity, equity, and inclusion; and the sway journalists have

EcONOMIcS

over editorial decisions made in their name (and under their byline). Ownership models are also changing, and not all the news is bleak. Even as weekly and daily papers have gone out of business or been taken over by hedge funds and private equity firms keen to strip newsrooms to the bone, several legacy publications, such as the Philadelphia Inquirer and Salt Lake Tribune, are now owned by nonprofits, and new nonprofit outlets are proliferating—including ProPublica, the Marshall Project, and the Texas Tribune, where I serve as editor in chief. Local ownership has made a comeback in Los Angeles, Boston, and Minneapolis. Employment at digital-only publications has risen steadily. Digital subscriptions, philanthropy, and live events are promising streams of revenue. Predictions are always dangerous, but it seems highly unlikely that the future of journalism will meet the ideal set out by E.B. White in 1976, when he castigated an arrangement in which Xerox sponsored a long reported essay by Harrison E. Salisbury in the pages of Esquire. Such commercial entanglements are “an invitation to evil,” White warned. White was correct in arguing that a “ferocity of independence” is an essential trait for a great publication—a trait embodied, in his mind, by Harold Ross’s New Yorker. But White died in 1985, long before social media giants and Web search engines gobbled up all the advertising that once paid journalism’s bills. The economics of our industry are more challenging now, in ways that he could not have anticipated. What’s clear is that the days when a top editor could focus only on stories—not digital audience, workplace culture, buyouts and layoffs, or assertive unions—are gone for good. cjr

SE WELL cHAN is the editor in chief of the Texas Tribune—a nonprofit, nonpartisan digital publication founded in 2009. Before that, he was the editorial page editor of the Los Angeles Times and an editor at the New York Times.

SEWELL cHAN

The old days weren’t all that good— or at least they weren’t very good for very many people.

100

ECONOMICS

can journalists be mothers?

The Baby Bind BY M ARY ELLEN SCHOO NMA KE R

MARCH/AP RIL 1988 In 1967, less than a quarter of mothers with children under three were in the labor force; by 1987, more than half of mothers of toddlers went to work. Parental-leave policies were inconsistent; journalists often received only six weeks of recovery time after delivery.

couple of weeks after I had my first baby a friend called to see how I was doing. My husband chatted with her on the phone in the dining room—“Oh, she’s feeling great”—while I sobbed hysterically in the living room. He wasn’t lying: physically, I was okay. I was just on the verge of sinking into journalistic oblivion. My husband, who is also a writer, had another reason to celebrate besides our daughter’s arrival—his first assignment from The Village Voice. It was five years ago, unemployment was soaring, and he was about to start what turned out to be a front-page Labor Day piece on the sad odyssey of job hunting in New York with no skills. (One vague want ad called for “men (small).” He applied, only to be rejected because he was too big to clean the grease out of airconditioning ducts.) It was a dream assignment, but while he was going to be out reporting, I was going to be at home, alone for the first time in my life with a tiny baby, in this case one that cried until she turned purple. I was convinced that my career was over. My worst-case scenario was coming true: my husband would become a star, and I would spend the rest of my life trying to catch up. It’s easy to see now how ridiculous I was being, but at the time those feelings were real. I was overreacting, of course. But maybe my fears also had something to do with the nature of the news business. A woman has to prove herself from day one—that she’s tough enough, competitive enough, aggressive enough. She works those long, hard

MArY ELLEN ScHOONMAKEr

101

102

hours all those years, and then all of a sudden she decides to have a baby and it’s like slamming on the brakes. Jane Eisner, now associate editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s editorial page, was a city hall reporter when she became pregnant with her first child. She still hadn’t told anyone about her condition when she was asked to take on a special assignment that would have required a lot of work several months down the road. “I really would have loved to do it,” she says. “Instead, I blurted out, ‘But I’m going to have a baby.’ The editors said, ‘Oh.’ I went home and just cried.” She was so anxious to keep her hand in things that, during her first maternity leave, she did some stringing for Time. That sense of missing out, and of needing to prove they can still go the distance, drives some women to return to work very quickly after they’ve had their babies. Judi Hasson was a congressional reporter for United Press International when she had her son. She could have taken up to two years’ leave without pay but she chose not to. “I worked till the day I gave birth and came back nine weeks later,” says Hasson, who is now with the Gannett News Service in Washington. “It was my own need to feel I was still a journalist. Some of my male colleagues said, ‘How can you be a mother and come back?’ I wanted to show the world this wouldn’t interfere with my job as a professional. In retrospect, I could have done that four months later, too.” Sometimes the feeling of being out of it, of being sidelined, can linger for years. “I’m not in retirement,” says Laura Kiernan, who was a reporter for The Washington Post before moving to New Hampshire to raise her family. She taught and freelanced and then worked part time for the Post’s national desk before being hired last year as a reporter for The Boston Globe’s weekly New Hampshire section, a job she loves. But she says the demands of her two small children have slowed her pace considerably. She’s just trying to keep her head above water until they are in school and she can go at it full-tilt again. “I worry a lot about whether people will feel I’ve disappeared,” she says. “You have to maintain some degree of visibility. If you start to fade, you’re done for.” Almost every woman I interviewed for this story said she had experienced some sort of career-related stress in becoming a parent.

ECONOMICS

These women talked about all kinds of tensions and pressures, including the personal anxiety I experienced, the wrestling with ambition that can take a long time to resolve. Sometimes the worrying eventually proves unnecessary. Jane Eisner at the Inquirer returned from her first maternity leave to be named city hall bureau chief. Soon after, she was sent to London, the paper’s first mother to be named a foreign correspondent. After her second maternity leave, she was given charge of the op-ed page. “Having children hasn’t hurt my career,” she says, although she adds that there have been times when her career has taken a toll on her family life. But other women are not sure they will ever get back on the fast track. Melissa Dribben was hired by The record in Hackensack, New Jersey, when she was pregnant with her first child. She started work when the baby was five months old. “It was the most stressful period in my life,” she says. “I was starting a new job, covering meetings at night, getting home at two or three in the morning. I remember leaving for work, walking down the stairs, saying good-bye, and crying. But I was really ambitious. I wanted to get ahead, and it paid off. I got promoted quickly.” Now she has another child and the pull of her family is even greater. She works three days a week, sharing a full-time job with another reporter. “This is the biggest source of conflict in my life,” she says, “all those years of wanting a career, and now I want two things just as much. How little you can let your family compromise your ambition is the name of the game. I’m afraid I won’t get to where I want to get to, but I’m not willing to compromise my kids.”

ome of this stress, the “I’ll never win a Pulitzer” kind, is probably unavoidable. A lot of hardworking professional women in all kinds of fields have a hard time adjusting to the limits imposed by having children. At some point they come to terms with their priorities and their family needs and then get their working lives in order. But many of the stresses that were described to me—the kind that relate directly to what goes on in the office and go far beyond any individual worries about ambition—could be prevented. Some of these stresses are caused by what workplace experts call “the culture of the industry,” both the myths and the realities

MArY ELLEN ScHOONMAKEr

103

“You have to maintain some degree of visibility. If you start to fade, you’re done for.”

of how the journalism business is run in this country. And some of them are caused by newsroom policies, both official and unofficial, including those that are ostensibly made for the benefit of women but may actually do them more harm than good. This is new territory for many newspapers. Some of the women I talked to said they are the first women to have children at their papers, and it is their experiences, for better or worse, that are setting the precedents for the women who come after them. Other papers are literally booming with babies: half a dozen or more women may be pregnant in the newsroom at one time, as the women who entered the profession ten to fifteen years ago reach their middle to late thirties and decide to start families. But there isn’t always strength in those numbers. Editors may promote one reporter who comes back from maternity leave and demote another. They may allow one reporter to share a job and work part-time while forcing another to work nights. The issues of maternity leave and job status are a whole new battleground

for women who thought their biggest fights— breaking into the profession and proving their skills—were behind them. How accommodating is the American newsroom to new mothers? The three most important factors in keeping stress to a minimum seem to be an adequate leave, satisfactory child care, and being able to return to the same job or a comparable one that fits both the paper’s and the employee’s needs. From my small random sampling, I’ve come to the conclusion that a newspaper can be one of the best places for a new parent to work. It can also be one of the worst. There are papers that bend over backwards to help new parents feel happy and productive, and there are papers that are run like sweatshops. In between are the majority, places where the editors may not be slave drivers, but aren’t all that understanding either. Given the fact that papers are hiring women in greater numbers than ever before, women who are talented and ambitious and don’t plan to stop working if they have children, isn’t it in the papers’ best interest to

104

take some steps, having invested in these women in the first place, to keep them? “Forty percent of our hires over the past couple of years have been women,” says Arlene Morgan, deputy metro editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer. “Most of them are married. They are valuable and talented. You want to have them come back.”

t’s important to note first that maternity leave policies in general in this country are dismal. The United States is the only major industrialized nation that does not have some form of national, partially paid maternity-related benefits. Over 100 countries do, and nine European Community countries provide paid parental leave to both men and women. At home, almost all of the top American companies responding to a 1986 survey said they offered shortterm paid disability benefits, usually six to eight weeks following a normal birth. But only 52 percent said they offered any additional unpaid maternity leave. In fact, more may offer it, says Margaret Meiers, a senior associate at Catalyst, the research group that conducted the survey, but they may do so selectively. “If they like a woman and think she’s a good employee, they’ll give her a longer leave,” says Meiers. “If they don’t like her, they won’t.” I found that little solid research has been done on maternity benefits at newspapers— and there is an urgent need for reliable

JULY/AUGUST 1982

A Daily News diary

When the Tribune Company put the Daily News up for sale, it nearly went out of business. Mary Ann Giordano, a reporter for the paper, kept a diary on that period of excruciating uncertainty.

January 12: At night we have little to do but speculate, spread rumors, worry, and go over this thing over and over again. There are plans afoot between a few of us to take some action. January 14: Left work at 8 for Costello’s, where about forty people showed up to sit around and complain about the News’s management. There were some doomsayers, who are perfectly right

ECONOMICS

studies—but it’s safe to say that there is a wide range of paid and unpaid leaves. The New York Times, for example, offers a leave of up to six months, partially paid. So does The Sacramento Bee. The Austin, Texas, AmericanStatesman allows its employees to use whatever vacation and sick leave they have, but they are allowed to take only as much time as the doctor says they need. In general, it seems that a few lucky reporters and editors may be able to take up to a year or more off, with some of that time paid, depending on seniority and how much vacation and sick leave they use, while others are expected to be back at their desks as soon as six weeks after they deliver. A pregnant reporter at one small daily who told her editors she would be taking her full six weeks says they acted surprised. “They said, ‘You’re not going to take all that, are you? We’re pretty shorthanded.’ ” At another small paper, this one in California, the publisher told me proudly that her city editor had just come back from having a baby and was actually breast-feeding it on what she described as an “incredibly stressful” job. The editor was working nights and her husband was bringing the baby in to be nursed. This woman had been home for six weeks after the baby was born, the length of time she was allowed following delivery under the paper’s official maternity leave policy, the publisher said. However, she added that employees could take a leave of absence

in their assessment that newspapers are a dying business but who were finally booed down by the rest of us who asked, So what do we do, lie down and die? The decision was, we have to do something. The Committee to Save the Daily News is about to get active! February 4: Went out drinking with the gang. At the time our meeting was going on, a lot of people were being interviewed for ABC’s Nightline. It is so funny—we have all

gone from covering the news to making news, and I think most of us enjoy it. Too bad it is about such a sad subject. March 11: Our mood was not improved today when we read that Warner Communications had backed out. We’d been rooting for them. But other interested buyers came out today, including Joe Allbritton, Donald Trump, Arthur Levitt Jr., and John Dyson. Also, there are lots of rumors that various investors are raising money to start

MARY ELLEN SCHOONMAKER

105

beyond that of up to six months, depending on how long they felt they needed to be at home, their particular job, and the length of their service. In this way, she said, the leave could be tailored to both the new mother’s and the paper’s needs. (That sounds fine, but I wonder whether a less enlightened management might be tempted to use such discretionary leave to play favorites.) How long is the ideal maternity leave? Six weeks may be time enough for a physical recovery, but there are other considerations. What about the emotional needs of the mother and the child? And how many babies are sleeping through the night at six weeks? The Sun Herald, a daily in Biloxi, Mississippi, with a weekday circulation of 49,000 and a newsroom staff of twenty-four reporters, offers its pregnant employees up to four months’ leave, with at least part of that period paid. “We feel that’s enough time to recuperate and be with the newborn,” says personnel director Toni Dutruch. “By then, you’re adjusted and you’re getting more sleep. Six weeks is not enough time to come back. You won’t be happy or productive.” But six weeks is all that many journalists get. The woman who told me the following story was not complaining, although she had every reason to. She was doing her job the best she could, but I found the conditions she was working under this past winter shocking. She asked that her name not be used because she was afraid of losing her

their own papers once the Daily News folds.

paper’s doomed. I just hope it ends soon.

April 1: Trump has backed out, but it seems Allbritton has stepped in. He has a thirty-day option to buy. Thirty days for the deal to fall through, as I see it. My hunch is that of all the potential buyers he has the least chance of saving the News.

April 8: Reacting to Allbritton’s high demands, some union leaders approached—of all people—Rupert Murdoch and asked him to buy us. Allbritton responded by breaking off negotiations. Such a joke. I give us three weeks.

April 7: My prediction about Allbritton seems to be right— he’s asking for 40 percent cuts in all departments. The

April 12: Optimism is rising again. It seems Allbritton really wants the paper. Talks resumed with some unions.

job, which is a combination of editing and reporting at a paper with a circulation of under 15,000. I spoke to her when her baby was seven weeks old and she had been back to work one week. The first day back she worked ten hours; the second day, twelve hours. That week she worked six days. She said she was averaging three to five hours of sleep a night. And with such long hours and such a small baby, she was having trouble finding child care. “The baby’s only seven weeks old and I’m on the third babysitter,” she said. In fact, the baby was sick the day I talked to her, and the child’s grandmother, who lived nearby, had taken a day off from her job to take care of it. This woman is divorced, has two children, and needs to work, and she certainly hasn’t taken advantage of her situation. She has been at her present job seven years. “With my first baby, I worked till Friday and had her on Saturday,” she said. “The next time I worked till Friday and had the baby on Sunday.” She said she felt under a lot of pressure. “You have to be here. I think I’m overcompensating. But I feel they’re keeping watch. You have to show you can do it all.”

hen I started researching this story I had no particular leads on women in stressful situations. I just started calling papers at random, asking for anyone with a new baby or small

April 16: Got a breakdown of cuts Allbritton wants to see in our department. Total of 197 includes 48 reporters, 41 desk people, 17 copy editors, 20 people from photographic department. April 19: It has been more than seven weeks since I menstruated and there seems no logical reason for this. Went to my gynecologist and asked him why I’m going through menopause at twenty-five. He gave me an exam and told me my problem is probably stress.

April 27: A nice moment today—a nun wrote to tell us her order is praying for us and the Daily News. Her letter was posted on the bulletin board next to “Typesetting Jobs Available.” April 29: Had the old alcohol overdose stomach all night, then a bad hangover. Allbritton’s out of it. May 1: Headline today: “We’re Here to Stay.” I hope so.

106

children. Especially at small papers, it was as though I had tapped a vein, and the stories just poured out. That may be some indication of how widespread these situations are. A reporter I spoke to at a small southern daily resumed her job full-time only five weeks after her baby was born, covering a beat that takes in three rural counties and requires her to be on the road at least two days a week, six to eight hours at a time. She works at home with a computer and says she’s been able to arrange her schedule so that she is not exhausted and can spend time with her baby. As the first woman in her newsroom to become pregnant, this reporter says she felt under great pressure to set a precedent that showed she could handle it. She fought while she was still pregnant to keep her beat instead of being reassigned to a desk job, not only because she liked it but also because it gave her some degree of autonomy and a sense of control in her personal and professional life. “I was showing that my mind didn’t go dead, that I wasn’t putting up wallpaper instead of working, that I was responsible.” She says the biggest obstacle she was up against was “this macho attitude, that to be a good reporter everything must be second; husband and family are negligible. When you bring a child into that atmosphere you feel like a real freak. I tried so hard to make arrangements so that I would not be seen as performing poorly, so they couldn’t say, ‘See, if you get pregnant, you can’t perform.’ ” However, when the next reporter became pregnant last year the editor instituted a new policy that all pregnant women would be brought into in-city assignments, to minimize the paper’s liability. That second reporter was given a life-style assignment. “She had been covering government, politics, and crime,” says her co-worker. “Now, one of her jobs is working on wedding stories.” What about that macho attitude, that hardbitten Hello-sweetheart-get-me-rewrite image, the notion that the news waits for no one and a reporter must be ready to go anywhere anytime in search of a story? “In that case,” says Anna Padia, human rights coordinator for The Newspaper Guild, “don’t take a vacation or get sick. In fact, why not move into the damned plant? Just give up your whole life and live for the profession

ECONOMICS

twenty-four hours a day. There’s a mythology that’s been inculcated over the years into our minds and bloodstreams that we’re different. But journalists are human beings: fathers and mothers, churchgoers and PTA members. Firefighters, engineers, teachers, and doctors don’t give up those rights. We don’t owe our souls to the company store.” However, that line of thinking still prevails, Padia adds, and therefore the interruptions of pregnancy penalize women just for being female. “It’s a terrible conflict,” she says. Just how terrible a conflict is illustrated by the story of another woman who asked that I not use her name, even though she no longer works in journalism. She left her paper two years ago, but she still can’t talk about her experience without crying. She was city editor when she took her first three-month maternity leave, “some vacation and the rest unpaid,” in 1981. She was living-section editor when she became pregnant again, and it was then she learned that a 1978 federal law entitled her to include her accumulated sick leave, which amounted to several weeks, in her maternity leave. But she says when she asked management about it and then her union representative, she was told she couldn’t. She says the union steward told her, “That’s not what sick leaves are for.” She called a lawyer, and the paper then agreed to let her take it. But she believes she paid a price for asserting herself. When she was about to come back from the second leave, she says she was told her day editing job was no longer open and she would have to work nights. She was surprised, she says, because “there had been no criticism of my work performance before that.” Relying on a state law that guarantees women returning from maternity leave the same or a similar job, she again sought outside legal help and was given her old job, with a written agreement guaranteeing her daytime employment for one year. When the year was up, she was again offered nights and weekends, hours she says management knew she couldn’t work because her husband is out of town a lot. She chose to quit. “I had to choose between my family and work, and that’s when my career ended after six years,” she says. “I’m really bitter and hurt by it. Despite the attitude there, I loved

MArY ELLEN ScHOONMAKEr

107

The biggest obstacle she was up against: “This macho attitude, that to be a good reporter everything must be second; family is negligible.”

the work.” Because there is no other newspaper in her city, she feels shut out of her profession, and she misses it. “I’ve allowed myself to dream that, if the management at the paper changed, I’d approach them again.” Child care is another area where new parents do not get much help from their papers, although a small but growing number of businesses of all kinds are realizing that such help can pay off in lower absenteeism and better morale. While finding good, reliable child care is always a problem, it can be particularly hard for reporters and editors who work unpredictable hours. Janet Davey is one of only two reporters at The Daily Herald in Columbia, Tennessee (circulation 13,000), and she covers a lot of meetings in the afternoons and sometimes at night. One of her two young children goes to a day-care center, which closes at 5:30 p.m. “Most of the time, two hours before a night meeting I’m having a heart attack,” she says, “scrambling at the last minute to find a sitter. My husband is unreliable; he doesn’t like to do it.” If she is out sick, she gets paid, but if her children

are sick and she misses work, she doesn’t. “Sometimes, if they’re sick, I’ll get someone to watch them in the morning until eight. Then I’ll try to get in the office at six-thirty or seven a.m. to work for an hour or so. I can get a lot done then.”

n 1979, 34 percent of women with children under the age of one were in the workforce. By 1986, that figure had jumped to 52 percent. There are some signs that both society and the workplace are coming to terms with those numbers, although at a pace that makes a snail look like a jogger. A bill now before Congress would create a national family-leave policy, giving new parents up to ten weeks of unpaid leave in all companies with fifty or more employees. That’s not much help to people who can’t afford to go without a paycheck for that long, but at least it’s a beginning. There is also comprehensive child-care legislation under consideration on the Hill, including a bill introduced by none other than archconservative Senator Orrin Hatch.

108

ECONOMICS

The top women at many newspapers today are single or childless. can the same be said of the top men?

In the workplace women and a handful of men have begun to push in the last few years for arrangements that give them more time with their families—job-sharing, flexible hours, four-day work weeks, working from home—and some of this is beginning to be done at newspapers. At The record in Hackensack, New Jersey, four reporters, all women, share two full-time jobs, one in the business department and one in general news. The Daily Inter Lake, a small paper in Kalispell, Montana, has a husband-andwife team sharing a reporting job. And the Post-Dispatch in St. Louis has William and Margaret Freivogel, who jointly share the title of assistant Washington bureau chief. Whoever is not working at the office is at home with the couple’s four children. They have been sharing a job since 1980, when they approached the paper with the idea, thinking it wouldn’t go anywhere. But management, says Bill Freivogel, “immediately saw the potential of a good deal for the company.” In essence, the Post-Dispatch got two good reporters for the price of one.

There are all kinds of good deals waiting to be worked out. Newspapers have more flexible hours than nine-to-five companies and the computer technology to allow some reporters to work from home. Given the range of jobs in the newsroom, there’s also plenty of opportunity for new parents and their editors to sit down and work out a schedule or a job definition that fits the needs of both. Judith Havemann was deputy national editor at The Washington Post when she left to have twins. When she came back, the paper created a new reporting beat for her, covering the Office of Management and Budget and another federal agency, which suited her time needs better. At the Detroit Free Press, Karen Schneider, a political reporter and editor returning from a leave, asked to work one weekend day as part of her five-day week, so she would only have to have a sitter four days. The paper obliged. “Newspapers have a golden opportunity to be leaders in policies for parents,” she says. “And that kind of consideration will pay off in terms of loyalty and dedication.”

MArY ELLEN ScHOONMAKEr

Some people believe the next few years will see big changes in newsrooms as the next generation of managers takes over, men and especially women who are more attuned to the needs of working parents. But Jean Gaddy Wilson, a journalism professor at the University of Missouri who has done extensive research on women in media, is not so sure things will change soon. “Only thirteen percent of the directing editors in the country”—those who make news decisions— “are women,” she says. “And that is changing at the rate of less than one percent a year. At that rate, when women achieve parity in editorships with their membership in the population, it will be the year 2055.”

ust having women in top management is no guarantee that newsroom policies will change, Wilson says. “I’ve sat in on seminars with a lot of top women who have gotten there without having children. When the conversation turns to day care or maternity leave, they don’t want to hear about it. They want to change the subject, to talk about something ‘that really matters.’ The news business is predominantly a male structure, and those who have made it within a male structure have those values. The feminist writer Shulamith Firestone said we will only have equal access [to power] when we stop bearing children.” But women are not going to stop having children, even though some, perhaps many, women in the news business up to now have sacrificed their personal lives for successful careers. The top women at many newspapers today are single or childless; can the same be said of the top men? The women I spoke to who are having children and returning to work see no reason why they can’t have what men have had all along—both a family and a fulfilling job. The women, however, are still the ones bearing the brunt of making that radical change. In an ideal world, it seems to me, fathers would assume an equal risk to their careers. A handful of male journalists have taken time off from their papers to be with their babies, and a few, like Bill Freivogel at the Post-Dispatch, have actually slowed down their careers to play a bigger part in family life. “Most men I talk to will say, ‘That’s terrific, but are you getting as much as you want to out of work?’ ” Freivogel says. “The

109

women will say, ‘Gee, I’d like to do something like that.’ ” But few men in any field take more than a few days off when they become fathers, even when their companies offer official paternity leaves. In fact, the leave policy may be only window-dressing, not meant for those on their way up. “If you think there’s resistance to women taking time off,” says a lawyer who works on parental-leave issues, “the resistance to men who take time off is extraordinary. Men have been told, ‘If you do that, you’ll never get promoted.’ Some are belittled and humiliated.” I worked with a reporter once who sat at his desk and pined for his newborn son, who came in late and often slipped out early to be with him. But it seems that most new fathers, for one reason or another, bypass the job stresses and career conflicts that new mothers face. “I think it’s just easier for men,” says Karen Schneider at the Detroit Free Press. Her husband is the paper’s television critic. He travels a lot and misses the children, she says, but he seems to take this in stride. “Men just plow ahead. They have no experience of radically modifying their lives for children.” I spoke to a woman at another newspaper who had been a reporter before her baby was born, but was now on the copy desk so she could work part-time. Her husband, meanwhile, had been promoted to assistant managing editor at the same paper. She didn’t sound upset. In fact, she said she was having too much fun with her child to worry about her career. But I wonder if, in darker moments, she doesn’t resent it. Maybe a little? Maybe a lot. cjr

MArY E LLEN ScHOONMAKEr, a former editor at CJR, was for twenty years an editorial writer and opinion columnist at the Bergen record; later, she became a journalism educator. She has contributed to the New York Times, the Village Voice, and Mother jones, among other publications.

110

EcONOMIcS

The miracle Le Monde wrought

Balance of Power

AN INTErVIEW WITH jE AN ScHWOEB EL

SUM MEr 1970 In 1951, Le Monde, in France, became the first publication to institute a shared management plan with editorial employees. By 1970, journalists elsewhere were campaigning for similar arrangements— employees of Le Figaro, also in France; members of a “free communications group,” in Britain; and others around the world.

FOr MOST OF A cENTUrY, technology has been changing the physical profile of journalism. Now, almost unnoticed, a companion revolution has begun. Still embryonic but clearly irreversible, it has to do with who within a journalistic institution can raise basic questions about it and receive meaningful answers; the extent to which journalists shall be free to exercise professional skills within corporate structures they do not own; and, ultimately, the question of whether distinguished, sophisticated journalism can thrive in an organization in which fundamental editorial arrangements are determined by fiat. In the interview below, Jean Schwoebel, urbane, thoughtful, diplomatic editor of Le Monde and architect of its pioneering staff-controlled management structure, describes his historic experience in Europe. The report following it discusses the increasingly significant “reporter power” movement in the US.

TK crEDIT

AUTHOr TK

111

112

The Society of Journalists is the vehicle through which staff control of Le Monde is exercised. How did it begin and why? Two factors produced the Society of Journalists. We had the historic revolution in France; we have this tradition. Then there was the liberation of France in World War II. The Occupation was very hard. Many papers had accepted the law imposed by Occupation forces. So at the end of the war there was a general idea that the press was not valuable, because it had collaborated with the Germans. So there was a law after the liberation to expropriate—confiscate—properties of editors of the old press, and their estates were put in charge of national societies. The idea was that we were to create a new press. At the end of the war we had big illusions and big hopes, and we thought we could keep the press free of economic control. We could see that freedom of the press must not only be freedom from oppression by the State; the State in a way is an expression of the democratic majority. To a certain degree, the press was in control of political parties, with a degree of protection against central power, but we also could see that economic progress depends more and more on very large investments and freedom of expression is given to people who can assemble formidable capital. So in a modern society freedom of the press is not only a question of structures which give freedom to journalists in relation to political powers, but also to economic powers. In the Resistance that idea was commonly accepted. That was a very revolutionary period. Of course, we live in a capitalist country, so these ideas were progressively abandoned. More and more the “new” owners have changed their minds, and they are exactly like their predecessors. Except for one—Le Monde. Le Monde was directed by Hubert BeuveMéry, who had been asked to found a newspaper with the property of the old Le Temps. He had a very high conception of the press. When he was obliged for many reasons to submit his resignation in 1951 there was a rebellion on the editorial board. The editorial staff was a very strong force because Le Monde practiced a very high level of journalism, and its quality depended very much on us. Influential elements in France—the universities and the elite—were waiting for a declaration from us. The thought that Le Monde would have any other direction was

ECONOMICS

“If you want to exert influence in a capitalist country there is only one way, and that is to have part of the ownership.”

a kind of scandal. So we were in a good position with the owners, and in 1951 we obtained the first agreement—it was not the last— entering into ownership. Why did the editorial staff insist on sharing ownership? If you want to exert influence in a capitalist country there is only one way, and that is to have part of the ownership; the rest is without value. It was a good time to ask for part of the ownership. The capital of the country was very low. The Liberation could take over such estates. It was something of a special situation. In Europe the status of journalists is very low because we work in a commercial framework. And what is the law of commerce? It is to make maximum profit. And what is the way to maximum profit? It is to have a maximum of receipts and a minimum of expenses. If there is any reduction it is in expenses. So in general the papers of France have very low-paid journalists. Because they don’t pay them, of course, the journalists are not of the quality required in view of their profession.

JEAN SCHWOEBEL

We say that is a stupidity and a danger to the future. We have the conviction that in modern societies progress depends on the high quality of citizens. To have a high quality of citizens you must have a high quality of education. It is a very common thing now to learn to read. Every country knows we must free the people of illiteracy. We must move to a higher level now. We must have citizens able to choose representative people in any field of activity. And they can do so only if the citizens know the real facts—the factors of every situation. If you don’t have that it is a caricature of democracy. That is why we say that only a society which has highly qualified journalists can progress. We contend that present structures do not offer to citizens the guarantee of a high quality of journalism. And so this is an idea which is more and more being adopted by journalists in France. What are the prospects for shared management on other French newspapers? Thirty-two societies have been created, within all the big papers of France. They have been created in the hope of having the same arrangement we have at Le Monde. They have been opposed systematically by the managers. So they have federated, and I am president of this federation, to try to act in the political field, to act on the Deputies, the Senators, the Government. We were on the point last year of winning the battle to pass a law. We had many friends. DeGaulle was playing his cards politically. As with Algeria he tried to make compromises. He was not prepared to go as far as we were. Was a bill introduced? One of the main reasons why deGaulle fell was this question. All the conservatives were fanatically opposed to any kind of participation, because in France there is a very old tradition of management authority. In a way I think the United States is much more advanced on the question of cooperation and work in teams. That tradition does not exist in France, and that in my view is a paramount question. If we don’t change on the question of the authority of middle age, we cannot change much else. We have a very strong concentration of that kind. So a commission was created by the Government to study our ideas, but with the departure of deGaulle and the reaction of the managers and owners the issue has been tabled.

113

S EPT EMB ER /OCTOB ER 1991

The Pain of Being Terminated

When, in 1986, General Electric regained control of NBC after more than fifty years, the company embarked on a series of cost-cutting measures that closed bureaus and eliminated employees. John Long, an editor at NBC News in Miami, was among ten people who were laid off when that bureau was shuttered, in July 1991. He and his wife had two daughters in college and a twelve-year-old son. The news hit me like a ton of bricks. I’ve been here a long time, doing a job I love. Now I have to put together a résumé. When I got hired at NBC, I never even filled out an application. I’m a victim of my location. If I was in Washington, with my seniority I wouldn’t have to worry about it—for now. But eventually it’s going to hit everybody. In network news you’ll have an anchor and that’s about it. They’re going to gather their reports from affiliates and other sources. I think NBC as we know it structurally will be gone. But even if you want to change your approach to newsgathering, how can you get rid of experience? I don’t understand it. This is all I’ve done for over twenty-five years. Now I’m faced with trying to get another job, at fifty-three. I don’t care where you go, when a fifty-three-year-old man applies for a job, they’re going to be hesitant about hiring you. Although I’m physically sound, they’re still going to say, how many years can this guy give us? I think the real loser here is the news viewer. We brought you that man on the moon. I was at Mount St. Helens when it blew. I was with Sadat when he got killed. We were in the earthquakes in Salvador and Mexico City. We are those people who for all these years have been part of what you at home turn your TV on to see. —As told to cassandra Tate

114

If deGaulle had not fallen would you have had a realistic chance? It would have been difficult, but we were on our way. But we will have our day. Already there is a tendency to come back to our conception because it is necessary for the future, and because it has had an impact on countries around us. I have been to Germany, to Italy, to England, to Belgium, and to Spain, and I see everywhere the same state of humiliation, of dissatisfaction among journalists over feudalistic power. In fact, at Le Monde we have succeeded not only in quality of information but in quality of administration. And that is very important. We did not surprise the industry on the first point, but on the second, we have a profitable enterprise, and the discipline is exceptional because we are conscious of the important questions of what is best for the structure, for the organization, for its ethics. But the daily administration we do not determine at all. How successful is Le Monde as a business? Le Monde has high profits. It has a modern mechanical plant. Its circulation is high. These are the reasons why our example has been followed in Germany. We were able to give them all the materials and concepts. We already had twenty years of experience—and not abstract experience. It was experience in the responsibilities of a major enterprise. We know the realities of an enterprise. That gives us real force. That is why in Italy last year I was invited to speak to Catholic journalists, and two months later, to all the journalists of Italy. You have named newspapers and a magazine. could this apply to television also? Television is another problem. The Society of Journalists was contacted two years ago about TV, but the Department of Television has been in chaos. So there is no more a Society of Television. The TV situation is very difficult, because it is in a sense directed by the State. How does the Society of journalists function? We are not like the American Newspaper Guild. We decided first to be a “commercial” society. Now we are a civil society. We do not want to operate like capitalists. We do not want part of the profits. We want part of the ownership not for the profits—that is for the investors—but only for the juridical rights the property gives. As soon as we leave the paper we have no more rights. The Society of Journalists has an assembly and a council of administration. We try to unite the journalists in a common conception. To unite journalists is very difficult. You succeed only if you pick very solid, very reasonable arguments. And in my view we have united on very sensible, responsible problems. There has been an epidemic of criticism of the news media in the US. If your success were duplicated there, might there be fewer such criticisms? We have had no relations with American journalists on this question. But in my view we are all, of whatever country, journalists, with common responsibilities. I think that in the future the journalism profession will be most important. It is not a question of nationalism—of nations. We must have a solidarity among journalists to improve their status. Political men may be very authentic men, but

ECONOMICS

they are dependent in large degree on the man who elects them, and it is on journalists’ courage and quality that we depend to raise the quality of citizens. Our profession must push the legislative man to courage, because he is so dependent. So in a way we have to sustain him. Since Le Monde is an elite newspaper, should we assume by analogy that the most likely place for your idea to take root in the US would be on an elite or quality newspaper? Very possibly it could happen someday at the New York Times, christian Science Monitor, and maybe the Washington Post. But I know perfectly well that conditions are different in America. You in the States are advanced in something which is necessary— efficiency, energy, and so on. But maybe you are slow to realize that the real cause of chaos in the future involves a dimension beyond efficiency. Your journalists are much dependent on a society which still believes much in profitability—which is necessary. I think the view of profits, of commerce, in American society in a certain measure represents progress; in another way, not. I believe sincerely that it is much more difficult for American journalists than for us because in such a society as yours it is not regarded as a scandal that economic processes control the press. In European societies it is looked on as a scandal that economic processes control the press. In my view, control of the press by economic processes is completely anti-American. In ten years I am sure this philosophy will have taken root in America. I say that not only journalists have a right, but clerks or workers have a right to press for their rights. But journalists are different. We are the defenders of truth. Now progress is a question of dialogue. We are at the end of a certain kind of journalism—of magisterial journalism—and of a certain kind of journalist: the magisterial journalist. And we must accept the dialogue. cjr

POrTFOLIO

GULF WAr rEPOrT

A US officer directing an Iraqi woman to a medical tent, with an American TV crew in tow, 1991. (Photo by Abbas/Magnum)

115

116

ECONOMICS

Most readers won’t pay for news. But if we move quickly, maybe enough of them will

Build the Wall BY DAV ID SIMON

o all of the bystanders reading this, pardon us. The true audience for this essay narrows necessarily to a pair of notables who have it in their power to save high-end journalism—two newspaper executives who can rescue an imploding industry and thereby achieve an essential civic good for the nation. It’s down to them. The rest of the print journalism world is in slash-and-burn mode, cutting product and then wondering why the product won’t sell, rushing to give away what remains online and wondering further why that content is held by advertisers to be valueless. The mode is full-bore panic. And yet these two individuals, representing as they do the two fundamental institutions that sit astride the profession, still have a card to play, and here’s a shard of good news: it’s the only card that ever really mattered. Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Katharine Weymouth, publishers of The New York Times and The Washington Post, are at the helms of two organizations trying to find some separate peace with the digital revolution, though both papers have largely failed to do so, damaging their own still-formidable institutions and, on a deeper level, eviscerating more vulnerable regional newspapers and newspapering as a whole. Yet incredibly, they delay, even though every day of inertia means another two dozen reporters somewhere are shown the door by a newspaper chain, or another foreign bureau

JU LY/AU GU ST 20 09 As of 2007, the Wall Street journal was charging for its online edition; the New York Times ended an experiment with TimesSelect, which charged for access to some articles. The year 2008 brought a decline in advertising revenue and circulation; by 2009, the Times was considering putting up a new paywall, though the Washington Post and The Guardian remained strongly opposed to the idea.

DAV I D S I M O N

117

closes, or another once-precise and competent newsroom decides it will make do without a trained city editor, an ombudsman, or a fully staffed copy desk. This then, is for Mr. Sulzberger and Ms. Weymouth: Content matters. And you must find a way, in the brave new world of digitization, to make people pay for that content. If you do this, you still have a product and there is still an industry, a calling, and a career known as professional journalism. If you do not find a way to make people pay for your product, then you are—if you choose to remain in this line of work—delusional.

I know that content wants to be free on the Internet. I know that the horse was long ago shown the barn door and that, belatedly, the idea of creating a new revenue stream from online subscriptions seems daunting and dangerous. I know that commentary—the froth and foam of print journalism—sells itself cheaply and well on thousands of blogs. I know that the relationships between newspapers and online aggregators—not to mention The Associated Press and Reuters—will have to be revisited and revised. True, all true. Most of all, I know that here you are being individually asked to consider taking a bold, risk-laden stand for content—that antitrust

118

considerations prohibit the Times and the Post, not to mention Rupert Murdoch or the other owners, from talking this through and acting in concert. Would that every U.S. newspaper publisher could meet in a bathroom somewhere and talk bluntly for fifteen minutes, this would be a hell of a lot easier. And yes, I know that if one of you should try to go behind the paywall while the other’s content remains free, then, yes, you would be destroyed. All that is apparent. But also apparent is the fact that absent a radical revisiting of the dynamic between newspapering and the Internet, there will be little cohesive, professional, first-generation journalism at the state and local level, as your national newspapers continue to retrench and regional papers are destroyed outright. You must act. Together. On a specific date in the near future—let’s say September 1 for the sheer immediacy of it—both news organizations must inform readers that their Web sites will be free to subscribers only, and that while subscription fees can be a fraction of the price of having wood pulp flung on doorsteps, it is nonetheless a requirement for acquiring the contents of the news organizations that spend millions to properly acquire, edit, and present that work. No half-measures, either. No TimesSelect program that charges for a handful of items and offers the rest for free, no limited availability of certain teaser articles, no bartering with aggregators for a few more crumbs of revenue through microbilling or pennies-onthe-dollar fees. Either you believe that what The New York Times and The Washington Post bring to the table every day has value, or you don’t. You must both also individually inform the wire-service consortiums that unless they limit membership to publications, online or off, that provide content only through paid subscriptions, you intend to withdraw immediately from those consortiums. Then, for good measure, you might each make a voluntary donation—let’s say $10 million—to a newspaper trade group to establish a legal fund to pursue violations of copyright, either by online aggregators or large-scale blogs, much in the way other industries based on intellectual property have fought to preserve their products. And when the Justice Department lawyers arrive, briefcases in hand, to ask why America’s two national newspapers did these things in concert—resulting in a sea change within newspapering as one regional newspaper after another followed suit in pursuit of fresh, lifesaving revenue—you can answer directly: We never talked. Not a word. We read some rant in the columbia journalism review that made the paywall argument. Blame the messenger.

ruth is, a halting movement toward the creation of an online subscription model already exists; at this writing, internal discussions at both the Times and the Post are ongoing, according to sources at both papers. And one small, furtive, and cautious meeting of newspaper executives took place in Chicago in May to explore the general idea of charging for online distribution of news. As for Rupert Murdoch, his rethought decision not to freely offer The Wall Street journal online speaks volumes, as do his recent trial balloons about considering an online subscription model for less unique publications. Where the Times and the Post lead, Murdoch and, ultimately, every desperate and starving newspaper chain will simply follow. Why? Because the need to create a new revenue stream from the twenty-first

ECONOMICS

Either you believe that what The New York Times and The Washington Post bring to the table every day has value, or you don’t.

DAV I D S I M O N

119

century’s information-delivery model is, belatedly, apparent to many in the industry. But no one can act if the Times and the Post do not; the unique content of even a functional regional newspaper—state and municipal news, local sports and culture—is insufficient to demand that readers pay online. But add to that the national and international coverage from the national papers that would no longer be available on the Internet for free but could be provided through participation in the news services of the Times and the Post and, finally, there is a mix of journalism that justifies a subscription fee. Time is the enemy, however, and the wariness and caution with which the Times and the Post approach the issue reveal not only how slow industry leaders have been to accurately assess the realities, but how vulnerable one national newspaper is to the other. Should the Times go behind a pay curtain while the Post remains free, or vice versa, the result would be a short-term but real benefit to the newspaper that fails to act, and fiscal bleeding for the newspaper attempting to demand recompense for work that is elsewhere being provided free of charge. Neither the Times nor the Post can do this alone. Will it work? Is there enough demand for old-line, high-end journalism in the age of new media? Will readers pay for what they have already accepted as free? And can industry leaders claw their way back in time to the fateful point when they mistook the Internet as a mere advertising opportunity for their product? Perhaps, though the risks are not spread equally. Given the savage cutting that has been under way at regional, chain-owned newspapers over the last decade or more, it may be too late for some metro dailies; they may no longer have enough legitimate, unique content to compel their readership to pay. But for the Times and the Post—entities that are still providing the lion’s share of journalism’s national, international, and cultural relevance—their reach has never been greater. The proof is that while online aggregation and free newspaper Web sites have combined to batter paid print circulation figures, more people are reading the product of America’s newspapers than ever before. Certainly more of them are reading the Times (nearly 20 million average unique visitors monthly) and the Post (more than 10 million

monthly unique visitors), though they are doing it online and not paying for the privilege. And tellingly, the Times—its product still unmatched in print or online by other mainstream publications or anything that new media has yet offered—has transformed its print circulation into a profit center for the first time in years, merely by jacking up the price, with newsstand prices rising in June to $2 and up to $6 on Sunday. Clearly, the product still moves. But to what purpose, when more and more readers rightly identify the immediate digitized version as superior, yet pay nothing for that version, and online advertising simply doesn’t deliver enough revenue? If the only way to read the Times is to buy the Times, online or off, then readers who clearly retain a desire for that product will reach for their wallets. And those comfortable acquiring their news at a keyboard will be happy to pay much less than they do for home delivery. No doubt some mavens of new media who have read this far have spittle in the corners of their mouths at the thought of the dying, taildragging dinosaurs of mainstream journalism resurrecting themselves by making the grand tool of the revolution—the Internet— less free. There is no going backward, they will declare, affronted by the idea that a victory already claimed can even be questioned. The newspaper is all but dead, they will insist. Long live the citizen journalist. Not so fast. While their resentment and frustration with newspapers—given the industry’s reduced editorial ambitions—are justified, their reasoning and conclusions are not. A little history: For the first thirty years of its existence as America’s primary entertainment medium, television was—after the initial purchase of the set itself—provided at no cost to viewers, instead subsidized by lucrative ad revenues. The notion of Americans in 1975 being asked to pay a monthly bill for their television consumption would have seemed farcical. Yet in the ensuing thirty years, we have become a nation that shells out $60, $70, or $120 in monthly cable fees; indeed, whole vistas of programming exist free of advertising revenue, subsidized entirely by subscriptions. How did this happen? Again, content is all. The move to the pay-cable model was preceded by an expansive effort to create additional programming

120

to justify the upgrade from network fare to multichannel packaging. In the beginning, some of that new content amounted to little more than feature-film purchases, additional sports, and twenty-four-hour news and weather. But ultimately, the quantitative increase in programming was accompanied by a qualitative improvement in television fare. You paid more, you got more: HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, and, ultimately, a string of niche channels catering to specific audiences and interests. One can critique American TV however ruthlessly one wishes, but the industry is doing something right. More channels, more programming, more revenue—indeed, a revenue stream where none had existed. By contrast, we have American newspapering, an industry that a quarter century ago was—pound for pound—as lucrative as television, with Wall Street commanding profit margins of 25 and 30 percent. As with television, circulation was accepted as a loss leader, strongly subsidized so that the money it cost to deliver content was more than made up by advertising dollars. But unlike television, in which industry leaders were constantly reinvesting profits in research and development, where a new technology like cable reception would be

S EPT EMBER/OCTOB ER 1976

What E.B. White Told Xerox

ECONOMICS

contemplated for all its potential and opportunity, the newspapering world was content to send its treasure to Wall Street, appeasing analysts and big-ticket shareholders. There was no reinvestment in programming, no intelligent contemplation of new and transformational circulation models, no thought beyond maximized short-term profit. Incredibly, and in direct contrast to the growth of television, the remaining monopoly newspapers in American cities—roped together in unwieldy chains and run by men and women who had, by and large, been reared in boardrooms rather than newsrooms—spent the last of their profitable days cutting product, scaling back news holes, shedding veteran reporters, and reducing the scope of coverage. Hiring freezes and buyouts were ongoing in the early and mid-1990s, all of this happening amid the unspoken assumptions that the advertising base was everything, that content didn’t really matter, that news was the stuff troweled into the columns next to the display ads, that there was more profit producing a half-assed, mediocre paper than a good one. In the 1970s, American auto manufacturing was complicit in its own marginalization through exactly the same mindset: Why not

The Xerox Corporation ventured into sponsorship of print journalism this year with an investment of $170,000 in a magazine “special”—$55,000 in fee and expenses to Harrison E. Salisbury for a twenty-three-page article, “Travels Through America,” and $115,000 in advertising to Esquire. Although Xerox, Esquire, and the writer all professed satisfaction with the arrangement, a distant voice was raised in the letter columns of The Ellsworth (Maine) American. The letter might have been little noted had its author not been E.B. White of North Brooklin, essayist and senior statesman of American letters. His protest led to an invitation to him from W.B. Jones, Xerox’s director of communications operations, to present the argument more fully. This White did. This text, which appears in Letters of E.B. White,

DAV I D S I M O N

121

churn out Pacers and Gremlins and Vegas, providing cheap, shoddy vehicles that would be rapidly replaced with newer cheap, shoddy vehicles? What would captive American consumers do? Buy a car from Japan? Germany? South Korea? Well, yes, as it turns out. But the analogy doesn’t quite capture the extraordinary incompetence exhibited by the newspaper industry. After all, a Toyota is a good car and all that was required for Detroit to begin its agonizing decline was for consumers to be offered a legitimate choice. In the newspaper industry, however, the fledgling efforts of new media to replicate the scope, competence, and consistency of a healthy daily paper have so far yielded little in the way of genuine competition. A blog here, a citizen journalist there, a news Web site getting under way in places where the newspaper is diminished—some of it is quite good, but none of it so far begins to achieve consistently what a vibrant newspaper, staffed with competent, paid beat reporters and editors, once offered. New-media entities are not yet able to truly cover—day after day—the society, culture, and politics of cities, states, and nations. And until new models emerge that are capable of paying reporters and editors to do such work—in effect becoming online

is presented with the permission of Harpercollins and the White estate. The press in our free country is reliable and useful not because of its good character but because of its great diversity. As long as there are many owners, each pursuing his own brand of truth, we the people have the opportunity to arrive at the truth and to dwell in the light. The multiplicity of ownership is crucial. It’s only when there are few owners, or, as in a government-controlled press, one owner, that the truth becomes elusive and the light fails. For a citizen in our free society, it is an enormous privilege and a wonderful protection to have access to hundreds of periodicals, each peddling its own belief. There is safety in numbers: the papers expose each other’s follies and peccadillos, correct

newspapers with all the gravitas this implies—they are not going to get us anywhere close to professional journalism’s potential. Detroit lost to a better, new product; newspapers, to the vague suggestion of one.

eyond Mr. Sulzberger and Ms. Weymouth—and yes, get cracking, you two; September comes fast—there is, in retrospect, a certain wonderment that so many otherwise smart people in newspapering could have so mistaken the Internet and its implications. A lot has been written on this phenomenon and more will follow, but three factors are worth noting—if only because of their relevance to the online subscription model that is clearly required: First, there is the familiar industrial dynamic in which leaders raised in one world are taken aback to find they have underestimated the power of an emerging paradigm. When I left my newsroom in 1995, the Internet was a mere whisper, but even five years later, as its potential was becoming a consideration in every other aspect of American life, those in command of The Baltimore Sun were explaining the value of their free Web site in these terms: this is advertising for the newspaper. Young readers will see what we do by “surfing the Web” and finding our site, and they will read some, and then settle down and buy the newspaper. Looking back, it sounds comical. Absent the buyouts and layoffs and lost coverage of essential issues, it would be buggy-whip-maker funny. But as it stands, the misapprehension of men and women who spent their lives believing in the primacy of newsprint is as tragic as the strategists who built battleships even after Billy Mitchell used air power to bomb one to the ocean floor in 1921. Regardless, it was industry-wide in newsrooms. On the business side, they were a little busy hurling profits at Wall Street to pay much attention.

each other’s mistakes, and cancel out each other’s biases. The reader is free to range around in the whole editorial bouillabaisse and explore it for the one clam that matters—the truth. When a large corporation or a rich individual underwrites an article in a magazine, the picture changes: the ownership of that magazine has been diminished, the outline of the magazine has been blurred. In the case of the Salisbury piece, it was as though Esquire had gone on relief, was accepting its first welfare payment, and was not its own man any more. Whenever money changes hands, something goes along with it—an intangible something that varies with the circumstances. It would be hard to resist the suspicion that Esquire feels indebted to Xerox, that Mr. Salisbury feels indebted to both, and that the

ownership, or sovereignty, of Esquire has been nibbled all around the edges. Sponsorship in the press is an invitation to corruption and abuse. The temptations are great, and there is an opportunist behind every bush. A funded article is a tempting morsel for any publication—particularly for one that is having a hard time making ends meet. A funding assignment is a tempting dish for a writer, who may pocket a much larger fee than he is accustomed to getting. And sponsorship is attractive to the sponsor himself. There are a thousand reasons for someone’s wishing to buy his way into print, many of them unpalatable, all of them to some degree self-serving. Buying and selling space in news columns could become a serious disease of the press. If it reached epidemic proportions, it could destroy the press. —E.B. White

122

Second, the industry leaders on both the business and editorial sides came of age in an environment in which circulation had long been a loss leader, when newspapers never charged readers what it actually cost to get the product to their doorstep. Advertising, not content, was all. This specific dynamic maximized everyone’s blindness to the real possibilities of a subscription model. Every reader who can be induced to accept an online subscription to a newspaper—at even a half or a third the price of doorstep delivery—represents the beginning of a new and quite profitable revenue stream. For example, if The Baltimore Sun’s product isn’t available in any other fashion than through subscription—online or off—and if there is no profit to be had in delivering the paper product to homes at existing rates, then by all means, jack up those rates—raise hard-copy prices and drive as many readers as possible online, where you charge less, but at a distinct profit. Yes, you would lose readers. But consider: 10 percent of the existing 210,000 Baltimore Sun readers, for example, who pay a subscription rate less than half the price of home delivery, or roughly $10, would represent about $2.5 million a year. Absent the cost of trucks, gas, paper, and presses, money like that represents the beginnings of a solid revenue stream. In the same fashion, the first handful of subscribers to HBO watched bad movies and boxing, but as the revenue grew, it paid for original programming and, ultimately, a vast expansion of product. First, someone had to dream it. At newspapers, no one did. Newspaper dreams of the last fifty years involved luscious department-store display ads and fat classified sections—visions that can no longer be. Last, and perhaps most disastrous, the rot began at the bottom and it didn’t reach the highest rungs of the profession until far too much damage had been done. As early as the mid-1980s, the civic indifference and contempt of product inherent in chain ownership was apparent in many smaller American markets. While this was discussed in some circles, usually as a matter of mild rumination, little was done by the industry to address a dynamic by which men in Los Angeles or Chicago or New York, at the behest of Wall Street, determined what sort of journalism would be practiced in Baltimore, Denver, Hartford, or Dallas. If you happened to labor at a newspaper that was ceding its editorial ambition to the price-per-share, it may have been agony, but if you were at the Times, the Post, The Wall Street journal, or the Los Angeles Times, you were insulated. As the Internet arrived, profit margins were challenged and buyouts began at even the largest, most viable monopoly papers in regional markets. But only when the disease reached their own newsrooms did it really matter to the big papers. Last year at The Washington Post, the paper’s first major buyout arrived at about the time of its six Pulitzer victories. The day the prizes were announced, newsroom staffers publicly predicted that such winning journalism would likely not be replicated at the Post in an era of cutbacks. This, they moaned, might be the newspaper’s last great prize haul. But of course the buyout of one hundred reporters at the Post, while painful and damaging, represented a bit more than a 10 percent reduction in force. At that point, the loss of the same number of reporters at The Baltimore Sun would have been a 30 percent reduction. The Sun, at this point, has had about eight rounds

ECONOMICS

of buyouts and layoffs, beginning well before the arrival of the Internet, dropping the editorial staff from 500 to 160. Given that kind of carnage, there was no need for the Post to have any prize-based worries. In the end, the Times, the Post, and the journal will be taking up more seats at the Pulitzer luncheon, not fewer. With whom, after all, do they think they are still competing? The cancer devouring journalism began somewhere below the knee, and by the time the disease reached the self-satisfied brain of the Washington and New York newsrooms, the prognosis was far worse. Or to employ another historical metaphor: when they came for the Gannett papers, I said nothing, because I was not at a Gannett paper.

or the industry, it is later than it should be; where a transition to online pay models would once have been easier with a healthy product, now the odds for some papers are long. But given the timeline, here are a few possible outcomes, if the Times and the Post go ahead and build that wall. First scenario: The Times and the Post survive, their revenue streams balanced by stillconsiderable print advertising, the bump in the price of home delivery and newsstand sales, and, finally, a new influx of cheap yet profitable online subscriptions. And reassured that they can risk going behind the paywall without local readers getting free national, international, and cultural reporting from the national papers, and having seen that the paid-content formula can work, most metro dailies will follow suit. As they do, they re-emphasize that which makes them unique: local coverage, local culture, local voices—coupled with wire-service offerings from the national papers otherwise available only through paid sites. Some of the chain dailies may well make the mistake of taking the fresh revenue and rushing it back to Wall Street. We need to worry that although readers, like television viewers, might be convinced to pay online for a strong, unique product, there is little in the last twenty years to suggest that newspaper chains would reinvest to create such a product. For those papers, it’s likely that a thin online subscriber base will reflect the hollowness of their product. But in our scenario, others do reinvest in their newsrooms, hiring back some of

DAV I D S I M O N

123

the talent lost. Coverage expands, becomes more local, even neighborhood-based, which in turn leads to more online subscriptions, as well as additional online advertising lured by those subscribers. Second scenario: In those cities where regional papers collapse, the vacuum creates an opportunity for new, online subscriptionbased news organizations that cover state and local issues, sports, and finance, generating enough revenue to maintain a slim— but paid—metro desk. Again, given the absence of circulation costs, such an outcome becomes, by conservative estimates, entirely possible. Here is a back-of-the-envelope plan. In a metro region the size of Baltimore, where 300,000 once subscribed to a healthy newspaper, imagine an initial market penetration of a tenth of that—30,000 paid subscribers (in a metro region of more than 2.5 million), who are willing to pay $10 per month. This is less than half their previous Sun home-delivery rate for the only product in town that covers local politics, local culture, local sports, and financial news—using paid reporters and paid editors to produce a consistent, professional product. That’s $300,000 a month in revenue, or $3.6 million a year, with zero printing or circulation costs. Moreover, that total doesn’t include whatever money online advertising might generate. Advertisers—considering a paid circulation base rather than meaningless Web hits—might be willing to once again pay a meaningful rate. Round it up to $4 million in total revenue, then knock off a half million in operating and promotional costs. At $100,000 a position for editors and reporters, that’s a metro desk of some thirty-five paid souls, enough to provide significant coverage of a city and its suburbs. If the reporters are on $50,000 contracts and benefits are not initially included, it’s a newsroom of seventy—larger than the Sun’s metro staff in the nineties. And if that online-only, paid-subscription daily were a locally-run nonprofit, with every increase in subscriptions going to fund additional coverage, well, what more does professional journalism require to survive at the state and local level? Third scenario: Except for one in which professional journalism doesn’t endure in any

form, this is the worst of all worlds. The Times and the Post survive because their coverage is unique and essential. But the regional dailies, too eviscerated to offer a credible local product, cannot entice enough online subscriptions to make do. They wither and die. And further, new online news ventures are stillborn because both national papers become exactly that—national. Imagine major American cities without daily newspapers, and further imagine the Times or the Post employing just enough local journalists in regional markets to produce zoned editions—The New York Times with, say, a ten-person St. Louis bureau, giving readers two or three pages of metro, sports, and local business coverage. Or a Washington Post edition for the Baltimore region, using a dozen ex-Sun staffers to create a thin but viable product, where once a comprehensive metro daily once stood. The joke then would be on the Justice Department lawyers as well. The longer it takes for the newspaper industry to get its act together, the more likely it is that regional dailies will be too weak and hollow to step through the online-subscription portal. Even localized Internet startups—the fledgling, digitized versions of professional newsrooms—will find themselves competing with, or bought out by, national monoliths. More monopoly, not less, for as long as we continue to fret the antitrust issues. But all of this is, of course, academic. Because at this moment, Mr. Sulzberger and Ms. Weymouth have yet to turn that last card. Until they find the will and the courage to do so, no scenario other than the slow strangulation of paid, professional journalism applies. Meanwhile, we dare to dream of a viable, online future for American newsrooms. cjr

DAVID SIMON, a writer and television producer, is the creator of HBO’s The Corner, The Wire, Treme, and The Deuce, among other shows. From 1982 to 1995, he was a reporter at the Baltimore Sun.

T H R E AT S

Thre TK crEDIT

124

AUTHOr TK

TK crEDIT

eats

125

127

HE rE AN D N OW

Standing Together joel Simon on the importance of unity in defending journalists’ freedom

HEN jAcOBO Timerman, an editor in Argentina, founded La Opinión, in 1971, he positioned the publication as a voice of reason in a polarized country. At the time, Argentina was entering a period of turmoil and upheaval. In 1973, Juan Domingo Perón, the country’s former president, returned from a long exile and was reelected. Timerman supported him. The following year, Perón died and was replaced by his wife, Isabel Martínez de Perón. The left rose up to oppose her; the country descended into chaos. In 1976, Jorge Rafael Videla, a lieutenant general, overthrew the government, which marked the beginning of a military junta and the onset of the Dirty War. Timerman covered the news in the pages of La Opinión, printing the names of desaparecidos—those “disappeared” by the brutal regime. In April 1977, on military orders, twenty armed men stormed into Timerman’s home, took him captive, and tortured him. He was subjected to solitary confinement, beatings, and electric shocks to his genitals. Over thirty months—first in custody, then under house arrest—he was never formally charged with a crime.

As Timerman later wrote for the columbia journalism review, his torment was lonely, and getting the word out was difficult. “No journalists were permitted to see me, and those who heard of my experiences raised the question: Who will be named as the source if we publish any of this information? Fearful of what the government might do, I did not want my family to be named. And the national press was afraid to act.” His only hope, then, was the foreign press. Even the most brutal authoritarian governments, Timerman argued, cared about the way they were portrayed in international media. In those days, press freedom was largely not on the agenda of reporters in the United States. Yet Timerman saw that the international press could have immense power to defend colleagues facing censorship, violence, and repression in their home countries. “As time went on, we were able to organize and refine a kind of news-spreading chain, whose effectiveness demonstrated the importance of the press.” He concluded: “Only the press can dispute that monopoly on reality which is the sine qua non for the existence of any totalitarian government.”

128

Timerman’s case made a strong impression on Michael Massing, who was then the executive editor of CJR. “For someone of Timerman’s stature and with his credentials to be arrested just drove home how extreme the situation in Argentina had become,” Massing recalled to me recently. Moved by the plight of journalists in Latin America, Massing, along with a CBS News writer named Laurie Nadel, decided to create an organization called the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), dedicated to the defense of press freedom around the world. Deploying the power of the American media and allies abroad meant building a coalition of leading journalists who were willing to stand up publicly for press freedom. Coverage in the pages of CJR helped them understand the significance of that role through the Vietnam War and the Nixon era—when journalists were in the crosshairs of the administration and needed to defend their rights—and beyond. “There are many kinds of ‘chilling effects’ on the exercise of press freedom,” as Daniel Schorr, a CBS News correspondent, wrote for CJR. “Whenever a president uses the powers entrusted to him to go after a reporter, there are bound to be some.” For decades, the media continued to enjoy an information monopoly, meaning that anyone who wanted to reach a mass audience—a sitting politician, a revolutionary group, an authoritarian government— had to engage with the press. Journalists talked to everyone, and it was their utility— not international humanitarian law or the norms of the profession—that kept them safe. More recently, however, the emergence of new technologies has allowed politicians to hijack the information agenda, insurgent groups to disseminate information directly, and governments to flood the zone with propaganda. Reporters, once cultivated, are now liable to become targets of kidnappings or killings. The end of the news monopoly, though it democratized information, also had the sad consequence of pitting journalists against one another, with established correspondents lambasting freelancers for their reckless behavior, as Shahan Mufti did in a 2010 CJR essay on Pakistan. “By venturing alone into the tribal areas,” he wrote of a journalist gone missing, “she had obviously put her life in danger . . . and, I

T H r E AT S

realized, she had eroded, however slightly, the reputation of the entire foreign press corps covering the war.” Today, technology complicates the challenges to press freedom. During my time at the helm of CPJ, I have found that the front lines are in places such as Russia and the Philippines, where local news organizations (many with international funding) are fighting an asymmetric war with authoritarian regimes that not only harass and threaten them but also influence the information ecosystem to discredit and undermine journalism. The case of Maria Ressa, the Nobel Prize–winning cofounder of rappler, an online news organization in the Philippines, has inspired a complex and sophisticated global campaign using social media, diplomatic outreach, and legal defense—which has so far kept her out of jail, though just barely. “The only way we can get a fair trial is if others are watching,” Ressa noted in CJR—an echo of Timerman. Press attention can no longer be counted upon to dissuade the world’s tyrants. That’s in part because the bond between the institutional media and the exercise of US foreign policy has weakened, along with American influence as a whole; the levers of global power have increasingly moved into the hands of authoritarian governments. But even if the power of the media is reduced, it remains considerable; Timerman’s argument still stands. CJR has highlighted the need for press freedom like no other publication, chronicling the triumphs and the losses, and through its coverage has helped forge consensus: when their colleagues are under threat around the world, journalists cannot be objective; they must stand together to defend their rights. cjr

jOEL SIMON is the outgoing executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, which he led for fifteen years. A regular contributor to the columbia journalism review, he has also been published by the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Guardian, and the Wall Street journal.

jOEL SIMON

Press attention can no longer be counted upon to dissuade the world’s tyrants. But the power of the media remains considerable.

129

130

T H R E AT S

A lesson from the Vietnam War on the press, the military, and authority

The Death of Supply column 21 BY DAV ID H ALBE RSTA M

he Associated Press bureau that operated out of Saigon starting in mid-1965 was a great one—a place of legends, a bureau created by arguably the most underrated editor of that era. Wes Gallagher was new at his job as general manager of the AP, and determined from the start to show that this story and this war, whether his constituent papers liked it or not, and whether the news was good or not, was a very important one. All three of the bureau members, Malcolm Browne, Peter Arnett, and Horst Faas, would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize, Browne in 1964, Faas in 1965 (the first of two), and Arnett in 1966. They were very good, the men and in time the women of the AP bureau. Like the other reporters in Saigon in those days, they lived the life of the obsessed. No one had a personal life. No one ever took a day off. Vietnam was a great crucible for anyone who wanted to become a serious journalist, not just because it was dangerous and you had to calibrate the value of every operation you went on, but because of the immense political pressures involved. Washington had invested so much in the appearance of the war that you were always under scrutiny. Since the war did not work, not from the beginning, any story that was important, and that had any significant dimension of truth, was bound to draw the anger of both Saigon and Washington. That meant any reporter working in Vietnam knew it was important to have your facts beyond dispute every time you filed.

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2006 This piece, adapted from Breaking News: How the Associated Press Has covered War, Peace, and Everything Else (2007), recalls the challenges of covering the war in Vietnam at a time when disputing facts dispensed from Washington placed journalists in a precarious position.

DAV I D H A L B E r S TA M

131

132

For the ten years he was in Vietnam no one drew more anger than Arnett. He seemed to be a lightning rod for the Johnson administration, in part because he was so good and in part because he was from New Zealand; the White House was filled with young men and women studying his stories, looking for mistakes. “Peter, you’re a great reporter,” Gallagher told him as they were leaving the luncheon where Arnett had been awarded the Pulitzer, “but don’t be wrong on a story—there are too many people out there just itching to get you.” Arnett had seemed like something of a journalistic hitchhiker in the beginning, taking whatever job was available. He started out running a small English-language newspaper in Laos in 1960, and first got the AP’s attention during one of those inevitable Laotian coups that brought down all communications for a couple of weeks. With all the news agencies cut off from the news on the Thai side of the river, Arnett had swum the Mekong, carrying his and other reporters’ stories in a plastic bag so they wouldn’t get wet, and filed them from a post office on the other side. It was a swim, as much as anything else, to a better job, and in time the AP offered him one. Arnett met Faas when both men were on assignment for the AP in Laos in 1962. Faas, who had worked previously for the AP in the Congo, thought Arnett had a certain cockiness he had seen before—quick and brave and boisterous. “There was a lot of Fleet Street in Peter when we first met, and I could see him getting an offer from one of the British papers and ending up there.” But as Faas said, Arnett kept getting better and better, wanting to know why things were happening and why the war was not being won; in addition, he had an almost pure instinct for combat reporting—like a man with his own personal radar that told him when and where to go. He had two kinds of courage, the courage to go into battle again and again, and the rarer kind of courage to report stories that the American mission and Washington hated because they went against the official optimism. The AP reporters who had been there when the first American combat troops arrived had, like a handful of other colleagues from the earlier days, a distinct advantage in covering the war. They had more sources, of course, but they were more rooted as well. By rooted I mean that because they had gotten there long before it was an American war, they tended to

T H R E AT S

see it more through the prism of Vietnamese history, not American history. Unlike many reporters who arrived with the big American buildup, they did not see it as connected to how well we had done in World War II; rather, they saw it more through the legacy of the French Indo-China War. They understood that the flaws of the South were political, bound up in Vietnam’s modern history and in the colonial war from which this current postcolonial war was so derivative. Thus, even as the war was Americanized, they possessed a certain skepticism that many of their more newly arrived journalistic colleagues lacked. They understood that you could have, in the technical sense, a series of victories, but that because the other side had absolute political superiority, the ability to recruit eager young men and to keep coming, they might not really be victories at all.

erhaps Arnett’s most symbolic clash with the American military authorities came right after the first American combat units arrived in country, three years after he first got there. In mid-August 1965, at the very start of the American war, the Marines received intelligence of the presence of a Vietcong regiment in the village of Van Tuong near the Marine base at Chu Lai, all of this just south of Danang. The Marines decided to attack, even though their own forces were still in the process of building up. The entire operation was kept secret— there was to be no coverage, even though it was the first major use of the Marines in Vietnam. Lieutenant General Lew Walt, the Marine commander in Vietnam, went on a very public inspection tour of Marine outposts to the north, taking most of the Danang press corps with him; clearly the Marines wanted coverage after the battle. The ground fighting in the Van Tuong operation, known as Operation Starlite, turned out to be very fierce. Probably, though there is no empirical proof of this, the Vietcong had decided to test the new American military machine, trying to find out both its strengths and weaknesses. Instead of breaking contact, as they often did in the face of superior western firepower, they held their ground and fought hard. There were heavy casualties on both sides. Arnett had watched the arrival of major American units in mid-1965 with a sinking feeling. He was very wary of what American

DAV I D H A L B E R S TA M

technology might do and, equally important, might not do. To win, he thought, the Americans would not merely have to fight the Vietnamese, they would have to become Vietnamese, and that was not likely to happen. In mid-August, he heard about a major battle going on just south of Danang near Chu Lai and got himself on a space-available flight up to Danang, where he found an old friend, who got him on an Army supply helicopter to Chu Lai. At Chu Lai he climbed aboard a Marine chopper about to bring fuel oil to the embattled Marines. But on their way to the main fighting in Operation Starlite, Arnett’s chopper pilot spotted a group of American armored vehicles stranded in a rice paddy. At that moment no one knew anything about Supply Column 21, which had been assigned to leave one of the ships just offshore and bring badly needed food and ammo to the embattled Marines of Starlite. Supply Column 21 was already in danger of being wiped out. It had been ambushed in the night by the Vietcong, and the survivors feared that a renewed assault was imminent. When Arnett’s pilot spotted it, five of its seven vehicles had already been immobilized. The lost column had included two M-48 tanks and five Amtracks (heavy amphibious vehicles). The Vietcong had immediately knocked out one of the tanks and destroyed one of the Amtracks. Three of the remaining Amtracks had bogged down in the paddy, a perfect target. By the time the chopper arrived, only one Amtrack was intact, around which the surviving wounded had gathered. As it landed, the chopper was immediately surrounded by wounded men screaming to get out of there; Arnett and a photographer named Tim Page, who had also hitched aboard, helped the crew members load the wounded onto the chopper. In those days you could not yet print casualty figures, but Arnett later estimated there were probably about twenty-seven men in the column at the start, that at least five had been killed, eight more seriously wounded, and about ten others more lightly wounded. Arnett flew back to Saigon where he filed his story—the Death of Supply Column 21. To Arnett it was not just a one-day story— a serious firefight, with higher casualties than anyone had expected, a tragedy caused by bad communications in a brand new war. To him it confirmed a feeling he already

133

JU LY/AU GU ST 20 10

A World of Trouble

Several years into the war on terror, the Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s spy agency, had become increasingly violent; journalists were targets of the state. When I arrived in Peshawar, my fixer told me he’d heard that the Taliban in the tribal areas had kidnapped a Canadian woman. Over the next few hours, I pieced together from rumors and half-baked accounts that she was a freelance reporter of some sort. I didn’t recognize her name, but I gathered that in spite of many warnings by local journalists, she had decided to travel alone into the heart of Taliban country to shoot a documentary. I called my contact in the Pakistan intelligence agency, the ISI, with whom I had arranged my embed. As we spoke, a few things became clear: first, the colonel was not convinced that the woman was a legitimate journalist. He didn’t go so far as to accuse her of being a spy or a collaborator with the insurgents, but he did wonder out loud why she was not on anyone’s radar if she was working in Pakistan as a reporter. Second, he was somehow holding me—and all English-language journalists—responsible for making his job more difficult. Third, he was going to make sure I paid for the PR nightmare that was already unfolding for him with the Canadian government. “We’re not taking in any reporters,” he said, and hung up before I could get in a full sentence. The Canadian, Khadija Abdul Qahaar (formerly Beverly Anne Giesbrecht), was fifty-five years old at the time of her kidnapping. Two years later, she is still in captivity. She was a one-person news organization, the publisher of Jihadunspun.com, a Web site dedicated to chronicling what Qahaar viewed as a war against Muslims waged by America in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. By venturing alone into the tribal areas, she had obviously put her life in danger and, I realized, she had eroded, however slightly, the reputation of the entire foreign press corps covering the war. —Shahan Mufti

134

had: that Vietnam was something of a quagmire, that a great deal of the technology that America was going to depend on in this country would be inapplicable and might turn out to be burdensome. In his story there are several prescient references to the sheer might and weight of the armored column, 287 tons of steel, and of how incredibly vulnerable it had proven—“a reminder too that armored vehicles have a limited use in Vietnam,” he wrote. The next day the Marines denied the story. To them, Supply Column 21 did not exist. They were pushing the main operation, Operation Starlite, as a success, the first big engagement of the war, for the Vietcong had finally fled, the Americans had taken the objective, and the casualty race was presumed to be roughly ten to one. They wanted no mention of Supply Column 21, for it would have tainted the larger story—that American military power was going to work. But there was a problem for anyone denying Arnett’s story—he had a bunch of photos. Among those pushing the idea that the story was wrong was General Wallace Greene, the Marine commandant. Gallagher invited General Greene to a publisher’s meeting. There he did a slide show with Arnett’s photos from the battle. “General,” Gallagher said, “you said this didn’t happen.’’ “I was misinformed,” Greene said.

s time went on there was a certain irony to the attempt of some American officers—newly arrived in country and warned back in America about the evils of the press corps and how unpatriotic it was—to lecture men like Arnett who had been there for so long. In the early years, 1962 to 1964, it was one thing, but later it became a joke, an American officer telling Arnett what was wrong with the press and why we were winning, and Arnett asking how long he had been in country and the officer saying three months or five months and Peter answering that he had been in country for five years or six years or seven years. More than any other journalist, Arnett became the possessor of the institutional memory of the American war. He had been there at the start and he was there at the end. It was Arnett, on that final day in April 1975, who wrote one of the last dispatches as Saigon fell. He was, in the unofficial judgment of his peers, the best combat reporter of the war.

T H r E AT S

Being a reporter is at the very core of a democracy, of being a free person in a free society.

Those reporters were not particularly well paid; print journalism has never paid well and the wire services are not known for huge paychecks. The rewards are in the doing. For those who cover this kind of history in the making, there is a certain kind of honor—one rarely expressed—in the willingness to go back day after day and take risks for what are, in the traditional sense of material benefits, negligible rewards. It is in some way about winning and holding the respect of your colleagues, and of your own respect for the men and women who are fighting the war. There is a camaraderie that comes from shared values and shared obligations; being a reporter is at the very core of a democracy, of being a free person in a free society. Even as I write there are in some parts of the world young men and women going out every day, and doing something difficult and complicated, something that takes a surprisingly varied array of talents—the ability to write quickly, a rare, almost intuitive sense of politics, and of course a certain kind of courage, the courage to stand up to powerful people who are always trying to bend you and intimidate you. When I was a young man in Saigon I was privileged enough to witness such work and to see a great institution at its best, at a moment in a democracy when it mattered. cjr DAV I D H A L B E rSTA M , an author and historian, was known for his writing on the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and sports. In 1964, he won a Pulitzer for International Reporting (shared with Malcolm Browne). He died in 2007.

POrTFOLIO

ALL ABOArD

TK crEDIT

Presidents Richard Nixon and Anwar Sadat talk with the press on a train to Alexandria, Egypt, 1974. (Photo by Rene Burri/Magnum)

135

136

T H R E AT S

Encounters with the Palestinian press

Life on a Leash BY ELLEN CANTAROW

ome people are trained to find news, but news and history came to Jawdat Mana‘a’s door. Born in 1952 in Dehaishe, a West Bank refugee camp, he began to write about it in 1980, after the camp was punished with a weeks-long curfew for the burning of an Israeli army jeep. He started sending stories to Palestinian newspapers, and people started sending him news of strife in other camps. He developed a sizable archive—“I have information about the camps, and photos, that go back to when I was born”—and he made contacts not just with Palestinian reporters, but with Israeli, European, and American journalists as well. Opening the Bethlehem Press Service in 1982 seemed only logical. Last March 13, armed Israeli soldiers, police, and secret service officers entered Mana‘a’s offices, ordered them temporarily closed, and arrested him. Two of the soldiers carried M16s. “They took all my negatives, hundreds of photographs and papers, even the music cassettes I like to listen to when I work,” he says. Like many Palestinian reporters with nationalist sentiments, Mana‘a had been arrested before. This time he was jailed twenty days without being charged, and then he was accused of possessing material that could incite his people to rebel—photographs of demonstrations and people wounded in clashes with the army; a Fax machine; a cassette with Palestinian nationalist songs; and most damaging of all in the eyes of the authorities, one of the thousands of leaflets issued by the leaders of the intifadah, as the Palestinians call their eleven-month-old uprising. Well-liked by his foreign colleagues, Mana‘a assumes it was articles published abroad about his arrest that spurred the military authorities to release him without making him pay the bail—4,000 shekels, or

$6,400—the court had imposed. His driver’s license was lifted, however, and he returned to find his phone lines cut. Mana‘a is one of forty-seven Palestinian journalists jailed between the start of the intifadah last December and August 20, according to the Arab Journalists’ Association in the Occupied Territories. During that period, eight newspapers suffered temporary bans on distribution in the territories, the licenses of two magazines were permanently revoked, and three press services besides the one in Bethlehem were closed. At least one more journalist was arrested after that list was compiled, a copy editor for Al Fajr, whose editor, Hanna Siniora, is considered a spokesman for the most moderate wing of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Al Fajr has been particularly hard-hit, with eight journalists jailed and three deported. Israel justifies these harsh measures on security grounds. The legal rationale comes from the Defense Security Regulations of 1945, which, along with some 1,300 military orders, impose restrictions on many aspects of life in the territories, including free expression. They were used sparingly until the midseventies and an upsurge of nationalism in the territories. Over the past eleven months they have been wielded unremittingly against the Palestinian press. Under the regulations, newspapers and magazines in the territories must submit to the military censor two copies of everything to be printed—from the weather to political analysis. The censor may remove anything deemed to be of “political significance.” That phrase is broad enough, in the words of a 1986 report by Law in the Service of Man (a West Bank affiliate of the International

NOVE MB ER / DECE MB ER 1988 The First Intifada (sometimes called simply the intifada), a sustained Palestinian uprising against Israel, commenced in December 1987 and lasted more than five years. Hundreds of people were killed— Palestinians and Israelis, soldiers and civilians—many of them in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

E L L E N c A N TA r O W

Commission of Jurists), to include “any suggestion that West Bank inhabitants are suffering under occupation . . . and [any] representation of national aspiration.” So the Palestinian press can’t even report on its own problems. Asked whether Al Fajr’s remaining staff had been able to write about their jailed and deported colleagues, an editor shrugged. “Write? It’s a big word. We can write that they have been arrested. We can say, ‘This man was arrested on such and such a day,’ but no one will know the details.” Another editor, who like most who were interviewed would not allow his name to be printed, says many reporters are reluctant to do legwork. “They say, ‘Why should we go out? The story will only be censored.’ ” Still, some Palestinian reporters have found a partial detour around the censor. They feed their tips to foreign wire services, then reprint the resulting stories; once articles are published outside Israel’s borders, the censors seem to be less harsh. News of interest to residents of the West Bank and Gaza may also reach the Palestinian press by way of Palestinian reporters working for West Jerusalem–based foreign media. All ten front-page stories published September 10 by the East Jerusalem daily Al Quds, for example, were taken from foreign wire services. “I titled one story AMERICAN DELEGATION CALLS ON

137

U.S. TO STOP MILITARY AID TO ISRAEL,” says Samaan Khoury, a West Bank journalist who works for Agence France –Presse. “The day after AFP ran it, I saw it with the same headline in five East Jerusalem papers.” In theory, Israel could censor its own press. From time to time the prime minister and the defense ministry may decide that certain issues are national security matters (Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, for example). Israeli reporters must then submit stories about those issues to the military censor, who usually makes few, and minor, changes. “Censorship is really not a problem for us,” says Dani Rubinstein, a veteran correspondent of the Israeli daily Davar. In fact, the Israeli press publishes vivid accounts of events that would be instantly censored in the territories, and are even fairly rare in the U.S. press: detailed descriptions of villages under siege for long periods, deprived of water, electricity, and food; eyewitness accounts of beatings and shootings of unarmed civilians; soldiers’ accounts of their feelings about meting out such punishment. But such stories rarely get into the Palestinian press. In early September, Mana‘a covered an intifadah birthday party in a hospital. A patient had just turned seventeen, a boy from Mana‘a’s birthplace, Dehaishe, who had been critically wounded in the stomach by a soldier’s bullet the month before. Unable to eat, fed by intravenous tubes, he was clearly dying. Flowers bedecked the room; there was a picture of the illegal Palestinian flag over the bed. Someone blew out the candles on a three-tiered cake, and a doctor fed the patient two forkfuls of it. Young men from the camp, along with his parents and relatives, surrounded him. As at an intifadah funeral, they weren’t mourning the young man’s impending death, but celebrating his martyrdom to the Palestinian cause. Mana‘a reported the event for the foreign and domestic clients of his wire service, taking care to give only the barest facts and not to use the charged word intifadah. But it came back censored in full. “I always write,” Mana‘a says, when asked if he gets discouraged. “Whether or not it gets censored, I must try.” cjr ELLEN cANTArOW began writing about the occupied territories in 1979. Her work has appeared in The Nation, the Village Voice, Mother jones, and other publications.

138

caught in the crosshairs of richard Nixon

The FBI and Me BY DAN IEL ScHO rr

T H r E AT S

DANIEL SCHORR

139

O NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1974 Schorr, a journalist for CBS News, drew the ire of Richard Nixon and wound up on the president’s “enemy list.” When the existence of the list was revealed, during the 1973 Senate Watergate committee investigation, Schorr read the names live on air— without, at first, realizing that his was among them.

n June 4, 1973, President Nixon sat in the Oval Office, earphones on his head, listening to tapes, making running observations to Alexander Haig and Ron Ziegler. He listened to himself suggesting three months earlier, on March 13, to John Dean, then still his agent, that it should be maintained that he had used the FBI “only for national security purposes.” As he listened, Mr. Nixon commented, “Yeah. The only exception, of course, was that son-of-a-bitch Schorr. But there—actually it was national security. (Laughs) We didn’t say that. Oh, we didn’t do anything. We just ran a name check on the son-of-a-bitch.” Maybe a name check was what the former President wanted. What he got was a full field investigation, frantically aborted, then covered up with a bogus explanation. What he also got was one more item in the impeachment litany. It was Item 65 in the Statement of Information on surveillance activities. It was Paragraph E in the Summary of Information on Illegal Intelligence Gathering. Finally, in the Judiciary Committee’s report to the House of Representatives, it was one of the instances of abuse of presidential powers listed in Article II. I have recently been able to supplement the Judiciary Committee’s extensive research and testimony with material from the files of the FBI, and finally have been able to piece together a comprehensive account of my mini-Watergate experience as seen from within the Nixon Administration. That account I now offer because there are lessons about government-press relations that should not be lost in the general movement toward Watergate amnesia. The “son-of-a-bitch” reflex of a president toward an offending newsman did not start, and probably will not end, with Nixon. But, for once, it is possible to document how presidential powers were abused in intended retaliation in ways that could occur again. The Judiciary Committee’s report summed up the operation: DANIEL SCHORR FBI INVESTIGATION

In August, 1971, Daniel Schorr, a television commentator for the Columbia Broadcasting System, was invited to the White House to meet with the President’s staff assistants to discuss an unfavorable analysis he had made of a presidential speech. Shortly thereafter, Haldeman instructed his chief aide, Higby, to obtain an FBI background report on Schorr. The FBI conducted an extensive investigation of Schorr, interviewing 25 people in seven hours, including Schorr’s friends and employers, and members of his family. When press reports revealed that the investigation had

140

taken place, the President’s aides fabricated and released to the press the explanation that Schorr was being considered for an appointment as an assistant to the chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality. The President knew that Schorr had never been considered for any government position. The President approved the cover story. Haldeman has testified that although he could not remember why the investigation was requested, Schorr was not being considered for federal employment. The FBI investigation—like my appearance on White House “enemy” lists—did me no ultimate harm, thanks, perhaps, to the ineptitude with which it was handled. But in the period after I became aware of it, the episode had its disconcerting if not “chilling” effects. It complicated my relations with my employer and my news sources. I had to worry about being projected into an undesired role of administration adversary. That concern persists. For that reason, I have waived any suit on invasion-of-privacy or other grounds, uncomfortable with the idea of a docket headed, “Daniel Schorr vs. Richard M. Nixon.” But I did want information, and I concluded, in consultation with J. Roger Wollenberg of the Washington law firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, that the Freedom of Information Act provided the appropriate vehicle. On March 19, we applied to Clarence M. Kelley, director of the FBI, for all material in the FBI’s file dealing with the investigation of me, specifically excluding interviews and summaries since I had no desire to violate the privacy of those contacted about me. On March 27, Kelley rejected the request on the ground that “investigations concerning possible presidential appointments are considered to be investigatory material compiled for law enforcement purposes and thereby exempt from disclosure.” One could only marvel that, at this late date, Kelley could still be talking about “possible presidential appointments.” On April 24, we appealed to Attorney General William Saxbe, pointing out that this investigation was not conducted for legitimate law enforcement purposes, and therefore could not be exempt from disclosure.

T H R E AT S

On June 6, Saxbe, overruling the FBI director, advised that the file would be released to me “as a matter of administrative discretion.” It was delivered to Wollenberg on July 2.

he FBI investigation was set in motion on August 19, 1971, two days after I had broadcast on the cBS Evening News an analysis suggesting that President Nixon’s promise to come to the rescue of the financially-beleaguered Catholic parochial schools represented political rhetoric, unsupported by any concrete program. The House Judiciary Committee quotes Haldeman assistant Lawrence Higby as testifying that, traveling with President Nixon and H.R. Haldeman on Aug. 19 over Wyoming, on a cross-country trip to California, he called FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, as instructed by Haldeman, to ask for “a complete background” on me, and was later surprised to learn that the FBI had launched a full-field investigation of “the poor guy.” Higby may have been taken aback by the wide- open nature of the investigation, but could hardly have been surprised by the fact that it had taken place. For, promptly after receiving his request, Hoover wrote to him on Aug. 20, “I am enclosing a memorandum of what our files show on Daniel Louis Schorr. I have also initiated a complete investigation of Schorr and, as soon as it is completed, I will forward it to you.” However Higby couched his request to the late director, Hoover from the outset treated it as a crash investigation preceding a presidential appointment. His first instruction, Aug. 19, headed, “Daniel Louis Schorr, Special Inquiry,” required a completed report by Aug. 23 “without fail,” and said, “The President has requested extremely expedite applicant-type investigation of Schorr, who is being considered for presidential appointment, position not stated. Do not indicate White House interest to persons contacted.” That message went to the FBI representative in the American Embassy in Bonn. It referred to a Who’s Who biography that listed me as chief, CBS News bureau for Germany and Central Euro, which I had indeed been until 1966. I might have been more conscientious about keeping Who’s Who up to date had I dreamed that the FBI might not be aware I had been working in Washington for five

DANIEL ScHOrr

I had to worry about being projected into an undesired role of administration adversary.

141

years, my presence no secret to other government agencies and to TV audiences. Next, the FBI sent telegrams to its field offices in Washington, New York, St. Louis, Baltimore and Alexandria, Va., asking for “identities and locations of all close relatives. . . . Make certain all periods of adult life are accounted for.” The telegrams included new information, “Note: Schorr is now in U.S.” It took until the next morning before the FBI learned that I was not just visiting. An Aug. 20 memorandum said, “Investigation this morning indicates Schorr has been transferred back to the United States and is presently residing in Washington, D.C., with his family. He is apparently assigned to the CBS Washington bureau.” The picture of the FBI, like the Keystone Cops, charging off first in the wrong direction to Germany has its humorous side. But it also suggests that the White House did not tell Hoover the real motive for the investigation. Interviews about my background were going forward in the United States and abroad, but in Washington, where I had finally been located, the FBI ran into trouble. The Washington field office advised that William Small, then Washington bureau chief of CBS News, when contacted about the “job” investigation, stated that “he was shocked to hear this as he had no indication that Schorr was being considered for any federal position.” Well, I might not necessarily have told CBS of my plans to join President Nixon’s team. But other FBI reports quoted me as saying I knew of no prospective position. Puzzled, the FBI got in touch with Higby, now in San Clemente with Mr. Nixon. One can picture the astonishment. An FBI memo said, “Higby . . . advised that in view of these developments, the FBI should discontinue its investigation until we hear further from Higby.” To FBI field offices went crisp telegrams, “Discontinue investigation immediately.” But in the seven hours that the investigation had been “active,” 25 interviews had been conducted, and the information already collected was ordered transmitted to headquarters. After a weekend of reflection, Higby called on Monday, Aug. 23, saying, according to an FBI memo, “The investigation should be cancelled; however, requested that all information developed by the bureau to date concerning Schorr be furnished his [Higby’s] office.’’ The same day Hoover wrote Higby enclosing “a summary memorandum containing the results of the investigation.” And, doggedly sticking to its bureaucratic guns, the bureau furnished for Hoover’s file “one copy of a biographical resume concerning the appointee.” (I have asked that the file be expunged. Director Kelley says that, under regulations, he can’t.) There the matter rested, the White House and FBI presumably hoping the case was closed. On Nov. 10, storm signals went up. Assistant Director T.E. Bishop, in charge of public relations, reported in a memorandum to his superiors that he had been called by “Ken Clawson, a reporter for the Washington Post, who is well known to the bureau,” asking about the August investigation. “Clawson advised Bishop,” wrote Bishop, “that the FBI might not realize it, but the FBI had been ‘used’ by someone in the White House in connection with its investigation of Schorr. Clawson said that he

142

has been informed by a source in the White House that Schorr was never being considered for appointment to a government position and that the individual who had made the request of the FBI was aware of this but had asked the FBI to conduct an investigation, allegedly in connection with possible employment, but actually for the purpose of getting background information on Schorr in an expedite manner.” If there was concern about possible misuse of the FBI, it is nowhere evident in the FBI file. The alarm was about impending adverse publicity. The next step was to coordinate with the White House. Here is Hoover’s memorandum of a telephone conversation at 4:18 p.m. on Nov. 10: Honorable H.R. Haldeman, Assistant to the President, called. He said that as I may know, the Washington Post is cranking up a story on an FBI investigation of CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr and apparently the bureau has confirmed to Ken Clawson, a reporter for the Washington Post, that such an investigation was ordered by the White House. I commented I would doubt that because my orders are to not give Clawson the time of day. Mr. Haldeman said he would be surprised if we had, but Clawson claims that he does have this confirmation from the bureau and in any event he is going apparently with the story that the White House is investigating this reporter. Mr. Haldeman said that I may recall that there was a request for a check on him back in the middle of August and obviously the White House would have no useful purpose in getting any more publicity on it than necessary so that what he wanted to do was to be sure that we did not supply Clawson or any of the rest of the press with anything. I told Mr. Haldeman my standing orders are not to give the time of day to him and I will check on it right away. Mr. Haldeman said that Ron Ziegler, Press Secretary, is concerned that they are going to create a repression of newsmen type of thing. I said that is the usual line. Mr. Haldeman said he thought they would slough it off over there and if they ask any question, say they would not have anything to say as obviously information

T H r E AT S

is sought on individuals at various times for various reasons such as appointments, routine checks, et cetera, and not have anything more to say and he assumes that is the position the bureau would take. I said we will not have anything to say and I would check and let him know, as it may have been confirmed by the Public Information Office of the Department of Justice. Clawson’s story appeared on the front page of the Washington Post on Nov. 11, and was widely quoted by news agencies. The White House moved to develop its cover story. President Nixon met with his special counsel, Charles Colson. Before the House Judiciary Committee, Colson testified that “the suggestion was made that we respond to press inquiries by stating that he [Schorr] was being considered for a position as a press or a television consultant on matters of environmental . . . environmental matters.” Committee Counsel John Doar interrogated Colson: DOAr: The fact was that Mr. Schorr was not nor hadn’t been considered for such a position? cOLSON: That is right. DOAr: And the President knew this? cOLSON: Yes, sir. DOAr: And you knew this? cOLSON: I did. DOAr: And Mr. Haldeman knew this? cOLSON: That is correct. DOAr: And that you were directed by the President to implement the instructions by putting out this information that Mr. Schorr was being considered for a job. cOLSON: I don’t know that I was instructed to put out the information, but it was decided that that would be the response and I think Mr. Ziegler actually gave that response. DOAr: When you say it was decided, you are speaking, that is a colloquialism to mean that the President decided. Isn’t that fair? cOLSON: Well, it is not a general colloquialism. In this case it is. DOAr: That the President decided it? cOLSON: I think the President and I decided that that would be the best way that we could work ourselves out of what looked like an embarrassing situation. . . . We

DANIEL SCHORR

143

decided that this would be an appropriate way to dig ourselves out of a political hole. It may very well be that I said we ought to put this out, and the President said, “fine.” It may be that he said to me, why don’t you talk to Ziegler and see if we can give this as an answer. Next day, Nov. 12, was a busy day at the FBI. Senator Sam Ervin was proposing a hearing of his Constitutional Rights Subcommittee, and Chairman Emanuel Celler of the House Judiciary Committee wrote Attorney General John Mitchell, asking for an explanation. While preparing to join the White House in the cover-up, the bureau was busy protecting its own flank. Hoover sent a memorandum to Mitchell summarizing the situation and displaying his own clean hands. Hoover wrote, “When we were originally requested to investigate Daniel Schorr last August by Mr. Higby, an assistant to Mr. Haldeman, it was indicated to us that he was being considered for an important position. There was no mention at any time relative to the White House being curious about the background of Schorr because of some unfavorable articles which he had written about the President and members of the White House staff.” Presidential Counsel John Dean visited the FBI with a lot of questions about investigation procedures to help prepare a plausible position. As summarized in an FBI memo, Dean wanted to know whether there were precedents for investigations initiated before jobs were offered, whether the FBI ever disclosed the White House as the instigator of an investigation, whether the FBI would respond if questioned by a congressional committee. The replies were all reassuring, and W.R. Wannall, supervising special agent in the intelligence division, wrote that Dean did not “make or imply any criticism of the bureau’s handling of this case.” Nor, apparently, did the FBI express any criticism whatever of the White House’s handling of the case, except internally. Wrote Wannall, “It was, however, apparent from the discussion that someone at the White House got their signals mixed and requested a full field investigation when, in fact, probably all they wanted was background information on Schorr and a check of FBI files similar to that which has previously

MAY/J UNE 1980

The Bodies counted Are Our Own

During Argentina’s Dirty War, jacobo Timerman, the founding publisher of a newspaper called La Opinión, was held prisoner by state agents, stripped of his citizenship, and eventually expelled from the country. For thirty months—from April 15, 1977, through September 25, 1979—I was held captive by the Argentine army, although I had not been charged with any crime nor had I ever been brought to trial. For the first forty days I was kept in a clandestine jail, where I was tortured and interrogated. For the next thirty days, my jail was in the police headquarters in Buenos Aires. There I was allowed to see my wife and children for three to five minutes each day in a small room crowded with people. Although it was difficult to carry on a conversation there, I was able to tell my family at least some of the tortures I had been subjected to. No journalists were permitted to see me, and those who heard of my experiences raised the question: Who will be named as the source if we publish any of this information? Fearful of what the government might do, I did not want my family to be named. And the national press was afraid to act. Despite the difficulties involved, I was able to put together some news, which was then sent abroad. All the clippings from the foreign press about Argentina were on the desks of army leaders and members of the government. Eventually, it became clear that the reporting compelled the government to become more concerned about establishing its “legal” relationship with me. The government could not accuse me of any crime because the international press had already laid bare the true nature of my situation: that I had been imprisoned and my paper closed down because I denounced all kinds of terrorism, whether carried out by the state or the individual; because La Opinión defended the right to life and to a legal trial of any arrested person. My family and I were able to establish our simple, yet effective, news-spreading chain because I am a professional journalist. —jacobo Timerman

144

been requested by Haldeman’s office on other news personalities.” (This was the first suggestion that I was not the first newsman Haldeman had asked the FBI to look into. Interestingly, this was the only point commented on when the FBI’s legal counsel, John A. Mintz, undertook personally to deliver the FBI file to my lawyer, Roger Wollenberg. Mintz, calling attention to the reference to “other news personalities,” volunteered that this meant routine name checks of the type made for credential purposes or for screening White House visitors. But, when Wollenberg asked whether Mintz could represent officially that no other Haldeman-instigated full investigations of newsmen had been made, Mintz said, “We do not know.” Since then the FBI has stated, “We will not furnish, affirm or acknowledge the identities of individuals on whom name checks have been made.”) With the information John Dean had brought back to the White House, the President’s position was formulated. A news conference was called for late in the afternoon, and Mr. Nixon was ready to respond to an anticipated question. Hoover got a phone call from Haldeman with advance word of what the President would say, summarized as follows in Hoover’s memo: . . . that he [the President] understands Mr. Schorr was being considered for a public affairs position in the area of environmental matters and there was a routine FBI investigation, but there was nothing detrimental; that the position was not offered; that no one can object to the FBI check being given him the same as to anyone else, and the only objection seems to be that he was not asked beforehand if he were interested, and that objection, to the President, makes sense; and accordingly he has ordered that whenever anyone is being considered for a Government position, he be informed beforehand and if he is not interested, consideration would be dropped; that there was no intimidation nor will there be, and to make sure, he has directed this additional safeguard be instituted. “I told Mr. Haldeman that was a good statement,” Hoover wrote. “Mr. Haldeman says it does put the burden that before any

T H R E AT S

check is run on anybody, he has to be notified, but he did not think that harms them any. I agreed.” Hoover’s memo concludes, “Mr. Haldeman thanked me.” As luck would have it, Mr. Nixon’s Nov. 12 news conference was dominated by questions about Vietnam, and no one asked about my investigation. So, afterward, Ziegler sought out reporters and told them what the President would have said had he been asked. The wire services moved that as a story separate from the news conference. One version caused Ziegler to make a speedy call to Hoover. Ziegler, according to Hoover’s memo, said he “understood that the UPI would carry a story to the effect that the President had said that the investigation of Daniel Schorr had been clumsily handled. Mr. Ziegler wanted to assure me that no such statement had been made by the President and the proposed story by the United Press would be inaccurate.” Clearly, this was no time to alienate Hoover. Peace descended on the Schorr file in the FBI for a time. Then there was a new flurry of paper at the end of 1971. The Department of the Army, which had sounded me out about speaking at the 1972 annual War College seminar, asked the FBI for one of those routine “name checks.” But nothing about me seemed routine to the FBI. It referred the Army to the White House, and on Jan. 5, 1972, Hoover advised Haldeman in a letter, “We are making no comment concerning the investigation we conducted regarding Mr. Schorr, and the Department of the Army is being referred to the White House.” What the White House told the Army, I do not know, but the invitation to the War College never came. Activity in the FBI stirred anew at the end of January as Sen. Ervin prepared to hold a hearing on Feb. 1. Confronted with an Ervin letter asking details about my investigation, the FBI, in a Jan. 26 internal memo, recalled the promise to Dean not to cooperate with any congressional inquiry, but said that since “our relationship with the Senator has been very cordial in the past,” it might be well to be “responsive to his inquiries.” Back came John Dean to the FBI to work things out. According to Wannall’s memo, “Dean advised that Clark MacGregor, Counsel to the President for Congressional Relations,

DANIEL ScHOrr

145

had gone to see Ervin and asked him in effect ‘what would call him off ’ . . . Ervin indicated to MacGregor that in the past, situations have arisen in which the FBI has presented the facts to him which have fully satisfied his interest in a particular matter. . . . Dean feels that a letter to Ervin simply stating the facts might well close this matter as far as Ervin is concerned. Dean said that in view of the extreme sensitivity of this matter to the White House the White House would like to have the opportunity to review our letter to Ervin before it is sent.” Dean later advised that he had discussed the draft letter with Haldeman, who suggested no changes. Hoover also sent a copy to Attorney General Mitchell, noting that it had been “cleared with Honorable H.R. Haldeman and Honorable John M. Dean III of the White House.” So, in a Jan. 27 letter, Hoover assured Sen. Ervin that “the investigation was requested as a routine background investigation for possible federal appointment in which we make inquiries regarding a person’s character, loyalty, general standing, and ability. The incomplete investigation of Mr. Schorr was entirely favorable to him and the results were furnished to the White House.” Hoover, of course, knew a lot more, but was not about to rock the boat. Sen. Ervin accepted his explanation at face value. The last document in the FBI file, as released to me, is a letter from Ervin to Hoover on Feb. 3, saying, “The FBI certainly did not do anything except its legal duty in initiating the investigation of Mr. Schorr at the insistence of some official in the White House.”

There remains to be investigated, though Mr. Nixon said I was “the only exception,” what other newsmen Haldeman had the FBI investigate. Why did the White House’s desire for a quiet, covert investigation of me become translated by Hoover into a wide-open fullfield job investigation that brought embarrassment to the White House? I still do not have the answer, and perhaps, with Hoover dead, I never shall. My mini-Watergate was only one facet in a much larger picture. But I recall the remark of Max Frankel, then Washington bureau chief of the New York Times, who knew about the FBI investigation of me from the outset. “I’ll never forgive myself,” he said, “for not sensing that such an investigation could not be an isolated event but had to be part of something much bigger.” But, if Mr. Nixon did not succeed in what he originally had in mind, he did accomplish one thing. He made me part of the story instead of simply the observer. He forced me to submit to a thousand jokes about whether my FBI “shadow” was still with me, and whether it was safe to talk to me on the telephone. He made me worry about whether I was still perceived by the public as an objective reporter, and whether I might be a source of embarrassment to my own news organization in its conflicts with the government. There are many kinds of “chilling effects” on the exercise of press freedom. Whenever a president uses the powers entrusted to him to go after a reporter, there are bound to be some. cjr

o, my mini-Watergate conformed to the pattern of the larger Watergate conspiracy—the plot, the goof, the cover-up. The fourth element—the unraveling—was to come some 16 months later in the testimony of Dean and Haldeman before the Senate Watergate Committee. I know now that Mr. Nixon himself wanted an FBI report on me, for reasons that can only be surmised, and that he personally approved the cover-up plan suggested by Colson. What I have not known until now is how far the FBI went in cooperating with the cover-up, and how little concern it showed about the White House abuse of its investigative powers.

DANIEL ScHOrr was a CBS News correspondent who broke major stories on Watergate and the Cold War; later, he became a senior news analyst for National Public Radio. The recipient of three Emmys, an Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University “Golden Baton,” and a George Polk Award, he died in 2010.

146

T H r E AT S

Arrested but not deterred

Targeted by Duterte BY M ArIA r ESSA

SUM MEr 2019 Ressa, a Nobel Prize–winning journalist and cofounder of the Manila-based site Rappler, has aggressively covered corruption, disinformation, and violence caused by the Philippine government. Rappler has faced repeated legal assault by the administration of President Rodrigo Duterte; in February 2019, Ressa was arrested for cyberlibel.

t was February 13, 2019. I was having a meeting in the offices of Rappler, the news site I helped create, when Beth Frondoso, who heads multimedia, burst into the room. She looked agitated. Our space is open, with glass walls, and I was sitting with my back to the office. I turned around and saw Glenda Gloria, our managing editor, walking hurriedly toward a group of men. “Turn around, Maria,” Beth said. “They’re here to arrest you.” My stomach sank. I thought for a moment, then laughed. (That’s how I cope.) The Philippines, where I live, is in crisis: since June 2016, when Rodrigo Duterte became president, there have been some 27,000 killings as part of his “war on drugs.” That number comes from the United Nations, but it hasn’t been widely reported—the police keep their own, lower tally, which they pressure news outlets to publish. Duterte, the first politician in my country to have used social media to win an election, wages a relentless campaign of disinformation— patriotic trolling—to pound critics into silence. His administration

MArIA rESSA

spews lies so fast that the public doesn’t know what reality is anymore. Even government officials get confused. Seven years ago, Rappler had published the story of a former chief justice who had used a bulletproof car belonging to a businessman linked to a murder. Now the businessman was filing a cyber-libel charge against us—for an article posted four months before cyber libel had been made a crime. The head of the police’s cybercrime unit threw the case out, but a week later, his decision was overturned. The agents coming to arrest me had timed it perfectly. I looked at my watch: it was 5:30pm; the courts had just closed. But there is a night court, I knew, and it would be open until 9pm. Glenda negotiated with the men to wait for our lawyers. Manila traffic does not move. It took us an hour to get to the National Bureau of Investigation. When we arrived, we were told to wait—the agents were taking a dinner break. After 10 minutes, I turned to my lawyer. “We should just go in,” I said. “They’re running out the clock.” So we did. Then my lawyer got a phone call from the night court: “I don’t have jurisdiction,” the judge claimed. It was 10 minutes to 9pm, which meant that I would be detained for the night. This was the veneer of due process, used to ridiculous effect. They fingerprinted and processed me; saying that they would treat me well, they kept me in a conference room with an officer stationed outside. My colleagues (bless them) and our lawyers asked to join me. The agents were endlessly polite: “Ma’am, we’re only doing our jobs.” Outside, people were protesting. I got some sleep, maybe two or three hours. I can sleep anywhere when I’m really tired. As I drifted off, I thought: The more they do this, the more I have firsthand knowledge of how power is abused. The more they try to intimidate me, the more certain I am that I must keep fighting.

was born in Manila, and when I was about 10 my family moved to New Jersey. I could have stayed in the United States. But after college, I won a Fulbright that brought me back to the Philippines. I never left the region again. It was the late eighties when I started my career as a journalist, covering Southeast Asia’s transition from authoritarian rule to democracy. It’s bizarre now to think of the euphoria then. The Philippines coined the term “people power,” with demonstrators filling the capital to peacefully oust a violent regime. The movement spread: to Thailand, to South Korea, to Indonesia. Working for CNN, I chronicled the political transformation as it was unfolding. Decades later, I’m in shock about what’s happening to my country. We are walking back to rule by hostile dictator, witnessing the erosion of our freedoms, becoming accustomed to murder. In the Philippines, 97 percent of people are on Facebook— Facebook is our internet—so as Duterte’s administration and its proxies astroturf social media with propaganda, a lie told a million times becomes the truth. Duterte also attacks journalists directly. First, he came for the Philippine Daily Inquirer, the largest English-language paper, filing cases against its owners. Then Duterte went after ABS-CBN, the largest media conglomerate in the Philippines, threatening not to renew its franchise. Rappler was his third target. In July 2017, during Duterte’s State of the Nation address, he declared that Rappler was “fully owned by Americans.” This is not true; in fact, the largest group of

147

shareholders is Filipino journalists. I tweeted: “President Duterte, you are wrong.” A week later, we received our first subpoena. In January 2018, the government announced that it would revoke Rappler’s license to operate. We fought back, but the attacks have been overwhelming. In 14 months, 11 cases and investigations have been filed; this spring, I posted bail eight times; over a five-week period, I was arrested twice.

hen I awoke on Valentine’s Day, the NBI asked me to join an official press conference. I refused, demanding to be brought to court so I could post bail. That didn’t happen until the afternoon. When I left the building, I was angry. But as I walked through the door and saw a crowd of reporters, I pushed the anger down and smiled. This is weaponization of the law, I told them. “I’m appealing to you not to be silent.” Later, Salvador Panelo, the president’s spokesman, gave a statement: “I think she’s enjoying it. She’s been smiling all the while.” My rights continue to be violated. Legal hassles can take up 90 percent of my time; a day after our May midterm elections, I was arraigned for cyber libel in the morning and appeared for a case of securities fraud in the afternoon. Duterte has barred Rappler journalists from covering any of his events; at a campaign rally, his agents sought out and expelled our reporter. In response, we filed a case at the Supreme Court, the first against this government for stifling press freedom. Unfortunately, we have a court mostly installed by Duterte—by the time he leaves office, he will have appointed 13 of the 15 Supreme Court justices. But it’s our court of last appeal. The only way we can hope to get a fair trial is if others are watching. cjr

MArIA rESSA is the CEO and executive editor of Rappler, a news site based in the Philippines that she cofounded in 2012. This year, she was named a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

148

cjr

Image credits

W I T N E SS TO H I STO rY Martin Luther King Jr. in Birmingham, 1963 8 Bruce Davidson/Magnum Women in Dallas, November 22, 1963 14 AP Photo/File John F. Kennedy in Washington, DC, April 14, 1961 20 Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images Walter Lippmann in Italy, April 9, 1946 25 Photo by Keystone/Getty Images

Sister Judith Zoebelein in Vatican City, May 7, 2004 80 Photo by Franco Origlia/Getty Images Edward R. Murrow in 1958 85 Photo by Erich Auerbach/Getty Images Agence France-Presse in Washington, DC, November 7, 2001 88 Paul j. richards/AFP via Getty Images Protest in Washington, DC, July 20, 2005 90 Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images Ec O N O M I c S

Injured photographer in Chicago, 1968 30 Photo by Miriam Bokser/Villon Films/Getty Images

Ringo Starr in London, 1964 94 David Hurn/Magnum

Katharine Graham in 2000 33 Photo by juergen Frank/corbis via Getty Images

Jane Eisner in 1988 101 Photo by Bill cramer, courtesy of photographer

Manhattan, September 11, 2001 38 AP Photo/Paul Hawthorne

Melissa Dribben in 1988 101 Photo by Bud Glick, courtesy of photographer

IDENTITY

Le Monde office, Paris, 1969 111 Photo by roger Viollet via Getty Images

Barbara Walters in New York, 2001 42 Bruce Davidson/Magnum Dorothy Butler Gilliam in Washington, DC, 1961 49 Harry Naltchayan/The Washington Post via Getty Images CJR Fall 1968 cover 51 CJR Fall 2018 cover 53 Alfonse D’Amato, January 13, 1986 56 Photo by Douglas Kirkland/corbis via Getty Images Portraits of Iraqi press killed at war, Baghdad, April 5, 2007 60 Photo by Akram Saleh/Getty Images Joan Cooke in 1984 63 Photo by Harvey Wang, courtesy of photographer Lewis Raven Wallace in 2019 67 Photo by Bill Healy, courtesy of Lewis raven Wallace T Ec H N O LO GY

Departing worker 113 Photo by johnny Green/PA Images via Getty Images Newspaper boxes in Santa Fe, October 23, 2017 116 Photo by robert Alexander/Getty Images E.B. White in North Brooklin, Maine, December 29, 1977 120 Photo by New York Times co./Getty Images T H r E ATS Citizen journalists in Cairo, February 6, 2011 124 Alex Majoli/Magnum Rikio Imajo in South Vietnam, 1968 131 Bettmann Archive via Getty Images Pakistani journalists in Quetta, April 17, 2010 133 Photo by Banaras Khan/AFP via Getty Images Palestinian youth in Sawiya, February 1988 137 AP Photo/Martin cleaver

Journalists in El Salvador, November 1964 68 Susan Meiselas/Magnum

Daniel Schorr, Walter Cronkite, and two producers in New York, April 1970 138 Photo by cBS Photo Archive/Getty Images

Mark Zuckerberg in San Francisco, September 22, 2011 74 Photo by David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Jacobo Timerman, 1984 143 AP Photo/Eduardo di Baia

Bloggers in Las Vegas, July 24, 2010 78 Isaac Brekken/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

Maria Ressa in New York, November 19, 2018 146 Moises Saman/Magnum

EDITOrIAL

Editor in chief and Publisher Kyle Pope Managing Editor Betsy Morais contributing Editor Lauren Harris copy editor Mike Laws Fact checkers Danny Funt, chidinma Irene Nwoye, and Will Tavlin Proofreader Vicky A. Walker ArT DIrEcTION & DESIGN

Point Five Alissa Levin, Nathan Eames, Laura Thorne, Nikita Kataev, and Esther Klingbiel Vol. LX, No. 3

Edward R. Murrow Maria Ressa Walter Lippmann E.B. White Jelani Cobb Victor Navasky Dorothy Gilliam Margaret Sullivan David Simon Alissa Quart David Halberstam Jacobo Timerman And more . . .