The new concerns about the press

These are the glory days of the American press. Never before has it exercised so much power so independently or found itself vested with such prestige and glamour. Journalism schools are flooded with applications. Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, the Washington Post reporters who dug into Watergate and helped bring down a government, are now being portrayed in a movie (Robert Redford will play Woodward), and are well on the way to making $1 million apiece for telling the story of their story.

It’s a far cry from the way things used to be. “The lowest depth to which people can sink before God,” wrote Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, in a classic expression of the esteem in which newsmen were once held, “is defined by the word ‘journalist’ … If I were a father and had a daughter who was seduced I should not despair over her; I would hope for her salvation. But if I had a son who became a journalist and continued to be one for five years, I would give him up.”

Despite their new prestige, there is an ominous sense among newsmen of a growing distance, if not outright antagonism, between the press and the larger society, and a corresponding sense of trouble shaping up. This unease is most often expressed as a fear that the First Amendment freedoms have been cut back-by wiretaps and other Nixon Administration moves against the press, by “gag” orders and other court-imposed restrictions on the reporting of trials, and by the frequent subpoenas that force journalists to testify in legal proceedings.

At the end of a swing

In fact, this fear has little substance. Freedom of the press has not withered in recent years and in some respects has expanded. “The press is very likely freer than it ever has been,” explains Robert L. Bartley, editorial-page editor of the Wall Street Journal. “The problem is that we’re at the end of one pendulum swing, and we worry about how far it will go when it swings back the other way.”

Bartley is right in worrying. The problem isn’t that Americans are eager to repeal the First Amendment. It is rather that many Americans are increasingly hostile to the press itself—and that this hostility could lead to any number of disagreeable consequences, not least a restriction of journalistic freedom.

This hostility comes as a reaction against a near-revolutionary change that has been transforming American journalism during the past fifteen years or so. To some extent, what is involved in the change is a matter of structure and scale. Previously, American journalism and its audience had been extremely decentralized; among publications that focused on news, only Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, and the Wall Street Journal had significant national audiences. But during the 1960’s some other sectors of the American press acquired a distinctly “national look.”

Flying the news to Washington

In part, the new look simply reflected new conditions in the newspaper markets of New York and Washington, D.C. Since one is the communications capital of the U.S., and the other is the political capital, newspapers in both cities have always had some national influence and out-of-town readers. In the 1960’s, it happened, the influence of the New York Times and the Washington Post was considerably expanded by the collapse of a good deal of their own local competition. In addition, the Times’s out-of-town circulation rose steeply; today, fully 25 percent of its daily circulation is outside the New York area—more than 200,000 copies a day in 1974. On the West Coast, the Los Angeles Times has also managed to expand its out-of-town influence, and it too has begun to look more “national.” In a determined effort to further this view of itself, the paper has been flying copies to opinion leaders in Washington, D.C., every day.

Meanwhile, television news, too, was acquiring a more national perspective. In 1963, NBC and CBS expanded their nightly news programs from fifteen minutes to half an hour; they were followed by ABC in 1967. They began, quite consciously, both to run more national news and to seek out the national implications of the local stories they covered. And they got an increasingly national audience: the three networks’ early evening news shows now have a combined audience of 50 million.

Thus, from having had a local and a regional press, Americans suddenly found themselves with a national press as well. It is true that there are still plenty of healthy local newspapers; indeed, from a business point of view there are still many that are healthier than the New York Times (which was barely profitable in 1974). Still, the prestige and influence of many of the great regional papers, e.g., the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Baltimore Sun, and the Louisville Courier-Journal, have undergone something of a decline.

As this national press emerged, several of its members began to transform themselves in other ways. Previously, the media involved had been quite different from one another. The newspapers mostly reported facts about the day’s events; the networks provided a bland headline service; the newsmagazines, in addition to summarizing the week’s developments, offered interpretation and covered larger social and cultural trends. In principle, all this might have remained unchanged after the newspapers and networks acquired national audiences. In practice, the new national press was powerfully influenced by some new currents in American life.

The impact of intellectuals

A new generation of Americans—better educated, more interested in ideas, more concerned with political and social questions—gave many institutions a more “intellectual” character in the 1960’s. The influence of this new generation on the press was dramatic. It had a special impact on the new national newspapers, which began developing new journalistic forms; furthermore, the national press as a whole seemed to have a new consciousness of American society and was conveying a new and more “serious” agenda to the American people.

To quite a few critics of the press, the change could be summarized as a great new wave of eastern Establishment liberalism. That definition of the case is somewhat simplistic. The national press is not consistently liberal; the Wall Street Journal is generally viewed as conservative, as is U.S. News and World Report; the New York Times is more liberal than the Los Angeles Times (or than Time). In the last presidential campaign the national press was at least as hard on McGovern as on Nixon. Still, the imputation of liberalism is not entirely unfair, and it is not entirely possible to separate the new ambitions of the national press from the politics it often reflected. But much of what the national press was up to was not political at all. It involved an effort to transcend the short-comings of the traditional newspaper.

The trouble with “events”

The shortcomings of the traditional American newspaper were no secret fifteen years ago. They had been identified for some time, primarily by college-educated newsmen at the better papers, but also by serious critics who were not always working newspapermen themselves. They included Daniel Boorstin, Dwight MacDonald, Douglass Cater, and others, and their case was argued in a number of books (e.g., Boorstin’s The Image).

These critics deplored the low educational and intellectual levels of the average newspaper, but they were especially concerned with its rather limited conception of news. To some extent, they were proposing to move toward the more expansive conception that had been adopted by Time and, later, Newsweek.

The problem about conventional newspaper news, as they viewed the case, was that it was limited to daily events, which inevitably would be written about in haste, and thus unthoughtfully, Focusing exclusively on “events” also meant that long-term trends, such as the massive migration of southern blacks to the North during the 1950’s, were systematically ignored. For the same reason, stable conditions—the situation of the poor, discrimination against minorities—were almost never written about because nothing “happened.”

Moreover, said critics of the conventional newspaper, news stories dealt only with events that were recorded and announced by important organizations, be it the State Department or the New York Yankees. People in groups not represented by established institutions therefore didn’t get fair “representation” in the traditional newspaper. By building the news story around an institution’s announcement, the critics went on, traditional journalism tended to adopt the institution’s language and bias. And this, in turn, made it possible for institutions to manipulate—and distort—the citizen’s impression of the way things are.

Thoughtful newsmen were also bothered by the conventions of objectivity, which prevented a reporter from making it clear that any deceit had occurred, since interpretive or critical comment was ruled out. Senator Joseph McCarthy had exploited this to the hilt; many newsmen had seen through his demagogy, yet the conventions of their profession left them with little choice but to be the Senator’s stenographers and mouthpieces.

Ultimately, the critics held, what was wrong with the traditional newspaper was that it had a narrow and distorted sense of reality. It imagined that uninspired persons, routinely turning out stories cast in stereotyped molds, were capable of giving an adequate picture of the world. It conceived life as a matter of day-to-day actions largely devoid of larger trends or ideas. It defined the world as an exclusive assemblage of institutions, and it depicted events from their point of view. The challenge confronting any serious journalism, the critics asserted, was to escape from all these constraints. Clearly, conventional newspapers had not even begun to do that.

The newsman became an expert

The newspapermen who accepted these criticisms had a number of proposals for change. In part, they wanted to do what newspapers had always done, but to do it better: to increase the resources of manpower, money, and space available for covering events; to raise the level of the newsman’s education, talent, and seriousness; to cover more events; and to increase the flexibility of the news-story format. To this extent the critics’ program was a simple matter of “more” and “better.”

But some dissatisfied newsmen were seized by a much larger ambition, at once intellectual and political. They wanted to transcend the limits of daily journalism as such. They wanted to give a true picture of the world rather than merely to describe events as announced by responsible institutions, and they wanted to redress the unfairness, as it seemed to them, that was created by the newspaper’s dependence on established organizations and indifference to the views of others. At this level their program involved a radical and qualitative change: the newspaper was to become more like the magazine and the book, and the newsman was to be transformed into a commentator and expert.

To some extent, then, the newspaper was to become more like the newsmagazines. As far back as the 1920’s, Time had devised new forms in which to cast the news story, had redefined the news as something more than “events,” had broadened the traditional range of coverage (to include even the press itself), and had served up the news with a good deal of interpretation and analysis.

It is not possible to put a precise date on the point at which the criticisms of conventional journalism were accepted by—and acted on by—the editorial executives of the new national newspapers. But during the 1960’s, it seems clear, the ideas of the critics ceased to be viewed as heresy. Indeed, they rapidly became something akin to a new orthodoxy.

The new journalism led to the upgrading of staffs, and more coverage of public affairs and social problems. Journalism increasingly broke out of the old molds. There were more magazine-type articles in the national newspapers, which began to focus less on events and institutions, more on ideas, trends, and miscellaneous non-institutional causes; e.g., the civil-rights and antiwar movements. There were also some changes in the rest of the national press. Articles in the newsmagazines became longer and more reflective. And television news too began to incorporate more documentary and interpretive material.

Although TV journalism still serves to some extent as a “headline service,” it has in some ways become more like the new magazine and the new journalism in general. The networks rely heavily on the New York Times and Washington Post for ideas about what to cover. And there is often a striking parallel between filmed news stories-like, for instance, NBC’s recent accounts of the world hunger problem-and the magazine-type interpretive and “feature” story. Thus, just as ideas, interpretation, and trends increasingly found their way into the daily newspaper, so did they make their way into the nightly news programs.

The result of all these developments was dramatic. The press—or, at least, a large chunk of it—was no longer the routine recorder of events and passive instrument of institutions. It had become much more influenced by ideas and more capable of communicating ideas.

Even more important, the national press conveyed a new consciousness of the American condition. Reacting against the dominance of established institutions in traditional reporting, it became increasingly preoccupied with the non-Establishment and anti-Establishment worlds—with the poor, the aged, the blacks. Reacting against those previous “manipulations” by established institutions, it became preoccupied with the issue of credibility and was quick to expose any lack of it.

Here come the advocates

Some of the changes represented by the new journalism were unmistakable improvements over the traditional way of newspapering. Journalism took on a greater variety, provided more information, gave newsmen the flexibility to convey their best understanding of events. But the intellectual outlook conveyed by the new journalism also has created problems—for the press itself and, it would appear, for the American System.

One of the most serious of these is the problem of advocacy. “Nothing is excluded,” said A.M. Rosenthal of the New York Times in 1966 in describing the kind of journalism he envisioned at that paper. But where there is freedom to break out of the traditional formulas and routines, there is also an opportunity to abuse the powers of journalism. A reporter can use a news story to push his own ideas so hard that the requirements of “fairness” are discarded.

The deliberate politicization of news has become an endemic problem, especially among young reporters. There were occasions, especially in the late 1960’s, when young reporters were so outraged by the Vietnam war, or the state of race relations in the U.S., or the behavior of the police in Chicago, that they assumed a right to editorialize strenuously in their news stories. Editors have generally resisted such efforts in the name of objectivity—Rosenthal recalls of the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention that “I stayed home and killed copy and added to my reputation as a son of a bitch”—but they aren’t always successful.

The process implies some problems for the credibility of the press. Opinion polls reveal a more or less steady decline in public respect and trust accorded the news media (as well as all other institutions) since the early 1960’s. Since there isn’t any evidence that the press is less (or more) factually accurate than it used to be, the source of this credibility problem may be the newly controversial agenda and perspective being supplied by the national press.

Good spelling isn’t enough

Partly because of this problem, and partly because of the expanding power of the national press (the power is increased by the supplementary wire services of the New York Times and Washington Post-Los Angeles Times, which together have more than 750 newspapers as subscribers), the new journalism finds itself increasingly subject to overt political attack—with all the attendant dangers that inarticulate disaffection from the media will be transformed into a concerted movement to curb their freedom. “A lot of people in Congress and elsewhere think the press is so powerful that they can’t ignore damaging coverage,” says Alan Otten, national correspondent of the Wall Street Journal. “So they attack. The old idea was, ‘You can say anything you want about me so long as you spell my name right.’ It isn’t anymore.”

In the long run, the greatest danger to the national press is probably posed, not by public unhappiness with its political position, but by the intense feeling among executives, in business and government, about what they see as its systematic distrust of all established institutions. There is growing concern among these executives that the new journalism has made it hard for them to make their records and views known to the public on their own terms. As examples they point to the almost unremittingly hostile coverage received by the Pentagon and the oil industry in recent years.

The consequence, argue these executives, is that it has become increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to get the public’s governmental and economic business done. “There’s been a communications revolution,” says Ian MacGregor, chairman of American Metal Climax. “As with all revolutions, someone is taken to the gallows. The victim of the communications revolution has been the political leader. He’s no longer able to maintain a position of leadership; he’s preempted by prior expressions of the media.” Echoes Herbert Schmertz, a vice president of Mobil Oil, “There’s too much accusatory journalism.”

Thus despite the flaws of the traditional newspaper, many executives still prefer it to the new journalism. “The ‘serious’ papers today are crazy,” exclaims one angry government executive. “The unserious ones are merely trivial.”

The businessmen can’t get through

Many thoughtful news executives are deeply concerned about the credibility problem that is being created by the press. “We’re opening up the pages to elements of society never before covered,” says William Thomas, editor of the Los Angeles Times. “At the same time, we run the danger of closing out what used to be the Establishment voice. We don’t listen enough to businessmen. The old Establishment voices aren’t in the paper enough. Often we’ve put them in the same category that blacks occupied fifteen years ago.”

The problem of credibility is by no means the only one that has been created by the new journalism. Some of its larger ambitions simply seem unrealistic. It is a fallacy to suppose that daily journalism can transcend its dependence on institutions and its focus on events. A half century ago, in his Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann pondered the possibility that the press could do just that and convey “a true picture of life.” He finally concluded, “It is not workable. And when you consider the nature of the news, it is not even thinkable.”

Lippmann argued that the central transactions in a modern democracy are between its institutions, which do most of the actual work, and the publics that oversee and control them. The central role of the newspaper is to facilitate those transactions by simply reporting what happened—the one thing it can do with a precision and expertise all its own. But it can perform this function properly only when it leaves to responsible institutions the task of defining events.

Something will have to give

When newspapers try to usurp that function, they cease to be a window through which publics and institutions can look at each other, and start to act as a screen. That, said Lippmann, is why, “at its best, the press is a servant and guardian of institutions.” When it relinquishes that role, he warned, it becomes a “means by which a few exploit social disorganization to their own ends.”

Some aspects of the new journalism, then, have put the System somewhat out of joint by making it more difficult for government, business, and other institutions to explain themselves to their publics. In the long run, it would seem, something will have to give: the effectiveness of government, the ability ‘of public opinion to control it, the freedom of the press, or the character of the journalism it currently practices.

The ombudsmen will help

It is possible that the issue will be resolved in a moderate way. There is emerging within the national press corps a body of criticism of the new “advocacy”; the views expressed by William Thomas are by no means eccentric. Some news organizations, in response, are increasing the variety of viewpoints expressed—in “op ed” pages, in letters-to-the-editor departments, in “ombudsman” columns—and admitting errors more readily, as may be seen in the increasing popularity of correction departments. And institutions, for their own part, are also adapting by learning to deal with newsmen as something more than mere stenographers, for example, and by using paid advertisements as a means of getting their own views across.

The press had a lot of power in colonial America, and that power was very much on the minds of the Founding Fathers. In the years that led up to the Declaration of Independence, they had watched the journals of their day help transform thirteen colonies of obedient British subjects into a new nation of Americans determined to make a revolution. Yet despite this firsthand experience of the power of journalism to alter or destroy political systems, when it came to writing a constitution for the new nation they were agreed that freedom of the press should be one of the basic rights provided. Not only would a free press provide a check against tyranny, but it was integral to their entire vision of an open and informed society under a popular government.

But if the Founding Fathers believed in press freedom, they also insisted on press responsibility. To them press freedom was not an end in itself, but a means of securing certain higher values, particularly individual rights and the viability of popular government itself. While such concerns justify a large measure of freedom for the press, they also imply certain substantial obligations to tell the truth, to observe standards of fair play, to make sure that responsible institutions are able to make their cases in public, and in other ways to accommodate journalism to the legitimate needs of the System. It is still a pretty good list.