Why Journalists Keep Getting It Wrong

Adolf Hitler was once asked by one of his henchmen why he despised his own generals -- seemingly a strange thing for a dictator-warlord to do. The answer is famously recorded in the henchman's diary:

"They (the generals) were uneducated and did not even understand their own profession of arms – the least one could expect of them....the fact that they knew so little about the purely material questions of war was absolutely against them."

In recent weeks, America's hate-need relationship (as opposed to a love-hate relationship) with its own press has reminded me of Hitler's quip. If asked about the press -- "the media" as it is now generally known -- the average American might respond in somewhat similar terms:

"They are uneducated and don't even understand their own profession of journalism. The fact that they know so little about their own country speaks absolutely against them."

Notwithstanding the fact that it's drawn from a quotation by Hitler, I believe this a fair approximation of modern sentiment. I also believe it an accurate assessment of the actual state of journalism in this country today. The modern journalist suffers a critical deficiency in his social and political education; he is also astonishingly ignorant of the country in which he lives. Only by accepting this stark fact can we even begin to explain the miserable failure of the press to either predict or to understand the sweeping political events which have taken place in America and elsewhere over the past few months.

Before we go any further, I ought to state here for the record that I have no personal axe to grind against journalism. On the contrary, I am the son of journalists -- my father covered the White House for the Chicago Sun-Times while my mother worked freelance. I grew up surrounded by reporters, some of them quite famous, and my first two jobs were actually for newspapers. A movie like All The President's Men plays more to my sense of childhood nostalgia than any sense of drama. The innate sense of contempt and loathing, mingled with distrust, that so many people have toward "the media" is not something I was born or raised with. On the other hand, having grown up the way I did, I am not one to romanticize the press. So when I offer an assessment of the Fourth Estate in America, I believe it to be closer to true objectivity than many others could offer.

Now, I think anyone who has given the matter any thought at all would agree that American journalism is in a bad way (I am paraphrasing Orwell here to balance the scale after quoting Hitler). The only questions, then, are when did this happen, how did we get here, and how do we reverse the process. Not surprisingly, we must answer all the questions to answer any one of them, so we may as well begin at the beginning.

We ought to start by saying that in recent times -- say, the last century or so -- there were essentially two different types of journalism: print and electric. "Print" was newspapers and news magazines; electric was first radio and then radio and television. And while television journalism became more and more prevalent as the 20th century advanced and then moved toward its conclusion, all the real prestige, the real integrity and class status, remained with print journalists. They were the "real" reporters, with real traditions going back literally centuries -- almost to the invention of the printing press. The TV boys, while glamorous and often at least locally famous, were merely "talking heads" selected more for looks and impressive-sounding voices than journalistic ability. In any case, the "heads" merely readthe news; the print boys went out and got it. This class system was reinforced by entities such as The Gridiron Club, a snooty and very influential private journalistic organization based in Washington, D.C. which was open only to the very best print journalists -- talking heads need not apply. My father was a member of this club and served on its board for a time, and I still remember the scoffing sound he made when I asked why famous people like the CBS, NBC and ABC news anchors weren't allowed. That sound carried with it not merely an entire conversation but an actual professional philosophy. There was snobbery involved, but not only snobbery; the fact was, talking heads weren't allowed because they just didn't have the same level of credibility to their journalism. It was a question of standards, and to my father and his peers, standards were everything.

I cannot stress enough how important integrity was to the old-school reporters around whom I was raised. It was not necessarily a question of personal integrity: many were hard-drinking, chain-smoking, skirt-chasing bastards who'd shove their mother into the path of an oncoming subway train to get a story. But they would get the story right. They would not lie or libel, they would not show fear or favoritism, they would not let their personal prejudices or political leanings influence their articles. They would ask the tough questions, but honor private bargains, and they would respect confidences uttered beneath that sacred three-word caveat "off the record" no matter how earth-shaking they might have been. They might run away in the most cowardly manner from a bar fight on M Street, but to follow a story they'd willingly fly into a combat zone or a plague-struck, third-world shithole, almost without flinching. They would protect their sources, if necessary by going to prison, and they would not tolerate abuses of their ethics by their peers. I can still remember a crusty old editor from The Washington Post explaining to my high school class the brutal interrogation methods he'd used to break the alibi of Janet Cooke, a reporter who'd won the Pulitzer Prize for a story that turned out to be fake. When he described the way Cooke had broken down in tears after confessing she'd lied, the editor's voice rang with righteous satisfaction. No one could be allowed to damage the credibility of the Fourth Estate, he seemed to be saying. The maintenance of public trust in the press was more important than whether or not Janet Cooke was allowed to use the restroom while being "interviewed."

It must be remembered that following the fall of Richard Nixon, the only American institution which really retained the trust of the American people was the press. The presidency, the Pentagon, the FBI and CIA -- all had been cast into disrepute by the enormous scandals which emerged from Vietnam and Watergate. And who had broken those scandals? The Fourth Estate. The press saw itself -- rightly -- as democracy's watchdog, a pen which was mightier than any sword the government could raise against it. And like any empire at the height of its power, it grew complacent about the future.

My father died young, but not so young that he failed to witness the first signs of decline in the institution to which he had devoted his life. I can still remember the anger he expressed when, visiting him in the hospital in 1993, I thoughtlessly brought him a copy of USA Today. "McPaper!" he sneered, and tossed the thing almost violently into the trash. This was followed by a peremptory order to return with a "proper" newspaper. When I did so -- it was probably a copy of The Washington Post, though The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times would have qualified, along with a few others -- he asked me, in a deeply troubled tone, if I was actually prone to reading "McPaper," which he regarded as "fluff" and "light in the ass" -- basically a step above a tabloid.
This question followed by a half-command, half-plea to keep myself "properly informed." And this in turn led to a diatribe against the 24 hour news cycle. I began to realize that in my father's weakened state, some of the fears he had previously suppressed or perhaps just dismissed regarding the future of journalism were coming to the surface.

I knew even at the time that the Gulf War had changed the nature of journalism, had pushed the public's preference for obtaining news permanently from the "print" to the "talking head" camp. To feed the public's ravenous desire for information at a very anxious and troubling time, CNN had created the 24 hour news cycle, with Wolf Blitzer at its helm. My father considered Blitzer "light in the ass" (not a reference to sexuality, but to the "weight" he carried as a journalist) and found it difficult to believe he had become a news superstar based on his ability to read information we had already been told a hundred times before off a teleprompter. But his real grievance was not against Blitzer or CNN but the threat that 24 hour news posed to the truthfulness and integrity of journalism. Having worked in two newsrooms myself (Chicago Sun-Times and Investor's Business Daily), I knew perhaps as well as my father did what a "slow news day" meant -- that there were simply times when not a whole helluva lot was happening in the world. Slow news days have always presented a tough challenge to the reporter with integrity, for a journalist's job is not to make the news but to report it, and if nothing's happening -- well, then nothing's happening. But if one created a 24 hours news program, then one was responsible for filling those 24 hours with news, even when there was none to be had. And the only way this could be done in practice was to use endless repetition of existing stories to fill up as much time as possible (which not only inflates their importance but artificially extends their time in the public eye). That... and to create news by giving disproportionate coverage to incidents and subjects which would not have made the cut for the traditional news cycle -- incidents usually selected for their sensational or "hot button" nature.

The Gulf War ended, but the 24 hour news cycle did not. It flourished everywhere, on every network, but not having a war to cover, did precisely the thing my father feared it would do most -- it began to create stories instead of merely reporting on them. O.J. Simpson, Joey Buttafucco and Amy Fisher, Scott Petersen, Casey Anthony, Paris Hilton -- there was no sleazy, tawdry non-story mean enough to escape the rabid frenzy of 24 hour "journalism." And concomitant with this was the rise of Fox News, which was owned by Rupert Murdoch and did not even pretend toward journalistic objectivity.** It was simply and flagrantly a propaganda organ of the right-wing establishment, pushing a specific an unvarying agenda designed to keep its viewers continuously angry, continuously afraid, and continuously misinformed. And the success of Fox News in the ratings department -- and remember that ratings = money, and money = success, and success breeds emulation -- ensured that the competing networks would have to adapt at least partially to the Fox style if they wanted to stay in business. It goes without saying -- though I'll say it anyway -- that this led to a concomitant drop in journalistic integrity everywhere. The new paradigm demanded a new sort of reporter, one who was quicker on the trigger and much less interested in the accuracy of his aim. To be first with a story was far more important than being accurate.

On top of this came the Internet, and then, in very short order, the cellular phone. The former broke the ancient monopoly that the press once had on information; freedom of the press had formerly meant "freedom of the press for anyone with a press;"
now anyone with an Ethernet cable could spread his or her own views across the planet with the push of a button, and never mind their intelligence, level of education or sincerity (or even sanity). As for the latter, the portable nature of the mobile device allowed news to be disseminated to people not only at all hours, but at virtually any place on Earth. This increased the speed and the range of the news; it also increased the speed and the range of lies, disinformation and baseless rumor. Whatever the flaws of the pre-24 news cycle, pre-Internet, pre-cell phone press, the standards to which it held itself were well-established and acted both as a means of maintaining credibility with itself and with the public, and as a sort of sewer grate which kept out shoddy and irresponsible journalism. By democratizing the press -- by allowing anyone with money to set up an online "news agency," be it HuffPo or Breitbart or what have you -- this filter was destroyed. Never mind having to endure the unbiased or moderately biased views of big news agencies and newspapers; it was now possible for people of any political leaning to pick and choose precisely what sort of information they were exposed to, simply by virtue of filtering out everything else. There are no figures available, but I suppose the majority of those now calling themselves journalists in the United States would not meet the standards set by my father and his peers for that word -- would not even come within screaming distance of them. They are editorialists at best; propagandists most likely; professional liars and manipulators at worst. But they call themselves journalists and this status is accepted by the majority of those who read their "journalism." The ability to distinguish between hacks and reporters is gone.

All this explains, if only superficially, why the quality and integrity of journalism has declined so sharply in the last twenty-five years. It does not explain how the individual journalist has become so disconnected from his own country that none of the major agencies, print or electronic, seem to be able to predict anything they do not want to happen; to take seriously anyone with a different viewpoint; or to grasp the actual motivations of those who disagree with them. Two momentous political events in particular have brought this failing into sharp relief: the first was "Brexit," the exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union. The second was the rise and the election to the U.S. presidency of Donald Trump.

I once asked my father to describe the "average" big-city reporter. He replied quickly, "White, liberal, Eastern-educated, admirer of John F. Kennedy." This was in 1992 or '93, and I would imagine that today's reporters would name another popular Democratic figure -- Obama, say -- than Kennedy. But the rest of the assessment probably holds. And since the majority of journalists were center or left thereof in their political leanings, it also holds that the age-old Republican grudge about the "liberal media" is not anywhere near as facetious as it might seem. Nevertheless, the old line journalists were trapped by their ethics into keeping most of their biases firmly in check when working a story: this can be easily proven by the sheer number of Democratic politicians who have been destroyed or disgraced over the years by journalists who probably voted for them. The point I am trying to make here is that while the "1.0" reporters of my father's generation tended toward the center-left (or just plain left), they managed to remain relatively even-handed in their writing. And the fairness they tried to impart into their pieces forced them to actually listen to, and weigh the merits of, viewpoints they opposed in their personal lives. This in turn forced them into seeing the world as or near the way it actually was, as opposed to the way they wanted it to be -- a process which not surprisingly made them better journalists.

The modern reporter -- the "2.0" version -- shares or exceeds the liberalism of his predecessors, but seems to lack the ability to be even-handed when discussing social political issues. In many ostensibly objective news articles, to say nothing of the op-ed pieces, the contempt and even hatred of the modern reporter is so evident from the very first lines of the story as to be almost palpable. We can trace some of this back to the general failure of our educational system to teach critical thinking to our young people, but much blame falls upon the modern system of journalism, for not inculcating its cub reporters with a hard, unwavering faith in journalistic ethics -- the foremost of which is impartiality. Hope clouds observation, and when one is hoping for a particular outcome in a political situation, it cannot help but blind the person in question to the possibility of unpleasant alternatives. Which brings us to Brexit, and to Trump, and why journalists keep getting it wrong where and when it matters.

Americans as a general rule do not understand what the European Union is, but the cries of agony from the big-city newspapers and from many of the network pundits were sufficient to remind us that it was, and remains, a darling of the political left. This is largely because the basic ideas behind the E.U. are in line with the basic goals of liberalism -- to eliminate borders, reduce national distinctions, centralize power, redistribute wealth, ease trade and impose uniform regulations on the membership. It is not a reach to say that in the E.U. we see the rough outline -- not quite a prototype, but a detailed sketch -- of a future world government, in which "nations" are eventually reduced to the status of member provinces, and surrender a corresponding amount of sovereignty to a lone central government. It's no surprise that many people view the E.U. as a preview of the world's future, and find this future deeply appealing. It should not be a surprise that just as many do not, but here is where journalistic bias rears its ugly single-eyed head -- and, as with Brexit itself, the reasons are as much geographical and economic as political in nature.

During the height of "1.0" journalism's power, the big American newspapers maintained bureaus in every major city in America as well as many foreign capitals. This allowed them a very broad view of what the ordinary person was thinking and feeling -- in Nashville as well as Miami, in Seattle as well as Dallas. Ditto the British press, which once had heavy representation outside of London. As newspaper readership declined, however, many bureaus closed down, until even the major American news outlets operated only in New York and Los Angeles, with perhaps a lone bureau in London to keep the international flavor. In terms of television journalism this had never been a question anyway -- NY, DC and LA were the domestic foci, and minor local affiliates took up the rest of the slack known as the United States of America. London, for Americans, was a prestige post, a sort of grooming-station for those meant for great journalistic things; but for British journalism it came more or less the center of the universe -- only four newspapers in the U.K. are currently headquartered outside London. It should go without saying that restricting the hubs of reportage to a few cosmopolitan cities thousands of miles apart from each other is a bad idea, for if big cities are guilty of a single besetting sin it is considering themselves the center of the universe, and passing on this prejudice to their inhabitants -- especially the transplanted ones. Someone who lives in Georgetown, or Manhattan, or the West Side of L.A. has absolutely nothing in common with those who live in St. Louis, or Harrisburg, or Baton Rouge, and when he thinks of those people at all, it is usually in terms of pity or contempt -- because they are not as witty, urbane and sophisticated as he is. One has only to spend a day in any of these self-appointed centers of gravity to grasp the fantastic chauvinism of their inhabitants, their deep-seated belief that anything they do is right because they do it, any thought they have is correct because they think it. And the insularity of these cosmopolitan lifestyles, the uniformity of political, economic and social identities and outlooks within them, tends to create a reassuring echo-chamber effect. A reporter asks the man on the street, "Do you support Brexit?" and the man replies, "Of course not." Fifty such interviews, fifty such replies, and the matter seems settled. But what matters is not the reply but the question, "What man, and what street?" An American reporter asking this question in Manhattan is going to get very different answers than if he asked it, say, in Cleveland -- but alas, there are no national reporters in Cleveland, because why bother? Who gives a shit about those bumpkins anyway? They belong to the "flyover states" and don't matter. Likewise, a British reporter will get very different answers to the same question if he travels to Slough or Bristol or Newcastle upon Tyne, than he would have received in London. But did the British reporters bother to visit Slough, Bristol or Newcastle upon Tyne? The shock which Brexit dealt to the journalistic establishment gives us our answer -- no. Not, at any rate, on a scale large enough to dissuade British P.M. David Cameron from putting the matter to a general vote in the first place. No doubt Cameron believed the gesture a safe one -- even a formality -- but this only goes to show the size of the disconnect between the British press and the people it purports to cover and to serve. And this disconnect is just as bad or worse in the United States. The idea of Brexit was at first dismissed, then subjected to harsh ridicule -- and then, when it became clear that it had become reality -- to a kind of mean-spirited hysteria, which betrayed not only the bias of the press toward the "remain" camp but a refusal to learn anything from its own failure to predict what had just come to pass. One is reminded here of the famous words of the German poet Christian Morgenstern:

Thus in his considered view
What did not suit could not be true

The dangers of a biased and limited world-view have manifested in what amounts to reportage which is little better than wishful thinking, tinged with the a near-religious smugness that the press itself, sympathizing with the political left, is on the "right side of history." This certainty is of course true of all political persuasions, but since left-thinking is predominant in journalism the burden is especially heavy there. Certainly the weight of it forced the collective gaze of the press downward, at its own reflection, so to speak, when it ought to have been straight ahead. And this brings us to the matter of Donald Trump.

In the opening of this blog I stated, "The modern journalist suffers a critical deficiency in his social and political education; he is also astonishingly ignorant of the country in which he lives." That this is a fact rather than an opinion can be discerned by the way the press not only failed to predict Trump's rise -- proving that they were either ignorant of, or dismissed as unimportant, the deep vein of anger which fueled so many who supported him -- but responded to his victory in the election not with self-examination (or self-recrimination), but rather self-righteous fury. Despite all their education, all their urbanity and sophistication, despite the fact they were on the "right side of history" and knew in their hearts they were backing the right horse, the outcome they had desired had not come to pass. And this sullen fact was all they seemed to grasp. The reasons for the outcome were, and remain, almost entirely lost on them. One has only to read the op-ed pieces in the East and West Coast papers to see the truth of this.

In his famous essay "The Lion and the Unicorn," George Orwell offered a harsh but penetrating analysis of the British ruling class of the 1930s. He accused them of deliberately retreating into stupidity to spare themselves the pain of grasping the fact that their continued hold on power had no moral justification. A similar charge could be levied at the American and British press of today, to wit, that to spare themselves the pain of realizing that fully half the voting public does not share their ideology or want the future that they find so alluring, they have retreated into that same dangerous combination of "arrogance and ignorance" they once found so loathsome in George W. Bush. And what are "arrogance and ignorance" but two components, perhaps the only two components, of stupidity itself?

If you accept my judgement that journalism is broken -- and I think that recent events have proven this almost beyond debate -- then it falls upon me to suggest solutions as to how to fix it. This I intend to do, but in the interest of keeping this blog shorter than, say, Lord of the Rings, I will break off here and continue this discussion in another entry, to be released in a few days. In the mean time I will continue to scan the headlines for evidence that the press has learned a lesson from Trump's victory, and that it is beginning the first stages of a long-overdue self-audit.

But I won't hold my breath.