From Woodstein to Drudge: America’s Love Affair with the News, and How It Went Bad

By Marc Fisher, The Washington Post

Delivered May 5, 2004

Lee Chapel

Washington and Lee University

The first clue came in New Hampshire, during the 1996 presidential campaign, when, no longer able to tolerate the inanity of Steve Forbes' Total Message Control, I stopped off in a picturesque town to take the local temperature. Among the first people I interviewed were 1) a C-SPAN junkie who wanted only to talk about the zen of Brian Lamb, 2) a talk radio fanatic who refused to let me write down a word of his rant because he knew from listening to Rush ("I'm a megadittos man," my new friend told me) that I would only twist his views to match my liberal homosexual agenda, and 3) a bakery manager who was slackjawed over the fact that I neither read nor had ever heard of his favorite news source, Media Bypass, a monthly magazine (and now web site and radio show, too) that reveals the "uncensored national news."

Of course, I still didn't really get it. Several more years went by before I finally realized that the essence of journalism had changed: This time, the revelation arrived on a sunny afternoon in suburban Maryland, where I traveled to interview an elementary school principal, who had prepared for me by writing a short, neat list of "Talking Points," which now sat front and center on his desk. "Here's my soundbite," the man offered lamely. Luckily, I was able to persuade the principal to leave his list behind, join me on a leisurely walk, and tell me what was really happening in fourth grade.

But whether or not I got any morsel of truth out of that principal, something big has happened. The past 25 years have brought not only vast changes in the technology and corporate structure of journalism, not only a revolution in the definition of news and the expectations of both news consumers and news providers, but a startling rejiggering of the basic elements of what we do: Truth, fact and information seemed fairly straightforward concepts to most people in the news business a quarter century ago. Today, they're entirely up for grabs.

In the 1970s, news people could still be heros--in our own minds and in the public imagination. In 1976, we flattered ourselves with comparisons to Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee and matinee idols Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Woodstein. Those were heady days: In "The Parallax View," only the reporter sees the huge conspiracy that is asphyxiating the nation, but he is killed before he can publish the story. In "Three Days of the Condor," the press is the last defense against the eternal Them.

But by 1979, postmodernism had poked its prickly finger into the national imagination: In "Apocalypse Now," Dennis Hopper was a freelance photographer who was our window onto the madness of Kurtz, the insanity of Vietnam, but Hopper was strung out, no longer able to synthesize information. He was our eyewitness, still shooting pictures, still sending us messages, but he was beyond judging. The observer had become an idiot.

It wouldn't be long before Hollywood picked up on the growing antipathy toward those who would dare to tell the people what the news was. The next decade brought an endless parade of reporters with loose morals, zero ethics, and a paralyzed, misshapen view of what America should be.

Bye-bye, Woodward! Bye-bye, Murrow! Hello, "Dirty Laundry," the Don Henley song from 1983:

"I make my living off the Evening News
Just give me something-something I can use
People love it when you lose,
They love dirty laundry.
We got the bubble-headed-bleach-blonde
comes on at five
She can tell you 'bout the plane crash with a gleam in her eye
It's interesting when people die
Give us dirty laundry.

Can we film the operation?
Is the head dead yet?
You know, the boys in the newsroom got a
running bet
Get the widow on the set!
We need dirty laundry

Dirty little secrets
Dirty little lies
We got our dirty little fingers in everybody's pie
We love to cut you down to size
We love dirty laundry

Kick 'em when they're up
Kick 'em when they're down
Kick 'em when they're up
Kick 'em all around

The Era of Journalistic Good Feeling that prevailed in the 70s, when disco was king and the imperial presidency was being dismantled by a cardigan-clad peanut farmer, was replaced by the unease and rancor of "Die Hard"--in which the reporter character was a self-obsessed buffoon who finally got a punch in the mouth, winning cheers from moviegoers. The press, now more routinely lumped into an unkempt mass called the "media," took on a collective identity; instead of hero reporters, we often saw ourselves depicted as a faceless throng, a clot of shouting, hectoring goons--The Pack. When we had any individual character, it wasn't exactly exemplary. In "Absence of Malice," audiences sided with the besieged businessman (!) Paul Newman against the conniving careerist Miami Sentinel reporter Sally Field. (I was covering county government at The Miami Herald when the moviemakers took over our newsroom overnights to film portions of "Absence." Each morning, we returned to find the standard newsroom clutter removed from our desks. Apparently, our trash was too innocent-looking, and had to be replaced with mounds of evil-looking computer spreadsheets.)

But our image wasn't all that had changed. The audience was different too. One verse of "Dirty Laundry" that I left out above demonstrates that for all the cynicism and aggression that came to dominate the image of the media mob, this souring of the relationship between the media and the public was a two-way street:

You don't really need to find out what's going on
You don't really want to know just how far it's gone
Just leave well enough love
Eat your dirty laundry.

The public, Henley knew, no longer had much appetite for serious news. Of course, they weren't getting as much of the hard stuff as their parents had. Time and People, once wholly different, even antagonistic cousins, now seemed hard to tell apart. The late '70s handwringing about the increasing presence of analysis pieces and interpretive reporting in the nation's newspapers soon gave way to the decline of beats, the wholesale evisceration of newsroom staffs and newsholes by chains that sold their souls to Wall Street, and the evolution of broadcast news operations from the glory days of CBS Reports and NBC White Papers to a state in which "Network," Paddy Chayefsky's 1976 satire on the creeping ascendancy of entertainment values, could easily be taken as a documentary.

This industry has reacted to powerful changes in what we produce and how it's received by focusing on some ailing trees, missing the fact that the forest is being paved over by developers. We pronounce ourselves determined to solve the Case of the Shrinking Soundbite or the Mystery of Our Lack of Diversity or the Tragedy of the Missing Young Readers. And to be sure, these mini-crises exist. Political candidate soundbites, which averaged 43 seconds each on the network newscasts back in 1968, were down to 9.8 seconds each by 1988 and squeezed to 7 seconds by 1996. But this debate, like most of those we've obsessed over through these 25 years, misses the larger point: You could hardly broadcast longer bites if you wanted to now, because politicians, like business people and even the proverbial man on the street, barely speak in complete sentences anymore. Of course, neither do TV newsfolk, whose language has devolved into a bizarre staccato of phrases and gerunds: "Mayor Smith rejecting tonight new allegations. Kathy Daly, on the nightbeat, with the mayor." Who's the chicken, who's the egg, who can figure out what's going on?

The harsh truth is that fewer people care what we do than did 25 years ago. And fewer think there's anything essential about the filtering and synthesizing of information that we perform.

We've made it all the easier for consumers to spurn our products because we've bought into the notion that all voices are equal, that a blowhard on talk radio has as valid a reading of political events as does the Washington bureau chief of the New York Times, or that opinions dumped onto a random web site are as useful as a story written by a reporter who knows every deputy secretary in the agency he covers.

We have moved ever further from the basics of journalism. In the magazine world, the 70s now seems an impossibly rich period of serious reporting and adventuresome writing--in general mags such as New Times, in an edgy sports book such as Jock, in an irreverent journalism review called MORE. The next era in magazine journalism explored new horizons in glitz, celebrity worship and a telegraphic style that virtually precludes storytelling.

Most newspapers at some point in the 80s or 90s declared government coverage boring, announced that we would cover the issues readers really care about, and under the guise of redeployment, proceeded to cut beat coverage and overall staffing to the point that nothing gets covered well. TV networks shuttered bureaus around the globe and nation, the nation's second tier of newspapers bowed out of national and foreign coverage, editorial and op-ed pages grew blander and more ideologically constricted.

And then we declared the decline in popular interest in our products unfathomable.

But news consumers didn't go away, they just found more interesting ideas. While we were busy dumbing down, the public was deconstructing the basic concept of news. Consumers couldn't buy our presses or transmitters, but some of them found other ways to express their skepticism: They questioned our methods and even our belief in facts. Encouraged by new technology that promised the most raw and open of information democracies, consumers developed a crush on "unmediated" news: Personalize your Yahoo! News page. Watch C-SPAN. Listen to congressmen and journos alike cutting loose with Imus. Get your politics from your college roommate's occasional e-mails about the Outrage of the Week.

Reasonably intelligent people today can and do report that they trust the "news" on the Howard Stern Show or Jay Leno's monologue or the Drudge Report or their favorite blog more than the product of self-appointed arbiters of accuracy and fairness. The more "professional" and glitzy the corporate media became, the more attractive seemed Brian Lamb's 1979 stroke of genius, C-SPAN's purposefully dull and quiet approach.

Has the audience grown more gullible--accepting Greta Van Susteren, Ann Coulter and George Stephenopoulos as journalists--or more sophisticated--sifting through the cacophony of the web to draw their own conclusions about current affairs?

The only possible answer: Yes.

When I worked in Miami, an editor named Lou Heldman made a big show of posting on the wall of his office a large, handwritten poster listing the things readers really care about. As you might expect, this did not bode well for nuts and bolts reporting. The list included sex, money, children, schools, home, car--and the governing idea was that we would shape our coverage to match the list. There is, of course, nothing wrong with this list, nor with using the pages of a newspaper to reflect and illuminate readers' passions. But a company like Knight Ridder was only too eager to use such lists as an excuse to scale back on journalism's other obligation, the one enshrined in the Constitution: To serve as a check on government and other institutions. This involves providing information that the audience may not be clamoring for. This involves doing something well beyond mirroring popular taste. This involves spending money that may not produce an immediate return.

News executives in this country like to portray the past 25 years as a period of adjusting to changing audience desires. This has produced the spectacle of editors and publishers claiming that they cannot control their own content because they are required to follow the public's demands. But there is no such natural law, and proof is available in other countries, particularly in western Europe, where the definition of news has not changed nearly as severely as it has here. Newspapers and broadcast operations in those countries retain the same news agenda of a quarter century ago--a sometimes dull, easily lampooned mix of government, diplomatic and foreign reporting. Our news is more interesting--far more varied, far more entertainingly presented. But the contrast is worth noting, if only to show that there was nothing inevitable about our dumbing down.

Some changes of the past 25 years were, however, unstoppable. Thanks to the rise of the computer and the web, the dreary spread of punditry has forced out real reporting like so many snakehead fish devouring other species in a pond. The rise of cable TV news channels, the web's infinite newshole, and corporate mandates to cut back on spending on newsgathering have pushed managers to turn to the easiest and cheapest form of content--mouthing off. The handful of web news ventures that engaged in original reporting didn't last long; those that survived consist primarily of what is charitably called commentary and analysis. Even CNN, which for years responded to the broadcast networks' cutbacks by increasing its fleet of reporters around the globe, has joined the rush to bloviate, replacing many hours of reporting to go up against such "news" programming as Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity on Fox News Channel.

But amid all the on-air shouting and online chatter, the web has also revolutionized reporting in exciting and encouraging ways. I shake my head just trying to reconstruct a day of reporting circa 1985--hours of phone calls just to find a good source on some new topic; long afternoons at the library, combing through the Reader's Guide to Periodicals; days spent at the courthouse, sifting through property records. All gone, like magic. But given the literally thousands of hours of drudge work that any reporter has saved over the past decade thanks to computers and the web, how is it possible that we do not live in a golden age of reporting?

Popular culture has splintered in dozens of directions over these 25 years. A common national conversation became harder than ever to achieve. Cable ballooned into 100 choices, including three increasingly similar news operations. New magazines and e-zines now cater to every sliver of interest and identity. But a wave of consolidation and closings also narrowed outlets for news--radio largely bowed out of the news business, a tragedy that became most apparent on Sept. 11, when most stations, without even a single news person on staff, ended up simulcasting the audio of TV coverage. In too many places, newspapers became monopoly operations, with coverage that reflects the arrogance and laziness that that status too often brings.

Every traditional news medium concluded that it is in grave danger of losing an entire generation of readers, viewers, listeners. Young people graze on the edges of the news empire, picking up headlines from the crawl on cable TV, tasting meatier stories highlighted on their favorite web logs, dipping into Yahoo! on the theory that it is something different, even though it's the same AP copy that's in their local newspaper.

Certainly the quality of people going into the business has only improved, at least on paper. The past 25 years saw the increased professionalization of journalism--more and more smart kids from fancy schools, ever fewer blue-collar types whose resumes featured more street sense than sheepskin. But expensively educated reporters didn't turn out to be any more aggressive, humane or artistic in their craft; if anything, the new crop was more malleable, more easily handled by corporate managers.

With ever fewer family-owned news operations, managers fell under the thumb of the short-term and short-sighted demands of Wall Street analysts, who made it clear that the journalism they liked best was tasty little morsels of stories--done on the cheap: TV newsmagazine minidramas that play on the emotions, a lite menu of news-you-can-use in print. I've been haunted for years by the sick feeling that overcame me in the mid-80s after I received a lecture from a former schoolmate who had become a media analyst at a big Wall Street firm: "The Miami Herald has no business having foreign or domestic bureaus," he told me. "It's financially irresponsible. They should be using wires." Not long after that, they were.

All of which brings us back to the central question: What went wrong? In 1976, the editor of my high school newspaper was suspended from his post after he published an article documenting marijuana sales and use on the school's campus. The story was a model of restraint, well-reported, played inside the paper with discreet art. A quarter century later, student editors around the country routinely find themselves prevented from reporting on sensitive topics such as drugs, sex and race. The Student Press Law Center says complaints about censorship jumped from 1,443 in 1996 to 2,129 in 2000, and the trend continues. Students have been prohibited from writing about lawsuits against their schools, criminal charges against students, student pranks, homosexuality, discrimination, even the debate over explicit teen dancing.

In the schools, as in the professional arena, lawyers and managers have gained the upper hand over reporters and editors. We all work in a narrower field of play--restrained by libel concerns, ethnic sensitivities, fiduciary responsibilities, all leading to less bold reporting, fewer chances taken.

For a brief, shining moment, it appeared that the web could be an end run around those heightened sensitivities. For a couple of years, there was even a site dedicated to publishing censored work of student reporters. But that site is no more. And with ever more students being suspended or even expelled for their writings, it's no wonder that many schools--as many as 20 percent of U.S. high schools, according to the High School Journalism Institute at Indiana University--no longer publish newspapers. A few brave young people continue to publish their censored work online, but high school students do not have the legal tools to be the vanguard of press freedom.

They do, however, have the righteous energy to show us what needs to be done. Have the traditional media consigned themselves to a grim future of narrowed possibilities and dull responsibility? Is dumbing down the only response we can concoct to our thinning audience? Or can journalists in the next 25 years reassert our sense of purpose and direction? All those people who have turned to other, seemingly less reliable sources are still searching for meaningful and compelling information. A trustworthy and fair filter that tells great stories and holds the nation's institutions accountable will always find an audience.