New Bottles, But Is It Wine?

Hodding Carter, III

March 4, 2005

It’s always good to be back at Washington and Lee. It perpetually reminds me of my desperate attempt to transfer here after my first semester at Princeton, 51 years ago. I had come north from a coed public high school in a smallish Mississippi Delta town where the women were uncommonly lovely. I had come to a previously unseen Yankee campus which was 1)all male, 2) isolated from everything, and 3) on which automobile possession was forbidden. It was also a damn sight harder than I figured anything should be.

So, just before Christmas I informed my folks by telegram (a quaint form of communication of that era) that I wished to transfer down to be with old friends in Lexington, surrounded by girls’ colleges and schools and attuned to the fact that we lived in the new age of automobiles.In those days, 18-year olds did not actually tell their parents what they intended to do. They asked. And my parents did what rational parents used to do when confronted with what they understood to be a ridiculous request.  They refused, by return telegram. And thus I played out my undergraduate years at a monastery, a monastery that for four months out of eight was bleak, rain-driven and miserably uncomfortable.  That’s why I ordinarily return to W&L singing, This Nearly Was Mine.

One other historical note. From the time I was l0 until I was 18, my writer/newspaperman father would load up the family for our annual summer trek to Maine, where over a three-month stretch each year he turned out most of his 22 books and 500 magazine articles. And each year we would come by Lexington, to visit Marse Robert at W&L and the monument to the brave cadets at VMI.  And Traveller, stuffed and mounted then, pastured in the sod now.  And then roll on to Frederick,, Maryland, the scene of Stonewall’s troops and Barbara Fritchie’s defiant refusal to haul down Old Glory , and Gettysburg, where Longstreet came too late and Pickett’s charge came too soon.

The Southern past in those days was not past, it was ever-present in ways that most of today’s Southerners simply neither fathom nor are taught. But such musings are not why Ed Wasserman invited me
here. Instead, I am to give a talk about our craft, our business, our profession----about my lifelong passion.
To begin, the title is almost totally unrelated to what I hope to say, like most titles offered up way too soon at the insistence of conference organizers. My remarks could as easily be titled, Stop Whining and Drink Your Beer.  Having given more than my share of those gloom and doom talks of which those of us who have been at the business for a half century or so are very, very fond, I am surprised to find myself in a somewhat different place. The critical litany is all too accurate---and in our question and answer period I will be happy to expand on it.

Indeed, when I survey today’s field of big media’s managers, I am reminded of why I continue to treasure William Allen White’s memorable non-eulogy for Frank Munsey, a group owner of 80 years ago. The great Kansas editor wrote:  Frank Munsey contributed to the journalism of his day the talent of a meat packer, the morals of a money changer and the manners of an undertaker. He and his kind of just about succeeded in transforming a once noble profession into an eight per cent security. May he rest in trust.  Change eight per cent to 28 per cent, and White’s indictment could be applied to more media managers than I can count.

But for today I am closer to Charles Dickens in the opening lines of A Tale of Two Cities:  It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, Quotations are the last refuge of the intellectually lazy—it beats trying to think of something pithy of your one ---and this one is one of the most over-quoted pieces of business in the English language.  But clichés have resonance because they reflect underlying truth----and when it comes to the frustrating, fulfilling, fun-filled, feudal, fecund and frenetic world of journalism, you can’t say it much better .

The tumbrels roll today, carrying the exemplars of the old journalistic order to their whimpering end; the certainties of the prophets of the new order---call it convergence, call it narrow casting, call it spinach--- arise to replace those of the old; and waves of new approaches play out in extraordinary sagas of innovation and renewal all but beneath the notice of the dueling behemoths of corporate journalism.
Let me be precise, having been verbose. I have thought of journalism all my life the way Princetonians sing of Princeton---as the best old place of all.  I still do, and if I were a young man again today, I would be pulled to it as surely as I was pulled before. I trust we will discuss this shortly as well.

To understand why I feel this way you have to understand that I came to work in the mid-morning of what is thought of as the golden age of American journalism--- and I know up close and personal that there was no such animal.  Certainly there was great journalism in some quarters. There was a new ethic of professionalism and objectivity. There was an understanding in the higher reaches of our craft that what went on in Afghanistan was not only not Afghanistanism, it was of vital importance to Main Street and Mom and Dad.  There was a feeling that you were working in a field vital to the republic’s health. You knew that standards were steadily improving, along with pay, and that what you did mattered. This was not the Watergate syndrome. It was before Watergate, though later enhanced by it.

But you did not have to live in Mississippi, with its impoverished newsrooms and racist editorial pages, to know that too many news institutions responded to a different drummer.  Most news---state, regional, national and international--- was filtered through one of two wire services. With rare exceptions (even rarer today) it was fed through one monopoly community newspaper competing against, at most, a handful of radio stations which considered news, if at all, as a federally dictated appendix. Most of those local newspapers, it cannot be said emphatically enough, did not aspire to be the New York Tmes or the Louisville Courier Journal, a great regional newspaper that was an exception to the rule of mediocre dailies.

(In this field, things are obviously worse, rather than better, the number of daily newspapers down by 250 and circulation penetration steadily falling---particularly in your age group. )  When I began as a cub reporter in l954, television was largely confined to the two coasts. When I bowed out of regular employment in journalism, it was omni-present, but it spoke in blandly uniform and increasingly market-driven terms. Even in the supposedly good old days, local television news operations were an abomination, outside a few noble exceptions.  What an incredibly different landscape faces you today. Forget cable, which despite the fact that it is a mixed blessing has multiplied the inherent possibilities for news and information a thousand-fold. A joke in l980, it is one of the networks’ worst nightmares today.

Where once there were 70 cable systems, today there are ll,000. Where once there were l0 cable channels, today there are some l00. You think CNN’s coverage is thin? Fine, but it has 4,000 newsgatherers around the globe. The networks once had a few hundred. Now they are down to a few score Forget National Public Radio, the fastest growing media audience in the United States, growing because of the quality of its product.  Forget the explosion of niche and targeted publications, offering depth in limited fields and audacity in coverage that puts many mainstream publications to shame.  Consider the multiple alternative print news operations which have proliferated over the past two decades or so. From l990 to 2002, alternative weeklies’ circulation went from three million to 7.5 million. Spanish language press circulation is up 12-fold.

Freestanding operations like the Committee for Public and National Security Archives, doing investigative journalism the big boys are steadily abandoning, have impact far beyond their resources. Fortunate are those who can work at any of them.  Survey the wide-ranging menu now offered on the political right, the Weekly Standard chief among them but dozens of others close behind. (When I was still running our newspaper in Greenville, Mississippi, Ed Kohn---in the audience tonight---urged me to take on a new columnist to provide intelligent conservative balance to the editorial page. His name was George Will. Other than him, you could choose from among William Buckley, J.J. Kilpatrick---the Oklahoma racist posing as a Virginia conservative—and maybe two others. Today, the trick is to find that many intelligent voices on the progressive side of the ledger.)

More statistics:There are 13,000 radio stations where there were 2,100. There are 25 networks instead of the four of l955.  And then---dive into your computer and behold the cornucopia. What an absolute feast. What nearly limitless possibilities. What variety and vigor and fresh thinking.
It is a though we had been set down shortly after Guttenberg invented the printing press and told we could each have one.  Oh, brave new world!  (Though, of course, it is Caliban who utters that memorable Shakespearean phrase ,deriving from ignorance as much as wonder.)  Numbers are not the point, obviously. More is not necessarily better.
 

What matters are the opportunities implicit in the numbers.  There could not be a more creative, exciting and promising period for journalism. And it is a young person’s world, if you will but seize it.
Bobby Kennedy’s paraphrase is applicable here:  “Some see things as they are, and say why? Others see things are they could be, and say, why not?  This year’s report, The State of the News Media 2004, said it best:  …Journalism is in the middle of an epochal transformation, as momentous probably as the invention of the of the telegraph or television. Journalism, however, is not becoming irrelevant. It is becoming more complex

Let me say it again. This is an explosively creative time to be going into journalism---if you are not in search of the past. The old order may indeed be dying, moribund or brain-dead ---and all of it isn’t by a long shot--- but the new, like all frontiers, is teeming with potential.  The trailblazers are already out there, variously full of piss and vinegar and irresponsibility and irreverence and fierce dedication to unearthing THEIR truths and sometimes even THE TRUTH.  According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, some 8 million Americans have blogs. About 32 million claimed to have recently read a blog, up 58 per cent in l0 months. These figures are almost certainly already overtaken by events.

What are blogs and bloggers? Many things, but it helps to remember that 150 years ago the glory of American journalism beyond the big cities was that anyone with the proverbial shirt-full of type could start a newspaper. From that ragtag army came newspaper journalism as we know it today.  As Nicholas Lehman, that brilliant writer and Columbia Journalism School dean, recently wrote:  More than most professions, journalism works out its future unsystematically, through action. As the barriers to journalist publication become ever lower, especially since the advent of the Internet, the number of journalists and publications keep growing. Journalism is a field that encompasses not only reporters and editors, but also humorists, litterateurs, political reformers, artists, raconteurs, detectives, and arbiters of style, among other types. It requires no formal credentials.

That’s your entrance cue.  Enter laughing. Enter kicking ass. Enter full of hope and experimentation and dedication and determination.  Every indictment of the here and now may be true, or partially true, but the horizon expands rather than contracts.  This Republic grew to maturity with a shabby, venal, partisan and not infrequently miserable press. It will survive todays embarrassments, the companies and individuals that are bought and paid for, the ideological parrots and bottom line warriors who might as well be button salesmen.  But is it really wine that is being offered in the new bottles? The answer is encapsulated in another cliché.

It’s really up to you.  In ways unprecedented for most of the last half century, you have an all but blank slate upon which to write. Leave the hand-wringing to oldsters like me---and get going. It can still be the most rewarding craft in the world---the best old place of all.
Traveller may have been buried. Journalism has not.