What are Journalists For?

By William Raspberry[1]

            Ever since Lou Hodges told me he wanted me to come here for a conference on the ethics of journalism, I have been trying to figure out what would make sense for me to say.  I will leave it to the others to tell you that the phrase “ethics of journalism” is oxymoronic.  The reason for my dither is that I am not sure how to talk about journalism in ethical terms (or ethics in journalistic terms, for that matter).  Good journalists are ethical men and women; that seems pretty clear to me. 

But what do I do with it?  I find myself reacting the way some of my peers react to the phrases “new journalism” or “public journalism.”  Give them an example of what these phrases mean, and they will tell you, “Oh, that’s just good journalism.”

Instead, let me talk about where I think we fail to do good journalism and hope we can pull out of the discussion an ethical consideration or two.

A while back, my colleague David Broder wrote of an important piece of legislation whose passage by an overwhelming 95-to-2 vote scarcely made the news.  No, it was not a matter of insignificance.  It was, as I say, an important bill. The reason it got hardly any coverage—not a line in The New York Times, for instance—is that it passed so overwhelmingly.  There was no drama in the vote, no credible “other side,” so our news judgments told us it could not possibly be significant.

            Broder said, “It is conflict—not compromise—that makes news... . The media bias for verbal slugging over legislative virtuosity is one of the main reasons, I believe, Congress is held in such low esteem.”

            If the low estimation of Congress were the only issue, I would not be making this speech.  But I am convinced that the phenomenon cited by my colleague lies behind and exacerbates much of the racial and political polarization, incivility and generalized bad blood that concerns so many of us.

            Broder's point was that the “easy” passage of that important legislation seemed unnewsworthy because the process went so smoothly.  But it went smoothly, he knew, because some members of Congress and their staffs had spent long hours—even years—negotiating the compromise legislation that passed so overwhelmingly. His concern was that the legislative skill and patience involved, qualities journalists used to admire, should go virtually unnoticed in the 1990s.

            My concern is that we pay so much attention to conflict and so little to substance.  Journalists have always loved fights, of course, but of late it is beginning to seem that that is all we enjoy. We cover debates over welfare reform and affirmative action—we even cover election campaigns—more in terms of who is landing the most punches on whose nose, and less in terms of the potential impact on the lives of people. Indeed, we behave as though the debates are primarily political theater, rather than substantive arguments about America’s direction and priorities.  I believe that is one reason why politicians find it so easy to abandon substance in favor of political theater. 

            Tom Rosenstiel recounts this scene in his book, Strange Bedfellows, on the 1992 presidential campaign.  It is early in the primary season, and the Democratic candidates have agreed to meet for a face-to-face televised debate in New Hampshire. The people of the state love it; 140,000 of them tune in, and it goes better than anyone might have guessed.  The candidates are discussing the issues in some depth and detail.  The people are engrossed and so are the reporters who are watching the scene unfold on the television sets in their hotel rooms.

But then the reporters start to get anxious.  Good stuff, they agree, but where is the story line?  What is the lede?  Then, says Rosenstiel, Robert Shogan (his colleague on the Los Angeles Times) shouts at the TV:  Less substance, dammit; more fireworks!

It was a joke, of course, but a telling joke.  It suggested that the needs of a democracy and the needs of a working journalist are at odds.  One wants comity; the other wants a fight.

This is not just true of the grand national issues. We cover fights between school boards and superintendents in excruciating detail—but without revealing to our readers the educational substance behind the fight.  You are far more likely to learn from your local paper who is ahead in the local battle over vouchers than whether vouchers are likely to improve local education. 

            Our emphasis on fighting may be entertaining, but it is hardly enlightening. That is why I so dislike those face-offs that television seems to love, where political opponents go nose-to-nose in some phonied-up fight in which each overstates one side of an argument, being careful to avoid the slightest hint that the other guy may just have a point.

            The idea, I suppose, is for the combatants to do battle, like opposing counsel in a murder trial, with the audience in the role of a jury in search of truth.

            My view is that it has about as much to do with a search for truth as watching a prizefight. I can handle it in the boxing arena.  Fighters do not have to fight about anything.  Where I have trouble is in the political arena—in the debates over abortion and school choice, in the wrangling over saving Social Security and most certainly in our presidential campaigns—where substance routinely takes a back seat to the fight.

I have an example—a few years old, but it still serves—of what I am talking about.  It was at the time of major league baseball’s All-Century ceremony, and  NBC-TV reporter Jim Gray was interviewing Pete Rose, who had been named to the All-Century team.  Well, interviewing is not quite the word.  Verbal assault may be a better one.

            Now here is the point:  Gray’s hectoring of Rose sounded like hard-nosed journalism.  I mean, there he stood, face to face with one of sports’ all-time greats, asking the hard questions.  And the fans—even those who never questioned Rose’s ouster from baseball for gambling—went nuts.  Listen to Kevin Baker’s impassioned reaction, in The Wall Street Journal, to the fans’ outrage:

            “Mr. Gray’s terrible transgression was to ask Mr. Rose repeatedly after the All-Century ceremony if he was finally ready to admit his guilt and express contrition.  For this Mr. Gray has been pilloried from coast to coast.” 

Baker was especially wroth that New York Yankee outfielder Chad Curtis refused to talk to Gray after the third game of the World Series.  “As a team we kind of decided, because of what happened with Pete, we’re not going to talk out here on the field,” Curtis was reported as saying. Baker said, “Apparently we [journalists] no longer understand our job description to include asking tough questions of scoundrels.”

          A few days later, a Wall Street Journal reader named Mike Tancredi wrote a very smart letter to the editor of The Journal.  If I were not being given such a signal honor here today, I might have recommended Tancredi as your speaker.  He has written my speech, but in words more muscular and direct than my own.  Let me read a couple of lines:

                    The reason Pete Rose received such a lengthy ovation—and  why Mr. Gray has been deservedly scorned for his antagonism—is because the fans appreciated a rare chance to see and to celebrate baseball’s all-time hit leader , not one more opportunity to ask him the same questions he had been asked for 10 years… .

                                But what many of us are more bothered by is Mr. Baker’s twofold assertion: explicitly, that interviewees are required to answer any questions asked of them, no matter how inappropriate, tired or                 devoid of interest they may be, and, implicitly, that what Jim Gray, NBC or any media outlet decides in of public interest is necessarily of public interest.

          That one little exchange says so much about what I think is wrong with the way some of us do our noble work these days.  It raises the provocative question that is the title of Jay Rosen’s new book on public journalism: What Are Journalists For? 

          It is not very mysterious what Thomas Jefferson thought we were for.  It might be a good idea not to take him completely literally, but here is what he said in that famous letter to Colonel Edward Carrington:

                The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.   

Similarly with the drafters of the Constitution.  We have got our own Amendment—or at least part of an amendment.  Doctors are granted no explicit right to practice their craft untrammeled.  Lawyers are not, nor are engineers or teachers.  But journalists are, and it seems to me that that extraordinary grant of privilege must mean something beyond the right to hector Pete Rose.

          Nothing in the Constitution requires that we be good journalists, of course. But it does seem to me that the whole idea of press freedom is predicated on the notion that enough of us will do decent journalism enough of the time to warrant that freedom. I think Mr. Tancredi—and journalism’s audience across the country—is trying to summon us back to the higher nature of our calling.  I wish our response could be something more than smug platitudes hurled contemptuously at the great unwashed who would dare to question our standards, our fairness, our very necessity.

I am not saying we should not entertain and divert and gossip.  But the reason for our special privilege is our necessity to the purpose of self-government.  Our democracy, as Jefferson and the framers understood, cannot last long if the people are not  informed.  That is what journalists are for.  It is the basis both of our specialness and of our special obligation—more special yet because it cannot be enforced.  Our fixation on conflict, I believe, threatens to trivialize our specialness.

I once wrote a column about a visit to a mid-size newspaper where, during an exchange with editors and reporters, I asked them to point me toward a local example of success worthy of a larger audience.  The response, I recounted, was total silence. The reason for the silence, it turned out, was not that they did not know any of the good things going on in their communities.  It was because their training and news values and habits kept them from even thinking about those good things.

As I say, it is a problem more for big papers than for community papers where the members of the news staff tend to see themselves as local citizens, not detached critics.

But detachment is not the only reason.  Let me talk for a minute about Hedrick Smith, late of The New York Times and now trying his hand at independent television. Rick spent more than a year chasing down a story of community-building in Southeast Washington—the most economically depressed and problem-ridden section of the nation's capital.    

            We have been reporting on those problems for as long as I have been in Washington. But Rick found a whole bunch of people who were NOT drug dealers or drive-by shooters or teen mothers or school failures.  He found people who spend their time—usually uncompensated time—doing what they can to bring neighbors together in common cause, to rebuild their community.  There were some truly remarkable successes, engagingly told.

I found myself wondering why we cannot do more of this sort of thing.  I also found myself thinking: This is what our readers have in mind when they criticize us for our emphasis on “bad news.”            

Obviously, there are exceptions to all these things I complain of.  There is much truly terrific journalism going on—I dare say, a disproportionate amount of it in my own newspaper. But the general indictment stands.  The way we do our work frequently exacerbates problems we could have a hand in solving.  Why, I keep wondering, can we not routinize our search for what works?  This is the stuff that can hearten America, move us out of our despair and make us believe that we really can do better.

            Our insistence on defining news (mostly) as fights and other disasters not only discourages those who might be tempted to try to make a difference.  It also poisons the relationships among us, perverts our institutions, and makes our future more difficult.

            So why do we do it?  There are several reasons I could name, but the most important may be journalism's need for drama. We cover everything from legislation to social policy to peace initiatives as fights because we understand that our stories need a certain amount of dramatic tension to make them interesting.  It is an important discovery, but so is this:  Pitting people against one another is not the only way to achieve the necessary dramatic tension.

This is the lesson taught by Rick Smith's documentary on Anacostia.  We have long covered that part of Washington, but principally as a series of dismaying problems: crime, violence, teen pregnancy, school failure, economic abandonment and political exploitation.  We have covered the squabbles between community leaders and police, between landlords and tenants, and between competing politicians, always being careful to get the quotes right and the facts straight.

            Smith's piece addressed all of those problems, but from the viewpoint of those who would solve them.  He achieved his dramatic tension not by pitting people against people but by counterpoising problems and problem-solvers.  The difference is almost startling.  The way we usually report these problems makes me hang my head in despair.  The way Rick reported them lifted my heart, made me believe that, just maybe, things can work—made me look for a way to get personally involved in helping some of those who were working to make things better.  The difference between hanging heads and lifting hearts is, I believe, what people have in mind when they beg us for more good news.

I am not necessarily arguing for “civic journalism,” though what Hedrick Smith did might well fit under that rubric.  What I am advocating is something different: that when we understand the journalist’s need for dramatic tension, we can turn our creative juices to finding ways to produce it.

My hero in this regard is Jon Franklin, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for his work at The Baltimore Sun.  It is the first prize-winning entry (1979) I want to talk about now—a brilliant, minute-by-minute account of a brain surgeon at work.

If you recall that series, it was about a risky effort to remove a tumor from the brain of a woman—a great subject for a science feature in any case.  But Franklin personalized it, introduced us to the doctor, who came across as a sort of  knight in surgical armor, named the tumor “The Monster,” and made clear from the outset that the outcome was in doubt.

Jon, now at the University of Maryland, taught me a number of things with that  work, among them the power of  sentence length.  During the explanatory passages, the scene-setting and the statistics, his use of long sentences gave the work a lugubrious quality, calmed me right down. 

But at each critical juncture, the sentences became shorter, the words coming in staccato fashion, and I could feel my pulse quickening—influenced by the facts,  of course, but influenced in ways no one else ever taught me, by the use of  words and sentences. 

I do not expect you to leave here and start turning out Jon Franklin-like prose.  But I would urge that you learn from him that you can find your dramatic tension in a variety of places, limited only by your imagination, and not just in our old stand-by way of pitting one person (or one group) against another.  You can do it by pitting heroes against monster problems, as Rick Smith and Jon Franklin did. 

If I appear to be talking writing technique, I suppose I am.  But I think I am saying a little more than that when I urge you away from conflict as the first resort.  I am urging you to be better writers and editors, of course, but I am also urging you to try to be better citizens.

It is a source of continuing dismay to me how often people in our business, particularly in the big cities, seem not to care about the cities they cover.  They care about breaking big stories, but not about the civic impact of those stories.  Indeed, they believe they are not supposed to care.  Objectivity, you know.

Well, I am not sure “objectivity” in the sense of not caring is a virtue.  Accuracy is, and fairness is. But cynical cold-heartedness masquerading as objectivity is not something I would encourage.  I would want the reporters in my newsroom to care about the people they report on and still retain the capacity to tell the story straight.

If that sounds contradictory, think again of our sports pages.  You can find in the pages of The Washington Post every negative thing there is to report about the Wizards—their lack of a big-time center, how they botched their early efforts to land a big-name coach, the fact that some of the younger players are given to hot-dogging, or to getting into trouble with the law, the fact that, in some critical games, a couple of players are just mailing it in.  But you will also find all the good things, every conceivable basis for optimism. More to the point: You will not doubt that our sports reporters—not a homer among them—want the Wizards to win.

I keep hoping we will learn to do something comparable in the coverage of our cities, and of our nation.  I hope we could learn to use the truth we discover not merely to sow discord and to tear down but also to spread hope and to build up.  Learning to use our considerable power to do good can transform this calling of ours into a respected profession—even into an art form.

I hope this audience comprises a fair number of such journalistic professionals and artists. I hope others attending this conference will work at joining that noble company.  But first let us work at becoming competent gatherers of fact, skilled interpreters of what we see, accurate and engaging tellers of stories.

If we can manage it, we might find that most of the questions of journalistic ethics will pretty much answer themselves.  Moreover, we will find ourselves in less-conflicted communities and with a less-complaining readership.  It might just bring us nearer a reasonable answer to Jay Rosen’s penetrating question: What Are Journalists For?