Woe is Media

It's time to save journalism from its saviors.

Matt Welch from the December 2002 issue

(Page 3 of 4)

This uniformity of opinion extends throughout the Concerned Journalists movement. To cite one example: This past April, Kovach delivered a speech to a convention of newspaper ombudsmen in Salt Lake City about the perceived tension between being a journalist and being an American. His conclusion: "We must educate the public. I believe it is vital to the interest of the journalist and the public that we engage in an urgent, forceful, and consistent campaign to educate the public that in a democratic society, the journalist is, in fact, exercising the highest form of citizenship by monitoring events in the community and making the public aware of them and their importance."

Thus Kovach exalted journalism as "the highest form of citizenship" and condescendingly suggested that the public simply needed to be "educated" to understand this. (Both comments are in keeping with a top-down worldview that allowed him once to say, in regard to Harvard, that "the best people really are the best people.") But instead of raising so much as an eyebrow, the gathered "reader's advocates" went back home and wrote about how smart Bill Kovach was in The Washington Post, The Hartford Courant, the Manchester Guardian, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Portland Oregonian, and The San Diego Union-Tribune.

When the feedback loop is set to applause, it's time to worry. Just because there's a consensus doesn't mean it's right. Many daily newspapers, in their Project for Excellence�approved keenness to avoid "sensationalizing" crime, have largely forgotten the art of covering it day to day, preferring instead to parachute in with the occasional series. Downie and Kaiser brag about a five-day Washington Post investigation in 1998 that used a computer-assisted researcher and 10 other reporters to uncover the fact that the D.C. police had the highest rate of "justifiable homicides" per capita of any major metropolitan force in the country, and that the city was quietly shelling out millions in lawsuit settlements. The series may well have been impressive, and it seems to have had a dramatic impact, but how in the hell could a good newspaper not notice that the local cops were busy shooting civilians and settling lawsuits?

The ombudsman, and to a lesser degree his cousin the media critic, are such widely accepted ornamentations on big news organizations that their existence is no longer much debated; nor are their performances given much scrutiny. This is too bad, because one of the things someone might notice is how eager conflicted publishers are to purchase the instant legitimacy of an "independent watchdog" -- for instance, when Microsoft's MSNBC earned predictable applause by becoming the first online publication to hire an ombudsman.

The watchdogs themselves, who are frequently plucked from the ranks of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, have a noticeable tendency to lose their teeth. Kovach, for example, was ombudsman for Brill's Content when it formed a major new media venture with a gaggle of companies it was ostensibly supposed to cover. The controversial deal was announced on February 2, 2000. Kovach, who had a monthly column, didn't get around to writing about it until the August issue -- his last at the magazine.

In theory, it might seem fine to appoint an individual as a quasi-independent advocate for reader concerns. In practice, four ombudspeople out of five spend more column-inches defending their newspaper's entrenched values to critics than they do highlighting its errors and weaknesses. Reporters and editors could obviate much of the perceived need for ombudsmen by taking the radical step of answering e-mail. And while the going theory asserts that the hiring of an ombudsman demonstrates concern for readers, a skeptic might suggest that it also flaunts flab. How many news organizations, after all, can afford to pay a full-time editorial employee who doesn't cover any news?

Monopoly newspapering in the U.S. is an idiosyncratic -- and extremely lucrative -- business, conducted largely by a small handful of companies. It is entirely possible that many accepted industry practices, such as maintaining massive staffs (the hardly top-notch San Francisco Chronicle has more than 500 editorial employees, for instance), are more accidental artifacts of evolution than logical organizations of resources.

Four out of five new newspaper hires have journalism degrees, but maybe one in 5,000 have been plucked from the fertile minor leagues of online journalism, at a time when Internet punditry has exploded in popularity while newspaper op-ed sections continue to disappoint. The stock newspaper columnist caricature of the nonconformist, passionate, politically incorrect populist is found almost exclusively on the Web nowadays.

The question the Harvard 25 and other journalistic solons should be asking themselves is: If "everyone agrees" on something, isn't that a great place to begin asking whether it's wrong? This is the terrifying subtext of Into the Buzzsaw, an uneven but fascinating collection of horror stories and occasional tales of triumph told by more than a dozen high-profile investigative reporters. The book, which mines the fertile borderline between investigative obsession and paranoia, is chock full of shameful instances where the keepers of the journalism flame have closed ranks to shout down the work of mavericks.

Gary Webb, the former San Jose Mercury News reporter who wrote a controversial 1996 series connecting the CIA with Los Angeles' crack trade, recounts how the media critic (and former State Department spokesman) Bernard Kalb of CNN's Reliable Sources reacted to his work by complaining, "Where is the media knocking it down?"

Kalb soon got his wish, in the form of hit pieces on Webb in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. Two years later, when two internal government investigations confirmed many of the key elements of the crack series -- that CIA agents involved with the contras had direct dealings with key U.S. drug traffickers, for example, or that their superiors knew -- the elite papers barely noted it.

At the core of Into the Buzzsaw are two long accounts, totaling 72 pages, by Riverside Press-Enterprise reporter David Hendrix and former CBS producer Kristina Borjesson, who unwittingly smacked against the establishment's brick wall after uncovering lurid details about the botched investigation into the crash of TWA Flight 800.

Both recount how a colleague of theirs, Kelly O'Meara, was trashed in a column by Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz mere days after conducting a skeptical interview with National Transportation Safety Board Managing Director Peter Goelz (who told Kurtz that O'Meara was "extraordinarily antagonistic").

Among other things, Hendrix and Borjesson were able to plausibly contradict government claims that there were no military exercises near the crash site that day; that there were only two military vessels in the area; that there was no evidence of explosive material in the debris; and that the suspicious residue found in the wreckage was a kind of glue. Both quoted investigators who questioned the official version of events. Yet Downie and Kaiser, whose paper hewed closer to the government line, bring up the investigation into TWA 800 only as a cautionary tale of reporting gone awry. "Ultimately all the investigators agreed that the crash was caused by a spontaneous explosion in a fuel tank on board," they state, falsely.

But the main complaint against the Concerned Journalists is not their conformity, not their elitism, and certainly not their abilities. (Downie and Kaiser may have written a bad book, but they clearly put out one hell of a newspaper.) And Elements has many interesting moments, especially if you have an appetite for journalism theory. Kovach and Rosenstiel make some good points about the need for ideological and intellectual diversity in newsrooms, for example, even if they seem unconcerned by their own movement's tendency toward groupthink.