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Journalism will have to pull up its socksBy EUGENE PATTERSON © St. Petersburg Times, published July 10, 1998 My mother had taught school and run a Georgia two-mule farm through the Depression, while my father struggled from job to job as a country bank cashier. They truly thought their son was addled for throwing away the security of a government job that promised a pension by age 40 -- and for what? "Son," my mother said, "from all I've heard, newspaper reporters don't make any money, and they drink too much." She blessed me in my folly, nevertheless, when I explained that after helping rid the world of Hitler I aspired to right wrongs and make poems, virtues she had advocated for years around the supper table. "Well, all right," she said. "Just remember your raising." If she had lived to see some of the drifts journalism has taken lately, I'm afraid she might have stuck to her guns. We in the news business might have seen it coming. Journalists assumed the adversary stance toward government when the opposition party flagged in hostility. Press-conference television favored the reporter whose questions turned from firm but fair to rude and accusing. TV then conferred the celebrity of tube exposure on the quick and the glib. Celebrity brought money and glory to those swift on the sound bite. Generous speaker fees set the famous ones to writing windy orations instead of muscular news stories. The rumpled reporter chewing on his pencil got his suit pressed and his hair styled and wound up onstage instead of off-camera where reporters belong. Higher pay and lower modesty in the ranks coincided with a trend of newsroom brass to go wobbly. This-is-a-reporter's-newspaper had a second translation: We-are-disempowering-our-subeditors. And reporters received a companion message that the ones who wrote oh-my-God exposes or investigations that put the mayor in jail were the ones whom the editor was going to nominate for the Pulitzer Prize. With mid-level editors getting out of the way and the risk-reward system plain to see, not every ambitious reporter was going to remember the bedrock value of decent journalism, which is: Cut no corners. Remnants remained of a 1960s foolishness called New Journalism, which suggested it was all right to improve on a true story the way Truman Capote and Norman Mailer were doing it in In Cold Blood and Executioner's Song. And here in the Matt Drudge era you can write anything on the Internet, true or not, and find some of the garbage seeping into the family newspaper. Against such a background of values gone soggy, we've now seen Janet Cooke and Patricia Smith and Stephen Glass making up stuff in such pillar publications as the Washington Post and the Boston Globe and the New Republic. The rein obviously lay too loose also against the neck of the beast of herd enmity. Such fashionable enmities includes those toward the military, so CNN/Time wrongly reported the Army had used sarin against U.S. defectors in Laos; against business, so the Cincinnati Enquirer's reporter used stolen documents to try to tar Chiquita; against the CIA, so the San Jose Mercury had to retract its innuendo of U.S. complicity in Los Angeles narcotics imports, and so on. Newly missing was the crusty deskman who used to warn: "You're making a stove out of steel wool here." Not least troubling is the press' neo-predilection with the sex lives of public figures. The old notion that this might be a private matter between a man and a woman who are married to each other, and that reputable men and women won't betray each other anyway, became a quaint relic as far back as Gary Hart. Now the media are avid allies of Kenneth Starr in presenting the Clinton presidency as French farce. And the great chase to find stains on tissues and witnesses to sin have forced such non-tabloids as the Wall Street Journal and the Dallas Morning News to retract things they wish they hadn't printed. Maybe the business side has played its part along with the newsroom in starting the slide in values. The concentration of media ownership has cost some fidelity to public service. For all the traditional fruitfulness of newspapers' bottom lines, the First Amendment did saddle them with the expectation of some sacrifice in the public interest. Attention must be paid by publicly held chains to the sensitivities of securities analysts, and those birds are not overly sentimental about good intentions that return diluted numbers to shareholders. Add competition flowing from new technology to that pressure, and you see front offices trying to count jumping beans. Cranky private monopoly owners are seldom around anymore to tell demanding advertisers, "You can take your ad across the street." Now, they would. They can yank ads out and hand them to direct mailers who'll put them in your mailbox at no cost to you. They can walk ads over to a TV channel and buy a whole half-hour "infomercial," dulling whatever senses the viewer clings to. They can buy whole chunks of consecutive pages in magazines with the space uncertainly identified as paid-for. They've gained purchase on newspaper advertising managers. Just note those two-column ads floating right in the middle of the stock market quotations so as to obstruct the reader's eye. Managers of privately controlled as well as publicly held companies feel the heat bending old rules. When the new CEO announces he's going to tear down the wall between the advertising department and the newsroom, he's helped if he bears news-side credentials. If he's a marketer who has not lived through the inevitable tensions between printing the truth and displeasing the influential, he is not helped with the troops. Editors and beat reporters are bred by nature and trained by experience to watch these business-side trends. When some distant corporate headquarters gets the local editor talking Dilbert-speak about FTEs (full-time employees) and MBOs (management by objectives), the signal is noted. Hand-licking fads like "civic journalism" may soothe the business office into thinking maybe those bomb-throwers in the newsroom are finally going to grow up and get nice. But once a couple of public projects blow up in the face of a newspaper that has embraced and promoted them in its news columns, journalists are likely to get back to covering the public officials who were elected to do this work. So it's useful to note that the resurgence of dominance by the business side, which is suffering pressures on its own values, accompanies the softening of the newspaper's hard-edged standards on which credibility with the public rests. Journalism is in a rough patch we have to cope with. But let me repair to the axiom of the late Vermont Royster, whose stylish editorials in the Wall Street Journal disarmed his enemies by conceding their strengths before he attacked them with his own. "First you give them something," Royster used to smile. "Then you take it away." Given the glaring faults of contemporary journalism enumerated here, I remain confident that the news media are going to learn the lessons of the current embarrassments and pull up their socks before public faith in the proposition of a free press fades. I believe the written word is going to prevail as the reliable record of a free and reflective society, no matter which technology delivers the page to the reader, and the tough idealists who take up this line of work are committed in the main not to cheap cheers or material gain but merely to telling the truth. All we have to do is remember our raising.
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y parents despaired when I resigned my Regular Army commission after World War II and swapped the salary of a captain on flight pay for a cub reporter's crust.
