You Can't Report What You Don't Pursue-- May/June 2000

May/June 2000 | Contents

YOU CAN’T REPORT WHAT YOU DON'T PURSUE

BY TRUDY LIEBERMAN

A young reporter writes an expose, but the editor says, "I don't think we're going to run that."
The second time the reporter goes to her editor, the editor says, "I don't think that's a good idea."
She doesn't research and write the story. The third time the reporter has an idea. But she doesn't go to her editor.
The fourth time she doesn't get the idea.
—Nicholas Johnson, former FCC commissioner, on the process of self-censorship

Mark Schwanhausser censors himself. "Journalism is in some ways the path of least resistance," he explains. "If you're beaten down once, you go to another story where you can have an equally important impact for your readers. Are we better off or worse off? That's the debatable issue."

It is indeed. Schwanhausser works for the San Jose Mercury News, and back in 1994 he wrote a straightforward story about how to buy a car. It told readers the ins and outs of negotiation, how such realities as dealer incentives and money holdbacks work, how to use an invoice to figure the actual cost of the car, and gave other shopping tips. Members of the Santa Clara County Motor Car Dealers' Association didn't like it one bit. They yanked some $1 million worth of ads. Publisher Jay Harris tried to coax them back with a mea culpa letter that was critical of the article, and a house ad asserting the paper's pride in its "longstanding partnership with the Northern California new car dealers." This made an impression on Schwanhausser, who, at the time, told cjr that "the chilling effect can be very subtle. When you start guessing what people will react to, you can find all kinds of reasons not to write a story."

In recent years the newspaper has run smaller, less controversial stories about car shopping, but "there was no big piece like mine that dealt with auto dealership issues," says Schwanhausser. If he were to suggest such a story today, he says, there would be "more conversations and alerts going all the way up to the executive editor. We'd have to say why are we doing it. That would be a harder hurdle for me right now." Harris had no comment.

Schwanhausser has moved away from consumer stories and has gone on to cover personal finance -- stories that tell people how to take control of their money, and that often deal with safer subjects than car dealers. "I haven't been real eager to come back and do more stories like that," he says. "There are other things that are just as good and a whole lot less hassle."

A PERVASIVE PROBLEM

Self-censorship is as old as journalism itself, and Schwanhausser's is just one variant. Almost all of us have held back at one time or another, choosing not to pursue a legitimate story or not to include a difficult fact, or to severely soften a story's angle. The reasons range from simple laziness and resistance to complexity to fears of conflicts of interest, our own or our media company's, to fears that pushing too hard will hurt our careers. We do it for many reasons, some of them far more subtle than Schwanhausser's.

Self-censorship is, of course, hard to quantify. One reporter's reluctance to tackle something complex is another's hard-eyed calculation that the payoff is not worth the struggle. One editor's crusade is another's tilting at windmills. And self-censorship is much easier to see in our colleagues and competitors than in ourselves. That fact is one of the striking findings of the poll on self-censorship that cjr asked The Pew Research Center For The People & The Press to take.

The poll showed that self-censorship is pervasive. One quarter of the editors and reporters who took part indicated that they have, on occasion, personally avoided certain kinds of legitimate stories. And the numbers rise when the journalists are asked about other journalists' practices. Investigative journalists -- drawn from the membership list of Investigative Reporters & Editors and separately polled -- were the most likely to cite the impact of corporate pressure as a cause of self-censorship. But many other journalists also cited that factor as well.

In addition to the poll, cjr interviewed more than three dozen journalists. The conversations and the poll indicate that journalists consider self-censorship a serious but touchy issue. Some did not want to talk, although others discussed at length the process of self-censorship -- why it happens and how it works. Their experiences tend to mirror Pew's findings.

In the wake of growing media concentration, journalistic angst has tended to focus on overt censorship -- media company managers directly telling editors and writers just what they can and cannot report, especially concerning the company's own far-flung interests. But self-censorship is more pervasive and arguably more insidious. Pressure from local power brokers may be less pernicious than the self-censorship of editors, producers, or reporters who simply choose a service story or an easier topic and shortchange their public.

You can't report what you don't pursue.

SIGNS AND SIGNALS

Sometimes the line between overt censorship and self-censorship blurs. Walt Disney Company officials insist they had nothing to do with the killing of an ABC News story by a pair of the company's most respected investigative journalists in late 1998 about questionable hiring practices at Disney World. A failure to run criminal background checks had allegedly allowed convicted pedophiles to work at the resort. A few days before the story's demise, Michael Eisner, Disney's chairman, had articulated his policy on Disney media covering Disney interests: "I would prefer ABC not to cover Disney," he said on National Public Radio's Fresh Air program. "I think it's inappropriate . . . ABC News knows that I would prefer them not to cover [Disney]." And they didn't.

At AOL/Time Warner, meanwhile, Norman Pearlstine, Time Inc.'s editor in chief, tells his journalists he wants AOL/Time Warner's ever-increasing commercial enterprises covered like those of any other company (see page 46). Editors are supposed to alert him to every story about the company, he says, so he can check for fairness and accuracy, although he has some concerns about the signals that this policy sends to his journalists. Steve Lovelady, an editor-at-large of Time Inc., says he takes Pearlstine's order as a positive journalistic signal. "He may be looking for inaccuracies," Lovelady says, and to avoid "the appearance of going easy on ourselves. The message is don't back off, do tread on toes when it is called for."

Self-censorship often reflects the subtle and not-so-subtle signals that define the boundaries of news. "After awhile you get to the point where you know the things that are really sticky issues. When things are sticky, there are lots and lots of questions -- basic checking, but much more," says a longtime reporter at a Florida newspaper who did not want her name used. "Nobody says directly 'this is an issue we don't want to cover,' but you can read between the lines. There are just things you know that are never put into words." The reporter came to understand, for example, that for some reason her paper was leery of items critical of mobile home dealers and used car dealers. So she learned to handle these topics very gingerly.

Sometimes, of course, a reporter may confuse an editor's lack of enthusiasm for a poorly written or a poorly reported story with a signal to lay off a particular topic. Journalists are not immune to paranoia. Sometimes we see conspiracies where none exist. Gil Thelen, executive editor of the Tampa Tribune, says that when he was editor of The Sun News, in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, he was friendly with civic leaders, and this was well-known in the newsroom. When a tip came in that one of those leaders was involved in a suspect land deal, reporters were reluctant to follow it up because of the man's association with the editor. "The newsroom was young and impressionable," Thelen says. When an editor brought the problem to his attention, the matter was clarified and reporters pursued the tip.

There are, of course, legitimate reasons for avoiding certain topics. Sometimes they really are worthy but dull; sometimes the news outlet has actually done enough on the issue. And sometimes the reporter or editor pitching an idea doesn't really have the tools it would take to sift through the nuances of a complex issue, and the editor knows it. Sometimes a reporter is simply tired of a subject. Pew found that some 58 percent of journalists say that their colleagues and competitors, at least sometimes, wrongfully suspect stories are rejected or buried because of financial conflicts of interest, when in fact the story ideas are not good ones.

Sometimes the worst signal is no signal. Tom Leithauser, who worked at four Florida newspapers and is now associate editor of a trade publication, Telecommunications Reports, puts it this way: "Sometimes you don't know why an editor may be balking at a story especially in a newsroom with lots of layers between you and the top editor."

David Cay Johnston, now at The New York Times, says he found the lack of a clear "yes" or "no" on story ideas particularly frustrating during his days at the Los Angeles Times. "If the top editor's fundamental response is noncommittal" when stories are suggested, he says, "you breed self-doubt into the organization." Self-doubt, of course, can lead to self-censorship.

THE MASTER NARRATIVE

So can another process that often takes place in newsrooms: an unconscious narrowing of the idea of what is news. "I don't think there is a news organization in the country that doesn't have a set of priorities peculiar to that organization," says Ben Bagdikian, former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. "They are usually unstated but are evident by what stories are greeted with enthusiasm and are given big play, and what stories are put down or cut down with signals -- 'we did that one, maybe another time.'" News priorities become internalized. "I know what the editors want, and I want the same thing," says Jim Ritter, a twenty-one-year veteran at the Chicago Sun-Times. But what is considered news can be quietly squeezed by journalistic conventional wisdom and by unspoken ideology -- the police always push blacks around; politicians are not to be trusted; the process of government is boring; labor is dull; the pro-life crowd doesn't respect women; athletes are greedy. Much self-censorship springs from what former St. Louis Post-Dispatch editor William Woo calls the "master narrative," which he defines as the template that reporters bring to an event or issue. "The master narrative," Woo says, "is a reason why some stories that should get in, don't get in." Editors and reporters absorb the conventional wisdom and often don't stray from its acceptable borders.

Examples of acceptable villains and victims abound in just about every corner of reportage. HMOs, for example, are new to the villains list. China has been on it since the early days of the cold war. In the summer of 1997, when Woo and his wife, journalist Martha Shirk, as part of a Knight fellowship, examined how U.S. media covered the transfer of Hong Kong to China, they found that news outlets, following the master narrative, continued to predict that the government would stifle free expression there. The same three anecdotes kept appearing and reappearing to "prove" the point -- despite the fact that the anecdotes didn't hold up.

"There's a reluctance to cover stories that stray from the mainstream," says Dan Rutz, who recently left his post as senior medical correspondent for CNN. In his field, he says that means "safe and desirable" stories come from major medical journals. Pieces about alternative therapies for HIV/AIDS, for example, are far more difficult to do, because they veer from the dogma of the mainstream scientific community. When it comes to writing such stories, says Rutz, "reporters chicken out."

Jonathan Weisman, White House correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, wrote a piece last July asking a question that wandered outside conventional wisdom: Is it really a good thing to pay off the national debt? "I wrote it and it got buried on a business page." Would he address the topic again? "Probably not," he says. He would wait, he said, until "others make it an issue. You're always trying to gauge what editors are interested in. We want to write for the front, not the inside pages."

CODE WORDS

In today's media culture, stories on any topic that journalists perceive as dull or complicated tend not to fit the master narrative. Pew found that by far the biggest reason journalists censor themselves, at least sometimes, is that a story is considered too dull or complicated for the average reader. Seventy-seven percent of the journalists said their peers avoid stories that are "important but dull," while 52 percent said their peers shy away from topics they consider too complex for readers.

This is nothing new, of course, and if readers are not interested in certain dull or complicated stories, that may well be an acceptable reason for not publishing them. Yet "dull" and "complicated" can be code words. Twenty-six percent of the local journalists Pew surveyed indicated that, although editors had told them to avoid certain stories that were dull or overly complicated, those journalists suspected the real reason for resistance was potential harm to their organization's financial interests. (In contrast, only 2 percent of national reporters believed that.)

What passes for dull and complicated is somewhat arbitrary and changes with the zeitgeist. Current newsroom wisdom dictates that among the dull and more complicated beats these days is government. Joan Lowy, a reporter for Scripps-Howard News Service in Washington, says her editors have less enthusiasm for stories about politics and government than they once did, and instead want pieces that "real people can relate to." Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post, writing in Brill's Content, casually asserts that the FDA is a "boring government bureaucracy" to cover. Yet the under-covered FDA is a cauldron of ferocious ideological and scientific struggles whose outcomes can affect us all. Walter Pincus, a national security correspondent for The Washington Post, says that "detailed" stories sometimes sit around for a while these days. There is a recent tendency, he says, to run stories only when an issue is hot.

"Dull" and "complicated" mean something different in TV news, where visuals matter so much. Ex-CNN reporter Rutz says that basic science stories are "judged too complicated or boring for TV." Editors don't think much of stories about health care reform "unless you have lots of whiny patients and doctors to present." "Complicated" generally translates to "time-consuming," and it's hardly surprising that reporters avoid major-effort stories, given today's cost pressures in the newsroom.

Yet time, cost, and space can define the permissible boundaries of reporting. As one magazine reporter put it, if the space is really limited, why do deep reporting? Likewise, when a news organization puts a price tag on a big story, "the story has been contained," says investigative reporter Fredric Tulsky. "The story never goes to the most dangerous of places because limits are imposed for nonjournalistic reasons. Reporting is a dynamic process. You don't know where the story is going to go. But if you can't make this many phone calls or file that FOI request because it will take too long, you don't know what you're missing." Neither does the public. That, Tulsky says, is the real problem stemming from profit pressures in the newsroom.

CAREER MOVES

Some reporters are careerists, and if climbing the ladder means avoiding stories that don't fit the master narrative, they back away. Pew found that 53 percent of journalists surveyed said that their peers sometimes avoided stories that might hurt their careers or subject them to scorn. But only 4 percent admitted that they themselves had dodged certain subjects for that reason. Says Nicholas Johnson, the former FCC commissioner: "It's difficult to advance while simultaneously arguing with one's superiors about what should be investigated and reported." No one wants to get nailed as the reporter who did "the" story that caused a ruckus at the upper levels of a news organization; few editors get fired for stories they don't publish.

One reporter who covered sensitive abortion issues for a midwestern newspaper, and who asked for anonymity, knows what Johnson means. "I pushed and pushed but after awhile I just got the feeling I better back off because some of the editors acted like I was obsessed with the issue. They would say 'Maybe you should cover other things or more mundane things.'" When they started questioning her phone bills, she did back off and eventually left the paper.

Reporters have lots of ideas, and we often move the ones we know will get editorial support to the top of the list. The troublesome topic goes to a back burner, where it may simmer forever.

Sometimes journalists censor themselves to protect their sources, although the Pew study found that only 18 percent of the journalists admitted to that (while 17 percent of investigative reporters did). In covering politics or foreign governments, access is the coin of the realm, and to protect that access, reporters may soften stories for the benefit of a source. Public officials can give access, and they can take it away. "If you ask the right question, and I don't want to answer it, I don't call you back," says Vermont governor Howard Dean. Too many rebuffs spell career trouble.

Access is super-important in sports writing, notes James Warren, Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune. "If you cover the White Sox and the manager and general manager think you're an asshole," he says, "there aren't many places to go."

"Every single sportswriter knows the story you shouldn't write," says Bruce Selcraig, a free-lance writer who often covers sports and is a contributing editor to cjr. Selcraig says he once wrote a story for Golf Digest about autograph-hunters on the golf circuit and an editor penciled out a particular passage that noted that Tiger Woods, the number one golfer in the world, had been uncooperative and failed to show up for a scheduled interview. Selcraig thought the magazine was afraid of offending Woods, who has a contract with Golf Digest as a "playing editor" to give golf tips to readers. Now, he says, "I know I'm not going to get anywhere proposing a story that takes the luster off Tiger Woods." (Peter McCleery, the editor who handled the piece, says he thought the anecdote was "maybe a cheap shot.")

The Pew/cjr poll noted that when it comes to avoiding conflicts with a publication's advertisers or friends of management, local journalists feel greater pressure than their peers who write for national publications. Alan Gersten, now a free-lancer, says that while he was the business editor of the Omaha World Herald in the 1980s, his reporters tended to soft-pedal poor earnings reports from local companies by putting the bad news at the bottom. "Any positive aspect was put at the top," Gersten says, "because they felt management would rewrite it" anyway if they didn't. Gersten says he tried to break that habit.

Sometimes pressure leading to self-censorship comes not from the business side, but from the public. In Denver, Tim Ryan, managing editor of KUSA-TV, an NBC affiliate, says that the station is quite mindful of how its viewers feel about continued coverage of the Columbine High School shootings. The public made it clear that they've had enough. "You can't ignore the psychological health of the community," he says. "It affected them very deeply." When reporters and camera crews go out to report a Columbine-related story, "we are one of the bad guys. I've had to wrestle with the urge to not do Columbine stories, because we know we will get these calls and these e-mails, and our crews might get yelled at out in the field." That even happens when the station views the story as positive, such as when it covered a story about this year's homecoming king, who had been wounded in the massacre. Ryan says his station struggles to find a balance between holding back and "the fact that there is still news value."

WHAT IS LOST?

Battling self-censorship may boil down to a question of whether we are honest with ourselves and to what we are willing to risk at any given time and over any given story.

Some journalists are better at spinning rationalizations than at taking risks. Says one reporter, "It's not the end of the world" if some story doesn't get in. "There are other stories that are equally valid." Another says, "Why should a reporter agonize over whether a story is acceptable to management? Send it over and let them decide. It frees you to move on from that story to another." Still others have so thoroughly assimilated the values of their news organization that they may not even recognize when self-censorship occurs.

Self-censorship has not shriveled journalism. Take a look at the list of prize-winning stories on page 60 and 61, some of which surely were risky to pursue, and think of the hundreds of other gutsy pieces that did not make the spotlight. Many good stories that might well be self-censored are not.

Many others are, however. When that happens, the public gets cheated and democracy is stifled. Our readers and viewers expect us to be their eyes, and sometimes that means we must look inside ourselves.

Trudy Lieberman is a contributing editor to cjr. She is director of the Center for Consumer Health Choices at Consumers Union. Her latest book is Slanting the Story: the Forces that Shape the News, published in May.