ON THE ROLLER COASTER

BY JONATHAN Z. LARSEN

Jonathan Z. Larsen worked at Time magazine as an editor and correspondent from 1965 to 1973, was editor of New Times from 1974 to 1978, when the magazine died, and The Village Voice from 1989 to 1994. He has written for New York magazine, Manhattan Inc., and New England Monthly, as well as CJR.

The press over the last forty years has been on a long roller coaster ride, at least in terms of quality and content -- a fairly quick ascent in the '60s and '70s, a plateau in the '80s, and then a slow slide during the '90s into the present. Newspapers, magazines, and television all rose and fell in different sequence, but they more or less ended up at the same place at the same time.

And that place was a low point for many -- until September 11. The journalistic performance that unfolded in early coverage of the nation's worst disaster was nothing short of astonishing in its thoroughness, its professionalism, its timeliness, its moments of lyricism. It served as a reaffirmation not only of old-fashioned reporting, but of the utility of the Internet, talk television, and talk radio at a time of need.

The journalistic history of the past forty years has been filled with fine performances in crisis but, particularly in recent decades, that level has not been maintained. A few mass publications stand out. The New York Times, now delivered across America, continues to set the national agenda and steadily improves. The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times (except for several years under a former General Mills executive) are broad in scope and deep in their own specialities. There are some very good regional papers -- The Oregonian in Portland, Newsday and The Star-Ledger in the New York area, The Dallas Morning News, The Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, and St. Petersburg Times, to name some. The New Yorker, Harper's, and several smaller publications remain significant voices for the new century.

But to some degree, even these publications face the same forces that have haunted television and most mainstream magazines: a desperate search for readers and viewers, marketing approaches that corrupt the news process, and relentless pressure for profitability.

So the question remains: Have the media been transformed in some permanent way by the events of September? Or will they soon return to the hype and cynicism of recent years? The best way to begin to answer these questions and begin to look forward at this point may be to take a long look back.

THE '60s
 
In those exhilarating days my contemporaries and I, as in Lord Lindsay's eulogy to his fellow Cambridge Olympians in Chariots of Fire, had "hopes in our hearts and wings on our heels." And the energy, God, the energy we had -- we vibrated with it. We were in the spirit of the '60s in the freedoms we enlarged and explored.
 
-- Willie Morris, New York Days
 
 
At the dawn of the '60s, the smartest reporting was still to be found in magazines, and the media outlets that would best illuminate the Cultural Revolution then under way were the smaller, more intellectual titles: William Shawn's New Yorker; Harold Hayes's Esquire, Robert Manning's Atlantic, and, later, Willie Morris's Harper's. Joined by Life and The Saturday Evening Post in their flameout years, they would lead the way into the '60s, offering brilliant writing on the early years of the Vietnam war, the spreading campus unrest, and the racial, sexual, and environmental politics of the time. Writers like Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, David Halberstam, and Tom Wolfe would rewrite the book on the war, on race, on the culture, and on the very possibilities of magazine journalism. In a single year, 1962, The New Yorker published two landmark articles -- James Baldwin's essay on race, "Letter From a Region in My Mind," which would be published in book form as The Fire Next Time, and Rachel Carson's research into the effects of DDT, later to be published as Silent Spring, a book that jump-started the environmental movement and environmental journalism.

During the New York newspaper strike of 1962-63, which lasted 114 days, Barbara Epstein and Robert Silvers launched The New York Review of Books, which ever since has added greatly to the public discourse. The same strike would cripple some newspapers, including the New York Herald Tribune, which folded in 1966. But its Sunday magazine, which had helped pioneer the New Journalism under Clay Felker, would become New York magazine, further energizing the magazine field.

Most newspapers at the dawn of the Cultural Revolution, on the other hand, had been sleepwalking. They were parochial, penny-pinching, and politically compromised. By the late '50s, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times had one foreign correspondent each. The dailies seemed attracted to the poles of power: they were either kingmakers or milquetoasts. Charles Taylor, the patriarch of the family that owned The Boston Globe, insisted that the Globe be "a cheerful, attractive, and useful newspaper that would enter the home as a kindly, helpful friend of the family." To keep the family peace, it had never endorsed a political candidate in the twentieth century.

And then there was the Los Angeles Times, a newspaper that had sponsored -- one almost wants to say created -- the Richard Nixon who would years later try to shred the Constitution. In The Powers That Be, David Halberstam argues that the Times had "created in Nixon a sense that he could get away with things, that the press was crooked and could be bought off." Another kingmaker, Phil Graham, who represented the family interests at The Washington Post, spent much of 1960 brokering a deal with John F. Kennedy, to take Lyndon Johnson on as his running mate. "If anything," wrote Halberstam, "the disclosure that Graham had done this did not hurt his reputation, given the values of journalism and politics in those days, rather it enhanced his reputation as an insider, a man of power close to power."

The state of the press was so dismal that journals of media criticism, like this one, sprang up to shine some light on the profession. Wrote James Boylan, the first editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, upon the occasion of its twenty-fifth anniversary: "Most discouraging for anyone contemplating the rise and fall of the Republic was evidence that, when summoned to great tasks, the journalism of the 1950s had proved far from adequate." Exhibit A had been the reign of terror presided over by Senator Joe McCarthy through the early '50s, largely unchecked by the Fourth Estate. An evenhanded reportorial approach had simply managed to legitimize and publicize his lies and slanders. McCarthy was stopped only by his own deportment during the televised Army-McCarthy hearings. The American people were finally face to face with the lunatic that print journalists had been shielding from their view.

The work force of the press was, by and large, undereducated and underpaid, mostly male, and extremely white. A Newspaper Guild survey in the mid-sixties would find that there were fewer than fifty blacks out of a total work force of 75,000 newsroom employees. "Journalism was essentially a high working-class activity," noted James Fallows in Breakings the News. Indeed, the Nieman Fellowship program at Harvard University was originally established in 1937 because so many top journalists had never been to college. The notion was to give them a taste of academia.

Nora Ephron would write that she was "physically revolted" by the working conditions when she joined the New York Post in 1963. The response to her complaints was, in effect, "This was the newspaper business. You want air-conditioning, go to work at a newsmagazine. You want clean toilets, go to work in advertising." (No doubt Reader's Digest did have clean toilets but, as Ms. magazine would report years later, female Digest employees in some departments had to ask permission to use them.)

But this was all about to change. A far younger, more idealistic work force was knocking on the door. These ambitious, college-educated journalists would exert an upward pressure for reform that would be felt in almost every newspaper in the country. In The Kingdom and the Power, Gay Talese would describe this pressure within The New York Times as a "quiet revolution."

But the new cottage industry of media criticism and the restless questioning of employees had less effect on the changes to come than other factors -- the rigor of actuarial tables, the sheer exigencies of the family dynamics within the controlling families, and the happy circumstance of the right editors and publishers taking their places at the right time.

In Los Angeles, Norman Chandler passed control of the Los Angeles Times to his son Otis, who in turn threw considerable resources behind the reforms engineered by Nick Williams, the paper's editor. Richard Nixon was so appalled that he was being held to a higher standard under the new regime that, upon losing his bid to be governor of California in 1962, he delivered his famous "You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore" speech, aiming his remarks largely at reporters of the Los Angeles Times. It was one of those monster-to-Dr. Frankenstein moments. In a matter of years the Times would take its place among the top papers in the country.

During the early '60s, The New York Times would be transformed by personnel changes. The Sulzberger family promoted the gifted Abe Rosenthal to metropolitan editor, the beginning of a rapid rise through the ranks, and at the same time installed two of its own, Arthur Ochs (Punch) Sulzberger as publisher and John Oakes, his cousin, to run the editorial page. Under Oakes, the paper's spine stiffened noticeably on a host of issues -- civil rights, the Vietnam war, and the environment among them. He would conceive and launch the paper's op-ed page, a model that almost every newspaper would follow.

At The Boston Globe, two sons would succeed their fathers, Davis Taylor as publisher and Tom Winship as editor, and the paper shot to the front ranks among the dailies. In 1966 the Globe won its first Pulitzer and over the next fifteen years the paper would win seven more. In Washington, following the suicide of her husband Phil, Katharine Graham took over control of The Washington Post. Her choice for editor was Benjamin Bradlee, and thus another editor/publisher dream team was born.

This new cast of characters would take its place just as the country began to combust internally. Perhaps no generation of editors has ever faced a story lineup such as the '60s presented: the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Cuban missile crisis, the introduction of ground troops into Vietnam, the assassination of the country's youngest president. "JFK's ghost will haunt the corridors of power in America for as long as the grass is green and rivers run to sea," wrote Hunter S. Thompson some thirty years later. It turned out to be simply the first of a series of political assassinations that would trigger nihilistic violence and devastating riots across the land.

"The center was not holding," as Joan Didion would famously write in the pages of The Saturday Evening Post. "It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled."

The civil rights movement, which had been on simmer ever since Rosa Parks's legendary 1955 bus ride in Montgomery, Alabama, came to full boil by the '60s: from the Freedom Rides during the summer of 1961; to the march on Washington, D.C., by Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1963, and his historic "I have a dream" speech before a mixed audience of 200,000; to King's assassination in 1968, after which the coalition of black civil rights figures and white liberals began to unravel.

The black power movement, the feminist movement, and the gay rights movement all began in the '60s. And a huge cultural story was unfolding, with journalists running to keep up with it all: the pill, introduced in 1960, opened the door to the age of sexual liberation, and then licentiousness; the pop music scene, which exploded in the wake of Elvis, would lay down the sound track for the decade. The culture was changing so fast by 1969 that journalists did double takes. Life would write two pieces in the space of three weeks about Woodstock. The first, in photo essay, would say how wonderful it was, some 400,000 beautiful young people camping out under the stars. The second, by columnist Barry Farrell, would say how frightening it all was that so many people could so drug themselves that they sat through torrential rain, food and water shortages, and lack of sanitation with barely a fistfight.

Both overshadowing and feeding this cultural revolution was the Vietnam war, the brushfire that spread ever further the harder the White House and Pentagon tried to "win" it. The war would dominate the news for more than ten years.
How did the press do with this sprawling story lineup? In his recently published history, The American Century, Harold Evans looks back to issue this scathing indictment on the newspaper coverage of the civil rights movement:
 
Nationally, with the exception of a few brave correspondents, the most respected, relatively liberal organs like The New York Times, Newsweek, Time, the New York Herald Tribune and The Washington Post for years lackadaisically portrayed the deadly struggle for rights as one more mildly amusing political game, with regular winners, losers, leaders, and trailers.
 
Evans singles out for praise the civil rights reporting of David Halberstam, writing in the mid-'50s for the Daily Times Leader in Mississippi, The Nashville Tennessean, and a biweekly magazine called The Reporter, but faults editorials in The New York Times in 1961 that warned against extending the Freedom Rides of that summer. Wrote the Times: "They are challenging not only long-held customs but passionately held feelings. Nonviolence that deliberately provokes violence is a logical contradiction."

The Kerner Commission, in its landmark report on race relations in 1968, concluded that the media had failed to communicate "a sense of the degradation, misery, and hopelessness of living in the ghetto."

Television, as it did on every other issue during the '60s, played a crucial role in civil rights, presenting firsthand evidence as no other medium could, such as 1963 footage of black demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, being attacked by Bull Connor's dogs and hoses. TV provided quieter epiphanies as well. In his book, The Sixties, Todd Gitlin writes about the black witnesses who testified before a televised credentials committee hearing at the 1964 Democratic party convention in Atlantic City: "Thanks to live television," says Gitlin, "previously voiceless people were able to speak to America over the heads of the usual managers." A black woman named Fannie Lou Hamer, who had been thrown in jail when she tried to register voters in Mississippi, began to narrate how the police had forced a black male prisoner to beat her with a blackjack. When that prisoner tired, another was ordered to take his place and continue the beating. "It was irresistible, uncensored television," says Gitlin, "and one of the people who thought so was Lyndon B. Johnson." So worried was the president about the effect of Hamer's testimony that he called an impromptu press conference. The cameras dutifully cut away from Hamer.

The following year, 1965, Johnson would sign the Voting Rights Act, and he would soon sign two other major civil rights acts outlawing discrimination and offering protection to movement activists. It would be too much to say that the media had inspired Johnson to these reforms, but certainly the media played a pivotal role in preparing the country to accept them.

As to the tangled web of Vietnam, how good was the reporting on the war? The answer is that the reporting was brilliant, courageous, and prescient. And at the same time it was shortsighted, timid, even corrupt. In the introduction to a book of poems entitled Song of Napalm, Robert Stone has written: "Wars are meant to be forgotten, the Vietnam war like any other. Memory resists them. Their reality bleeds away, surviving in fragments." The fragments of reporting that survive the Vietnam war and sit now on library shelves are the very best. I had the privilege of reviewing one collection for this magazine when it was published in 1998, the two-volume set published by the Library of America called Reporting Vietnam. And I was stunned all over again at how well the reporting held up, how accurate and dispassionate it had been.

But this is only half the story. Pieces like these took weeks, sometimes months, to report. And while the best reporters were out reporting them, some of their fellow journalists back in Saigon -- wire service and newspaper reporters left to file daily stories -- were dutifully reporting worthless accounts drawn from Pentagon and embassy briefings, skeletal dispatches full of armaments fired and sorties flown and prisoners killed, stories that captured very little truth and almost no narrative. It was a regular conveyor belt of disinformation and, incredibly enough, much of it ended up on the front pages of the country's newspapers. On top of that was the voluminous reporting from stateside Pentagon correspondents, State Department correspondents, and White House correspondents, most of whom quoted government officials dutifully and reinforced the party line.

Nor can one forget the role of Time magazine, which fielded exceptional correspondents during the early '60s and then not only changed the meaning of their files so that they would fit into Harry Luce's political construct, but also criticized its reporters by implication if not by name in its own press section. While Newsweek was taking an increasingly skeptical line in the war, Time by 1965 was declaring "a turning point." Life was also thrown into the war effort, serving as a platform for an editorial by Hedley Donovan, then editor-in-chief of Time Inc., who returned from a trip to Vietnam in the same year to reassure the nation that we were winning. Time changed its official policy by the late '60s, but even in 1970-71, when I was serving the magazine as its Saigon bureau chief, the pattern of tipping stories toward establishment sources continued. Writers in New York jokingly referred to the magazine's Pentagon correspondents as the Panzer division and to those of us in Saigon as the "flower children." In many a dispute, the Panzer division rolled over the flower children.

The same phenomenon applied to television coverage. Working in Vietnam as a television reporter was incredibly difficult because one had to get not only the story but also the film, and that meant dragging around a camera crew for days at a time, often with little to shoot. Thus the remarkable footage of the war that people remember was intermittent, while talk on the evening news about the war, from White House, State Department, and Pentagon officials, was constant.

Even so, the power of those memorable pieces of TV war reporting was searing, and no doubt did as much to turn public opinion around as all the print put together. Take, for instance, a Morley Safer report from South Vietnam in 1965. Halberstam tells the story in The Powers That Be: Safer gets a tip about a Marine action near a series of villages outside of Da Nang called Cam Ne. He and his crew accompany the soldiers as they enter the village. The soldiers fire their guns, but no one fires back. Three marines end up shot in the back, all by their own men. Enraged, the marines take the village by storm, setting fire to thatched huts and "throwing in grenades and using flame throwers in holes where civilians were cowering and where they would be either burned to death or asphyxiated."

Reading the words now, or even reading words like them back then, is one thing; but seeing the film is another. When Safer's footage arrived stateside, CBS officials broke into cold sweats but put the footage on the evening news.
Viewers were horrified, none more so than LBJ. The next morning the president called CBS president Frank Stanton, a friend, and said: "Frank, this is your president, and yesterday your boys shat on the American flag." Safer's report was, Halberstam would write, "the end of the myth that we were different, that we were better."
 
 
 
 
 
 
THE '70s
 
We had started off okay with the Freedom Riders and Woodstock and Four Dead in Ohio and driving Nixon from office and Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy and so on. But then we hit a rough patch. We became crass and self-absorbed. We stopped caring about anything but money and food.
-- Joe Queenan, Balsamic Dreams
 
The '70s was a great decade for the media, and a dreadful one for the country. As journalists scored one reportorial coup after another -- My Lai, the Pentagon Papers, Watergate -- the culture itself continued to unspool. Every indicator portended trouble. If, as Weekly Standard writer David Frum writes in How We Got Here, the first sixty years of the twentieth century had been "an ever-more successful attempt to impose order on a recalcitrant world," then the next twenty represented a retreat into chaos. Some time after 1965, crime shot up, and would continue to do so until the early '90s; illegitimacy and divorce, drug use, wanton violence, political corruption, all rose in steep ascents.

Pop idols began to keel over from overdoses -- Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Elvis Presley, Lenny Bruce, Brian Jones. More and more people would cheat on taxes, skip work without notice or reason, and sabotage assembly lines. The pox of Vietnam, symbolized by soldiers "fragging" their own officers, had come home to infect the country at large with a virulent anarchy.

The melting pot was no longer working properly; we were one nation, divisible. The country fell not just along racial lines. In 1973, the Supreme Court, in Roe v. Wade, gave women the legal right to abortions, capping a decade of growth for the feminist movement. But the ruling, far from settling the dispute over reproductive rights, only inflamed it.

In almost every way, the country was near bankrupt -- financially, morally, and spiritually. By 1975, even New York City could not pay its bills. Cults were growing like fungi in a dank crawlspace. In 1978 more than 900 followers of the Reverend Jim Jones in Guyana would die from a suicide cocktail of Kool-Aid and cyanide. Five people were shot and killed trying to reach the victims, including three journalists.

"Between 1967 and 1981," writes Frum, "the United States sank into a miasma of self-doubt from which it has never fully emerged." But the country's dissolution would not infect the media until the second half of the decade. There were major national stories to report, and the press was reporting them brilliantly.

The decade began with continuing coverage of the My Lai massacre, first reported by Seymour Hersh through Dispatch News Service in the fall of '69, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. There followed Neil Sheehan's coup in obtaining the Pentagon Papers and The New York Times's subsequent publication; Sydney Schanberg's courageous reporting for the Times on the fall of Phnom Penh and the bloodbath that followed; and The Washington Post's tenacious, trail-blazing pursuit of the multi-faceted Watergate scandal, backed up by additions to the story line from the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and Time magazine, to name a few.

It is doubtful that the Pentagon Papers would have been published, or the Watergate story pursued with such determination, had not an era of close relations between newspaper owners and managers and the White House come to an end. The protectiveness of the press toward the presidency from the '40s through the '60s is now part of press lore -- the photographs that never showed FDR's braces, the never-disclosed knowledge of JFK's trysts, The New York Times's self-censorship of its own Bay of Pigs coverage, the Times's cooperation a year later during the Cuban missile crisis. This collaboration with the seat of power sprung quite naturally from a wartime (hot and cold) sense of enhanced patriotism, not to mention awe for the presidency and an instinct to protect it. In his book, Thy Neighbor's Wife, Gay Talese describes a memo that Hugh Sidey, a top Time Washington correspondent, wrote to his editors, a for-your-eyes only communication never meant for publication, which likened the hedonism of JFK's White House to ancient Rome. Somehow, the memo found its way to Robert Kennedy, who summoned Sidey and threatened a suit for slander, whereupon an equally irate Sidey lectured the attorney general, "I don't think that this is the way the government should be run." The public remained in the dark.

The familiarity between presidents and eminent publishers, editors, and journalists of the day fostered back-channel communications, usually well out of sight of the newsroom. If press managers resisted the entreaties successfully, they would make the fact known and become momentary heroes. If they succumbed, one might never hear of it. One thinks of Kennedy's 1963 sit-down in the White House with Punch Sulzberger and Scotty Reston to complain about Halberstam's reporting from Vietnam, or that phone call from LBJ to Frank Stanton at CBS about Morley Safer. As the decade progressed, however, publishers and editors became more inured to these entreaties.

In 1970, Henry Kissinger tried unsuccessfully to get Max Frankel, then Washington bureau chief of The New York Times, to mute the reporting of the secret resumption of bombing of North Vietnam. The White House had already announced its "incursion" into Cambodia (the event that triggered the protests at Kent State in Ohio that resulted in the death of four students), but the bombing broke a deal with Hanoi to begin negotiations. According to Frankel's memoir, Kissinger told him, "Max, if you blow this up, you will be doing a grave disservice to the national security -- with all that is going on." Frankel blew it up and blew Kissinger off.

The subsequent publication of the Pentagon Papers made a clean break. The New York Times managed to publish three days' worth of the forty-seven-volume study of the war in 1971 before a court issued a restraining order, whereupon they were passed along to The Washington Post and then The Boston Globe like a hot potato until the restraining order was lifted. Being sued by the federal government was a terrifying prospect, and the publishers involved showed every bit as much courage as the journalists.

When word came down from the Supreme Court that the publication of the Pentagon Papers represented no threat to national security, and that the prior restraint had been unjustified, there was celebrating in the newsroom. According to The Trust, a history of the Times by Susan Tifft and Alex Jones, "Punch and Rosenthal heard the news in New York on an open telephone to the court and spontaneously hugged each other. 'Get some champagne quick, because we're drinking it like mad here,' Rosenthal telegrammed Frankel in Washington."

The court battle over the Pentagon Papers had been a trauma for all concerned. Certainly the press would not regard Nixon in the same way afterward, and for his part Nixon created the plumbers to seek revenge on the man who had leaked the papers in the first place, Daniel Ellsberg, one of the many authors of the study. Thus it truly was one big story: the Vietnam war begat the Pentagon Papers and the Pentagon Papers begat Watergate.

Watergate was a difficult enough story for the print media, and for television next to impossible. There were few images; sources would not appear on camera, and most of what was known had to be attributed to The Washington Post. Then, too, the back channel with the White House was still effective at the networks. The licenses of their lucrative stations were periodically reviewed by the government. At CBS, a planned two-part Watergate series by Walter Cronkite suddenly became a one-and-a-half part series -- the second installment was cut from fourteen minutes to eight minutes -- after a vicious tirade from White House aide Chuck Colson. According to Halberstam's account, Colson was not satisfied. After Nixon's reelection, he told CBS president Frank Stanton: "We'll break your network."

By the time the Senate committee hearings on Watergate began in 1973, the Post had already won its Pulitzer Prize. But it was left to television, doing little more than clearing the schedule and rolling the cameras, to deliver the coup de grâce. The nation would be transfixed by the hearings, as it had been during the McCarthy hearings, as it would be during the Clinton impeachment hearings. By 1974 Nixon was gone, airlifted into oblivion.

The story was over, but the dramatic postscript was not written until April 1975, when other helicopters would airlift hundreds of American State Department officials, civilians, and Vietnamese off the roof of the embassy in Saigon. Keyes Beech, a reporter for the Chicago Daily News who had lived in Saigon for nine years, had to fight his way to the embassy, "scratching, clawing, pushing ever closer to the wall. We were like animals." Finally, he was in the air and looking back. "My last view of Saigon was through the tail door of the helicopter," he would write. "Tan Son Nhut was burning. So was Bien Hoa. Then the door closed -- closed on the most humiliating chapter in American history." In the short time it took Beech's helicopter to reach the deck of the USS Hancock, Saigon had been renamed Ho Chi Minh City.

The public would reward print journalism for all of its good work with increasing distrust. The media had done what they were supposed to do -- report the news "without fear or favor." But the news had been so unremittingly bad that the public held the media, and the printed media in particular, responsible. It wasn't just that the messenger was being blamed. Journalists were perceived by some as out of touch with mainstream attitudes -- an excessively liberal elite based in New York and Washington. Readership declines, brought on by alternative media choices, and by failures in the educational system, added to newspaper woes. By the '70s television had already replaced newspapers as the most trusted communications medium. In the mid-'60s, 80.8 percent of the adult population read newspapers. By 1997 that figure was down to 58.3 percent.

Still, because of population growth, newspaper circulation was increasing, as were advertising revenues, thanks to the purchasing power of the Boomer generation that was entering its twenties and thirties. Between 1960 and 1970, newspaper advertising revenue increased from $3.6 billion to $5.7 billion. Over the next ten years it jumped to $14.8 billion.

Throughout the '50s and '60s, the newspapers' profit margins, when there were any, seldom rose above 5 percent. But by the mid-'70s, the unions had largely lost their chokeholds on the industry. Labor-saving composing and printing technologies were introduced and profit margins began to increase. The newspaper industry was now big business, and attractive to Wall Street investors. Family-owned papers like the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, which had already gone public, found themselves under pressure to increase profits and stock prices. And those public companies that didn't have family control felt the pressure even more. Professional managers began to move in, and with them marketing consultants and accountants who knew little and cared less about the values of journalism. In his memoir, Max Frankel tells of how he had to fight off the business side of the Times to keep the Book Review alive:
 
Since the advertising revenue that the Review attracted consistently failed to cover the costs of its production and staff, the 'return-on-investment' crowd foresaw profit in its elimination, or at least significant shrinkage. They never bothered, of course, to measure the contribution that even an 'elitist' Review made to the sale and cachet of the whole Sunday paper.
 
The Washington Post was responding to the marketplace and social forces when it started Style in 1969. No longer able to deliver the news first, papers looked for new ways to hold readers. And so they entered the era of "personal" rather than "official" coverage -- often useful service information but at times frivolous in the extreme. Style replaced "For and About Women," ending that traditional segregation by gender. Many newspapers around the country adopted a similar approach. The New York Times, traditional pacesetter for hard news, went to a section-a-day format, and came under fire for what to some seemed excessive coverage of the unimportant.

That newspapers had crossed some sort of line became clear in November 1975 when the Times put on its front page an article by its food writer, Craig Claiborne, about a $4,000 meal he and a friend had enjoyed at a Paris restaurant, paid for by American Express. Nora Ephron would call Claiborne's article "terminal decadence" in her Esquire media column, arguing that the Times "had managed to give front-page play to a story that was essentially a gigantic publicity stunt for American Express." The letters poured in, running four to one against the article.

What upset Ephron and many other journalists even more was the advent of celebrity journalism, first promulgated in a "legitimate" publication with the launching of People magazine by Time Inc., in 1974. Within two years, it was profitable and would go on to change the media landscape, as celebrity profiles began to spread like kudzu. Newsweek would eventually run a cover story on Vanna White, the woman who spun the wheel on Wheel of Fortune. (At the magazine I was then editing, New Times, we protested the genre with a cover photograph of Farrah Fawcett and a line that read: "There is Absolutely Nothing in This Issue about Farrah Fawcett." Fawcett, then a television actress appearing in Charlie's Angels, has remained a staple of celebrity journalism to this day.) Writing about People magazine, Ephron would bemoan the fact that all of this "lowest common denominator" reporting "has to be at the expense of the issues and events and ideas involved. It seems even sadder that there seems to be no stopping it."

One obvious problem with this new form of journalism was supply and demand -- too many journalists chasing too few top-draw celebrities, the sort whose cover image could sell magazines. Pretty soon the subjects gained the upper hand and began negotiating terms to reporters and editors. This was treacherous ground.

And to create drama, the lives of celebrities large and small had to be cast in dramatic terms. Whatever the dullness of their real lives, for the purposes of People and its competitors, celebrities always had to be in motion, either up or down, coming back for a reprise, or going down for the first time, anything but staying the same. The publishers of these magazines, like stockbrokers, could make money by touting celebrities or selling them short, but not by holding. The best celebrities were therefore the most dysfunctional, cycling through the valleys and peaks of their lives.

It was a depressing time for journalism. The press was exhausted, collectively and singly, no less than the nation itself. It was a time for reflection and recollection, not to mention remuneration. Willie Morris had quit early on in 1971 as editor of Harper's, pressured by a magazine owner who wanted to see profits and didn't give a fig for what Morris had accomplished. David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Gloria Emerson, Jonathan Schell, Frances FitzGerald, and Sydney Schanberg all turned to nonfiction books, most of which were extensions of their reporting on the war. Ephron had switched to screenwriting and film directing. Ward Just would turn to novels, Norman Mailer would return to them. It was the end of an era.
 
 
THE '80s
 
The issue isn't just the loss of journalism. At stake is whether, as citizens, we have access to independent information that makes it possible for us to take part in governing ourselves.
-- Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel,
The Elements of Journalism

I first encountered marketing consultants in 1981, while working as Life's news editor, a title that was not quite yet an oxymoron. The big-format picture magazine, having folded as a weekly, had been reborn as a monthly. Life relied heavily on newsstand sales and impulse buys and had hired, like most every other publication by then, consultants to guide its choices. By the time I joined the magazine, the specialists had already seen enough to reduce their advice to a coda: Life covers should stick to celebrities and cuddly animals.

Animals were in ascendancy because Life had run a cover shot of a Shar-Pei puppy, a Chinese guard dog with heavily wrinkled fawn-colored fur and a lugubrious expression. The cover had been a huge hit. I wanted to hug the dog myself. Still, there were hard choices to be made. The best-selling celebrities were hard to bag, not all animals were cute, and editors wanted to run covers on medicine and science. The consultants set up their own newsstands throughout the country to test out the three or four possibilities for each month -- mock-up covers of Life would be interspersed with already published magazines. Then the editors would sit rather sheepishly to hear how poorly their choices fared, and why. Seldom was the quality of the stories behind the covers addressed. One month, I suggested that a story I was editing, on water issues across the country -- depleted reservoirs, collapsing aquifers, and access-to-water controversies -- be thrown into the mix. For a cover I proposed some beautiful landscapes of California's Mono Lake, showing the water level so low that it exposed otherworldly underlying salt formations.

The consultants were incredulous; an emotionally cold landscape would never fly. Nonetheless, other possible covers were falling through. Mono Lake went on the cover and became one of the better selling issues of the year.

I tell this small anecdote only to illustrate how much ground editors had already ceded to "the suits" by 1981, and how misguided the advice received often was. In the introduction to Media Circus, a meditation on the failures and excesses of the press published in 1993, The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz writes,
 
In some ways we were the architects of our own misfortune, sacrificing our credibility for a misguided notion of what sells. Dumbing down the product has done nothing to stem the tide of newspaper closings.
 
But editors and publishers, under increasing pressure from owners, corporate executives, and stockholders, had lost their bearings by the '80s and eagerly embraced advice from all comers. Surely businessmen knew best. After all, they were the new rock stars of the decade. Magazines like Manhattan, inc. had emerged to elevate people like Donald Trump, the real estate developer, and Carl Icahn, corporate raider to iconic status. Tina Brown, who was thought to have captured the zeitgeist of the period in the pages of Vanity Fair, would pick up her own pen to write about Saul Steinberg, another corporate raider, and his wife Gayfryd, then the toast of New York.

Editors were not only giving away much of their discretionary power, but, as they huddled with consultants and pondered focus groups, their time and attention. This would become such a fact of life over the next two decades that by 1998 Geneva Overholser could observe in the pages of American Journalism Review, "Walk into any sizeable newsroom in the country, ask where you can find the editor and chances are good the answer will be: in the Marketing Committee."

It was a particularly trying time for the networks. In 1980, Bill Paley had put CBS into the hands of an outsider, a Pillsbury executive from Minneapolis named Thomas Wyman. Al Neuharth, the head of the Gannett company, who would play a minor role in the drama that was to follow, wrote in his memoir that Wyman was a "flustered misfit" who was "totally lacking in knowledge or understanding of the company he was running and the business we were in." Over the next five years CBS's income was down and so was morale in the news division.

By 1985, CBS was "in play," as were the other two networks. No network had ever been sold, but now, within the year, they would all lose their independence. CapCities acquired ABC; General Electric took over RCA, the owner of NBC; and Paley, dissatisfied with Wyman and fending off Ted Turner, turned to Laurence Tisch, a major stockholder, who would then take over Wyman's job and the network. Tisch took control and within three years, "the Tiffany network" had gone from first to last place in the ratings. Dan Rather would grouse on the op-ed page of The New York Times about hundreds of employees who had lost their jobs "so that the stockholders would have even more money in their pockets." (Wyman would not be the last flour executive to grease the skids at a franchise media corporation. Some fifteen years later the Times Mirror board would make the identical mistake and hire Mark Willes out of General Mills, Pillsbury's cross-town rival.)

The effect of the "suits" was everywhere. The newsmagazines began to pare down their international and national reporting staffs while promoting and hiring writers skilled in life-style and human-interest stories. There were more and more celebrity covers. A study by The Project for Excellence in Journalism found that Time and Newsweek were "seven times more likely to have the same cover story as People in 1997 than in 1977." The marketers had also introduced a new personal cover vocabulary, which is now ubiquitous. Both newsmagazines pepper their covers with the words "us," "we" and "you." Thus one finds these lines on a cover of Newsweek this year -- "The Economy: How Scared Should You Be? The Market's Wild Confidence is Shaky: What You Can Do Now?" And on Time, "How to Protect Your Privacy Online: Identity theft is growing, spy software is spreading. 10 ways to keep your vital information secure."

Fifteen years or more of such pandering has done little to shore up newsstand sales. Time and Newsweek now find themselves in danger of slipping off the list of the top 100 magazines ranked by single-copy sales. Both are outsold by Soap Opera Update. Meanwhile, the average sell-through rate for all magazines on newsstands and on store shelves has dropped from 65 percent in the early '70s to today's figure of 35 percent. That's not good news for the business, or for landfills.

Newspapers were also under increasing scrutiny from within and without. More and more independently owned papers were succumbing to the instant wealth offered by the newspaper chains. During the '70s and '80s, Gannett would gobble up sixty-nine newspapers, sixteen TV stations, and twenty-nine radio stations. The staffs were then squeezed to make the purchases pay off, as their new bosses began to look for profit margins of 20, even 25 percent. Some of the most talented editors in the country would take a hike. Bill Kovach left The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Jim Squires left the Chicago Tribune, and Gene Roberts walked away from The Philadelphia Inquirer, a paper he had guided to glory. All had grown tired of playing milkmaids to the chains' cash cows. Squires would conclude, "Enough would never be enough." Roberts's leaving signified the beginning of a decline in Knight Ridder's journalism, which had been among the nation's best.

The country's largest remaining independent papers were protected from the chains in part by their size, and in part because family members often held voting stock separately. But many third and fourth generation stakeholders in family-run newspapers were also getting restless, no longer content with single digit margins. Managers turned to ever more sophisticated tools of quantification and market research to squeeze profits. Writing in Republic of Denial, Michael Janeway recalls that the news business of the period rushed "as to a huckster's miracle cure to trendy techniques for fragmenting its own products and markets."

Janeway, briefly editor of The Boston Globe, sat through his share of meetings with media consultants, who fed back to the editors the readers' complaints about the "bad and tedious news in the paper, stories about chicanery, crime, governmental process." In other words, newspaper editors were being encouraged by business consultants to cut back on their beat coverage of federal, state, and local bureaucracies. Many did so, and the consequences would become apparent as the '80s advanced.

One factor that was forcing all newspapers into new directions was the debut in 1982 of USA Today, conceived by Al Neuharth of Gannett. The launch of a national newspaper was a huge gamble, and the paper would not turn a profit for years, but its impact was immediate. The use of color and graphics, breezy layouts, and zesty headlines was a real departure from the norm, and shook the industry. Newspaper executives either heaped scorn upon it or rushed to copy it, but they could not ignore it. Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post wrote that USA Today was serving up fast food, giving readers "only what they want." Ben Bradlee added that if USA Today is a good paper, "then I'm in the wrong business." The free publicity was just what Al Neuharth needed. To his staff, he joked, "Bradlee and I finally agree on something. He is in the wrong business." To the world, he gleefully marketed the paper as McPaper.

With editors looking nervously over their shoulders, they began to miss the stories that were right in front of them -- often in the form of copy from their own reporters. It can be argued that some of the biggest stories of the '80s were all hiding in plain sight for years before they finally broke as big national stories:

* Early signs of perfidy at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) had been reported as early as 1982 by Kurtz in the Post, yet the story never got out of the back pages. When the Post took Kurtz off of the HUD beat in 1985, no one at the paper replaced him. It would not be until 1989 that the nation learned that the federal department responsible for housing the poor had been ransacked by a bunch of wealthy, well-connected developers.

* Ronald Reagan had indicated his near obsession with the Sandinista government of Nicaragua continually in the early years of his presidency. Within three months of Reagan's inauguration, the contras were being trained in Miami; in 1983 congressman Edward Boland, the Massachusetts representative who had sponsored the amendment blocking covert aid to the contras, declared "the evidence was very strong" that the law was being violated. But the world would not know that anything was amiss until the fall of 1986.

* The savings and loan story had been reported, but mostly on a bank-by-bank basis in the financial pages, and the few reporters connecting the dots were ignored. Shortly after the story finally broke wide open in 1989 with a series in The Washington Post, the bill had climbed to $500 billion.

* As for the AIDS epidemic, Frankel writes in his memoir that The New York Times, like most American newspapers, "was inexcusably indifferent to the early evidence of epidemic in homosexual ranks." He adds, "The Times's interest in AIDS did not pick up until after Rock Hudson died of the disease in 1985."

One reason why all of these stories were so slow to break was the lack of television coverage. By now it had become axiomatic that national news stories had to follow a formula: major play in the most important daily newspapers, particularly The New York Times, and then pick-up by television. The big stories of the '80s took years to work their way onto the front pages of the papers, and only then got any significant television play.

There was only one kind of story that immediately captured both the front-page and the evening news: a human-interest story, and preferably a political sex scandal. Kovach and Rosenstiel write in The Elements of Journalism that "the press is increasingly fixated on finding the 'big story' that will temporarily reassemble the now-fragmented mass audience." More and more, this in fact meant a small story with enough sex, sleaze, and racial or political intrigue to keep it in the news for weeks or even months: Gary Hart's affair with Donna Rice, O.J. Simpson's murder trial and acquittal, the Elián González story, congressman Gary Condit's alleged affair with Chandra Levy, and of course the granddaddy of all news stories in the '90s, the Clinton sex scandals.
 
 
 
THE '90s
 
Probably the most surprising aspect of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the cold war was the effect it had on the American media executives; they seemed released from being serious not just about foreign news, but in domestic reporting as well.
 
-- David Halberstam,
War in a Time of Peace
 
Harry Evans made an interesting decision in writing his large picture book on the last one hundred years, called The American Century. He ended the volume with the elder Bush's presidency, adding only an Edward Sorel illustration of Bill Clinton's swearing-in ceremony. This short-sheeting of the century was probably a wise move. It meant that a tome full of the glory and tragedy of U.S. history, and the country's role on the world stage, ends with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and Operation Desert Storm, rather than with President Clinton's tryst with Monica Lewinsky, the stained blue dress, and some tawdry audiotapes. Would that the rest of the media had sat out the Clinton years as well.

It is easy enough to argue that the period from 1993 to September 2001 represents a nadir in journalism.

What went wrong? The information revolution had such a nice ring to it. There had been such promise.

Never before had journalists been so educated, so well paid, and seemingly so representative of readers served. Never before had journalists enjoyed such remarkable tools with which to do their jobs -- lightweight laptops, cell phones, digital cameras, satellite hookups, and instant research on the Internet. Never before had they been presented with so many venues and formats through which to deliver their information, with twenty-four-hour news channels, media Web sites, and chat rooms. Never had newspapers seemed so profitable. And television news, once the loss leader of the broadcast industry, had proven itself a profit center as early as the '70s, with the success of 60 Minutes.

Yet many of these strengths were either liabilities or illusions. Journalists were better educated academically, but they were far less educated in life. The media workforce was indeed more diverse than it had ever been. In 1976, minorities had represented only one percent of the 40,000 daily reporters in the U.S. Today the figure is nearly 12 percent of the newspaper workforce and nearly 25 percent in television newsrooms. But those figures still lag behind today's diverse population.

As for pay, some journalists were now pulling down six-figure incomes, and a few stars had reached seven. Having helped to create the celebrity culture, the face cards of the industry had themselves evolved from observers to high-rolling players, no longer paid to report what others did and thought but for what they themselves thought. Thanks to what James Fallows calls the "political talk industry," they were now ubiquitous, appearing not just on endless TV roundtable discussions but also before industry seminars and conferences. This "harlotry of the lecture platform," as John Updike has aptly described in Bech: A Book, did wondrous things for journalists' egos and bank accounts but little for the public discourse.

Part of the information revolution is the Internet. People are using it as another source of news, and this is slowly eroding the audience for traditional news sources. But it is turning out that the most popular news sites are run by the traditional news organizations. With few exceptions, stand-alone news sites, which don't charge for usage, aren't making it.

The Internet has freed anyone who chooses to be a publisher without any gatekeeper and that is wonderful for free speech but also has a dark side: witness Matt Drudge. His 1997 false reports on Sidney and Jacqueline Blumenthal were unsubstantiated, unchecked, and just wrong.

Even the profitability of the newspaper business over the last twenty years is a two-edged sword. The industry has gone from single-digit margins to double-digit margins to some degree because money is not being plowed back into the papers. Owners and newspaper chain executives are not "putting more tomatoes in the soup," to use Abe Rosenthal's wonderful expression. Instead, the money is going out the door, to outside stockholders, or up the chain of command to stock-holding managers. The push for ever-higher profit margins, sometimes as high as 25 percent, threatens to erode the journalism being offered. Geneva Overholser, writing in these pages, pointed out that newspaper profit margins increased by about 50 percent, while readership has decreased 15 percent. She goes on to write: "Poynter Institute's Al Tompkins says he asked a drug-agent friend, in Tennessee, what percentage profit crack dealers make. Around 25 percent, was the answer."

Within the television industry, the discovery that "news" formats could be produced much more cheaply and profitably than other programming has given rise to both the twenty-four-hour-news and the news talk shows that largely fill the cable news day. While these talk shows certainly have enriched the journalists who participate, and presumably the cable operators who created them, some have debased the profession. The worst of these shows are sort of jumped-up gladiatorial contests that are in essence "rigged," if not for profit as were the quiz shows of the '50s, then for sheer entertainment. There are happy exceptions, such as CNN's Greenfield at Large. But most are based on conflict and hyperbole. Fallows writes in Breaking the News that the producers of Crossfire are "shouting constantly in the earphones of the hosts, 'Cut him off!' 'Interrupt!' This makes for lively talk TV. But the culture of artificial polarization and overstatement spills over into the rest of journalism." He quotes Margaret Carlson of Time on her "simple rule for success" in the new television talk show industry, as reported in The Washington Post: "The less you know about something, the better off you are."

These talk shows, combined with the new twenty-four-hour news cycle, have created far too much "capacity" chasing after far too little new information. It is my guess that when television switched from fifteen-minute evening news broadcasts to half-hour formats in 1962, there had been much hand-wringing about whether there was enough real news to fill the slot. Often there isn't (although there is plenty right now). Yet even so, unmediated, unfiltered information, such as direct quotes from public figures in the news, continues to shrink. The average length of a television news sound bite in 1968 was forty-two seconds. That had been pared down to what would seem an irreducible minimum of ten seconds by 1988. In 2000, according to a study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs, the average sound bite was down to just over seven seconds.

The information revolution has many blessings, but its gift of speed has a downside, as the Clinton sex scandal would prove. The very impediments to newsgathering and transmission in years past, the difficulty of composing the words -- manual typewriters, setting type by hand -- and of delivering film, the time it took for stories to reach the street, the intervals between newscasts and paper deliveries all reinforced a process of deliberation and second thoughts that once were ingrained into the communications industry. Now it is journalism on the fly. There is barely a moment for reflection.
In his memoir, Ben Bradlee writes,
 
But at the bottom of the barrel, the stain of the tabloids was spreading with the help of television into what could be called 'kerosene journalism.' In this genre of journalism, reporters pour kerosene on whatever smoke they can find, before they determine what's smoking and why.
 
Over the years, one has heard a great deal about the chilling effect that libel verdicts and prior restraint orders can have on the media, and rightly so. But now the media, with its trumped up atmosphere of conflict and hysteria, seems to be exerting something of a chilling effect on government. Fallows, who calls the coverage of the Clinton health care proposal "the press's Vietnam war," says that government is all but held hostage by the media, with no time to generate new initiatives in an atmosphere of civil discourse. "Trying to carry out long-term plans in this environment," says Fallows, who has served as a speechwriter for the Carter White House and as editor of U.S. News, "is like trying to conduct medical research in a hospital emergency room: conceivable but unlikely."
 
The full effect of this Journalism with the Gloves Off is not yet known. But it is interesting to speculate. In their book about the coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, Warp Speed, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel tell the story of how in 1964 J. Edgar Hoover shopped audiotapes of Martin Luther King, Jr. around to selected journalists. The tapes revealed that King, a married man, was having an affair. Not a single reporter wrote the story. "How different," the authors ask, "would American history be had the press operated differently in 1964?" The authors play it out a little further: "Imagine Hoover sharing his tapes with professional Internet gossip Matt Drudge. How would CNN handle the leaked tapes if the network knew MSNBC was about to give the same information?" The same question can be asked about the Cuban missile crisis, which was largely managed off-stage.

The story that would expose all the fault lines of the new media was of course the Clinton presidency, and that began not with Lewinsky but the moment he took office. Within the first days of his new administration, Clinton nominated Zoë Baird for attorney general. She was forced to withdraw when it was revealed that she had employed an illegal alien as domestic help. Clinton then nominated Kimba Wood, who was perceived to have a similar problem, and also withdrew. Fallows reports what happened next. "Less than two weeks after the new president was sworn in, Sam Donaldson of ABC said on a weekend talk show, 'This week we can talk about, 'Is the presidency over?'" Within months, Time would run a cover called "The Incredible Shrinking Presidency" and Newsweek would ask, "What's Wrong?" This sort of press commentary seemed way over the top at the time, in part because of the apparent hypocrisy involved -- how many of the finger-wagging pundits also employed illegal aliens as housemaids, cooks, and nannies? And then there was the issue of precedent and proportionality. Less than three months after his inauguration, John Kennedy ordered up the disastrous Bay of Pigs Invasion. It had been a bad idea to begin with, and Kennedy managed to make it much worse by watering it down until it had no chance of success. The toll: 114 dead and an enormous international embarrassment. Weigh the Bay of Pigs against Zoë Baird's and Kimba Wood's illegal aliens.

But this is the new information age. Cheap talk is the coin of the realm. And it never got cheaper (hopefully never will get cheaper) than during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal that broke in 1998. The following year, Kovach and Rosenstiel wrote in Warp Speed what they believe the scandal represented for the press:
 
. . . the moment when the new post-O.J. media culture turned its camera lens to a major political event for the first time. What do we mean by post-O.J. media culture? It is a newly diversified mass media in which the cultures of entertainment, infotainment, argument, analysis, tabloid, and mainstream press not only work side by side but intermingle and merge. It is a culture in which Matt Drudge sits alongside William Safire on Meet The Press and Ted Koppel talks about the nuances of oral sex, in which Hard Copy and CBS News jostle for camera position outside the federal grand jury to hear from a special prosecutor.
 
Sam Donaldson, he of the hair trigger, knew the repercussions of the scandal before anyone else. He thought it was going to be, well, about as devastating as Zoë Baird and Kimba Wood. Four days after the initial reports Donaldson declared: "If he's not telling the truth, I think his presidency is numbered in days." After a few beats, Donaldson would speculate that Clinton "will resign, perhaps this week."

In his introduction to Warp Speed, David Halberstam writes, "This past year has been, I think, the worst year for American journalism since I entered the profession forty-four years ago."

But the years 2000 and pre-September 2001 have hardly shown much improvement. In 2000, the presidential election was badly bungled in its final hours with premature network declarations of victory for both Bush and Gore. Dan Rather would ruefully remark: "We've lived by the crystal ball and learned to eat so much broken glass tonight that we're in critical condition." The story that got second billing for the year in terms of airtime and copy inches was Elián Gonzáles, the young boy whose mother died trying to bring him from Cuba to the United States. Elian's father wanted him returned to Cuba; his relatives in Florida wanted him to remain in the states -- a human-interest story that was blown all out of proportion, and which may well have affected the presidential election results.

The story this year that has received overwhelming coverage has been the Gary Condit/Chandra Levy story, another apparently irresistible combination of sex, politics, and crime reporting. The bewildering coverage the story was given was accompanied by a considerable amount of hand-wringing, self-examination, and self-justification, surely a hangover from the Clinton scandal. Maureen Dowd of The New York Times would feel compelled to write that the Condit story was "the stuff of great drama and novels and journalism through the ages," a story every bit "as legitimate as covering the patients' bill of rights or campaign finance, maybe more so, because here the press has a crucial role in forcing out the truth."

And when the reporters and talk show guests were not defending the Condit coverage, they were attacking Dan Rather and the CBS Evening News for not joining in the melee. Rather and his executive producer, Jim Murphy, boycotted the story through much of July, in what was seen by the rest of the media as an act of outrageous moral grandstanding. For some like myself who were cheering on the sidelines, however, Rather and Murphy had become Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

Stock analysts in days like these often speak of groping for the true bottom of the market, something that must be reached before the market can recover. It is not clear whether the media business has reached its own true bottom, but I like to think it has. In my opinion, that occurred in September 2000, at the very beginning of Hillary Clinton's debate with congressman Rick Lazio, moderated by the normally fair and estimable Tim Russert.

To kick off the debate, Russert turned to Clinton and asked her if she was ready to apologize to the American public for "misleading" statements made during the Lewinsky scandal. With that, he cued up a videotape of the first lady on the Today show, six days after the Lewinsky scandal broke, trying to defend her husband. The impertinence of it, the unfairness of it, took my breath away. It was as if a boxing referee had said, we are now going to have a fair fight, and then hit one of the participants in the stomach with brass knuckles. Apologize for what? For not testifying against her own husband, something she could not even be forced to do in court? One could only think of Joseph Welch's famous line to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy hearings: "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"
 
The tragic events of September 11 have changed the landscape for the nation's media, as they have for its citizens and government. The media's forced march toward banality and irrelevance -- compelled by the economies of flagging audiences and profit-hungry media conglomerates -- has not just been stopped but has been turned around. Newsmagazines, adrift for years with covers on angels and shark attacks, are selling news once again on newsstands, and in numbers not seen in decades. CNN, reportedly on the brink of trimming international coverage and hard news in favor of cultural and Hollywood reporting, has scrapped the plan -- at least for the moment.

This reordering of priorities and values has reached into almost every outpost of the media. Now everyone is reappraising, recanting, circling back to rediscover long dormant talents, passions, and values. Over the summer, Tina Brown's Talk magazine ran a tasteless fourteen-page photo fashion feature, using vamped-up models to depict the president's twin daughters in bars, dance halls, and police stations (in one photo, a George W. look-alike arrives to bail the daughters out of jail). Now, trimming her sails to the new prevailing winds, Brown could write of the intrepid Rudy Giuliani and his all-but-forgotten marital woes: "His heroic example, I hope, puts into perspective the late twentieth century media hysteria about the relevance of a public servant's private life."

The journalism of the past weeks has been both heartening and alarming, heartening because journalistic infrastructures and instincts seem to be alive and well, alarming because the stories that came pouring out in the space of a few weeks were things the country should have focused on years earlier, among them the disintegration of the CIA; the internecine battles between federal, state, and local agencies responsible for public safety and health; the calamitous state of the country's airport security system; the growing intensity and reach of anti-American sentiment among Islamic populations, even within the United States. Had you read, prior to September 11, that the Michigan laboratory responsible for producing an anthrax vaccine had failed to ship a single dose since it went private in 1998? I doubt it. And yet a clear threat of bioterrorism has been with us for at least a decade, and high on the list of possible weapons throughout that span has been anthrax.

Were these the blown stories of the '90s, issues that had been obscured by the media's focus on sex scandals and celebrities? Some of them had in fact been reported before, but in the back pages of newspapers, or in small circulation magazines that seldom set the national news agenda. Too many major media outlets, driven by little beyond quarterly profit statements, were otherwise occupied by the cheapest stories they could find -- cheapest in every sense of the word. Looking back, one wants to know: Did the country's apathy dictate the media's slide from national and international news reporting, or did the media's voluntary capitulation of its societal role to report difficult, complex stories create an ill-informed, uncaring audience? David Halberstam, writing in War in Time of Peace, his new meditation on the failures of U.S. foreign policy in the '90s, suggests that it was both: "The networks had become essentially isolationist, or neo-isolationist, both reflecting and at the same time increasing the nation's self-absorption."

Certainly recent developments have proved vindication for the many voices in the wilderness -- several of whom have been quoted in this essay -- that have decried the retreat from foreign reporting, as well as from dogged beat reporting of the federal bureaucracy. What remains to be seen is how long this recommitment to hard news will last within the corporate offices of companies like Disney, General Electric, and AOL, particularly as audience interest inevitably begins to abate. Where will the balance between info and tainment rest four months from now? Four years? Or forty?