When the Press Outclasses the Public

Last fall, Sam Donaldson was asked on CNN whether the nation's most prominent journalists now make so much money that they have grown remote from ordinary people. Not at all, the ABC newsman insisted. "I'm trying to get a little ranching business started in New Mexico," he said. "I've got five people on the payroll. I'm making out those government forms." This, said Donaldson, "gives me something to be in touch with America about."

The ranch in question is 27,000 acres, and includes 1,300 sheep and nearly 300 cattle.

Donaldson is hardly alone in being well compensated for his craft. Reporters, editors, and pundits, particularly in Washington, have become card-carrying members of a socio-economic elite that is comfortably insulated from many of the controversial issues they so glibly debate.

This hardly qualifies as stop-the-presses news, but the plain fact is that most big-city journalists earn considerably more money and enjoy more privileges than the great majority of people who buy their newspapers and watch their newscasts. Most of us have little in common with struggling parents who must feed three kids on $ 25,000 a year. Reporters may once have been champions of the little guy; now they are part of a smug insider culture that many Americans have come to resent.

Far be it from me to propose that journalists take a vow of poverty. I am part of this comfortable culture and have, I confess, occasionally popped off on television for fun and profit. But I'm troubled by a sense that the pejorative phrase "media elite" increasingly has the ring of truth.

"We spend a lot of time hanging out with the high and mighty," says Tony Snow, a Detroit News columnist and a former speechwriter for President Bush. "It's intoxicating. In Washington, access to people in power is important, if nothing else for social reasons, for name-dropping. A lot of people think most of us are a bunch of selfimportant crackpots.

"I know for a fact I spend too much time in the office," Snow adds. "We're all glued to our phones. And there increasingly is a class element to it, where you have reporters bragging to you about their wine cellars. I also aspire to those lofty levels of income. I'm as guilty as anyone else."

I don't mean to suggest that all journalists are to the manner born. In my own newsroom at The Washington Post, many people come from modest backgrounds, attended public colleges, and worked their way up from small papers. But to climb to the upper rungs of the journalistic ladder is to find oneself breathing more rarefied air.

To be sure, many journalists regard their lofty surroundings with Lettermanesque irony. Maureen Dowd, The New York Times's high-profile feature writer, recounted in her December 12 column in the Times Magazine how she watched a Redskins game from the owner's box with Jack Kent Cooke but really knows nothing about football. In a piece a few weeks later, she recalled -- in a mildly sardonic tone -- a small private dinner at the White House, but still managed to tell us that she and the Clintons dined on rockfish, discussed Chelsea's math homework, and shared popcorn during a screening of The Pelican Brief.

The seductions of power are everywhere. When Norman Pearlstine was managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, he took a free helicopter trip with Donald Trump to watch a boxing match at one of Trump's Atlantic City casinos. Pearlstine later acknowledged that this had been a mistake when one of his reporters got into trouble for accepting similar largesse from The Donald.

And it's not just big-shot media types who get to rub shoulders with the glitterati. At the Renaissance Weekend in Hilton Head, South Carolina, in January, Bill and Hillary Clinton and 1,000 businessmen and policy wonks were joined for the off-the-record extravaganza by such journalists as NBC's Andrea Mitchell, CNN's Wolf Blitzer, Time's Jill Smolowe, and Newsweek's Howard Fineman and Joe Klein. Fineman, for one, claims he got a deeper understanding of Clinton by playing touch football with him and observing the commander-in-chief in the huddle.

Such coziness is hardly a new phenomenon. The likes of Arthur Krock and James Reston always moved comfortably among the capital's top politicos, and Ben Bradlee was one of Jack Kennedy's more celebrated confidantes. But in the last fifteen years an exploding talk-show culture has turned once-obscure newspaper hacks into top-drawer celebrities who cash in on the lecture circuit. Jack Germond, a chain-smoking political reporter little known to the public when I worked with him at the old Washington Star, has become a star on that journalistic sit-com The McLaughlin Group. Michael Kinsley, once the erudite editor of The New Republic, is now a shouting head on Crossfire. Even The New York Times, which long disdained television, has hired a p.r. firm to help get its writers on the tube.

Television exposure often leads to bigger lecture fees and other forms of commercial success in which journalists are used as drawing cards. Mort Kondracke of the newspaper Roll Call and Fred Barnes of The New Republic have staged a debate at a $ 75-a-plate dinner for American Express Platinum Card holders. CNN commentator William Schneider gave a talk at an Atlantic magazine forum designed to hawk the new Toyota Camry. American Express cardholders who run up 300,000 frequent-flier miles get to meet New York Times columnist William Satire.

Occasionally such activities can cause journalistic embarrassment. In January, PrimeTime Live aired hidden-camera footage of a Florida junket for thirty congressional staff members that was sponsored by the American Insurance Association and other insurance groups. Sam Donaldson introduced the piece. Yet reporter Chris Wallace had to acknowledge that a coalition including the American Insurance Association had paid Donaldson a fee - $ 30,000, to be precise, although this wasn't mentioned - for a speech at New York's Waldorf-Astoria. What's more, this was the second year in a row that PrimeTime had to disclose that Donaldson had been paid by the same industry group it was solemnly denouncing for wining and dining lawmakers. Donaldson told me he is in no way beholden to such groups and has not discussed the insurance industry on the air, but admitted having "second thoughts" about such lucrative appearances.

The key element here is not so much the precise income of journalists -- it isn't every scribe who can buy a ranch in New Mexico, or a house in the Hamptons -- but the values and outlook they share with the movers and shakers they cover. Ross Perot tapped into the public's resentment of the press in 1992 by portraying its practitioners as part of the mess in Washington, and while this gave him an all-purpose excuse to avoid difficult questions, he was clearly on to something.

One of the big crises in the capital unfolded last year when the Clinton administration's new ethics rules threatened to shut down the White House Correspondents Association dinner, the Gridiron dinner, and other black-tie affairs at which reporters hobnob with senior government officials. There was an almost audible sigh of relief among media people when high-level negotiations produced a face-saving compromise, and not long ago the White House quietly exempted journalists from the rules.

Gradually, almost imperceptibly, this sort of high-level schmoozing and socializing can change one's outlook. Soon the little perquisites and luxuries that are part of the expense-account life no longer seem unusual. While the press had a fine old time ridiculing Bill Clinton for his infamous runway haircut from Cristophe, I know several reporters who dropped by for a trim when the Belgian-born stylist opened up shop in Washington. (Sorry, I'm sworn to secrecy here.)

Thirty years ago, the average reporter was more likely to be found guzzling beer at the corner bar than sipping white wine with the political operatives. A generation of hard-boiled journalists -- Mike Royko, Pete Hamill, Jimmy Breslin, Mike Barnicle -- spoke the language of the masses. Many of them never finished college. Hamill was a sheet-metal worker as a teenager. These were men -- they were mostly men, of course -- who, whatever their shortcomings, felt the pulse of their cities. Now, even Royko has moved to the exclusive suburb of Winnetka, Illinois.

"We're not getting people out of what used to be called the working class," Hamill says. "It's helped separate us from the readership. Editors tend to be more part of a managerial class now. Most of them live in the suburbs." Hamill acknowledged that he was speaking from his country house in Ulster County, New York, where he was working on a movie script. But he hastened to add that he does all his newspaper writing at his Greenwich Village apartment.

The newsroom has become a heavily credentialed place, and the new journalistic beverage of choice is cappuccino. Some reporters have medical or law degrees; others are graduates of the finest universities and journalism schools. This is a vast improvement in some ways, for it better enables journalists to cover such highly specialized beats as constitutional law and military procurement and corporate finance. But something has been lost as well. As more journalists drive to work in their Volvos, doing much of their reporting by fax and cellular phone, they no longer have a feel for the mean streets and the plight of the less privileged. Too many of us do the equivalent of covering public transportation without ever descending into the subway.

Consider the media's embarrassing performance on the Zoe Baird story. When The New York Times reported that Clinton's nominee to be attorney general had hired a pair of illegal immigrants from Peru as a nanny and chauffeur, the Washington press corps reacted with a barely stifled yawn. This was, after all, a minor yuppie infraction. Many high-powered journalists were hardly unacquainted with the illegal babysitting market. It was, everyone agreed, no big deal.

After calling the usual suspects -- senators and political analysts -- reporters calmly predicted that Baird's nomination was not in jeopardy. BAIRD'S HIRING DISCLOSURE NOT SEEN AS MAJOR BLOCK, said The Washington Post. The Hartford Courant called Baird's confirmation "an almost-sure thing." On CNN's Capital Gang, the strongest condemnation that Margaret Warner, then of Newsweek, could muster was that Baird's handling of the matter had been "a little odd." Al Hunt of The Wall Street Journal said that what Baird did was "wrong" but that "her entire history is one of great ethical integrity." Bob Novak was more dismissive: "I think it's a ridiculous offense, saying that she had an illegal alien. All of Al's high-tone social friends have illegals."

But the folks out there in the real world had different ideas. To them, the idea of a $ 500,000-a-year corporate lawyer saying she just couldn't find a legal babysitter smacked of arrogance. How could someone who had knowingly violated the immigration laws function as the nation's chief law-enforcement officer? Talk radio shows were flooded with angry callers. The capital switchboard lit up. Newspapers belatedly assigned a spate of stories on the day-care crisis and the underground nanny network. Journalists with no green-card babysitters looked vaguely embarrassed when the subject came up in casual conversation. Eight days after the Times story appeared, Baird was forced to withdraw her nomination.

Equally revealing was media response to the Clintons's announcement that they were sending their daughter, Chelsea, to Sidwell Friends, a $ 11,000-a-year private school in northwest Washington. When columnist Mark Shields praised Sidwell on The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, he had to note that his children went there, as did Jim Lehrer's and Judy Woodruff's. Woodruff's husband, Al Hunt, made a similar disclosure while defending Clinton on Capital Gang. Carl Rowan touted Sidwell on Inside Washington, pointing out that his grandchildren attended the school. Howard Fineman, whose daughter was in kindergarten at Sidwell, said he "shamelessly lobbied" the Clintons to choose the school.

Obviously you don't have to be poor to write about the problems of inner cities, or work in a factory to understand the anxieties of auto workers. The essence of journalism is the ability to transcend one's personal experience, to ask probing questions and absorb information and penetrate unfamiliar cultures. But it seems that many well-heeled journalists have lost the edge that once defined the profession. Witness the haughty attitude in much of the bloodless reporting on corporate layoffs. In most of the news reports on Sears or IBM or General Motors cutting tens of thousands of jobs, the underlying tone suggests that this is good news for stockholders and for America's global competitiveness. Downsizing is in and the human cost is dismissed as what the Pentagon calls "collateral damage." When Xerox announced last December that it planned to cut 10,000 jobs, there was little media outrage over the fact that a company that had earned $ 600 million the previous year was taking such a step. Sometimes a fesad paragraphs are devoted to the poor schlubs who, thanks to the mistakes of management, are losing their jobs.

I submit that journalists would approach these stories very differently if more of them lived with the anxiety of waking up one coming with no job and a bleak future. When media jobs are threatened -- as with the repeated threats to shut down the New York Post -- the story receives saturation coverage, in part because journalists place a higher value on such jobs. They are, after all, held by people like us.

Perhaps no issue more starkly illuminated the cultural gap between elite journalists and workingclass Americans than NAFTA. The North American Free Trade Agreement was warmly embraced by the American punditocracy, from George Will and Bill Safire on the right to Anthony Lewis and Mike Kinsley on the left. On all the talk shows the weekend before the House approved the agreement -- Face the Nation, Meet the Press, This Week With David Brinkley, The McLaughlin Group, Washington Week in Review, Capital Gang -- the only journalistic voice raised against NAFTA was that of Mark Shields.

I happen to believe that both sides exaggerated the likely impact of lowering Mexican trade barriers for political effect. But even NAFTA supporters did not deny that there would be a short-term loss of jobs concentrated in certain industries. What was striking was how casually many journalists dismissed these concerns, comfortably secure in a business that is not among those threatened by foreign competition. As Shields told me, "One reason for the press unanimity is that there are no $ 35-a-week Tijuana bureau chiefs."

Administration officials are keenly aware of this mind-set and factor it into their strategy. One White House official told the newsletter White House Bulletin that the press reflects the values of "the elite ... the views, feelings, conventions of people who earn two, three, and four times the median income. That worked to our advantage on stories like NAFTA, and it clearly redounded to the president's disadvantage when he was raising taxes on the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans."

William Greider was disgusted by the coverage of NAFTA. "The Washington press has an increasingly corporate perspective," he says. "They identify with a status quo ideology. The press could not bring itself to take the labor opposition to NAFTA at face value. In another era, twenty years ago, the press would be out talking to these people. Now it's all done through focus groups and public opinion data."

The press corps of the '90s is the best trained, best educated, and most handsomely compensated in history. But today's journalists are bound to sink even lower in public esteem if they're seen as unwitting shills for the leisure class. The next time a Nanny-gate saga comes along, it would be nice if we didn't have to turn on our radios to find out it was a big story.

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