Journalism After Diana

When I was a boy growing up in Washington, I mixed the martinis at our house on N Street - precocious brat - and got to listen to my journalist parents and their journalist friends batting around scandalous gossip about the late Truman or early Eisenhower administrations: the item, for example, about the famous senator who could not give a speech without a twelve-ounce glass of bourbon to steady himself, and about the night someone got the senator loaded at the Shoreham and had a redheaded woman who looked just like his wife (the great man was too drunk to tell) lead him to a hotel room and get him undressed, whereupon a photographer burst in and took a picture of both of them naked on the bed. For what use, exactly?

The assembled journalists soaked up the gossip and martinis and did not publish the story, any more than they wrote about another popular subject in those days, Mamie Eisenhower's supposed lonely boozing.

Later I worked a couple of summers as a Senate page and took a sort of Dickens urchin's pride in knowing what I thought was the secret stuff. I knew, for example, which senators kept "cough medicine" bottles full of vodka in their desks and nipped at them on the Senate floor.

My boss in the Democratic cloakroom was Bobby Baker, Lyndon Johnson's protŽgŽ from North Carolina, a hillbilly version of Sammy Glick, with a Wildroot pompadour and pleated silk ties - later indicted for tax evasion. Bobby Baker entertained us on Monday mornings with stories about the blonde he had seen "Jack" with on F Street on Saturday night - Baker making curvy va-va-voom hourglass motions with both hands, and winking. Jack, of course, was Jack Kennedy of Massachusetts, the golden boy on crutches (he'd just had another back operation). Jack's adventures, along with those of Senator George Smathers of Florida, Jack's roguish and magnificently tailored buddy, fascinated the ragamuffin pageboys. I would repeat the stories to my parents, to impress them that, at age thirteen, I was an insider too.

My father had covered the White House for The Philadelphia Inquirer during Franklin Roosevelt's last term, and was of course complicit in the gentlemen's agreement among White House reporters and photographers that suppressed the fact that the president was crippled, bound to a wheelchair, and had to be lifted in and out of cars by Secret Service men.

Some kindred complicity (or possibly mere inattention) years later allowed Wilbur Mills of Arkansas, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee - the man who had to approve much of the legislation that went through Congress, and therefore one of the most powerful public servants in the republic - to stay drunk for several years (by his own later account) without the public getting wind of it. Only his famous synchronous swimming in the Tidal Basin with stripper Fanne Foxe, "the Argentine Firecracker," one night in 1974 brought his alcoholic untidiness to light.

All of that was long ago and far away. We live in a different universe, as the journalistic post-mortems after the death of Princess Diana remind us. We have gone, it seems, from being the courtiers, the scribbling butlers of power (souls of discretion or clueless sycophancy) to being, as Earl Spencer said in Westminster Abbey, assassins on motorbikes - princess-killers.

 When exactly did American journalism start to change over from the old standard? Bay of Pigs, 1961? Dallas, 1963? Gulf of Tonkin, 1964? Tet, 1968? Watergate, 1972-74? Rock Hudson's death from AIDS, 1985? The answer of course is that the entire culture has changed dramatically in the last thirty or forty years, and journalistic practice with it. The overall evolution, or devolution (depending on your point of view), can be traced from Franklin Roosevelt's invisible wheelchair long ago to press speculation now about Bill Clinton's "distinguishing mark." We have come a long way.

But journalists retain, presumably, their editorial free will - meaning the power to say Yes or No on a story. The Diana phenomenon is another of those occasions for earnest and even penitential introspection (like, in a very different way, Spiro Agnew's 1970 speech, written by William Safire, about the press: "nattering nabobs of negativism, the effete corps of impudent snobs"). Have we, in our carnivorous careerism (to use Spiro's voice) erased the necessary line between the public and private? Or how exactly do we draw the line now? Have we sufficiently understood and honored a distinction between what might be called public privacy (the private lives of public figures) and private privacy (the private lives of people who deserve to be considered private figures)? Should we revert now to some overall status quo ante of reticence?

 As if we could. You cannot begin this discussion without a caveat or two. Journalists are incurably self-important, even narcissistic. For some reason (an uneasy conscience?), we always agonize about our "role," though it is not clear that such spiritual exercises result in better behavior or higher standards on the street. (By the way, it might be a useful display of humility, that neglected virtue, if we stopped calling ourselves "journalists" and went back to saying we are "reporters.")

 Further: the paparazzi who chase down celebrities on motorbikes or shove cameras into famous people's faces hoping to provoke a punch are comparatively few and do not represent the craft as a whole. They are the shifta of journalism, the profession's renegade poachers of ivory and rhino horn. The distinguished photographer Neil Leifer, who shot for Sports Illustrated and Time for thirty-five years, insists that "such people are not journalists. It is ridiculous to give them the dignity of the title and then to beat our breasts about ‘what's wrong with journalism?'"

 Yes, the hypocritical mainstream press publishes the paparazzi's shots, and then condemns the jackals who took them. (It is a bit of a sophomore's irony to keep saying so, however.) Yes, we should have better taste, should resist the lowest common denominator, and should set about defining deviancy up again.

But the disappearing line that is most troubling in the Diana story is not the line between public and private; rather it is the line between journalists and the subjects we are covering. What worries me more than the individual outrage against privacy, however tragic the result, is the tendency, especially among magazines and television shows, to abandon the traditional journalistic attitude of skepticism and instead to indulge themselves in inundations of uncritical gush - a massive wave of Barbara-ism.

That wave was far worse news for the practice of journalism than the familiar paparazzi intrusions. Has there ever been a more noisome display of grief-pandering, simultaneously self-important and venal? "I guess it's safe to say that [Diana and I] were friends," Barbara Walters began on ABC, setting a ghastly and unprofessional tone of self-congratulatory pseudo-intimacy. As the "Bright Young Things" said years ago in Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies, it was "too, too sick-making."

 The occasion of Diana's funeral was sorrowful and harmless, but any journalist, at the end of the twentieth century, should be made vaguely uneasy by any mass display of intense, irrational emotion. A number of observers did not entirely buy into the global grief; even if they felt private sorrow over Diana's death, they considered it a professional duty to wonder about the sources and dynamics of such dramatic mass emotion. But too many journalists, instead of analyzing the phenomenon, bent themselves to manipulating it and turning it to profit.

Tina Brown's The New Yorker distinguished itself for mawkishness. Time, on the other hand, did a more restrained job and sold 1,200,000 newsstand copies of its Diana commemorative issue; a respectable newsstand sale of Time is, say, 180,000 (full disclosure: I work for Time as a contributor and wrote a somewhat skeptical essay for that issue). It would be childish to be shocked - shocked! - to find that the media made a lot of money off Diana's death. After all, Life made a lot of money covering World War II.

 But at a time when boundaries are vanishing between news and entertainment, between fact and fiction, subjective coloration and objective reality, between celebrity movie star and celebrity journalist, and all vivid news seems to form almost instantly into global folklore, reporters need to refresh their skepticism and to harden their eyes and their hearts a little, even when such skepticism or hardness seems to go against human nature, against the individual impulse to weep.

The press too often undertakes the role of a third-rate dramatist - even of a pornographer: it tends to sanctify (as with Diana, borne off to eternity on a tide of teddy bears and flowers and a quaver of Elton John, floated to her Avalon on the lake); or else to demonize, or in any case to pry and slaver over the darker details, as with the Marv Albert case.

O.J. Simpson upped the journalistic ante and lesser fare is bound to disappoint. The night that Marv Albert pleaded guilty, television was awash with the sort of interviews and commentary (on the network news, on Larry King, on Geraldo, on Crossfire and a dozen other shows) one might have expected in the midst of an international crisis. Yet here was merely a well-known sports announcer (not really a celebrity; most women, for example, did not recognize Marv Albert until all this happened) brought to court for some vividly sleazy private misbehavior.

Every era has its Fatty Arbuckle case (though in the Arbuckle case, which involved a popular Hollywood comedian who was host to a wild sexual party in 1921, a woman died). Chris Matthews, hosting CNBC's Hardball, aggressively defended his discussion of Albert's case by adducing the Watercooler Principle: if people are talking about it at the office around the watercooler, then it should be on the show. Some magazine editors call it the Dinner Party Principle.

If there were a world war going on right now, or an economic depression, the people at the dinner party would be discussing those. A hypothetical: it is October of 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when millions around the world held their breath, expecting nuclear war. Suppose that just at that moment, The New York Times had obtained evidence confirming that the president, John Kennedy, had been having an affair with a woman named Judith Exner, who was also the girlfriend of a Mafia boss, Sam Giancana. It would have made an interesting story conference that morning at the Times. What priorities to put in place? Eight-column page-one banner on the possible nuclear holocaust? Two-column story below the fold on Exner? More likely: no story on Exner until 1) the crisis had passed, or 2) the world had been incinerated.

 Stories of global moment tend to crowd out sleaze. Today, with global war and cold war long gone, with a surging economy for the moment, the proliferating media are suffering through a terrible substance famine. More and more competitive with one another, harassed by bottom-lining business offices, hungrier and hungrier for material, they are increasingly tempted to plunge profitably into the emotional goo (as with Diana) or else, as with Marv Albert, to elevate private pornographic moments (savage erotic bites! ladies' underwear!) to the status of public events. Marv's misadventures made the front page of the Times, below the fold, after he pleaded guilty.

What has happened to journalism?

In part, two answers: 1) The Exile of the Grownups, the remarkable disgrace of "elitism," and therefore the erosion of those standards that an older journalistic "elite" once enforced; and 2) what might be called The Multicultural Faute de Mieux: in a multicultural society where uniform standards of propriety and ethics are difficult to maintain or to even locate, editorial profiteers can cater, in the confusion, to the least common denominator.

 But the two points immediately suggest their own countertruths: 1) If the old elite was so good, why was it so often subservient to power? An alert Washington press corps, for example, could have reduced Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin to nonentity at least two years before Edward R. Murrow accomplished the job on CBS, after McCarthy's damage was done. And 2) Do we really want the nation, and its media, to be run by a moral monopoly - the sort, say, that brought in Prohibition? Maybe not. Still, the media could use more taste and brains, and more respect for their audiences. The old elite, at its best, did not write or edit down. Those in charge today cannot seem to dumb down fast enough.

 The press reflects the culture, and churns it through a Heisenberg spin cycle as well. The sleaze and stupidity abroad in the media advance chicken-and-egg with a permeating trashiness in the society at large. Maybe both are, curiously, a function of boredom and directionlessness.

But journalism should not lose itself in its metaphysical perplexities. Good journalistic standards are not difficult to state - just tough sometimes when applied case by case. Journalists function best when they are mature and experienced and intelligent - and calm; when they keep their work as clear and simple as possible; when they keep their own egos out of the story; when they fall back upon decency and common sense if questions arise about whether to run a piece.

 Is there a reason, beyond prurient interest, to make the private story public? The answer lies in the answer to another question: Is the private hurt that it might cause outweighed by the public need to know?

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