Reflections on the Century - CJR, November/December 1999

November/December 1999 | Contents

reflections on the century
Millennium-Bound

ABOUT THIS REPORT: CJR, in collaboration with the Freedom Forum, conducted two panel discussions (September 16 in Arlington, Virginia, and September 21 in New York City), where participants reflected on journalism over the past 100 years - and on what lies ahead. Judy Woodruff chaired the Arlington panel, with Ifill, Seigenthaler, and Witcover; Harold Evans chaired New York, with Halberstam, Payne, Safer, and vanden Heuvel. CJR editor at large Neil Hickey excerpted and reorganized the material around specific topics. HBO helped support this project.

JUDY WOODRUFF: I'm not sure I would have chosen this as my all-time favorite century. I would have loved to have been there reporting as Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, when Jesus Christ walked around Galilee, when Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel, and I'd love to have covered the American Revolution. But in terms of change, which is what all of us journalists spend our lives documenting, the 20th century beats them all. Between the industrial revolution, the communications revolution, the shrinking of the world by air travel, computers, exploration of space, splitting the atom, Hiroshima, and on and on, this century has been a reporter's dream - enough change to fill a billion newspaper pages and another billion television and radio newscasts.

DAVID HALBERSTAM: It's been a century in which we ended up with significantly higher standards of professionalism in journalism. We're reporting for better educated readers and viewers. We've seen the growth of cable and the Internet, the fragmentation of the television audience. Generally, we have better journalism at the end of the century than at the beginning.

KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: We face a similar situation today to what the muckrakers faced at the beginning of this century. Corporate power has never been so concentrated. But the muckrakers — even though they operated in an environment where media owners wanted to impose their ideas and ideology — had a connection with the public, with the public's fears. Today there are more and more obstacles to investigative journalism, particularly of corporations. We face a very dire moment, when corporations become almost as important as states and government. We have tools today that the muckrakers did not have — the Freedom of Information Act, First Amendment decisions that should give the press more capability to do its job. But there's more interest in sin and sinners than in investigation of crooks and crookdom.

MORLEY SAFER: What was interesting about the early days of the muckrakers was that these vile and often loathsome publishers had one redeeming feature: they believed in something. Today some owners believe in nothing. Having said that, I think journalism has improved. But to use that awful tired phrase about almost everything in life, we have gone through our 'golden age" and are on a slippery slide. Just look at how all journalism has been corrupted by what I can only call life-style reporting, which has almost driven out foreign news. If you look at any one of the great newspapers or great television networks, you will find that there's more emphasis on where you should eat and how you should do your hair than on watching a good part of Central Europe falling apart.

GWEN IFILL: We have many stories we can tell, but we still have to push the envelope in order to get them told — because it's often not in the interest of the powers-that-be to tell the stories that are most compelling. As more and more media organizations are usurped by large corporate interests, there's going to be less and less interest in trying to get to the bottom of many important issues. The questions get tougher and tougher to ask and the answers get more and more complicated.

DAVID HALBERSTAM: Muckraking was very easy, in a way, at the turn of the century. The especially sinister companies were really doing easily identifiable, egregious things. Now, corporations have gotten more sophisticated. It's not as egregious and it's slicker. Instead of the old, brutal corporation, you've got the new slick, modern corporation. Disney, for example, is a giant corporation that's also a major — allegedly — journalistic company. One of the good, new, modern questions is: Can it investigate itself? Because we have met the enemy and he is us.

KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: Corporations may be slicker today in what they're able to do but so are the media. The First Amendment may become more the property of corporations than the property of the media in its adversarial role with government. Some of these corporations are now media companies. Who will investigate them? It may come to a point where there might be Karetsu — some kind of agreement against predatory investigative journalism.

MORLEY SAFER: We're running out of outrage. Our viewers and readers really can't get stimulated any more by industrial pollution stories, or by further massacre and starvation in Africa, or by many of the other stories that were the high points of this century.

DAVID HALBERSTAM: In Vietnam, the press was an early warning signal that the war didn't work. The group of young print people who went out there thirty-seven years ago did their job and honored our profession. There's no great nobility in that. We did the right thing. But it took a long time for the message to come home because we were up against generational attitudes that had lasted since World War II, in which generals and high public officials told the truth. So Vietnam didn't turn around because of the reporters. It turned around because of the battlefield valor of the other side. There were a lot of factors that contributed. It wasn't the press that lost the war. That excuse became a convenient crutch for certain people in the military. When they had a public forum, they would blame us.

LES PAYNE: I was surprised that the media did not understand that the war was ill-conceived from the beginning. The great fear was that Vietnam one day — ha, ha! — would be ruled by Vietnamese. I didn't see healthy skepticism among the huge mass of the press corps. My view is that — not only was it not the press's fault that we lost — I think it was the press's fault that they did not report early enough that the whole concept of pursuing the war was ill-conceived.

DAVID HALBERSTAM: The reporting from Vietnam actually was quite good. The failure was in the reporting from Washington. State Department reporters and Defense Department reporters did not go into the interior of the bureaucracy to find the people who would have given them a very good, darker portrait — which would have coincided with what we were reporting. The newsmagazines, particularly, had good reporting from Vietnam that got sanitized by the stuff coming out of the Washington lying machine.

MORLEY SAFER: In television, we were at odds in Vietnam with what our colleagues in Washington were reporting. We were appalled because it all seemed like government handouts. I don't think the press lost the war. The war lost itself. Americans had never sat through a war that long. We win our wars quickly. Stalemate, or just sheer battle losses, lost the war.

JULES WITCOVER: Domestically, the civil rights revolution was the overwhelmingly important event in this century in our society. Journalistically, what made it such a rich story was that it was a developing, moving story involving the relationship between human beings. The Wright brothers' flight was startling, among the other important stories of the century, but the civil rights story was an ongoing story of conflict. Journalism thrives on conflict, and this one happened to be a noble conflict. That's what made it so rich and significant. But in trying to decide what was the greatest story, overall, of the twentieth century, I finally concluded that it was the conflict between totalitarianism and freedom — personified in the the Russian revolution, the onset of communism, and finally the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the rise and fall of nazism in between. To me that is the dominant story of our century.

HAROLD EVANS: By comparison with even ten years ago, the amount of foreign news in most of the press is declining seriously. The three news magazines that used to give about 25 percent of their space to foreign news now give 10 or 12 percent. Many people were almost stunned to find there was a place called East Timor, or Kosovo.

LES PAYNE: Foreign news can be made interesting, once you overcome the ossified leadership at some media companies. The younger generation will rise up in reaction to the kind of stalemate that we find in the media. There's a way to cover the Kosovo situation and East Timor so that our readers will be interested. We keep talking about 'globalization" both in terms of the technology and the economy, yet we in the media have not dedicated ourselves strongly, irreversibly enough to exploit that. In the U.S., one out of every ten Americans is foreign born — not second, third generation, but foreign born. In New York, three out of every ten New Yorkers are foreign born. And yet you have editors sitting around saying foreign news is not of interest to readers and viewers. Newspaper people complain about their circulation going down and down and down. I would imagine there's a correlation there. I think it would be very useful if we broke the stranglehold that some of these middle-aged, powerful dinosaurs in newsrooms have on making all the key decisions — not allowing the fresh wind of youth and vigor.

JOHN SEIGENTHALER: Public opinion polls and letters to the editor and commentary from people interviewed on the street indicate that there is, at present, this great chasm of disagreement between journalists and the public about what is important. The public is saying more and more: 'I'm not interested in that. Why do they keep giving me this garbage." I can't remember another time in my long experience when there has been this disconnect — this great gap of perception as to whether journalists are making the right judgments about what is important to the public.

GWEN IFILL: The disconnect is partly the result of what our jobs are as journalists. We're information gatherers. One of the big changes in the last fifty years is that people can now get their own information from a number of different sources. One of the most important stories in the last hundred years is the creation of the Internet. People no longer need to come to us for information. One of my pet peeves is that they do not distinguish between the information they get from Oprah Winfrey and the information they get from journalists. We have to adjust how we gather and disseminate news to take into account the fact that people are getting their information from all of these different sources that have nothing to do with us.

MORLEY SAFER: The supposed 'unpopularity" of the press is based on material that the audience cannot keep its eyes off of. Yes, the press went too far on Lewinsky. But CNN and the cable channels, which usually don't get much of an audience, never had higher ratings. So the polls make no sense whatsoever. People will respond in a certain, kind of knee-jerk way: 'Yeah, I hear the press is going too far so I guess we shouldn't like them." But they cannot stop watching.

JOHN SEIGENTHALER: Mistakes, and we make a lot of them, have been the absolute bane of the journalistic craft. But I do believe that journalists in the mainstream are making a greater effort than ever before to recapture their credibility. I think they are aware of the doubt that exists between them and the news-consuming public. And I do believe that never before have we made such an effort to focus on why we lost our credibility and what we have to do to regain it.

GWEN IFILL: It's heartening that we're actually thinking more about how to regain journalistic credibility because everyone does have a sense that it's slipping out of our control — that we have all this information and ways of getting it out, yet we're not telling the story well. People are still going to come to us for news, but not if we just keep throwing it out there willy-nilly. Yes, it's terrible that the Web sites have beat us to the punch, and some journalists are now saying it's not important to have the story first. I think we're going to hear more of that just because we can't stand the embarrassment. We like the idea that we are the great disseminator of the first draft of history.

JOHN SEIGENTHALER: There is a dark side to this society. And for some reason, it seems to me, more often than not, the press has run behind the curve as those dark shadows have emerged. How long did it take us in this century to give women the right to vote? There were some in the press who were in the forefront of that drive. How long did it take us to realize what we had done to the Nisei, the Japanese-Americans during World War II whom we incarcerated in our version of concentration camps? How long did it take us to get on to Joe McCarthy and the evil he perpetrated on this society? It does seem to me that it's difficult for the press even now to break through the shadows when there is fear or paranoia or concern. Throughout our history we've been victimized by our inability to put light where the shadows are — soon enough so that the public would understand. So while I think it's been a great time to be a journalist, I also think that if you look at our record, it's not always bright and shining.

JUDY WOODRUFF: I've just been reading Max Frankel's book and was reminded that when the early stories started coming out of Germany and the rest of Europe as to what Hitler was up to, even the vaunted New York Times was reluctant to print them. They didn't want to believe it. It was relegated to the back pages for the longest time. Earlier, in the period leading up to the Depression, the press wasn't doing a very good job of shining a light on that impending crisis. If it had, maybe regulations would have been imposed that would have softened it.

MORLEY SAFER: My concern is that the fringe is going mainstream on the Internet — this grab bag that no one has a clue how to deal with, or regulate or legislate or control in any way. And my concern is about access to news in these ever weaker media — newspapers, magazines, television, which are becoming ever more fractured, but where there is some vestigial sense of responsibility. But the biggest thing coming down the line is an out-of-control monster with no sense of responsibility.

JULES WITCOVER: Most people don't have any kind of discriminating filter for the overwhelming amount of information coming to them. Unless there is more intelligence brought to the examining of information the result can be dangerous. When important stories that have a core of seriousness fall into the hands of talk-show fanatics, then the function that we are supposed to perform is lost.

JOHN SEIGENTHALER: There is some confusion. Is Rush Limbaugh a conveyor of news? Is Larry King? Matt Drudge? When I was a child, every Sunday night it was Walter Winchell on the radio saying, 'Mr. and Mrs. North and South America and all the ships at sea, let's go to press!" J. Edgar Hoover once told me he thought Walter Winchell was the greatest journalist he'd ever known. Was Winchell an entertainer? That's about all he was. But he certainly posed as a journalist. For a long time movies characterized journalists as sort of Walter Winchells with press cards in their hats on the telephone saying, 'Hello, sweetheart, get me rewrite." There are young men and women coming into journalism who may be hustlers. But there are also young men and women in the profession right now who are better than I ever was. And I think they're going to be a great credit to journalism in the next century.

JULES WITCOVER: One of the things my generation has been criticized for is that we sometimes knew things but didn't report them because we were too close to the sources. The classic example is John F. Kennedy and womanizing. As a junior reporter at the time, I knew nothing about that. And no reporter I knew knew anything about it. But I don't believe if we knew about it at the time we would have reported it because the standards were so different. A public figure could do whatever he wanted if it didn't affect his conduct on the job. That's a valid standard that has been skewed greatly over the last century. We've learned from some presidents that knowing about their character is very important. Nonetheless, some of the things reported in the Monica Lewinsky story I don't believe we had a valid reason to put out. Journalism has changed greatly in that regard during the century. Standards of what is considered legitimate to report have been lowered.

MORLEY SAFER: I think we are witnessing the last gasps of the three evening news programs on the three traditional networks. I think that's over — a network with its serious editors, its serious producers and reporters telling you the important stories of the day in twenty-two minutes. That was an important institution in this country for a number of years. I think that's going to be gone before we hit 2005.

DAVID HALBERSTAM: There's a great Langston Hughes poem, 'Curb Your Dog." Curb your dog, don't let your dog curb you. The great change in media is driven by technology and nobody really knows how to bring the traditional restraints and strengths of journalism to the new technology. It's out there — the fragmentation of television, the twenty-four-hour news cycle, the Internet, the decline of the editing function. What's declining, for the moment at least, are standards — the rise of a kind of culture of allegation in journalism rather than in confirmation of stories. And I think that's a real crisis in the profession.

I presume that there will be survivors who will emerge from this. And they'll be the people who will be the more accurate, thoughtful purveyors of news and information with the new technology.

LES PAYNE: I'm optimistic. I think there will be an insurgency and that it will take advantage of the new technology. I think the insurgents will have standards and will return to the concept of providing news that is vital to a democracy and to the appetites of the American public. I subscribe to the notion of news being important, vital, previously undisclosed, verified information that someone powerful wants to keep secret. Everything else is advertisement. This withering away of the news business is from within. We are presiding over it. But the insurgency will rise and I think it will be very useful, very vital, and will take advantage of the technology. What you are seeing is the dinosaurs and the profit-makers holding onto something that they helped in large part to corrupt — because they lost their nerve.

JULES WITCOVER: One of the problems looking into the next century is what to do about the issue of entertainment as journalism. Too often, younger members of our profession want to be personalities, celebrities, and have forgotten what they are in journalism for. They forget that we're supposed to be observers and reporters and not part of the story. Unless we emulate the best of our breed of the twentieth century who saw their job not as participants in the story but as reporters of the facts, we're going to have more and more of this mixture of journalism and entertainment.

KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL: I'm an optimist. I think you will see the insurgency through the Internet, but also through people — Americans who are fed up. More and more polls, if we believe in such things, show that Americans are ready for some kind of media reform — whether it's a new form of anti-trust, whether it's looking at regulatory agencies that have lost their meaning and increasingly seem corrupted. But there will be happy remnants of those of us who wake up every morning and say: 'What can we do to inform an American public?"