Is it journalism or 'gerbalism'?

Day 586

Rather late, it's beginning to dawn on some thoughtful folks that what ails the traditional news media isn't the encroachment of the Internet, or the current advertising drought, or a lack of interest in among young people.

What's wrong with newspapers is that they are boring, hardly a revelation. So are the supper-hour TV news shows. (And "show" is the operative word, as Network told us back in 1976.) The newish wrinkle is that questions finally are being raised about why exactly the news-media output is boring. And the reason that more and more frequently comes up is that the efforts of journalists, and maybe journalists themselves, are boring.

 

Spot the difference: Today's San Jose Mercury News, St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Willoughby, Ohio News-Herald. Same design grid, same fireworks, same prominence of Palin "shocker" and same Palin photo. Source: Newseum.

I was confirmed in my mild despair on this point, now manifest, more than a decade ago, in a swan-song story by Maureen Dowd just before she took up column writing. In one of her last reported articles, Dowd describes how the legendary "boys on the bus" no longer drink, smoke or swear. How they now dress, identically, like middle managers at an insurance company. They no longer trade "war stories" after hours, but instead fuss over their laptops and other gadgetry. And their obsession isn't with work but with home. Home being not the newsroom, but literally their home. I've since sat patiently during a rare conversation with a boss, who in 20 minutes in his office allowed himself to be interrupted three times by cellphone calls from his daughter. "What dress should I wear for my playdate?" "You bought the wrong cereal." "I need you to pick me up at 4:30."

Groupthink rules. No editor or producer wants her media outlet to be the only one that ignores the Michael Jackson story for even a day. If a reporter's story in next edition differs significantly from everyone else's, he feels stupid and worries about his job security. (A call from his editor likely reinforces this fear.) What once was a badge of honour - idiosyncrasy - is now highly suspect. ("That guy from the Press-Gazette, he thinks he's Woodstein or something. He actually interviewed every single person on the train platform in Kelowna yesterday. No wonder his piece today says the candidate is more popular than the press says. Guy's nuts.")

Conformity born of peer pressure is the rule, so we have assembly-line journalism. Speed is of the essence, so we have drive-by journalism. Formulaic producing, reporting and editingare so embedded that the roughly 1,100 dailies and hundreds of local newscasts across North America are almost indistinguishable. Imagine checking out the five dress shops in town, each offering the same garments displayed the same way. I can't, actually, but that's how it is with the Montreal Gazette and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, CTV and CBS, Newsworld and CNN. That so many people say they get their news from "The Daily Show" grieves Jon Stewart. But not Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, who had a photograph of mourners at Jackson's Neverland theme park on his front page yesterday, nine days after the singer's death.

Is it a coincidence that the only news medium with a growing audience, cyberspace, is the one where the responsible websites dealing with important issues offer reporting and commentary that is consistently lively, comprehensive and authoritative? Most of the folks drawn to working on those sites, for low or no pay, are veteran or aspiring journalists. Which helps explain why the writing and editing is so good. I find more typos in each day's New York Times than on economist Robert Reich's blog. Actually, I can't recall a typo on Reich's blog, and that's been the rule in my web reading. (This site, alas, conspicuously excepted.)

Mention Internet news sites to some traditional editors and they sneer about TMZ and the Drudge Report. Do they know that Talking Points Memo's expose of Bush's politicization of the Justice Department forced Alberto Gonzales' ouster as attorney general? That's the same TPM which in assiduous detail warned against the futility of a Mideast conflict in 2002, while the New York Times was running a gulled Judith Miller's scare stories about Saddam's fictitious WMD stockpile ahead of the crucial Congressional vote authorizing Bush's war of choice in Iraq.

 

David Axelrod, senior advisor to President Obama; Doug Bates, Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer; and Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter on what ails journalism and what to do about it.

Here's David Axelrod, senior advisor to President Barack Obama, in a June commencement address at his alma mater DePaul University on his early journalistic ambitions:

“In those days, superb reporting played a historic role in uncovering the truth, shining a bright light on events like Vietnam and Watergate,” Axelrod said. “Journalists helped save the republic, and I wanted to be a part of that. But, over time, things changed. By the mid-1980s, journalism was becoming more business than calling. The front office began to take over the newsroom. The emphasis went from veracity to velocity, from reporting to receipts.”

Here's Graydon Carter of Vanity Fair, in his latest editor's column:

"Aren’t you growing just a bit tired of reading about the demise of newspapers—in the papers themselves? It’s no wonder readership is down. Who has the patience to hear endless whining about someone else’s misfortune when your own fortunes are rickety?...'Youthing' down a paper to attract 21-year-olds isn’t the answer: the only way you’re ever going to get the average 21-year-old to read a daily newspaper is to wait 9 years until he’s 30. My suggestion to newspapers everywhere is to give the public a reason to read them again. So here’s an idea: get on a big story with widespread public appeal, devote your best resources to it, say a quiet prayer, and swing for the fences."

And Doug Bates, Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer at the Portland Oregonian, in his June commencement address at the University of Oregon:  

"I've decided 'gerbilism' is a pretty good word for what's been going on in the news media these days. Gerbilism is an apt term for something that's soft and warm and cuddly, safe and timid, with no sharp teeth and no bite whatsoever. Gerbilism, I've decided, is partly responsible for a lot of our nation's problems today.

How relevant, in fact, have newspapers been in the modern era? It's hard to exaggerate the hatred newspaper proprietors had for FDR. Yet he survived the ceaseless vitriol of their papers and was the republic's longest-serving president. And it was radio that FDR used to raise the spirits and then galvanize a nation. Vietnam? TV images of body bags turned Americans against that conflict. Bush's irrelevance after 2005? Again, TV images of post-Katrina New Orleans made widespread and irrevocable Bush's reputation as an incompetent.

And why has so much world-changing journalism occured between magazine and book covers and not on newsprint? Here are a few of journalism's high points of the last century:

Ida Tarbell's History of the Standard Oil Company (1904), which began as a McClure's magazine series, and prompted Teddy Roosevelt's busting up of the Rockefeller and other trusts.

John Hersey's Hiroshima (1946), initially a New Yorker assignment, later a global bestseller evoking a worldwide popular backlash against nuclear weapons, whose destructive power was vaguely known but not well understood until after its exposure in the graphic detail of Hersey's account. 

Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), which led to the banning of DDT, and is credited with launching the modern environmental movement.

Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), which began as a New Yorker assignment, a pioneering examination of genocide.

Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile (1965), a milestone in the consumer-rights movement.

Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963), the first handbook of modern feminism.

David Halberstam's The Best And The Brightest (1969), on the delusionalism of ostensibly brilliant men in pursuing an ill-fated war in Southeast Asia.

Robert Caro's The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1975), a breakthrough expose of the uses and abuses of power - by a civil servant, as it happens, but applicable in charting the lives of those who attain and hold power in all walks of life.

Thomas Ricks' Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (2006), a companion to The Best And The Brightest, the definitive description of the denialism and unfolding of miscalculations in fighting the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.

What this work has in common is that newspapers had little or nothing to do with it, though some of the authors - Halberstam and the Washington Post's Ricks, among them - began or remain newspaper journalists. Rough-and-ready newspaper journalism - exploring crack houses, chatting up cops and prosecutors on their off hours, touring a tent city with a veteran public-health nurse, studying the body language of CEOs and labour bosses - imparts marvelous powers of observation of the human condition, as Halberstam fondly recalls of his beginnings as a newspaper cop-shop reporter. But by longstanding tradition, a great many of the best journalists - from Mark Twain (Buffalo Morning Express) to Margaret Mitchell (Atlanta Journal, now the Atlanta Journal-Constitution) to Tom Wolfe (Washington Post, New York Herald-Tribune) have "graduated" to magazines, books, and screenwriting.

Their newspapers could not or would not accommodate their longer stories that needed telling. 

Proprietors like Rupert Murdoch call long-form, explanatory writing an indulgence. Which it would be if it was not responsibly edited. But editing isn't the real issue for Murdoch and fellow proprietors who can't see past the newsprint bills, and so have been offering their readers smaller and smaller newspapers while jacking up cover prices to whatever they can get away with. In any other business, that would be seen as a formula for losing customers. And certaintly that's the effect it's having on newspapers.

Many editors and TV news directors regard in-depth journalism as commercial folly, believing it will drive away an audience that suffers "time poverty," and won't sit still for even the most compelling account of events or conditions of the greatest interest and importance.

They're wrong, of course, and their formulaic output of trivia is killing their media "platforms."

Good journalism will out. A shame so little of it appears in newspapers or on television. And with authors, documentarians and, increasingly, the better websites putting the lie to any notion that compelling, important journalism cannot find an audience and have its impact on the world.     

Related

Jack Shafer, Slate: The long, slow death of newspapers, beginning circa 1965.

For the purposes of this blog, the inception of the Great Recession in the U.S., the epicentre of the crisis, is taken as the start date for the global slump. The U.S. has been in recession since December 2007.

Comments

[Steve Wax]

Newspapers had little to do with exposing Watergate?

[Bill Michtom]

While I agree that newspapers have gone downhill significantly, I don't think that television news had very far to go. I stopped watching it about 35 years ago because it so clearly trivialized the news, was so poorly done and such a waste of time and money. And that was only the network news and McNeil-Lehrer. Local news was even worse.

Now we have newspapers—and all of the mainstream media—spewing stenography, not journalism.
and, while I continue to browse the NY Times online, I am frequently writing to their so-called public editor to ask why they won't call torture torture, why they use loaded language, or why they act as courtiers to government.

The Washington Post's decline was finalized with the firing of Dan Froomkin. And I watched my own paper, The Oregonian, sink into triviality within months of Sandy Rowe taking it over in the early '90s. Not to mention that it has the worst newspaper website in the western world.

Why would I want to actually give credence to any of these media?

[John Lorraine]

That aptly and eloquently summed up a significant part of the problem.

Of course, it's also what the promising, savvy and edgy young journos at your paper have been saying for years. You know, the ones the Star didn't hire.

[Antonia]

Brilliant, David.

[David Olive]

Steve, obviously the Wash. Post had everything to do with getting Watergate underway, then the NYT joined the trail. But Watergate might have been the death-knell. I was there for it, and the journos collectively flattered themselves they had perhaps too much power in bringing down a president. A counter-intuitive outcome, to be sure.
Bill, sad to say, the Oregonian last meant much to me during the Tonya Harding scandal. If only it was an isolated case. On urban-renewal ideas alone, Portland should have global attention, and I can't help thinking the lack of heft of its principal paper doesn't help. Never thought I'd see the day of NYT and WaPo "spewing stenography," but that's exactly what's happened, the second Iraq war being sufficient proof. I won't debate the merits of the war, just to say that as with healthcare reform now, the mass media aren't explaining what's on offer, the virtues and shortcomings affecting 16% of the economy. It bores the networks, as a CBS executive said after Obama's fifth press conference, last month, on health care. All they cared about was "Gatesgate."
John, we do need more young folks in the Star newsroom. We have short-term (summer) and long-term (one year) internships for J-school grads and other qualified young journalists. And the newsroom really embraces these new folks. In this tough economy for papers especially, we can't keep as many of them on permanently as we did pre-recession, but I hope we'll do better when the storm clouds lift.
The thing about the "kids" is that they don't yet know what cannot be done. That's why they're essential. Us older folks have seen ideas and concepts fail so often, we don't realize the moment has arrived when they might now work. That's part of the perspective young journos offer, clear as day on their websites and "zines."