Journalists are not much beloved these days. The latest Forbes Most Admired Professions ranking has America's ink-stained wretches (as reporters like to affectionately call themselves although most of them haven't been near a printing press in years) charting in at number 18, behind bankers and accountants, and the lowest level for the press since 1977. That Jon Stewart is now the "most trusted" journalist in America does not speak well of the industry, although, in fact, Stewart embodies many of the qualities that great journalists have always had--integrity, fearlessness and a passion for truth.
There are many reasons for the decline in respect for the press, some external and uncontrollable, others self-inflicted. Constant sniping by conservative bloggers that the mainstream media is composed entirely of closet liberals who unfairly tilt their coverage toward candidates like Barack Obama has taken a toll. That Obama was something entirely new on the political scene, and the first serious black candidate to boot (and thus more newsworthy), is not enough to justify the extra attention in their view.
A more serious charge is that the press abdicated its responsibility to adequately fact check and challenge the Bush administrations assertions leading up to the Iraq war--an abdication magnificently skewered by Stephen Colbert at the 2006 White House Press Dinner to the discomfiture of the Washington press corps poobahs in attendance, most of whom chose to pan his remarks or ignore them. In his column in today's New York Times (called
The American Press on Suicide Watch) the indispensible Frank Rich (who, coincidentally, is also thinking about the future of journalism this week) notes that the video of Colbert's performance went on to be one of the most popular YouTube videos ever.
Curiously, or perhaps deliberately, Rich does not mention the outsized role the New York Times played in betraying the public trust by cheerleading the Iraq war through its top intelligence reporter Judith Miller. Miller wrote, or co-wrote, most of the scary stories about Iraq's WMD which, as almost everyone now concedes, were non-existent. In so doing, Miller revealed herself to be something of a Manchurian reporter, manipulated superbly by the CIA and operatives like Ahmad Chalabi. Going to jail for refusing to out Scooter Libby will never be enough redemption for her in the eyes of her peers.
A second possible reason for the Times' accidental complicity may have been the replacement in 2003 of Howell Raines as Executive Editor by Bill Keller, who had been an early supporter of the war. Raines was forced out when one of his proteges--a young reporter named Jayson Blair--was discovered stealing or making up many of the stories he wrote.
Yes, Dorothy, journalism, like all other professions, does have some bad apples. But, they are thankfully few in number. There are no secret handshakes or initiation ceremonies (unless being yelled at by a City Editor is an initiation rite), but every real journalist I have ever met is committed to Adolph Ochs's famous dictum to resist special interests and follow stories wherever they lead "without fear or favor." This is true of reporters at the Wall Street Journal, which is viewed as a conservative paper, and equally true at the New York Times, which is a liberal paper. Editorial pages and bloggers have opinions; reporters have facts, no matter where they work in an environment that tolerates a free press.
As Rich notes in today's column:
"...news gathering is not to be confused with opinion writing or bloviating â€" including that practiced here. Opinions can be stimulating and, for the audiences at Fox News and MSNBC, cathartic. We can spend hours surfing the posts of bloggers we like or despise, some of them gems, even as we might be moved to write our own blogs about local restaurants or the government documents we obsessively study online.
"But opinions, however insightful or provocative and whether expressed online or in print or in prime time, are cheap. Reporting the news can be expensive."
The press industry has not done a good job of communicating to the public that its member organizations do hold those who gather and report the news to high, long-established standards of accuracy and fairness. Reporters are taught to resist pressures from all special interest groups--including their own advertising departments. (Most news organizations have separation of "Church" and "State" policies that forbid anything more than casual contact between the two sides.) I have worked on the editorial side at Dow Jones and with the business side at Fortune, Forbes and Business Week and I've never met anyone who didn't understand and respect those boundaries.
Whether the press can find a new sustainable business model is a matter of national urgency because an honest broker is essential to the functioning of a free society. Thomas Jefferson said so, and he was right. In my lifetime I have been a real reporter and I have been a marketer and producer of content. Democracy can survive without the latter, but it cannot survive without a free press.