We'll need a strong media in the coming years, and his thoughts are valuable. If you haven't yet, give $$$$$ to NPR, the Washington Post and the New York Times. Just as your models,voter files, musical skills or other professional skills aren't free, neither is courageous reporting. Pay your dues, peeps, pay your dues. Freeloaders can't fight Trump...
Dr. Green, I turn it over to you:
The media who covered the
presidential election of 2016 have a lot to answer for on Judgment Day. But
when Saint I.F. Stone (google him) greets them at the Pearly Gates, they can
help their chances if they make these resolutions and keep them.
Always look for the unhappy ones. James
Reston of The New York Times won the
first of two Pulitzer Prizes for reporting when he obtained the secret papers
the Allies had drawn up for the Dumbarton Oaks conference, which gave birth to
the United Nations. Each nation’s representative blamed whoever he disliked or
considered his greatest rival for leaking the papers. Reston actually got them
from a member of the Chinese delegation who was upset at the lack of attention
his country received (a personal connection also helped, but we’ll get to
that).
Democrats
will be unhappy during a Trump administration. So will some Republicans—John
McCain and Lindsay Graham, for example, if the new president is too friendly
with Russia. The media would do well to cultivate the losing side and those who
feel left out on the winning side.
Look for the nothings. During a 1960s
conference, several CBS newsmen hoped to find out what went on inside a closed
meeting. Charles Collingwood, one of the brilliant corps of correspondents
Edward R. Murrow hired during World War II, arrived with the minutes of the
meeting. He told the group, “There’s a young man in the Laotian delegation whom
I used to know at the Sorbonne. He’s nothing, the fifth secretary of the
delegation. But he did happen to have the minutes.” Marvin Kalb, a superb
diplomatic correspondent for two decades, said his colleague “went for somebody
like the Laotian fifth secretary, who he knew
would know what was going on.”
Similarly,
Reston went to a lower-level Chinese official—who also happened to have worked
at one time at The New York Times.
Like Collingwood, he knew how to exploit connections. But if they were covering
the Iditarod, both of them would have understood that the lead dog may know a
lot, but the dog at the back is closer to the sled and the driver, and may know
more. Reporters need to cultivate those sources. Remember: Bob Woodward’s
friend Mark Felt only confirmed information, but Carl Bernstein’s ability to
get to know telephone company employees helped them find numbers they might not
otherwise have obtained.
Remember Joseph McCarthy and Murrey Marder.
McCarthy is more famous as the senator leading the communist witch hunt of the
1950s, attacking reputations without a shred of evidence or compunction. In The Powers That Be, David Halberstam
brilliantly described McCarthy’s technique:
It
was a great journalistic shell game of its kind, hit and run: McCarthy charges,
press picks up, passes on, never checks, charges
are forgotten, McCarthy goes to next town, reveals a new set of charges, press
again uncritically passes them on. McCarthy had shrewdly and ruthlessly seized
on the weakest part of the mechanics of journalism, the desire of reporters to
have a hot story, and the ability of a senator--who was after all a high public
official, and thus a serious man--to make a charge. Because he was a serious
man the charge became, if not reality, at least news. The boys in the Senate
press gallery occasionally had minor qualms about what McCarthy was doing and
what their role in it war, but there were always excuses: he was a senator,
their editors wanted it, the play was good, Joe might be right, you could never
tell. Sure, they had doubts, but only a columnist could express doubts. Thus it
was news. So it was not just McCarthy who was violating the essential bond of
trust and civility in a free society, it was the press that was a willing
accessory.
The hero of Halberstam’s account is
Marder, a reporter at The Washington Post,
who was determined to hold McCarthy to account. Whenever McCarthy made a claim,
Marder would carefully investigate it, or point out how it diverged from
something else he had said, or put it into a broader perspective—when McCarthy
claimed communists had infiltrated the army, Marder went to the base in
question to get the real story, rather than just going into print with what
McCarthy claimed.
Marder’s editors supported him, but when
they questioned him, Marder replied, as Halberstam put it, “either you believed
that a full and fair and honorable explanation of the man and what he was doing
was all your readers needed and would in the end bring him down, or there was
no sense in being a journalist.” The journalist’s job is supposed to be a full
and fair and honorable explanation of what is happening. Halberstam knew it.
Marder knew it. Marder’s editors knew it. So should today’s journalists,
regardless of the demands of Twitter and internet hits.
Learn
From Russell Baker. Those familiar with Baker know him as the onetime host
of Masterpiece Theater on PBS or for
37 years of Pulitzer Prize-winning commentary in The New York Times or for his charming (and Pulitzer Prize-winning)
memoir, Growing Up. They also can
learn from him about journalism. The
Times had assigned him to cover the U.S. Senate, and the then-majority
leader, Lyndon Johnson offered to help him. Baker grasped there would be a
price: “a sweetheart contract … couldn’t do me anything but harm.”
Baker understood that. But he also
understood himself, and what he wanted to do. “I had never been much interested
in getting ‘inside’ information and scoops. Such stuff was important to a
newspaper, but it wasn’t what I did well. On the Senate beat I hoped to give
the reader accurate and absorbing pictures of the fascinations that occurred there
daily,” he said. “I wanted to let readers know that senators billed as titans
of statesmanship were also human. That the Foreign Relations Committee’s
stately Walter George of Georgia was also the senator from Coca-Cola, that
Senator [J. William] Fulbright [a scholarly and thoughtful foreign policy
expert] also worried about keeping the board of Arkansas Power and Light
pacified, that the oil industry often called tunes for senators like, well …
Lyndon Johnson.”
Good writing and reporting can capture a lot
in a few words. Scoops and inside information can be part of a bigger picture.
Consider today’s Senate. The GOP leader’s wife has been nominated for the
president’s cabinet; if that doesn’t present problems, what does? The
Democratic leader once replied—correctly, to be fair—to Jon Stewart’s criticism
of his efforts to tweak Dodd-Frank by saying that “Wall Street is in my
district.” Those facts won’t necessarily breed great scoops, but they certainly
are part of providing “accurate and absorbing pictures.”
Know
Thy Followers and Readers, and Care About Them First. David Farenthold, who
did brilliant reporting on Trump’s foundation, used Twitter to try to round up
information. Some correspondents interview someone for one story and never
expect to encounter that person again, but good journalism involves saving
string: the school nurse interviewed for a story about vaccinations might end
up being in charge of medical care for her region and have a great story for a
reporter about Obamacare, good or bad.
People like them ultimately matter more
than whether other journalists adore you. An editor in my hometown once told me
the story of a reporter who begged to be taken off of a story that was on the
front page every day because other reporters laughed at him—they didn’t think
it was their kind of story. It wasn’t. It was just a great news story, and the
public liked it and cared. That needs to matter more than whether your
colleagues follow you on Twitter, or whether they invite you onto their
television panels.
