Deadline

by Randy Alcorn

  Leonard ran his hand back through his thinning gray hair, as troubled as Jake had ever seen him.

  “I don’t know how to break this to you, Leonard, but the Trib’s got a multicultural concerns committee, and somehow I got on it.”

  Leonard groaned. “Those committees are springing up all over the place. They started with the sensitivity training, which is the absolute worst thing you can do to journalists. We get sensitive to certain people, and then we don’t take them to task. We stop doing journalism and resort to protection and advocacy. Now the seminars aren’t enough, we have to have committees. Multiculturalism? Diversity? Let people worship diversity or Buddha or Christ or anything else they want, but keep it out of the newsroom!”

  Jake was surprised at how similar Leonard’s analysis was to Clarence’s, despite their radically different beliefs. Leonard flicked the butt of his cigar in the ashtray and hopped off his desk in an agitated motion.

  “I don’t even take the invitations to speak at journalism schools anymore, not many of them anyway. It’s a bunch of clones, an army of automatons. The saddest part is they think they’re thinking for themselves. You know why they think so? Because they’ve been told they’re thinking for themselves! The real problem with journalism schools is they’re located on college campuses. So they’re in the shadow of all those speech codes and sensitive language and all that hogwash. The journalism department becomes an extension of the college’s philosophy of ‘don’t say anything that could offend the wrong people.’ Offenders go to sensitivity training until they repeat the party line like a bunch of zombies. What a place to learn journalism! We grab hold of one perspective, and we get as dogmatic and preachy as the religious right!”

  “An interesting comparison.”

  “It’s true. We’re so much like the church in the Middle Ages it’s scary. Anybody who comes up with unpopular data or discoveries or ideas is like Galileo, a heretic. Instead of looking at the facts, researching and investigating them, we reject them because we don’t want to believe what they’re saying. They didn’t want to know the earth revolved around the sun, so they wouldn’t listen. We don’t like discoveries that could discredit our world view. So we don’t listen.”

  Leonard paced more furiously, in a well-worn section of carpet he’d obviously walked many times before.

  “The more I think about that analogy, the more I like it. Young newspaper reporters are as indoctrinated as any religious fundamentalist. Most of them don’t know how to think. They come out of journalism schools believing a good story is any combination of homelessness, AIDS, crack babies, single mothers, and some social program that’s being unfairly cut. It’s formula news, just like romance and science fiction and westerns and gothic—it has to have certain ingredients. Stories have to have a victim, and if there isn’t a real victim you have to find one. People are never lazy and it’s never their fault. It’s always some businessman or landlord or citizens or the community who’s exploiting them or isn’t doing enough. We’re social workers masquerading as journalists.”

  Leonard looked at his watch. “We’ve got twenty-five minutes left. I need some coffee, Jake.”

  Leonard kept right on talking as he walked toward the lunch room across the massive newsroom, three or four times bigger than the Trib’s. Like any newspaper man he was always aware of the clock, always aware of limited space into which the maximum story had to be stuffed.

  The two stretched their legs and enjoyed the familiar and comforting environment of the newsroom, the background music for both of their lives. After pouring two cups, Leonard sat on the edge of the Formica countertop, took a sip, and looked at Jake in an almost fatherly way, as if he were talking to a young son about the facts of life.

  “Fairness used to be our goal. But now we decide in advance which side deserves to be treated fair. To be fair to the wrong side is actually to do the wrong thing because their values could end up being advanced. And the ‘right side’—we can’t critically analyze them because if we did, some readers might not sympathize with their agenda.”

  Leonard looked at a half dozen reporters sitting around the room, a few of whom appeared to have overheard him. Self-consciously he gestured a “Let’s go” to Jake. Clearly he didn’t want others hearing this discussion. That was fine with Jake. Neither did he. Leonard went to the door, heading back toward his office.

  “Something on my wall I want to show you.” They reentered Leonard’s office, where he immediately became animated again and led the way to the left of his window, behind his desk. He pointed to some papers thumbtacked to a cork bulletin board.

  “Here’s Robert Bazell of NBC. He says, ‘Objectivity is a fallacy. There are different opinions, but you don’t have to give them equal weight.’ Linda Ellerbe says, ‘Any reporter who tells you he’s objective is lying to you.’ Leonard pointed at a statement highlighted in yellow. “Tom Oliphant of the Washington Post says, There’s no such thing as objectivity, so there’s no use wasting time striving for it.’

  “On the one hand, I applaud their honesty. At least they’re admitting they aren’t objective. But I resent that they’ve given up on objectivity, that they feel no compulsion to even try. Just look at the narrative style of a lot of lead articles, you know, that Gay Talese or Tom Wolfe fiction-feel. It’s like storytelling. When your goal isn’t just to relate the facts but tell a good story, it’s a quick slide from fact to fiction. Reporters know a story has to be engaging and readable but it doesn’t have to be entirely factual. And once you depart from the facts, the writer’s moral prism inevitably refracts the story.”

  Leonard wasn’t just responding to Jake’s concerns. He’d been plagued by the same thing, and had given it a great deal more thought.

  “There may be no ultimate moral standards, Jake. I really don’t know. But I do know that whenever we go beyond reporting a group of abortion-rights marchers had a march, and then write as if we know their moral cause is right, we’ve ceased to be objective. We’ve become preachers, indoctrinators, propagandists. Just as much as the religious right. We’re not looking for readers, we’re looking for converts. We’re dispensers of doctrine. The committees, like this one you’re on, they’re like little church councils that determine orthodoxy and heresy.”

  Jake stood up, wanting to inject a little hope into the dialogue. “We’ve got a guy named Clarence. He’s a real comer. You should hear him, Leonard. He’s a conservative, a black guy. I guess I’m supposed to say African-American now. But Clarence doesn’t care. To him, skin color doesn’t matter one way or the other. They don’t know what to do with him at the Trib. He’s sharp, one of the best writers we’ve got and he won’t kiss anybody’s feet, or any other part of their anatomy. It’s hurting his career, but I think he’s too good to be held down. He’s on the Multicultural Committee with me. Actually, he’s the one who makes the meetings worth going to.”

  “Hope he sticks it out. A lot of good people just get fed up and leave.” Leonard rubbed what looked like a day’s growth of salt and pepper beard.

  “Then there’s the hiring quotas, spoken and unspoken,” Jake added. “The Trib committed itself seven years ago to having at least 10 percent homosexuals on staff, and we achieved it, even surpassed it. Then next thing you know the Guttmacher study comes out proving homosexuals are less than 2 percent of the population. So now we’ve got over five times the homosexual representation society does. To be honest, it never bothered me till recently. And it still wouldn’t bother me if it didn’t tilt the Trib. But it definitely does.”

  Both men instinctively looked at the door, barely ajar. Leonard went over and closed it.

  “The philosophy behind all these quotas is the same, Jake. It’s like the only way we can insure fair treatment of every group is to have every group represented. What happens is exactly the opposite. We hire people now not just because they can write well and do good research and are disciplined and energetic, but because they’re part of a certain group. So no
w it’s like having that group as an in-house censor, telling us what is and is not sensitive, what is and is not acceptable. One of our basic goals in the old journalism was to train writers to separate themselves from their vested interests. Now we hire people precisely because of their vested interests. Some of these people are good reporters, but some are there to make the paper an arm of some cause. And that compromises the integrity of the paper. If they want to go serve their cause, fine, let them join the ACLU or NOW or the Church of the Hokey Pokey or whatever, but get out of journalism!”

  Jake recounted to Leonard the story of the rape crisis center piece killed by the Trib’s multicultural committee, feeling some shame he hadn’t voted completely with Clarence to let the story stand. “I guess my point is, advocacy doesn’t just happen in writing stories, but in selecting them.”

  Leonard nodded. “And you think other reporters don’t get the message? This woman had maybe invested twenty or thirty hours on that story. She probably used some of her own time. Think she’ll do it again? Why bother? Save your investigative skills for something you know will make it in, like scandals in the Salvation Army. It’s censorship with a capital C. Most of it’s self-imposed, but that’s the worst kind of censorship. Why waste your time and energy on a story that’s so politically incorrect it doesn’t have a chance of seeing the light of day? What’s the point?”

  “Exactly. I thought the same thing after that meeting.”

  “I mean, reporters are only human. We want to be liked. I remember Susan Okie at the Post. She wrote a story that wasn’t even about abortion, it was about new methods to save premature babies. Some of the other reporters took her aside and warned her this kind of story wasn’t good for the abortion rights movement. Never mind that it was 100 percent true. Susan said she felt herded back in line.”

  “When did all this happen, Leonard? I feel like I’m just catching on.”

  “It’s been gradual. The sixties were part of it, of course. Then came Watergate. Everybody hated Nixon. So did I. Then we threw the bum out. And who pulled it off? Two journalists. All of a sudden journalism had a new image, Woodward and Bernstein, or more precisely, Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. Journalists were movers and shakers, shapers of public opinion. Now we had power to dethrone people, to change the shape of politics. I deal with this in one of my lectures. Did you know that in the single decade between 1968 and 1978 enrollment in journalism schools quadrupled? Everybody was a Woodward and Bernstein wannabe. Journalism was no longer showing the world what it was. Now it was making the world what we thought it should be.”

  Jake got up. “I’ve got ten minutes, Leonard. While we walk to the elevator, let me throw one more thing at you. I’ve got a friend who insists conservative Christians are portrayed unfairly in the media. I’ve always thought she was whining, looking for special treatment. She says she’s not, and though she overreacts sometimes, generally she’s pretty fair minded, and she’s hard to ignore. She can show me article after article where Christians are linked with censorship, bigotry, hatred, child abuse, you name it. At first, I always had an explanation. I told her it was her imagination, or coincidence, or an exception, or that it really wasn’t as bad as she made it out to be. But she makes a good case. And, of course, I know a lot she doesn’t. If she heard some of my inside conversations at the Trib, she’d really flip. What do you think? Any truth to her complaints?”

  As they stood outside the elevator door, Leonard took another deep puff from his third cigar, almost as if he needed an extra boost of nicotine to take him down this path.

  “Jake, I’m not a religious man. I waver between agnosticism and atheism. I haven’t darkened the door of a church in forty years, and I don’t plan to. Frankly, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for religion. Keep that in mind as I answer your question.

  “Okay, back in the eighties they did the Lichter studies, which showed 90 percent of journalists didn’t go to church, more than half thought adultery and homosexuality were okay, the whole deal. Journalism was radically more liberal than the country as a whole. Most us knew that, but now it was official.

  “Then, you remember the flap in ’93 when the Washington Post described the religious right as ‘poor, uneducated and easy to command.’ After all these people came forward with their PhDs to prove they weren’t complete morons, the Post apologized. But the reporter explained he’d meant no offense, he simply thought this description was a universally accepted one. And the truth is, among journalists, it was, and it is. How else could that statement make it through all the layers of editing? No one even saw the red flag. Pure and simple, religion is associated with the Dark Ages, the bad old days. Look at Ted Turner. Owns a network and one of the most influential voices shaping the news, and he tells a group of broadcasters Christianity is just a ‘religion for losers.’

  “My point is, nobody could get away with saying that about anything but Christianity. But the thing is, who built all the hospitals and rescue missions in this city? It wasn’t the ACLU or NOW, that’s for sure. It was Christians. I’ve got a sister and a couple of nephews who are conservative Christians. I disagree with them, but they aren’t hypocrites. The thing your friend has to come to terms with is that people like her have no standing. There’s no legislation granting them special protection from being fired because of their convictions or lifestyles. There’s no proposals making it a special crime to harass Christians or hate Christians. There’s no sensitivity training sessions to help people understand that fundamentalists are people too. And I don’t even have to ask if they’re represented with the others on your multicultural committee. They never are.”

  “You’re right. They’re not.” Leonard’s certainty about this unsettled Jake.

  The elevator door finally opened and the two walked inside, Jake feeling relieved no one else was on board. Leonard didn’t miss a beat.

  “Okay, that’s one side of it. Here’s the other side. Frankly, a lot of it’s their own fault. First, they abandoned journalism. They quote those statistics and say we’re lots more liberal than your average Joe living in South Dakota. True. I admit it. So what? Who told them they couldn’t be journalists? If we’re such heathens, why didn’t they send their children to be missionaries at America’s newspapers instead of sending them to Africa? It’s a free country, so don’t come whining when you cop out and then it doesn’t go your way.

  “Not only that, but some of them treat journalists like we’re the devil. I mean, who takes the journalist to lunch? You know, I can’t remember the last time I had a casual conversation with one of these conservative Christians, except my sister and her boys at holiday dinners. Sure, a few people have called and bawled me out, sent me some angry letters. But that’s the only contact I have with them, ever.

  “Meanwhile, I’ve had all sorts of lunches with abortion rights people and homosexual leaders and feminists and liberals of every variety. I don’t let them pick up the tab, ethics and all that. I’m not beholden to them, don’t get me wrong. But I’m sympathetic to them. I rub shoulders with these people. They tell me their stories. I play cards with a guy on the ACLU board. I speak at liberal colleges. How many invitations do you think I get to speak at Christian colleges or seminaries? How many Christian magazines ask me for an interview? How many of the abortion protesters invite me to lunch? Where am I going to bump into these people? At church? Don’t hold your breath! Next time I’m in a church will probably be my own funeral.”

  They walked out of the elevator together, heading for the front door of the Times, and out to the sidewalk.

  “I’ve told this friend of mine,” Jake said, “the Christian, that I get tired of the conspiracy theories. Some of them seem to think journalists sit around in smoke-filled rooms doing incantations to the devil and trying to figure out how to crucify Christians and bring the country to moral ruin. I admit we’re biased, but most of us are still trying to do what’s right. They can’t seem to accept that. When somebody treats me like I’m th
e antichrist or something, it’s pretty hard to take them seriously.”

  Leonard laughed. “I know exactly what you’re saying, believe me I know. My sister used to talk about the newspaper’s ‘ungodly humanist agenda,’ as if editorial meetings consist of choosing the stories for the day based on what’s most ungodly and anti-Christian. But she’s helped me understand why it seems that way to Christian people. We finally came to something we can agree on—that the only conspiracy in journalism is the conspiracy of shared values.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Well, I’m a liberal, so are you. Most of us in this business are. So, naturally, if I share the same values of the feminists in NOW or the ACLU or the NEA or the Hemlock Society or the Gay Task Force, I’m going to be sympathetic to their agenda and portray it in a positive way. If I don’t share the same values of the Christian Coalition or the Catholics or the local Baptist church—and I don’t—obviously I’m not going to portray them and their agenda as positively. So even though I don’t sit down in that smoke-filled room with NOW and the ACLU, often I’m going to sound like I did. Of course, that’s not a conspiracy in the conscious sense. It’s just an unconscious alignment that exists no matter how objective I try to be. It’s a ‘conspiracy of shared values.’ That’s why we need true diversity in this business. And that’s why it’s too bad the Christians have largely abandoned it.”