John Thrasher, the superintendent of the Press Association of the Confederate States of America, instructed his association’s reporters to submit clear and concise telegraphic stories, free of opinion or comment.14 Thrasher insisted that correspondents eliminate extraneous words and instructed them to “see where you can use one word to express what you have put in two or three.”15 He provided an example in which he italicized the words to be omitted:OKALONA, April 25—Our cavalry engaged the enemy yesterday at birmingham. The fight lasted 2½ hours. The enemy were completely routed, with 15 killed and a large number wounded. Col. Hatch of the 2d Iowa cavalry was seen to fall from his horse, which ran into our lines and was captured. Our loss was one killed and twenty wounded. The destruction of the bridge prevented pursuit.16
This transmission process gave birth to the “inverted pyramid” of reporting, in which the most important facts were stated at the beginning, followed by less important ones, and so on throughout the story.17 The “lead,” or the main point of the story, always went in the headline, and from there, “it was not a long distance to reserving the first paragraph of [the] stories . . . for the most newsworthy facts and then organizing supporting material in descending order of newsworthiness.”18
The impact of the war and the influence of the wire services transformed journalistic styles and introduced a powerful emphasis on fact over commentary. 19 By 1866, Lawrence Gobright, the AP’s Washington agent, concluded, “My business is merely to communicate facts. My instructions do not allow me to make any comments upon the facts which I communicate. . . . My dispatches are merely dry matters of facts and detail.”20 In the decade after the Civil War, “objective” stories still only made up about 40 percent of all news articles, but that share rose to more than 66 percent by 1900, and according to journalism researchers, stories described as “biased” declined sharply after 1872.21
After the Civil War, journalists themselves called for standards to purge the profession’s excesses. This was nothing new: as early as 1843, editors called for a national convention to establish standards, “enter[ing] into mutual pledges . . . [and] form[ing] a virtuous resolution, that they will hereafter control their passions, moderate their language,” in order to “pursue truth.”22 Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, established rules for contributors to his paper, assuring that “all sides” to an argument received attention.23 In 1889, an article criticizing the press used the word ethics in the title for the first time, and a year later the first code of conduct for journalists appeared.24 Adolph Ochs, who bought the struggling New York Times, symbolized the ascent of “objectivity” over partisanship when he arrived in New York in 1896 and instructed the staff “to give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect or interests involved.”25 Oswald Garrison Villard, publisher of The Nation and the New York Evening Post, reiterated the concept of “fairness,” emphasizing that the objective journalist had to report “both sides of every issue.”26 Other subjects besides politics were increasingly covered, and whatever interested “any one hundred people” merited reporting, but the centrality of fact was established.27 Even many Progressive-era muckrakers believed that consumers were competent to judge for themselves a product’s worth if given reliable information.28
Of course, a certain number of elitists, who thought “the people” could not be trusted with the news, remained, with one of their most outspoken members, Edwin Godkin of The Nation, maintaining that the columns of newspapers should be “gentlemen writing for gentlemen.”29 Journalists “entered the thriving ranks of professional elites by subscribing to the prevailing tenet that political decision-making required insulation from ‘mobbish’ and ‘irrational’ voters.”30 Casper S. Yost, for example, the first president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE), wrote that “no people have ever progressed morally who did not have conceptions of right impressed upon them by moral leadership.”31 By “moral leadership,” Yost meant himself and his colleagues.
But even allowing for political bias, publisher Richard White in 1869 explained that a journalist should make the “strongest argument” he could for his political party, but was not “at liberty to make intentionally a single erroneous assertion, or to warp a single fact.”32 (Hailing Keith Olbermann!) And it’s equally true that some crusading journalists, or muckrakers, pompously saw themselves as the moral voices of society, allowing their activism to bury any traits of basic reporting ethics they may have had. Journalists, Collier’s blared, needed to cast their beam of light “forward up on the way that must be followed.”33 This is the same Collier’s that insisted, “Truth is the very kernel of the reporter’s art,” leaving it unclear as to what happened when the kernel of truth suggested the forward beam was aimed in the wrong direction.34
Partly in response to the muckrakers, the Society of Professional Journalists was founded in 1909, followed by a more serious response in 1922 when Malcolm Bingay, of the Detroit Free Press, organized the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) to unite editors “on the common ground of high purpose.”35 Bingay and Casper Yost of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat feared that “general attacks upon the integrity of journalism as a whole reflect upon every newspaper and every newspaperman.”36 Editors responded, initially, with ASNE’s membership swelling to 100,000 (including editors and editorial page writers) before the numbers started to shrink because of internal disagreements over policy.
A code of ethics or conduct, which ASNE established as the “Canons of Journalism,” played a key role in establishing the news business as a profession. The “Canons” embraced the objective position by stating that the “primary purpose of gathering and distributing news and opinion is to serve the general welfare by informing the people and enabling them to make judgements on the issues.” Article IV said that “every effort must be made to assure that the news content is accurate, free from bias and in context, and that all sides are presented fairly.” Editor & Publisher magazine (launched in 1901 and merged with The Journalist in 1907) predicted the new standards would eliminate the “Typhoid Marys of Journalism.”37 A reporters’ counterpart to ASNE, the Society of Professional Journalists, was also established, stating that “public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy” and that journalists should further those ends by “seeking truth and providing a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues.”38 As if to underscore the point about seeking truth, the Society insisted journalists be “honest, fair, and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information,” and test the accuracy of their information to avoid inadvertent error. “Deliberate distortion,” the Code of Ethics added, “is never permissible.”39
The Associated Press also had a managing code of ethics, which any modern reader of AP reports would have difficulty recognizing:• The good newspaper is fair, accurate, honest, responsible, independent, and decent.
• Truth is its guiding principle.
• It avoids practices that would conflict with the ability to report and present news in fair, accurate, and unbiased manner.40
Already, however, reporters and editors were experiencing a tension between what they viewed as their call to be a “constructive critic” of society and still tell the truth and be fair. For example, what if accurate and honest news did not criticize society? Cracks in the ethics of journalism began to appear in 1947, with the Hutchins Commission on Freedom of the Press (formed out of concern that wartime coverage was too patriotic).41 The Hutchins Commission claimed in its publication, A Free and Responsible Press, “it is no longer enough to report the fact truthfully. It is now necessary to report the truth about the fact.”42 Merely allowing facts to establish the truth wasn’t sufficient: journalists had to establish the truth before they could present the facts!43 Of course, this raised the question “whose truth?” and earned the answer, “the journalists’ truth.”44
Still, to many journalists of the World War II era, these were rad
ical ideas. Consider the comments of beat reporter Lou Guzzo, who worked for the Cleveland Plain Dealer from 1937 to 1942, then again after the war, and recalled the near-dogmatic commitment to objective reporting at his paper: “When a reporter on any beat dared fracture the barrier of objective reporting, his copy was tossed back to him for immediate revision.45 Neither of his city editors, Guzzo recalled, “tolerated even the slightest hint of bias in news reporting.” Further, “the newspaper itself espoused so subtle an editorial stance that virtually no one could state with authority that the Plain Dealer editorial board or the staff was conservative, liberal, or whatever. . . .”46 “Balance in reporting,” he later said, “was not simply a textbook venture for the entire Plain Dealer staff; it was a badge of honor.”47 Guzzo recalled “the devotion there to balanced and truthful reporting, regardless of the issues or persons involved,” an expectation made clear in the “Journalist’s Creed.”48 It is important, though, to recognize that the majority of journalists in the 1950s saw themselves as professionals who dealt in facts, not the “framing” of news events.
But some exceptions had already started to appear—Murrow, on television, was the most famous. In print journalism, James B. Reston, the Washington bureau chief for The New York Times, started to write “news” columns in 1953 that “clearly reflected his own judgments.”49 Soon, other Times reporters began to write similar articles reflecting their own interpretation of the facts. And there was an even more troubling trend: the large journalism schools, such as Columbia, were gaining an inordinate degree of influence over those aspiring to careers in the news, just as New York and Washington had attained unparalleled levels of opinion-making power in the United States. One cannot underestimate how swimming in this self-selecting gene pool affected the media. Sociological studies confirmed that “political choices . . . were dominated more by active personal influence and face-to-face communications than by the mass media.”50 When those influencing others’ political choices were members of the media, a significant in-breeding started to develop. Contrary to the notion that the elites were always “conservative,” in journalism the predominance of the peer group ensured that primarily liberal views would triumph.
Reporting itself was transformed, giving rise to the notion that journalists should not only serve as messengers but also provide a source of authority, credibility, and power. Journalism’s homogeneity went beyond a commonly shared view among reporters about gaining, and extending, the authority of the news media. Rather than diversifying, media elites homogenized even further. From 1964 to 1976, the percentage voting for the Democratic candidate in national elections never fell below 81 percent. ABC reporter Frank Reynolds, in an attempt to refute the notion that the network news reflected the attitudes of a group of eastern elites, wound up confirming the fact: “Sure, I suppose there is an Eastern Establishment, left-wing bias. But that just happens to be because the people who are in [the media tend to] feel that way.”51 Theodore H. White commented on the exclusionary social milieu in which the eastern journalists operated: “These people drink together, talk together, read the same esoteric and mad reviews . . . [and] they control the cultural heights. . . . [O]ne who does not agree with them has enormous difficulty in breaking through.”52 Such a bias could prove critical in 1969, when 90 percent of the population watched a television news show regularly.
One cannot overstate the similarity among the editors and publishers of the nation’s top papers. In a study of the leadership at four major papers—The New York Times (seven subjects), The Washington Post (two), The Boston Globe (six), and the Los Angeles Times (five)—since the 1960s, the biographies reveal that there “is not a single graduate degree among them outside of journalism, and only a handful of years spent doing anything other than reporting and editing.”53 They had, in the process, been “thoroughly inculcated in the creed of newspapermen. They are important. They are privileged.”54 Virtually none have had military experience, and aside from running a magazine or two, none have ever had to meet a real payroll where profits counted. (Increasingly, they all came from the same narrow strip, the New York-Washington corridor, which accounted for some 40 percent of Columbia Journalism School students.)55 When Hugh Hewitt surveyed a Columbia Journalism School class of sixteen students, he found that none owned a gun, all supported same-sex marriage, and only three had been in a house of worship within the previous week. Only one of twelve eligible to vote had voted for George Bush in 2004, eleven for John Kerry.
In the early 1960s, some vestiges of fairness and objectivity still remained, but John Kennedy’s election, administration, and assassination seemed to sweep those away. If anything, the assassination boosted television reporting, even though virtually none of the reporters covering the assassination had witnessed the event. In fact, few reporters on the scene—or anywhere close to the assassination area—saw anything. They failed to follow traditional, reliable news reporting techniques when it came to interviewing eyewitnesses, gathering evidence, and transmitting information from the spot. Many, if not most, of the fifty journalists covering the president never personally saw the attack or heard the shots at Dealey Plaza. Most of the television reporters were “huddled outside Parkland Hospital . . . clutching notepads and pencils, listening to radio journalists paraphrase intermittent wire-service accounts of what had happened.”56 That did not stop them, particularly CBS’s Dan Rather, from promoting themselves as “eyewitnesses” and making themselves “central players in the record of Kennedy’s assassination.”57 The media also immediately labeled Lee Harvey Oswald as the “assassin” before the evidence had proven his guilt. After Jack Ruby shot and killed Oswald, the New York Times headline read “President’s Assassin Shot to Death.” Oswald had not even stood trial, much less been convicted.58 Newsweek, reacting to Oswald’s statement that he had not killed anyone, termed Oswald’s denial “a lie.”59
The failures associated with poor assassination coverage (never tracking down the witnesses who saw “other shooters,” or explaining the discrepancies in various stories of multiple ambulances and caskets at the Bethesda Naval Hospital) took its toll on reporting as a profession.60 In 1968, pollster George Gallup told an audience, “Never in my time has journalism of all types—book publishing, television, radio, newspapers, magazines, movies—been held in such low esteem.”61 Rather than returning to objective, fair, and balanced reporting, the news media began to sharply drift in the direction of “gotcha” journalism, as epitomized by the CBS show 60 Minutes. As David Frum noted, “nothing on television worked harder to spread mistrust” than 60 Minutes.62 As the press sought to reclaim its credibility, it scoured the landscape to expose scandals. The Charlotte Observer even subjected squeaky-clean evangelist Billy Graham to a hit piece (which proved to be completely without merit).63
Vietnam played a role, too, though not the one people generally think of in which brave reporters led the opposition to an “immoral” war. Rather, much of the change came as a result of the news industry feeling that the Kennedy administration, followed by the Johnson administration, was not providing honest and accurate information. Certainly the media did little to cover the troops. As one historian of The Washington Post put it, “especially after LBJ’s 1964 landslide, the . . . Great Society programs were highly exciting to Post editors, reporters, and editorial writers. The war . . . was an annoying distraction.”64 Television news had a more significant impact than the major news magazines, which according to one study dedicated only about 7 percent of their coverage to the war.65 Whatever the press’s role in achieving a defeat in Vietnam, James Reston, of The New York Times, claimed the media was responsible: the “reporters and cameras were decisive in the end. They brought the issue of the war to the people . . . and forced the withdrawal of American power from Vietnam.”66 The Tet Offensive provided a shocking transition during which reporters began to be more sympathetic toward the North Vietnamese. Comments in the media about the North Vietnamese plummeted from 100 percent negativ
e prior to the event to only 29 percent negative afterward. On the other hand, negative comments about both the Johnson policy and the South Vietnamese rose by 70 percent and 600 percent, respectively.67 The failure of journalists to follow even basic rules of objectivity during the Vietnam War should have been obvious to even the most casual observers. Reporters never relied on documents or statements from “official” sources in the North, or from any of the Communist participants, because they knew them to be false, controlled, or contrived. Yet it never dawned on these journalists that there was a disconnect in their criticism of the administration—the same system that allowed reporters to criticize government openly by creating and maintaining a free press was deemed less credible than the totalitarian governments that repressed such freedom.
Until the arrival of George W. Bush, no president was more hated by the media than Richard Nixon, who won election in 1968, then reprised that with a massive 1972 victory. In the later campaign, Nixon realized what the Democrats had handed him with the nomination of George McGovern, telling his staff, “Here is a situation where the Eastern Establishment media finally has a candidate who almost totally shares their views.”68 The president noted that the nation would “find out whether what the media has been standing for during these last five years really represents majority thinking.”69 Nixon won a crushing landslide over McGovern, who carried only the District of Columbia and Massachusetts. The magnitude of Nixon’s victory stunned and terrified elite journalists. McGovern’s popular vote total—29.1 percent—was the lowest ever by a major party’s candidate. The reaction was predictable and chilling: one powerful editor responded to Nixon’s election, “There’s got to be a bloodletting. We’ve got to make sure that nobody ever thinks of doing anything like this again.”70 When he referred to “anything like this,” he meant winning an election. Historian Paul Johnson said the aim of the powerful editors and publishers was “to use the power of the press and TV to reverse the electoral verdict of 1972 which was felt to be, in some metaphorical sense, illegitimate.”71 Watergate handed them their issue—their means—to force Nixon out.
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