“Liars, Incompetents, Distorters: Who Believes Journalists Any More?”

Fall 1997

Panel discussion sponsored by the Pew Center for Civic Journalism in cooperation with
The Atlantic Monthly – September 11, 1997, New York City

Alex Jones, Moderator:

Host, NPR’s On the Media:

When you think about it, the press at its best is the bulwark in this country against lying, incompetence and distortion. We are, at our best, the shrewd observer, the explainer, the watchdog. But somehow the cop has become the perpetrator to a lot of people. That’s not an inapt analogy — the press and the police. The public feels deep ambivalence for both of us. Need and trust on one side, and disappointment and anger on the other… We in the press exhibit also the same tendency that the police have to basically close ranks and close our minds when someone comes along to criticize us… Whatever we may think the problem is or who’s to blame, the public is increasingly turning its back on news, on serious news anyway.”

Phil Scheffler
Executive Editor, 60 Minutes/CBS News:

Maybe the question I want to talk about is: Does responsible, ethical journalism have a future? And sadly, in the case of commercial television, I would have to answer that question no… Attracting an audience is now the most important activity in television news departments. Separation of church and state? Not anymore. There’s only one umbrella now and it’s called money. Networks use audience research and focus groups to find out what the public’s trigger points are… then they go find stories that fit that. Sixty Minutes doesn’t have to do that yet, but if the size of our audience falls enough, I won’t bet that won’t happen to us. If I sound pessimistic, I am. If journalists are not believed anymore, it’s not that we’re behaving differently than other great institutions of our society, but rather that we’re behaving the same.”

Eric Alterman
Media Columnist, The Nation:

The problems we’re facing in the profession are the same problems we’ve always faced, but there are differences of scale, of degree, which bring them up to the level of crisis. The first is the question of who owns the media. The problem with the conglomerization of the media, with not being able to identify exactly who owns the product for whom you’re working, is that there are any number of people you could be offending without thinking about it… So we have a form of self-censorship taking place. If a journalist’s responsibility is to his own conscience and to his reader, anything that interferes with that messes up the integrity of the job. The second problem is the question of celebrity fluff… The third is the issue of class and celebrification of journalists themselves…

There’s a simple equation: There’s a journalist, an editor, and there’s a reader. And anything that gets in the middle of that equation, be it advertising, be it corporate ownership, be it friendships, be it whether or not one is eating that night at Elaine’s… are corruptions that are fundamentally at conflict with what our jobs are. A minor amount of them are unavoidable in this world. But the degree that we’ve all come to live comfortably with them, I think, is enormously worrisome. And I think the public is quite right to sense that, even if they can’t articulate it, and to walk away from it.

Jack Beatty
Senior Editor, The Atlantic Monthly:

Right now we have some of the greatest journalism in the country. Right now citizens can be informed more deeply than ever before. And if they’re not, if they say the media is lying, we can’t trust the media, here’s my guess. It’s because in a way they’re blaming us, they’re putting on us their own civic derelictions. If our people were voting at 70 percent instead of 50 percent, if we had a vibrant political life instead of this sort of tomb, there would be a very different situation here. The public says they don’t like the media because we’re always goading them. We’re saying be serious about this. This is complicated, let us tell you about it. And they say: we don’t want to bother.

Caroline Miller
Editor-in-Chief, New York Magazine:

I’ve found on a number of occasions when I was intimately involved with a story, that I was shocked at how inaccurate the reporting was. And more, I was deeply disappointed in the level of insight in the journalism being offered. It’s easy to say that sometimes stories aren’t as accurate or aren’t as insightful as they should be because the reporter lacks knowledge or diligence. But there are more interesting factors, I think. The factors that have really changed journalists or created this kind of crisis are from outside. In any given story, virtually everyone a journalist is getting information from has an agenda, a reason for giving that information. And sophisticated journalists don’t always recognize that. I would argue that one of the biggest problems with journalism is that this tremendous growth in the spin industry has resulted in that fact that even those who aren’t in the professional hands of a spin person have been empowered to feel that the truth is very pliant and pliable, that anybody who has his wits about him will dole out information in ways that are self-serving. And while a lot of people like to say journalists lie, one of the reasons journalists have difficulty getting accurate stories is that other people, people who talk to journalists, lie. They lie comfortably. They lie with impunity. They lie, feeling that they’re doing something quite moral because the perception of information in this culture is that it’s either my information or yours. It either serves your ends or it serves my ends…

So I think journalism is more and more a kind of sport in which very sophisticated people are trying to use it for their own ends. And it has created a kind of bunker mentality for journalists, that you can’t really believe anything anybody tells you.

Jane Hall of the Los angeles Times and Osborn Elliott of the Citizens Committee for New York City challenge the panelists.

Jones: Let me ask you to concentrate on the things that journalists can do something about.

Miller: I think the most important thing editors can do is to push and to fact check and to ask really probing questions about whether the meaning of the story is really accurate or whether it’s just a good story. And in terms of newspaper journalism, the speed at which stories go by is extremely important and I would beg newspaper editors to convey to reporters that they need to make sure that they know what they don’t know. And I don’t think they always do.

Scheffler: As far as network television is concerned, it’s not a question of good journalism or bad journalism, it’s a question of journalism. The way things are goingnow, the news divisions of the three networks and Fox are not in the news business anymore. They’re in the programming business. What they are charged with doing is presenting programs that will make money. You know, news divisions have more time on the air now than they’ve ever had, and they’re using it worse than they’ve ever used it.

Alterman: There’s one very important thing we’ve lost as journalists and that is an ideal, a sort of ethic of solidarity as journalists as opposed to being part of this larger “national entertainment state”… And journalists themselves can do something about that.

Panelists Beatty,Miller, Alterman and Scheffler feild questions from the participants.

Jones: Why does television news have greater credibility than any other source of journalism?

Miller: I think that it has immediacy… but you know we live in a city in which the mayor, for instance, has made his position very clear that he prefers local television to virtually any other form of media because it affords him an opportunity to say exactly what he wants and without any kind of questioning or interpretation. And I think one of the big issues of the moment, and that contributes to this credibility issue, is how mean should reporting be? How aggressive should reporting be? And we saw it all over the papers with Diana and the paparazzi, what level of intrusion is responsible? And what’s a real story? Is the story of the mayor’s relationship with his press secretary a real story or is that a personal story? Increasingly to get attention in the world of journalism, the stories have to be harsh, mean, very intrusive and often negative. And I think that’s one of the things that the public is reacting to.

Jones: How would you address the question about a lowering of standards, of standard practices, of what is expected of basic journalism?

Alterman: As I understand it, the reason we have a First Amendment is because somebody needs to tell the citizens what the powers-that-be are doing so the citizens can make informed decisions about whether or not they want to keep them there. But if the journalists who are charged with doing this go over to the other side and tell citizens what the powers-that-be would like them to think that they are doing, then the profession fails at its foundations. Now historically there’s always been a negotiation in terms of these two tasks: You have to write a little bit for your sources so that you retain your sources. And you have to keep that in context with your ultimate responsibility, which is to your readers. But I think that ultimate responsibility has of late gotten lost and that the reader is the person who comes into the calculation absolutely last… So that, more and more, the people who are the most respected journalists in the profession and who set the tone for the profession are the people who are writing exclusively for the people they are supposed to be covering. And then it becomes a toothless and ultimately deceptive operation.