Journalism: Broken, Unmoored from a Higher Calling

Ervin S. Duggan
President, Public Broadcasting Service

What was the secret that made Jim Batten one of the truly great journalists? The answer that I would put forward would have something to do with the old religious concept of stewardship: the idea that we are not what we are just for ourselves, that we do not own what we have; that we are merely stewards, that we serve causes, beings, interests higher than ourselves.

That idea of being a steward, of having responsibilities beyond himself, was a natural idea for Jim Batten. How appropriate that an award in civic journalism, the kind of journalism that exists for something other than itself, should bear his name.

For a few minutes tonight I want to talk about this debate about civic journalism, about the problem — the brokenness in our press — that makes civic journalism, in my judgment, vitally necessary as an experiment.

I am not an expert about civic journalism. I am not sure I fully understand yet what civic journalism is. But I do believe, right down to the soles of my shoes, that this is an experiment that needs to go forward.

Why? Because all of the conventional wisdom that now straitjackets our journalism seems to me so symptomatic of a brokenness in the enterprise that something new not only can’t hurt but is vitally needed. I don’t have research information about that brokenness; I have only anecdotes that I’ve experienced as a citizen, as a consumer of journalism.

I was on a panel a few years ago with Ben Bradlee, then the executive editor of The Washington Post. I remembered that the old Post style book had not only rules of usage but also a kind of ethical set of precepts for reporters.

One of the rules was that uncorroborated stories or allegations would not be used; there had to be a second corroborating source for a story or it wasn’t a story. Another rule was that if an allegation was made against someone, you tried to get a response in that news cycle; you didn’t go with allegations without a response from the person accused.

I asked Bradlee whether those rules still were printed in the Post style book and whether they still were the ethic by which the Post lived. His answer, which I’m paraphrasing, was: No, things are so fast-moving now that we don’t have time for rules like that. The world is so competitive that if another paper goes with an accusation story and it becomes a big story, we have to go with the story, too.

I see that as symptomatic of the brokenness in our journalistic enterprise, that a great editor of a great newspaper would admit to a relaxation of the rules, an abandonment of the rules for competitive reasons and for reasons of the fast pace.

When I watch television news, I see on national programming a kind of softening or weakening of the definition of news. I writhe in agony when I see Arch Campbell come on my NBC affiliate news broadcast at 11:00 and say: “Up next, a backstage interview with the cast of Friends. How deeply corrupt that the journalistic part of the schedule should be used to promote the entertainment schedule of NBC. Yet, that is what happens every night . . . a symptom of the brokenness of the enterprise.

The coverage of PBS is straitjacketed in a kind of conventional wisdom: That of a beleaguered PBS trying to shore up sagging funding, as if we would not make any decision, launch any enterprise except to shore up our sagging funding.

We are actually undergoing a quite successful reinvention, but the story can’t be reported that way because the conventional wisdom is so powerful that no reporter can . . . break out of the straitjacket of the conventional wisdom.

This seems to me another symptom of the brokenness of the enterprise . . . a pre-written story that so mesmerizes and beguiles reporters that they can’t break through it to the real story.

Jim Fallows’s recent book about the way in which the press is broken did not create a sensation, I think, because it was simply accepted by everyone as so true that it didn’t have the kind of galvanizing effect that it should have had . . . To the extent there was an effort to counter his argument, it took the form of trying to find out whether there was some personal flaw in his own administration of the U.S. News and World Report that would brand him as a kind of hypocrite. It was not a reasoned response to his argument so much as an effort to find personal flaws in the author himself. Yet another symptom of a deep brokenness and cynicism in our enterprise of journalism.

What is at the heart of this brokenness? I think it is bound up with an unmooring from that idea of stewardship that Jim Batten so beautifully represented. The heart of every decent morality is that notion of living for something other than, something higher than, ourselves. When an enterprise is conducted, whatever the enterprise is, for itself alone, a corruption enters in.

The idea of journalists that the purpose of the story is the story itself invites a terrible kind of journalistic amorality. Trying to do the story just for itself invites cynicism. It doesn’t invite a kind of heroic approach to journalism at all. It invites a series of compromises and corruptions that deaden the enterprise at its heart.

That is why I believe that civic journalism is an experiment that deserves to take place. There is no guarantee that it will succeed. There is no guarantee it will take place without occasional failures or disasters. But it is an experiment that must take place precisely because the crisis is so great elsewhere in the journalistic enterprise. Imagine saying about the bold experiment of the New Deal, we shouldn’t do it because this or that terrible thing could happen. Of course it could happen. But the economy was so broken and the crisis so great that FDR’s policy of bold experimentation, knowing that there would be failures, was precisely the right thing to do. We remember the New Deal as a sort of logical and natural thing now — forgetting how terribly controversial it was when he first proposed it.

That kind of spirit of bold experimentation, justified by the brokenness of the enterprise, is precisely what is needed now.

We don’t know what all the possibilities are for the future, but I am determined to make PBS and its member stations and our national schedule a kind of laboratory for civic journalism, not because I am already a decided advocate or because I know what the outcome will be, but because I believe so deeply that this experiment needs a place to happen. We want to give it a place to happen.We have no idea how we will finance the effort. I’m a believer in the old “Field of Dreams” aphorism: if we build it, they will come. If we do good things, we will find the wherewithal with which to do it.

For years, walking into the National Press Club, I would walk by the great bronze plaque there, with its quote from Joseph Pulitzer, without really reading it . . . His quote I would defend as a high ideal even though he may, at times in his journalistic career, have been a flawed human being: “Our republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, impartial public-spirited press with trained intelligence to know the right and the courage to do it can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mold the future of the republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.“

The aspiration in that quote is a press with a certain ideal beyond just the story itself, a press that is the opposite of cynical. What seems to me the besetting sin of the enterprise today is a know-it-all cynicism that gets in the way of the story. The very accusation that the cynics make against the experiment of civic journalism seems to boil down to the fact that they’re afraid you may not be quite cynical enough.

Let us confound those cynics. Let us carry this experiment forward. If we are lucky, there will be more successes than failures. And if we are lucky, if we do our job well, it may be said of us as we can say of Jim Batten, in Steven Spinder’s words, we may leave the vivid air “signed with our honor.”