John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists

1999 Lee Hills Fellow: Russell Baker

Will the Media be the End of Us?

Russell Baker, New York Times columnist and author

I woke up one morning last August to discover that I had become 73 years old.

It was an unsettling discovery. Not quite so disturbing as the experience of Gregor Samsa, who woke one morning to discover that he was becoming a cockroach.

Still, it was an odd sensation.

As a child it had never occurred to me that I might grow up to be a 73-year-old man.

Like most people, of course, I had always wanted to live forever. But it had never crossed my mind that this might necessitate growing old.

I have since absorbed much of the shock and now realize that age has more advantages than Social Security and Medicare.

I find, for example, that I am no longer easily persuaded that something terribly important is constantly going on.

This can be a defect in a newspaperman. Especially in a columnist. A columnist, as John Kenneth Galbraith has observed with considerable accuracy, is a man obliged by the nature of his trade to find significance three times a week in events of absolutely no consequence.

On the other hand, even in the pressure-cooker of journalism there is some value in having a few people around who do not think that the O. J. Simpson case was the beginning of human history.

The beginning of human history was actually the Alger Hiss case.

I know it for a fact because one of my very first reporting jobs was to pursue Whittaker Chambers through the streets and corridors of Baltimore in order to hear him say, "No comment."

It has been a long time since anybody in public life said, "No comment." And the result has been unhappy for journalism.

Since "no comment’s" disappearance from the language, a depressing quantity of newsprint is now wasted with gassy emissions from people with nothing to say.

The phrase – gassy emissions – might be another way of describing the columnist’s output.

My plan tonight is not ambitious. I propose only to reflect on a few of the changes that have taken place in journalism since I first laid eyes on Whittaker Chambers.

And we might as well begin with the word "journalism": In 1947 when I first walked into the city room of the Baltimore Sun, no respectable reporter would have uttered the word with a straight face.

The word "journalist" was used only in comic mockery. It suggested a society reporter giving himself airs at a country-club tea dance.

A similar stigma attached to schools of journalism, which were still comparatively few. Anyone who had attended journalism school was thought to have wasted a chance to get a good college education.

H. L. Mencken, who was still at the Baltimore Sun when I started there, had, in print, pronounced journalism schools a waste of time.

In six weeks in the newsroom, he said, he could teach the most innocent novice everything necessary to make him a competent journeyman newsman.

In 1952, because the Sun was sending me to London, I consulted a veteran foreign correspondent about the world of Fleet Street.

Well, he said, with an expression indicating he did not expect me to believe him, over there they call themselves "journalists."

He seemed depressed by the shame of it. I thought it hilarious.

You may think this a small matter. Yet it reflects an important change in the way we now look at ourselves.

If, today, the word "journalism" seems pretentious, so be it.

Aren’t we entitled to strut a bit?

The business now attracts the brightest students from the best colleges. High-school dropouts need not apply. Alas.

It goes into the highest courts ostentatiously wrapped in the Constitution of the United States.

If feels entitled to invade the privacy of all who interest it, asserting a patriotic obligation to satisfy what it calls "the people’s right to know."

It has the power to make presidents tremble, and with its glamorous investigative reporters, even to drive them out of office.

Nowadays editors and reporters often speak of their business as a "profession."

In formal get-togethers where they lament assaults on the First Amendment and eat high on the expense account, they worry about the need for professional codes of ethics.

To state it plainly, there is now about us a tendency to pompousness which makes 1947 feel as if it were light years away, instead of a mere half century.

Fifty years ago there was much less disposition to take ourselves or the business as solemnly as we do today.

The newspaper people of that era were a raffish, boozing, smoking, wisecracking, and miserably underpaid bunch – most of them social misfits – who were not offended about being called "newshounds."

The men among them, and they were almost all men, were the kind you wouldn’t have wanted to marry your daughter. They often smelled of gin and police stations.

Their newsroom was a scene of squalor inconceivable to anybody bred in today’s electronic work stations, so reminiscent of embalmers’ offices.

The noise could be deafening. Fires often broke out in the huge trash cans, caused by dumping heaped-up ashtrays in them.

I recall a Saturday night at the Sun where two reporters had to restrain a colleague – a muscular police reporter brimming with whiskey and anger about his wretched pay – from beating up the night managing editor.

I don’t want to make this sound enviably romantic, like a scene out of "The Front Page," because while it did have its romantic aspects, we were by no means enviable.

The rotten salaries created considerable misery and terrible family problems.

There is nothing romantic about being unable to pay the rent.

Few people had any illusion about being professionals. The notion that we might be professionals was disposed of by – again – Mencken. He pointed out that a man as august as the managing editor could be fired whenever the publisher called for his head.

A professional, Mencken observed, could always open an office and be his own boss. A fired reporter could not open his own newspaper.

To Mencken, the notion that a newspaperman was anything but a hired hand was nonsense.

In that time I don’t recall anyone ever worrying that we were losing the esteem and confidence of the public.

Nowadays, it is a subject of infinite discussion.

I take this as evidence that the business is in the hands of the most timid branches of the baby-boomer generation.

I refer to that same terrified clique which has afflicted us with white wine at the cocktail hour and driven pathetic cigarette slaves into the streets.

The suggestion that the United States won World War II on whiskey and cigarettes makes them shudder with disgust. Nowadays World War II would have to be fought on wine spritzers and Omaha Beach would be a smoke-free zone.

That the public has lost confidence in the media seems doubtful to me.

It seems more accurate to say that the public has been revolted by the media.

Baudelaire said, "I am unable to understand how a man of honor can touch a newspaper without a shudder of disgust."

I think we are now seeing a great public shudder of disgust at our total immersion in a Sex Scandal.

We heard fearful talk about a public loss of confidence during our coverage of the Vietnam War – which, on the whole, was not just brave and absolutely brilliant, but also did a great public service.

What happened then was not a loss of confidence in our credibility.

To the contrary – our credibility was being painfully demonstrated every night on the parlor television, which did a wonderful job showing what TV news can really do when it stops treating news as entertainment.

What the public lost confidence in during those years was the conduct of the war – and then in the war itself.

Now its coverage of the Lewinsky story that is said to be damaging our standing with the public.

The question is whether this shows the public is irritated because we are bringing them painful truths they’d rather not hear. . . or whether the public is simply embarrassed to see our best papers and TV news people trafficking so enthusiastically in the coarsest kind of gossip.

The American appetite for gossip is vast, but until recently it had been adequately satisfied by the supermarket tabloids and various celebrity magazines like People and Vanity Fair, which do it extremely well.

It’s my suspicion that the same people who lap it up in the gossip tabs and magazines are embarrassed and uncomfortable when they see it in the Washington Post, the New York Times, NBC, CBS and ABC.

I’m reminded of a story told by Meyer Berger, the great Times reporter, who once wrote an unflattering story about the murderous gangster Dutch Schultz.

He was alarmed when a day or so later Schultz summoned him to his headquarters in Newark.

But Mike Berger was a brave man, and he went. Schultz was furious because Berger’s story stated that he was "a pushover for a blonde."

"What kind of language is that to use in the New York Times?" he asked.

So is it credibility that we have lost? or reputation?

As for credibility, the public obviously trusts our reporting of the baseball scores and stock market gyrations.

Nobody doubts our reports of who died yesterday, of how much rain fell last month, how many were killed in the pile-up on Interstate 81, or how many cases of E. coli poisoning followed the Cub Scout hamburger cookout last weekend.

On the majority of subjects with which we deal, there is no decline in public confidence.

What has declined is respect to our coverage of public affairs, and most especially the Washington coverage.

Our handling of the Lewinsky affair has been far more damaging to our good reputation than to our credibility.

So I want to speak tonight to some Washington problems that the Lewinsky scandal has dramatized.

I’ll spare you a rehash of the whining about the terrible new round-the-clock news cycle, the Internet, the development of cable news stations, and how the mainstream media’s urge to compete in the resulting food fight has made it abandon certain traditional standards.

You have heard all that.

Instead, I’ll confine myself to some specific problems peculiar to the Washington press.

The first of these is lack of function.

Quite simply, the massive concentration of media power in Washington is now far too big for the size of the job.

The Washington press needs a good downsizing.

Washington is just not as important as it used to be.

Its vast media concentration developed during the years between the start of the New Deal in the early Thirties and the end of the Cold War in the Eighties.

There was good reason for it during those six decades. Washington in the Thirties became the biggest news story in America.

Between the end of World War Two and the end of the Cold War, Washington was the biggest news story in the world.

After sixty years as a great, great story, Washington has now become a comparatively small story.

The justification for a gigantic media presence ended with the end of the Cold War.

Ironically, however, like those bloated, everlasting government bureaucracies which the media constantly deplore, the Washington media establishment has grown and grown as there became less and less for it to do.

One result is that we are swamped with a great deal of noise above events that fascinate the insular society inside the Beltway, but are not uppermost in the minds of most Americans.

People who worry about having no health insurance and having to send their children to rotten schools may sensibly wonder why the Washington press pays so little attention to matters so vital to them while lavishing endless attention on Monica and Bill.

To most Americans, I suspect, the Washington press seems disconnected from real life.

President Clinton has persuaded millions that he is their champion of real-life issues.

And so, as the press has come to treat impeachment, and resignation, as a storm in a class with the Second Coming, a big part of the public is tempted to suspect that we are in cahoots with people out to "get the President."

It is now being said that the media have become part of the Washington elite, and the facts are persuasive.

The old definition of the press’s duty held that it was supposed to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

Nowadays in Washington, media people are the comfortable they are supposed to be afflicting.

They can hardly be expected to spend a lot of energy comforting the afflicted.

It’s not just that their salaries are now quite generous, often higher than the pay of government officials they cover.

It’s also that long service in Washington inevitably locks them into a power circle in which everybody is using everybody else to do well.

I speak from 20 years of experience of Washington work.

You mingle with the great rich lawyer-lobbyists.

Senators call you by your first name.

You may have a nodding acquaintance with the president.

One day – in a very dry news season – you luck into a lollapalooza story like the Lewinsky scandal and lay it all out for the public in all its grotesquely tasteless detail . . . Not omitting the famous semen-stained dress.

And where is public gratitude? Who do so many resent you for bringing it to them ad nauseam, the ingrates?

I am describing a press isolated in a very insular little world.

One consequence of this insularity is a loss of perspective –

Events of little significance get inflated into great historical importance.

The Lewinsky story illustrates the process at its most bizarre.

The shock and amazement with which it was reported that the President had engaged in unorthodox behavior with a woman young enough to be his daughter showed a pathetic lack of perspective.

There were many ways to view this story – for one, it had all the elements of French farce.

The plot was well-worn even when Molière wrote such stuff 300 years ago.

There was the foolish overheated husband – the flirty maid, in this case an intern.

There were the spiteful in-laws, this case Linda Tripp, trying to do the silly old fool out of his estate – in this case the Presidency

Yet the farcical aspect of the story was almost totally ignored by the press.

Instead it was reported – in Joe McCarthy’s classic phrase – as the most unheard of thing ever heard of.

It was Napoleon at the gates of Moscow . . . the Wehrmacht marching into Paris . . . Custer massacred on the Little Big Horn.

Breathless reporters on television were instantly talking resignation – impeachment – Armageddon!

It was Hysteria Unbound among the media wizards – many of them no strangers to sin themselves.

I do not find it astonishing that the President – or any man – confronting a comic humiliation that would set the whole world laughing, might lie about it to everybody in sight.

There are few agonies more unbearable to a man than being exposed to all humanity as a silly ass.

We are talking about loss of perspective – and partly this results from our refusal to consult our own history.

Thus: Lyndon Johnson, as we now know, pursued the Vietnam War for five years after acknowledging – privately – that it was unwinnable – all the time assuring us publicly that there was light at the end of the tunnel.

Thus: Richard Nixon, having told us he had a secret plan to win the war if we would only elect him, got elected, and we discovered that his plan for ending the war was to continue the war – for four more years.

In perspective, Clinton’s lies to lawyers about sex were trivial compared to the fictions Johnson and Nixon told the public.

So far, not a soul seems to have been killed as a result of Clinton’s fictions.

Yet there was no pressure from press or television for LBJ or Nixon to be thrown out of office.

There were too many great events happening in those years. The press was too busy for self-righteousness.

The public apparently has kept its sense of perspective while all the media around them were losing theirs.

How can they be so obtuse out there beyond the Beltway?

Leading lives of well-heeled insularity, Washington news people find it hard to stay in touch with life out there.

And so, I propose a few ideas to put them back in touch with American life.

I believe, for example, that all reporters being assigned to Washington should have to give up health insurance.

This would instantly help them understand the fears of 40 million of their countrymen.

And why for so many Americans, sex in government is not the overriding issue of the age.

I also think that, after three years of a Washington assignment, journalists ought to be taken off media payrolls for one year and compelled to find another kind of job.

After a year working as cashier in a supermarket a reporter would come back to his Washington assignment with a new grasp of the complexities of American life.

I would also forbid all Washington media people to live in Georgetown, Alexandria, Potomac, Chevy Chase or Cleveland Park.

Further, they should be required to live next door to a cop, a bus driver, a school teacher, a janitor, or a WalMart floorwalker.

They would have to put their children in the public schools.

And so, finally, I come to television.

Television is wonderful. I wouldn’t be without it.

But it has a grave defect for news people: It compels sensible people to behave melodramatically.

News people should shun theatrics but the TV industry, being an entertainment business, insists on melodrama.

So television gives us news as show business – or to put it another way, as fun.

Since Cronkite and the Golden Age of TV News, pressures for TV news people to show emotional involvement in their stories have got out of hand.

During the Year of Monica we saw normally respectable TV news people exhibiting amazement, extreme agitation, even outrage about the story of the day.

They were loading the story with their own personal emotions, and this corruption of the ancient press gospel was not edifying.

Some pushed personal involvement so far that they quit pretending to be reporters and started telling us what they foresaw in their crystal balls.

Poor Sam Donaldson, who can be a valuable reporter, will live a long time with the humiliation of having forecast a year ago that Clinton would be out of office by the end of the week if the Lewinsky story held up.

It is a pity that the nature of their work forces TV people to carry on like this, but it’s not doggedly careful reporting that earns them those big paydays.

For print journalists to carry on in such grotesque fashion is simply unforgivable.

Yet many do. They are journalism’s spoiled priests – the people we call talking heads, or, the Sabbath Gasbags, as Calvin Trillin calls them, because they flourish on weekends.

These are people – once honest-to-goodness top-drawer reporters, some of them – who yearn to become famous enough in the weekend panel shows, to command $20,000-a-pop lecture fees.

Some of these birds, I'm told, have become millionaires by turning themselves into TV pontificators.

These people remind me of the movie actors who were working when sound replaced silent films. Suddenly the future -- meaning, the big money -- was with those who could talk well.

For those whose voices sounded funny, the jig was up.

In a sense, the jig is already up for the print reporter, for the public now gets its news mostly from TV.

To most people, in fact, the loathsome term "news media" means television.

Woodward and Bernstein were the last print reporters to achieve national recognition. That was 25 years ago.

Now only television news people are recognized by the masses.

And the most widely recognized make millions. A lot of print reporters naturally envy them the money.

The chance to make some of it by learning to act nonsensically for cameras means the talking head is here to stay.

Now I see that the title of my lecture was, "Will the Media Be the End of Us?"

For those of you came tonight only to find out, the answer is no.

Although we may not - as Mencken said - be professionals, we have a good bit to our credit.

It is not media that cause the doom of great nations.

The lack of media is far more dangerous.

Hitler's Third Reich destroyed the media and on the ruins built a government propaganda agency.

The Soviet Union did the same.

We know what happened to them. Nor was it the media that caused the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.

Unfortunately, the Roman Empire had no media. If it had we might all be assembled here tonight wearing togas.

So let me reassure you: No, the media will not be the end of us. It is the automobile that will be the end of us.