By Richard P. Cunningham
Quill © 1995
Joann Byrd gave The Washington Post what reads like a B-plus in press ethics as she turned over The Post ombudsman job to Geneva Overholser, former prize-winning editor of The Des Moines Register.
Byrd went back to Washington, where she had been editor of the Everett Herald, to teach press ethics at the University of Washington and to pull together many years’ work on a model for ethical decision making in newsrooms.
When Bryd took The Post job three years ago, she set out eight values by which to judge the newspaper’s news coverage: Was it accurate? Fair? Balanced? Informed? Sufficient? Offered with enough context? Given the right attention and weight? Consistent with the paper’s public obligations?
In excerpts from the last few columns, Byrd wrote:
Accurate? “Yes. Usually. All things considered. But all newspapers except the sleaziest tabloids are usually accurate.”
The Post knows, she wrote, that to be accurate a report must be independent, complete, balanced and free from stereotypes, labels, and biases. It is a defect, then, that the newspaper overuses such labels as conservative and liberal resulting in “superficial, one-dimensional and, therefore, inaccurate characterizations.” She faulted the paper for perjorative stereotypes, particularly in the Style section, and she wished the newspaper would lower its threshold for corrections and clarifications, and devote more space to public responses.
Fair? “The Post’s news coverage is fair except when it succumbs to elitist perspectives or arrogance or when the subject is a sitting president or an ultra-conservative politician or talk show host or — and this is the biggest shock — when the subject is a woman who leads with her beauty or a woman who does not meet the gorgeous standard.
“The paper is not intentionally racist, sexist, ageist, or homophobic; neither pro-Israel nor pro-Arab; nor anti-Catholic, anti-Christian, anti-Jewish. But to continuing public dismay, the paper disdains `correcting’ its news judgment to avoid sustaining stereotypes or appearing to be prejudiced.”
Sufficient? “If The Post were perfect it would routinely give more weight to solutions, to cooperation, to the good that people do. That’s not to make people happy or proud but to provide a more accurate and complete picture of the world that is now apparently dominated by disaster and conflict and ugliness….The Post cannot do much with local news; so it regularly does too little.”
Enough context? “Context is one of The Post’s strengths,” Byrd wrote. “Context tells us (1) this is more of the same; (2) bigger (or less worrisome, longer, more deadly) than the ones were are used to; (3) the second of five verses; (4) a new (or continuing) argument; (5) different from what it may seem; (6) conditional or qualified; or (7) not your father’s Buick.”
She said, “With the number of individual stories competing for the reader’s attention every day, context may be closer and closer to being everything.”
Informed? The test is, said Byrd: Does the reporting tap enough knowledgeable, dependable sources to produce a trustworthy and sufficiently comprehensive report? The Post usually does, she said. She marveled at the research capability, the expertise of specialized reporters (there are two medical doctors and five lawyers on The Post news staff); and the paper’s access to “most of the major players on the world stage.”
“But,” she wrote, “it also can be informed very narrowly. The paper is too fond of official sources and government sources and the usual sources.”
In the end Byrd focused on whether The Post meets the commitment to serve the public that is enunciated in former owner Eugene Meyer’s “Seven Principles for the Conduct of a Newspaper”: In the pursuit of truth, the newspaper shall be prepared to make sacrifices of its material fortunes, if such course be necessary for the public good.
Byrd decided The Post met that criterion. She wrote, “The Post is willing to spend money — big money, from the looks of it — to get reporters and photographers to the news. Despite the price of newsprint, the paper publishes the full text of many speeches and documents. The paper does its own public opinion polling, likes to crunch statistics to evaluate public issues and sometimes even lead the paper with the most arid (though most significant) report of the day.”
Byrd concluded that The Post deserved its reputation for devotion to public affairs, its expertise and access, the depth of its reporting, its credentials as a watchdog, and its commitment to Meyer’s principle. And her replacement.
While Byrd was filling out her report card, her successor approached The Post as “a particularly rich feast.”
Overholser, 47, startled American journalists by resigning unexpectedly last February from the editorship of The Des Moines Register. At The Register she was responsible for the production of a series on the agonies of an Iowa rape victim. The series won a Pulitzer Prize. She has a master’s degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She was a cub reporter in Colorado Springs. She did freelance reporting from Zaire and Paris; was hired as an editorial writer for The Register in 1981; went to Harvard on a Niemann Fellowship in 1985; went to The New York Times as an editorial writer; and went back to The Register as editor six years ago.
In her resignation from The Register, she and her managing editor, David Westphal, blamed in part the tide of pressure for profit at the expense of news quality. She had raised her concerns in talks around the country not only about The Register, which was bought by Gannett Co. from the Gardner Cowles family, but about newspapers in general.
Expanding on her “rich feast” comment, she wrote in her first Post column, “Any paper with the heft and texture to give you the staples as well as this paper does, and also to toss in a debate on whether it’s OK to talk about being a chick (if you are one), delights me.”
But in no-nonsense prose she laid out three gripes about The Post:
“First, it doesn’t look as good as it is. Smart use of photos, graphics, elegant typography, decisive layout — all this is substantive journalism, too, but not what The Post does best.”
Second, she wrote, “I think it’s terrible that the paper so often lets people say things without giving their names. The ubiquitousness of unnamed sources here in Washington breeds uses that are utterly unjustifiable. We must at least be candid about the inestimable damage this does to our believability.”
Third, “I also find it unfathomable that the opinion pages so often draw on so limited a pool of human talent. If op-ed pages were scintillating successes, one might argue in defense of their being written almost entirely by men and on so limited a range of subjects. As it is, they’re largely boring, so what defense can there be?”
Commenting on the stories about the arrest of actor Hugh Grant for having sex with a prostitute and of former White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers for drunken driving, Overholser scoffed at critics who scolded the press for playing to prurient interests.
“Just guess how many times Myers and Grant come up around water coolers and dinner tables,” she wrote. “No newspaper is better at responding quickly to stories like this and in ways that go beyond simple reporting. The day after Grant was arrested The Post had a Style section cover story on the issues raised by a man who wants gratification inconsistent with his station.”
As for Myers, she wrote, some readers don’t want drunken driving stories in the paper because there but for the grace of God go they. But, Overholser wrote, “A story like this sparks conversations that get us further down the road to understanding the role this issue plays in our lives.”
Newspapers should be less squeamish about reporting such stories, she wrote, but their run should be brief. It’s the titillating hanging on to the story that is offensive.
The late Richard P. Cunningham, former readers’ representative for the Minneapolis Tribune and associate director of the late National News Council, was a teacher of journalism at New York University. This column appeared in the September 1995 edition of Quill.
