By Dr. Deni Elliott
Practical Ethics Center
University of Montana
It doesn’t take a psychic to predict journalistic backlash. Take any scandal or any sensational event that dominates the news shows and news columns. The public will be riveted by the story. They will read the same rumors in three different newspapers and news magazines. They will surf the channels looking for one more re-telling of the same speculation.
Then, the handwringing and head-shaking over the state of journalism begins. The story after the story is how journalists screwed up. In something as complicated and on-going as the Clinton-Starr saga, the hand-wringing over journalistic excess becomes the story within the story. And then journalists report that, as it turns out, the result of their polls shows that people really weren’t that interested in the story anyway.
Well, I don’t think that journalism is going to hell in a handbasket. I don’t think that reporters and editors have lost their sense of mission in favor of better ratings or higher profits.
What I think is that just as technology created a new paradigm for news reporting around the turn of the last century, thanks to new technology, we are once again in the throes of building a new structure for how to report the news.
I think that journalistic revolutions, like scientific revolutions, are difficult, messy times. Practitioners, sources and consumers realize that the old expectations that they had for how things should work no longer hold. Yet, even as the old paradigm dissolves around them, practitioners are expected to keep doing their work. As it takes a while to create new rules, new understandings, new conventions, it is natural that there will be blunders and excesses. What we are experiencing here in journalism is the Clash of the Paradigms.
Let’s look for a minute at how things have changed: For generations, a truism of the journalism business is that there was always more information than a news organization had space or time to use. In addition, journalists have always had facts that they believe to be true, but that they could not report because of lack of hard evidence or verification.
Part of the jounalists’ formative years were spent in learning that what they actually get to report is little more than the tip of the iceberg. The sane reporter learned to function without feeling frustrated by what she knew and could not say. The good reporter never stopped trying to get a little more out. And journalism schools taught the pillars of objectivitiy, verifiability, external news — and that the resulting story should be the blander the better.
Then came Cable News Network, Court-TV, C-Span, the Internet and the Web. Suddenly, what was once a limited news hole looks more like a Black Hole, with no perceivable edges of space or time. There is ample space and time to report all of what was once thought to be news, and lots of stuff besides that.
And the rules have changed. Instead of all of the information givers being journalists who operate under similar restraints, the Internet gossip columns and tabloids of both print and television have become players too. And these information givers do not respect the same rules as traditional journalists.
When the Drudge Report told its e-mail recipients and Web site browsers in mid-January 1998 that Newsweek had decided to sit on a story about allegations of a presidential sex scandal, it should be no surprise the Newsweek responded by dumping the story to its on-line publication, rather than wait another week to publish it in the hard-copy magazine.
If part of Newsweek’s motivation for holding the story was its agreement to refrain rather than interfere with the independent prosecutor’s attempt to launch a Presidential sting operation, that reason dissolved when Matt Drudge pressed “SEND.”
If part of its motivation was the hope of getting a little more verification, getting it a little more nailed down, that reason disappeared as well. Initially, readers and viewers need to know why the originating news organization reports a certain claim. But once those claims were richocheting around in the public fora, from net to TV to web to print and back again, the claims took on a life of their own.
This is the reality of reporting at the turn of the 21st Century. The social function of journalism is unchanged. The special job of journalists is the same as it has been for more than 200 years: to notice and report the important events and issues that citizens in a self-governing society need to have. But that work is happening within a new structure, a new paradigm, that has been evolving the the past 50 years.
The reporting on Richard Nixon’s Presidential crisis in 1972-74 showed indications of the changing paradigm, but the 1998 reporting on allegations against Clinton gave a demonstration of the new structure in full operational mode.
I’m going to give a brief but irreverent history of the old paradigm, discuss some aspects of the new paradigm, and then show how some of the recent journalistic mishaps are the result of the paradigm clash.
In the first 30 years of this century, telegraph, the wire service and the other technological developments created the ability to move a single story or picture to thousands of news outlets at a time.
At the same time that these technologies were in development, the industrial revolution and unending series of scientific discoveries were giving people a new sense of control over their environment. Causes and effects, and solutions to problems could all be discovered if only enough talent and resources were dedicated to the problem. Everyone agreed. Truth was external, certain and knowable.
These beliefs about the world, and the human relationship to it, reverberated in the 20th century journalistic paradigm.
For the first time ever, people could “experience” an event through electronic media and thus have something like first-hand knowledge of it. Print media provided photographic images that allowed readers to know how something really looked; print journalists worked to transmit the accounts of sources and story subjects with dispassionate accuracy.
Technology created the ability to produce and the expectations for a homogenous story that contained only verifiable facts (Homogenous as in homo- genetic — having a single origin).
Information came from a common source, such as the team of Associated Press reporters at the scene of a catastrophe. That written material and those pictures were then distributed to the thousands of news outlets that subscribed to the AP wire service.
The first U.S. code of ethics for journalists was adopted by the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1923. It illustrated the technological, political and scientific understandings of the new century. Journalists were expected to have “natural and trained powers of observation and reasoning.” The primary role of the journalist was that of “chronicler.”
Even into the later part of the 20th Century, news organizations and professional societies constructed codes of ethics or statements of standards on the pillars of objectivity, verifiability and external news.
According to a statement of practice from the New York Times in the 1960s, “Although total objectivity may be impossible because every story is written bya human being, the duty of every reporter and editor is to strive for as much objectivity as humanly possible…presenting both sides of the issue is not hedging but the essence of responsible journalism.”
And from the St. Paul Pioneer Press and St. Paul Dispatch at around the same time, we are told that, “One of a newspaper’s major functions is to be a mirror of the society in which it exists.”
But these purported ideals, when attained, turned out to be nothing more than a story that didn’t threaten commonly held values. The reporting of World War II provides a good example of this. This was a non-controversial war, from the point of view of the United States. When the U.S. entered the war, it was with all but one U.S. representative voting approval.
From the time that Pearl Harbor was attacked December 7, 1941, journalists were heroes. The attack provided a demonstration of the importance of the new electronic media. The war was a radio news exclusive from the 2:22 p.m. Eastern Standard Time wire service report that day until the morning newspapers hit the stands at daybreak Monday.
CBS correspondent Edward R. Murrow gave listeners minute-by-minute descriptions of life in the war zone and experimented with new reporting techniques. For the first time ever, listeners had what we now call “natural sound.” They could hear for themselves what was going on at the scene while it was being reported.
Scripps-Howard print reporter Ernie Pyle told poignant stories of the realities of the American soldiers at his shoulder in the battlefield. He died with them, reporting on combat in the Pacific.
For the three-year-and-nine-month duration of the war, hundreds of U.S. reporters on battlefronts around the globe, created radio, print and motion picture reports, dutifully had them cleared by censors and enthralled millions of Americans with coverage of the war being fought by their sons in their name.
Objectivity was easy to achieve when there was only one right side. It was easy to believe that news was something external when everyone agreed that what counted as news was determined by bombs, official declarations and the emancipation of Hitler’s extermination camps.
Within a decade of the war’s end, however, objectivity and the understanding of what counted as news came under serious attack. The U.S. returned to peacetime comfortable in its military strength, but not as sure of the country’s ability to withstand the more subtle threat of anti-democratic politics.
Communism was an intellectual curiosity to some and a viable political alternative to others. But the concern that communists were plotting to overthrow the U.S. government grew, particularly among those in government.
The House Un-American Activities Committee and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s permanent Senate subcommittee on investigations in the early 1950s drew media attention not unlike that commanded by an independent prosecutor’s office of today.
McCarthy was a careful student of objective reporting. The news cycles of the time revolved around daily deadlines for newspaper publication. McCarthy’s claims of communists in government, the press, the armed forces and the entertainment industry gained credibility through the dutiful, non- interpretative journalistic reporting of the time.
Day after day, the senator waved his new set of allegations too close to deadline for jounalists to find an equally believable source who could give the other side. The news convention of the day dictated that journalists report only what they were told. The senator, as named source, provided an illusion of expertise that was hard to beat.
Whether McCarthy’s claims turned out to be true or not was irrelevant at the time of their reporting. News was “out there,” in the halls of the Capitol, waiting for journalists to gather it. Objectivity required only that they accurately report whatever the prominent senator had to say. Denials, if published at all, came too late to gain the attention given to the initial claims.
Thoughtful journalists at the time were troubled that their objective, verifiable, named source reporting of external events did not reflect truth. They knew but could not find a way to say in the news columns that Senator McCarthy’s allegations of communist ties were often false and his pronouncement of the sweeeping red tide were dramatic but fictional.
More than one reporter quit in disgust over the inability of news organizations to see beyond the limits of their own conventions to tell an important story. It took the maverick television reporting of Edward R. Murrow to provide context to McCarthy’s allegations. The just-born television documentary had not yet developed norms of conduct. It was different enough from a news story that it didn’t need to follow all of the same rules. The content was controlled by its producer, not its sources. The “See It Now” piece, so devastating to Senator McCarthy, was aired in early March 1954.
Bound by the Federal Communication Commission’s requirement of fairness, Senator McCarthy was given an opportunity to produce a response that was later broadcast in the same time slot. But, in the end, McCarthy fell victim to the process he had himself exploited. The “See It Now” television documentary provoked public disgust over McCarthy’s misuse of his power and of news media. McCarthy’s denial and explanantions, four weeks later, could not rally equal attention or belief.
Still aching from the mortification of such public source manipulation, U.S. news organizations found themselves in that decade and the next reporting on civil rights. As the events and issues developed on the streets of Birmingham as well as in the halls of the Supreme Court, journalists realized that they often could not find a matched set of equally prominent sources representing opposite points of view. Yet, unlike the popular war, there was not one clearly right side. It seemed impossible to achieve any kind of balance in the civil rights reporting.
There was the powerful status quo and the powerless, asking for what the U.S. Constitution seemed to guarantee to all citizens: equal protection under the law. There were peaceful marches led by a Southern preacher who eloquently demanded that his people have what was rightfully theirs, and there were Southern sheriffs and their deputies chasing little girls down the street with fire hoses and police dogs. Enraged young black men looted the white-owned stores and burned down the inadequate housing that society allowed them; frightened whites cowered in the suburbs and kept their children out of newly integrated schools. The story could not be told in the “blander-the-better” style taught in journalism schools. The events and issues needed to be explained.
The war in Vietnam, too, signaled problems for the reporter-as-conduit style of reporting. Reflecting national ambivalence and ultimately amplifying anti- war sentiment, news coverage undoubtedly promoted a lack of public support for the American military action. Television coverage of the battlefields, streamlined through new technology to bring the scenes of death and destruction to American living rooms before the final wisps of smoke had disappeared from the scene, led military leaders to the conclusion that the Vietnam War had been lost by news media. While some journalists were delighted to take credit for their part in the U.S. retreat, none could ignore the signs that news coverage did more with this war than “chronicle” important events. Like it or not, journalism played an important role in the formation of public policy and political action.
Any hope that journalism might return to some mythical earlier day and settle for unobtrusively relaying discoverable news items to readers and viewers disappeared in the two years’ reporting on Watergate. This was a story in which reporting intruded into the story’s development and creation; it was one of investigative reporting’s finest hours.
The evolving stories that culminated in the resignation of President Richard Nixon on August 6, 1974, were rich with political importance and filled with the twists of a good crime novel. In short, there was something for everyone in the Watergate saga. But the story could not have happened if journalists stuck to reporting within the old paradigm.
Then veteran Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward and novice reporter Carl Bernstein did not wait for official pronouncements or for on-the-record credible sources to tell the nation what was happening and why. Woodward and Bernstein obtained information however they could, tricking telephone company clerks and pressuring witnesses called before the grand jury into the disclosure of information.
Rather than searching for, finding and then reporting some indisputable truth, the Watergate reporting included a confluence of perspectives emerging from White House statements, leaked then published tapes, insiders seeking to expose corruption, those seeking to cover it up and those changing sides, leaked grand jury testimony, testimony before the U.S. House, files from local law enforcement as well as from the FBI.
Journalistic lore holds that Woodward and Bernstein kept the “two-source rule” as they laid out their story in newspaper columns and in two books. But it is unlikely that they did so.
If every claim had the backing of two independent sources, one would be forced to conclude that after kneeling together in prayer in the company of only one another, Nixon and advisor Henry Kissinger, or confidants of both of them, confirmed this intimate moment for the reporters. It is far easier to believe that Woodward and Bernstein drew conclusions from a conglomerate of sources “close to the matter” and provided a narrative that best fit the pieces they were able to collect.
Quietly, a new journalistic paradigm was emerging. Acknowledged by investigative reporters and those who published their clearly non-objective work, the myth of objective reporting continued elsewhere until the reporting on a new Presidential scandal 14 years later.
The pillars of the new paradigm are immediacy and interactivity.The challenge for credible news media is to retain standards of reporting that separate them from other sorts of information givers and to use the new technology to enhance their important voice, even as the voices of others threaten to minimize the importance of journalists.
Let’s take a look at the myths we are giving up in turning our backs on the old paradigm.
First, journalists should be objective.
No. An objective press is a powerless press, used and exploited by powerful sources.
McCarthy’s blatant attempts to manipulate the news, which horrified journalists and consumers alike, have now neutralized into an accepted method of political survival with its own name — SPIN.
Ronald Reagan, the Pentagon and Bill Clinton (never thought I’d have a chance to use those three in one sentence) all refined the government’s ability to get news organizations to function as propagandists rather than independent information givers.
The multitude of news outlets allows sources to shop information for the best play and best combination of off- and on-the-record reporting.
Instead of objectivity, which forces reporters to be the mouthpieces of the powerful, citizens need journalistic perspective. If the job of journalists is to tell us what we need to know for self-governance, then some of what we need to know is who is trying to manipulate the journalists, how they are trying to do it and why. Journalism under the new paradigm is not that of the objective conduit, but is an active role brimming with professional perspective.
Which leads to the external news myth — the notion that the job of the journalist is to report, rather than create the news. Well, the sad truth is that news has never existed like a wildflower in the meadow, waiting for someone to come along and discover it.
Of all the events going on all over the place, all of the time, of all the issues in politics, economics, religion, science, technology, industry, business and education to think about, news is what journalists say it is. News is what happens when journalists choose to pay attention to some event or issue and to ignore others. Sometimes the journalistic noticing is what makes something news; sometimes news is the fact that journalists are ignoring something that another information giver points out.
Photographers and photo editors have always known that a photograph doesn’t mirror what is out there, but is the product of angle and framing. But the new digitizing technology forces everyone to realize that photo representations are creations, not discoveries at all. Journalism under the new paradigm recognizes the important professional decisions made by those creating a news story, video or picture. News is an interaction of journalists with other people, events and issues. It is not an external reality.
Next, we were told that journalists should get both sides of the story. Interesting thing about most stories: They either have one side or many. Natural disasters and house fires generally have one side. There is no good guy/bad guy. Unless, of course, you get into how well individuals and social institutions are doing with coping with the disaster; then you have a story with many sides.
Anything more complicated than an earthquake is going to be a story with many sides. Journalists must choose among the many sides to provide focus to their stories, but when they choose only two, to give an either/or perspective, they lose the story.
This happened most vividly in the reporting of the Clintons’ attempts to work on national health policy during the first term. Journalists turned that complicated story into a debate: national health care or fee for service. Reporting the story as an either/or situation left millions of American and health care providers unprepared for the managed care system that we have now and that was already evolving at the time. Now we don’t have either of the either/or that journalists told us about.
We don’t have universal health coverage. None of us has a physician who makes decisions based on her professional opinion.
Profit-based insurance companies and managed care companies make those decisions. The health policy story now waiting to be well told is that big corporations are the decision-makers about health care — not consumers, not practitioners and not our representative public policy makers. That is a story that can be told only through enterprising, creating the news, new paradigm, journalistic perspective reporting.
Then there is that old notion that information should be attributed to names sources. I predict that the days of the “he said/she said” reporting are over — and not a minute too soon. “He said/she said” reporting is based on notions of objectivity, of external news, and of there being two sides to a story.
Instead, because news is now a 24-hour-all-the-time cycle, a news story has become a never-ending story, with pieces added bit by bit and created by a wide variety of news organization. Credibility is to be found not in the credentials of the source, but in the judgment of the journalists in choosing the variety of voices need to create a comprehensive narrative.
Source relationships are different now. Information used to be a gift; now it is a commodity, and the conventions of bartering for information are yet to be established.
I’ll end with a couple of examples of how I see the two paradigms clashing in current journalistic practice. They are clashing because journalists are still holding on to some ideals from the old paradigm, even as they operate in a different world. The first example is pretty clear. The second is more subtle.
Friday, May 1, a man caught the attention of police and news organizations when he stopped his truck at the intersection of two Los Angeles freeways. He left his dog in the cab to lay a sheet on the freeway that had a handpainted message. He weighted down the edges of the sheet so that the message could be legible for the cameras in news station helicopters and so that it would not blow away. He lay a shotgun nearby. He tossed a video of himself over the side of the bridge, a video that described his disappointment in his HMO and his intention to commit suicide. He looked as though he might jump off the freeway bridge himself. He returned to his cab; the cab burst into flames. The fire, clearly planned, killed his dog and set the man on fire as well. He emerged from the truck, stripped off some of his burning clothes, put the shotgun under his chin and pulled the trigger.
These events, which took nearly an hour, were broadcast live, in whole or in part, on some stations. Station managers and news directors apologized for breaking into Friday afternoon cartoons to broadcast the series of events.
We see elements of the old paradigm — news is OUT THERE, waiting for enterprising journalists to cover it. The best news presentation is that presentation that makes viewers feel like they are THERE, part of the drama.
But this fellow wasn’t playing by the old rules. He understood the new paradigm, even if the LA television newsrooms sought to deny it. He created the event for the cameras. Want to get the attention of local journalists? Block the freeways at the start of rush hour. Want to keep their attention? Have a banner with a message that they can read from helicopters. Kill yourself in some dramatic way.
The new paradigm source-reporter relationship is one in which the source barters with news organizations to promote his agenda. And Mr. Jones offered a deal that non-thoughtful news managers could not resist: neat stuff to watch in exchange for him getting an audience for his message.
The point is: The death of Mr. Daniel Jones was not news. The visual telling of his last hour is not information that people need to have for self- governance. People in LA needed to know that the freeways were blocked; people everywhere need to know about the human tragedies caused by our nation’s lack of health care policy. The first story could have been told in a 15-second bulletin; the last story, which needed hours and hundreds of inches, was simply ignored. Lost opportunities to report the news is one of the costs when paradigms clash.
Now, the second, more subtle example:
On March 5, The Washington Post published a detailed account of President Clinton’s deposition in the Paul Jones case. At the time, the deposition was sealed by court order, although a few quotes from it had been previously leaked. March 5 was more than a week before Clinton’s deposition was publicly released by Jones’ attorneys in their response to Clinton’s request for summary judgment. The Post’s report was unattributed, but the ultimate sources for such a leak are few.
The sealed deposition could have been leaked by Clinton’s defense team, by Jones’ lawyers, by Ken Starr’s office or by U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright who sealed the deposition and placed a gag order on all participants and attorneys in the case.
Post reporter Peter Baker, who received and published the information, certainly knew the source of the report. If tradition holds, at least one Post editor also knew the source as well, or knew enough about the source to agree that the information supplied was likely to be accurate.
The problem is that the Post knowingly deceived its readers to protect its source. The second-day story contained lies: Every side from which the leak might have reasonably originated denied, in that story, that they had done so.
Clinton attorneys called the leak illegal, reprehensible and unethical. They promised to track down the leaker’s identity.
Jones’ lawyers said that any suggestion that they were responsible for the leak was “erroneous, reprehensible and fallacious.”
Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr categorically denied that his office was the direct or indirect source of the story.
Assuming that the judge and her staff did not violate her own order of confidentiality, the supporters of Clinton, Jones or Starr were indeed responsible for the leaked information. And The Washington Post knows who.
The Post intentionally lied to its readers in printing this set of denials. The quotes printed were probably accurate presentations of these named source’s denials, but logically, at least one of them was false. The fact that Howard Kurtz, Post media reporter, filed the second report and Peter Baker the first, did not change the fact that the news organization deceived its readers.
If a statement known to be false is worth publication, news organizations should help their readers understand that the statement ought not to be believed. The era in which news organizations could claim that they ought not be accountable for knowingly printing falsehoods disappeared in the 1950s coverage of Senator Joe McCarthy and his unchallenged claims of communists in our midst.
If the thought of a new structure for news reporting is a little uncomfortable, let me end by pointing out that none of the notions that we hold dear from the old paradigm — objectivity, external news, two-sided reporting or named sourcing — developed out of some fundamental ethical principle.
They developed out of the market-driven reality that news services sought audiences and an advertising base larger than a community limited by geography or politics. These services could sell their product to a large groups of news organizations only if they provided material that had very broad appeal. The notions I have explored here sustained that particular marketing ideal. And because they did, they were embraced as ethical ideals.
As technology has changed, marketing possibilities and ideals have changed as well. Intense competition among a multitude of news givers feeds the marketing ideal of creating instant news and equally quick updates. Because of the ability to quickly take the pulse of the audience, the marketing ideals often include appeal to the short-term interests and desires of readers and viewers.
None of this sounds like the making of ethical principles.
But these marketing ideals that are present in the new paradigm point the way for the development of new understandings of what it means for jounrlaists to act ethically in fulfilling their social function. For example, now no one news organization should understand itself to be the sole news provider for any reader or viewer. And rather than continue to clamor for that elusive mass market audience, more and more news organizations are working to serve specialized parts of the market well.
We have already seen competition among news organizations begin to merge into cooperation in using one another’s pieces in building the larger narrative.
Reporting, under the new paradigm, will be judged on how well news organizations are able to interpret elements of the complex narrative so that it fits the needs of the particular audience. Rather than reporting a single verifiable truth, news organizations will be judged by how they meet the needs of a particular audience (or market-share) to contribute as active citizens in a democracy. This is a new merging of market and ethical principle.
Dr. Elliott is a professor of ethics and director of the Practical Ethics Center at the University of Montana. She is one of the country’s leading experts and commentators on press ethics. This was the keynote address at the 1998 ONO conference in San Diego, Calif., delivered on May 11, 1998.
