I couldn’t bear to watch Dan Rather give his apology last week.
As a journalist, I found it too painful.
The scandal that led to his apology was a blow for me personally and professionally, harming a fragile trust from the past and raising new fears about journalism in the future.
I grew up where CBS icon Edward R. Murrow got his start, watching Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather almost every evening. They took me beyond the small town of Pullman, Wash., and opened up the world, from Washington, D.C., to the Soviet Union.
They whetted my appetite for news, and then newspapers fed it. I pored over the Lewiston Morning Tribune, the Spokesman-Review and even the Spokane Daily Chronicle, first elbowing my brothers for the Sports section and later turning to the news pages. I remember at age 10 crying at the sight of the slain Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the front page and watching the death toll climb in Vietnam.
The stories those broadcasts and newspapers shared didn’t shape my opinions — my parents helped do that — but instead they informed me. And when Woodward and Bernstein uncovered Watergate and “60 Minutes” exposed government wrongdoing, they seared in me an awareness of the power of journalists to inform.
They all made me want to pursue journalism so I could shed light, because I thought by educating I would be helping society.
But today I’m wondering, if nobody believes what journalists are saying, then what service can journalism provide?
The Rather episode understandably erodes the public trust already battered by other journalistic scandals. It even shakes mine.
The network not only revealed it relied on bogus records. The fiasco exposed how it breached many sound journalistic practices in its report on President Bush’s National Guard service, from encouraging the Kerry campaign to contact a source of theirs and relying heavily on an anonymous source with a history of animosity toward Bush, to failing to pursue questions raised by its own staff.
And when questions first arose after the report, the network arrogantly defended its report.
It was reminiscent of the refusal of editors at USA Today to heed journalists who questioned the veracity of the work of reporter Jack Kelley. And it was reminiscent of how readers and subjects of stories thought The New York Times was so arrogant it wouldn’t matter if they pointed out that reporter Jayson Blair had never spoken to them for his pilfered and made-up stories.
It’s no wonder that research not only shows that readers and viewers don’t trust what journalists say — a new Gallup poll showed that only 44 percent of respondents have confidence the media reports fairly and accurately, a drop from 54 percent a year ago. But other research also shows most people believe that journalists cover up their mistakes.
But distrust of the media runs deeper than recent breakdowns in meeting journalistic standards. A chasm dug by partisanship may never be bridged again.
The CBS debacle simply fed an already rampant perception of a biased media. I’m amazed each week at how angry readers are about stories that don’t fit their view of the world. Readers routinely raise their voices, swear and hang up on me. To a Republican, if a story highlights John Kerry’s views, then the newspaper is biased against conservatives. To a Democrat, if a story highlights President Bush’s views, then the newspaper is biased against liberals.
It seems that no people want to be informed anymore for civic debate. They only want their views to be reinforced.
They can be satisfied by Fox News, Air America and an explosion of partisan Web bloggers. But frankly, mainstream journalists also are guilty of fanning that partisanship.
Coverage of the presidential campaigns has been mostly dictated by the ugly charges made by both sides — not journalistic independence and enterprise. It’s why we read more about the Vietnam War than the war in Iraq. It’s why we know more about typewriter fonts than we do about the fine print of Medicare proposals. It’s why we slavishly relay stump speeches rather than hold the candidates accountable for what they say and what they did.
We as journalists could be more aggressive in holding both leaders and ourselves accountable. That also means being transparent with readers.
Yet I’m not sure seeing would mean believing.
While readers and viewers are quick to assume bias by journalists, I think what they would see in a newsroom would be vastly different. At The Oregonian, they would mostly see professionals, albeit many of them admittedly liberal in their personal lives, who don’t have agendas and seek to bleach any political bias from their work through questioning and challenging their work and the work of their colleagues. They would see lead political reporters and editors whose political leanings I still couldn’t begin to tell you after years of working with them. They would see mild-mannered Bruce Hammond, the leader of the politics team, becoming visibly angry over the CBS debacle because he works so hard to stress to his reporters and readers his goal of providing fair and balanced coverage. They would see investigative reporter Les Zaitz, who wrote after last week’s CBS disclosures, “It’s accuracy first and always — period. If we all don’t learn that lesson, if we don’t recommit to that principle, we stand to see a lot of good journalistic work doubted by the public and therefore wasted.”
I want to believe that the trust between readers and journalists can heal. And I want to believe again that our information can help, not harm.
I found hope at the end of the discouraging week in the students who gathered Friday to launch another year of the Beaumont Bugle, the student newspaper for Beaumont Middle School in Portland.
They arrived in the fog of the early morning, long before their school day usually begins. I asked them why they came. Many of them said they loved to write. But they also said they liked to learn things first, and then share them with other students so they could learn about them.
Those still seem like noble goals.
