Taking stock of everything from politics to pop culture is a tradition that belongs to the end of one year and the beginning of another.
If President Bush’s standing is discussed alongside that of the fortunes — or misfortunes — of Nick and Jessica, and it is, then it seems only fair to turn that same sort of gaze at the practice — or malpractice — of journalism.
I asked Bill Kovach if he’d do the honors of answering my year-in-review questions, and he graciously agreed.
Just so you’ll know who you’re hearing from, Kovach’s 43-year journalism career as a reporter and editor began in Tennessee, first at the Johnson City Press-Chronicle and then at the Nashville Tennessean. He next worked at The New York Times, capping his 18 years there as its Washington bureau chief. He left The Times for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution; that paper won two Pulitzer Prizes in the two years he was its editor. He also served as curator at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalists.
Among his published works, Kovach is the co-author, with Tom Rosenstiel, of The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect.
Currently, he is the chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists (Web site, journalism.org), a consortium of journalism practitioners and academics whose goals include “to clarify and renew journalists’ faith in the core principles and function in journalism” and “to create a better understanding of those principles by the public.”
I e-mailed the following questions to Kovach, and he sent me his answers.
Q. How would you characterize or describe the year 2005 in journalism, and why?
A. The year was yet another in a string of bad years for a journalism of real value to a self-governing democracy. The New York Times and The Washington Post, two of the world’s great newspapers, lost a great deal of respect from their readers when senior reporters were seen to be more concerned with their access to people and institutions of power than to their readers, and senior editors at both papers seemed unable to manage their reporters. The soap opera-like behavior of Judy Miller at The Times and Bob Woodward at the Post extended for another year the public disillusionment with the values and standards some journalists apply, running back to Jack Kelley at USA Today and Jayson Blair at The Times.
The year was also a continuation of a string of bad economic news as the Knight Ridder chain was forced to consider selling its newspapers, yet another indication that owners and managers of the strongest newspapers in the country have yet to figure out an adequate economic base to sustain their competition with other information providers operating in the new Web technology.
And finally, the year saw an extension, broadening and deepening of the shut down of information to the public since Sept. 11, 2001,as more and more areas of once public information disappeared behind impenetrable walls of official secrecy.
Q. What were the most discouraging events dealing with the people’s right to know?
A. A trend with two threads: The new-found willingness of courts to refuse to recognize the value of reporters’ shield laws and lack of significant support for federal legislation that would help journalists gain access to important information the public has a right to expect to know. And the ease with which state, local and federal government officials felt justified blocking reporters, often with threat of lethal force, from covering the effects of Katrina and the extension and expansion of elements of the Patriot Act that built new walls of secrecy around not just national security information but previously accessible commercial information.
Q. What was (or were) the most encouraging?
A. The fact that at both The Times and the Post, a good portion of the staff, maybe even a majority, spoke openly of their disagreement with the values displayed by their notorious colleagues, again continuing a trend reaching back to Kelley and Blair that indicates most journalists still hold their fundamental responsibility to the public and the credibility of their work.
Q. In recent past years, media credibility took a hit because of publicized cases of fabrication and invention. This year, it came in a different wrinkle, with the “outing” of Valerie Plame, and its revelations about sourcing and access. Which threat to credibility, in your opinion, is more serious, or poses longer-lasting damage, and why?
A. I would consider them equally damaging.
In the new competitive atmosphere of unlimited information accessible in an instant, journalism based on a methodology of verification — the only journalism that is of value to self-government — will survive only if it offers citizens something clearly of value. Fabricated information is not only worthless but dangerous.
Shielding people of power as they attempt to destroy a citizen’s reputation is not only worthless but dangerous.
If the public comes to accept these as the values of journalists it will not survive in competition with the propaganda, manipulation, and disinformation of the entertainment-rich product of people and institutions of social, political and economic power.
Q. What is right with mainstream news media? What is wrong?
A. What is right is that the large majority of practitioners still believe their purpose is to provide citizens the timely, independent information they need in order to make informed decisions in the economic and political marketplaces of their lives.
What’s wrong is that MSM is still too often content to maximize profit and not invest in the research and training necessary to develop a new economic base that takes advantage of the opportunities technology has made available.
Q. How can the strengths be strengthened, and how can the wrongs be addressed? By media? By news consumers?
A. Most important, by not separating themselves from their consumers. Journalists must actively engage with the public in a dialogue that makes it clear they need each other. Journalism came into being by diffusing knowledge to an amorphous mass of people and through that process allowed them to form themselves into a public. What journalism offered were the tools (knowledge) of citizenship. It is imperative that our generation of journalists re-learn that role and help the public extract from the undifferentiated flood of information the knowledge they need to continue to be a force in their own governance.
Self-government is predicated on the notion that we the people are not stupid. We are, all of us, ignorant of many things — but we are not stupid.
Journalism’s value is providing the information to overcome ignorance.
Journalism and self-government were born together. They could just as easily die together.
Q. What do you think of blogging? Which blogs do you read and find valuable?
A. I think blogging is one of the great advances in democratizing speech with all the pitfalls and values any expansion of unrestrained speech can have. I believe it is one of the tools MSM should embrace to make themselves more transparent and create the continuing dialogue journalists and the public must have.
I check out a lot of blogs including, not in any order: Instapundit, LA Observed, Buzz Machine, Power Line, Press Think, RealClear Politics, Daily Kos, The Volokh Conspiracy, etc., etc.
I really don’t have a favorite and sample something new every time I have a chance.
Q. Many top newspapers suffered paid circulation setbacks this year, even as print tried to figure out a way to grapple with readership and its Web editions. What do you think is the future of print? What do you think its role will be with online?
A. I think the future of print is strong — most of what passes through the Internet is still print and I think will continue to be so.
We should be thinking of the Web as our number one distributor for that is what is has become (even if others are distributing it free without our direct permission) and what it should be.
We should be preparing our material for Web distribution rather than for print on paper distribution because that would allow us to think more creatively, more deeply and more broadly about how we prepare our material in the first place. Thinking in terms of how we get the story on the press limits how we think about the story and reduces the effectiveness of our work.
Q. Who owns a newspaper — a community or a corporation? What should corporations remember about communities, and what should communities remind corporations?
A. Obviously the people who put up the money to support the infrastructure that discovers, organizes, analyzes and produces news owns the news company but the news company cannot exist without a public. Our government has considered that public service important enough to provide legal safeguards for its work. If it does not serve that public it has no claim on those safeguards; but more importantly if it does not serve that public is has no claim on them and their attention either.
Q. As you noted in a recent speech, 24 journalists gathered eight years ago to form the Committee of Concerned Journalists, which you chair. The group said then, “The central purpose of journalism is to provide citizens with accurate and reliable information they need in order to make informed judgments in a self-governing society.” What is the greatest threat now in journalism serving that purpose, and does that threat come from within or without?
A. Actually, we didn’t say that, you and your colleagues (did). That statement of purpose was nearly unanimously the purpose described by more than 3,000 journalists who we brought together in two dozen forums around the country to gather their wisdom and hopes when we launched CCJ .
The threat to a continuation of that purpose is equally threatened within and without — within by owners and managers who think too shallowly and too episodically and invest too niggardly in competing in the new atmosphere; and without by institutions of power that have invested enormous resources into developing techniques, approaches and programs to shape and control the flow of information to the public in forms that serve their vested interest, whether commercial or political and social.
