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Citation: Nieman Reports Fall 1998, v52, n3, p4(9)
Author: Kirkhorn, Michael J.
Title: Widening gap between haves and have-nots. by Michael
J. Kirkhorn
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COPYRIGHT 1998 President and Fellows of Harvard College
In recent months the daily press has perched on the edge of repentance.
With some justification it has been blamed by critics of all stripes for
falsifying, trivializing, distracting the public with juicy gossip, chasing
sensational stories in the company of the shameless tabloids, disregarding
major social issues and discarding useful safeguards such as the verification
of facts.
The demeaned and distrustful public compounds journalism's dilemma by
demanding better journalism while at the same time patronizing the worst. The
public's ambivalence is reflected in journalistic indecision. In other tabloid
periods--the 1920's, for example--editors argued that the public demands trash
and as long as it does, not much can be done to improve the quality of
journalism. While they may at times be tempted, editors of the late 1990's who
are trying to find ways to revive the affections of readers and viewers cannot
afford to blame the public.
Blaming the vulgarians might have been possible in more confident times,
but not in an age of prolific, criss-crossed competition when nobody can feel
very confident about having a hold on any large part of the public. The
tendency to blame the public has shown itself at times, usually in shruggingly
apologetic what-can-we-do anyway disclaimers, but it's not convincing. The
precious credibility of journalism is at stake and journalists have to find
more effective answers for the misdoings of all sectors of that blurred entity
called "the media."
The time seems right for a frank acknowledgment of errors committed by
careless or greedy journalists, or crypto- or pseudo-journalists, and for a
determined revival of the values that most journalists have been following in
any case. "I can't recall a better time for owning up to our mistakes," said
Reid MacCluggage, Editor and Publisher of The Day Publishing Company of New
London, Conn., and President of the Associated Press Managing Editors. Like
many editors, MacCluggage is feeling very frustrated by the fact that at the
same time the reputation of journalism has been suffering, newspapers
themselves "are better than they ever have been," and many if not most are
making some efforts to get the public involved with their local papers.
The time also may be right for a return to serious explanatory reporting on
unfinished business. There are a number of issues that have not been receiving
much attention in the newspapers, magazines or broadcast journalism. One of
the most threatening and in a way most shameful of these issues is the
persistence of poverty in cities and the countryside and the growing gap
between rich and poor that former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich has said
threatens the United States with a "two-tiered society," with relatively few
Americans living luxuriously and many, many others barely making a living or
trapped in poverty.
Some believe that by paying little attention to an issue as ominous in its
social and political implications as this one, journalists are committing an
act of malpractice that far overshadows the handful of sensational plagiarisms
and lies and deceptions that get the headlines.
It's not stated anywhere that American newspapers and broadcast journalists
must pay attention to the poor; it is a kind of inherited sentiment--one that
once allowed the press to proclaim itself champion of the underdog, comforter
of the afflicted and afflictor of the comfortable, with a duty, as one writer
said, to "represent the unrepresented." Practiced with passion by honest and
persevering editors, reporters and photographers, the exposure of poverty
often has provided journalism with the satisfaction of doing good. In the time
of Joseph Pulitzer or E.W. Scripps, it built readership among the laboring
poor who could afford a penny or two for a newspaper. Journalists like Dorothy
Day, founder of the Depressionera Catholic Worker, or Carey McWilliams, Editor
of the Nation, could from their positions on the margin play advocate for
social justice for the poor, and champion the downtrodden in the tradition of
the abolitionist and muckraking reporters of other eras--and in that way
inspire mainstream journalists to make greater efforts of their own.
It's no longer profitable to expose poverty amid wealth, but there are
journalists who still believe that reporting on injustice is at the heart an
ideal of American journalism that has lately been overlooked. Newspapers,
however, seem to be looking the other way, diametrically the other way, up at
their more or less comfortable, highly-paid or mutual-funded subscribers with
the suburban cul-de-sac addresses advertisers love to see in the subscription
lists.
Important in itself, in an atmosphere of embarrassment over lapses in
ethical standards and sound practice, the coverage of the poor also seems to
help focus some of the discussion of the need for a clearly articulated "new
professionalism" that would clarify journalism's responsibilities on major
social issues, and perhaps push American newspapers beyond what Sandra Mims
Rowe, Editor of The Portland Oregonian, has called the "hand-wringing"
response to journalistic problems. It also portrays in broader context some
innovations of recent years. Even among those who dislike "public journalism"
for, as they see it, threatening the integrity of the newsroom by involving
journalists in the issues they are supposed to cover, there is a recognition
that innovation is needed to win public support for good journalism, and that
a responsibility for the creative solution of public problems should be part
of that strategy.
Editors may disagree, as MacCluggage does, that poverty and the rich-poor
gap are being overlooked, but a conversation with him, as with other editors
concerned about the future of good journalism, suggests that problems of this
dimension are less likely to be ignored if the newspaper is in touch with
readers in active and imaginative ways.
"I've seen a lot of reporting about the so-called growing difference
between rich and poor," MacCluggage said in an interview. "... I don't know if
I believe it or not. There are people in need but there seem to be plenty of
social programs for them. We're living in the richest time in our history. We
live in an extraordinary time. We report on three of the poorest cities in
America, Hartford, Bridgeport and New Haven, but I don't see much of it in our
circulation area. It does show up in our reporting of other
issues--impoverished housing, bad schools, crime, drugs, poor health care ..."
But MacCluggage, like most editors, knows that coverage of all issues will
improve when journalists forge a stronger bond with their communities. When I
talked with him, his paper had recently been visited by some representatives
of the Freedom Forum's Free Press-Fair Press initiative, and they had left the
impression that confessing journalistic problems to the public was not a bad
way to learn about the problems of the communities the paper serves. "What we
need to build is a relationship with the community we cover," he said. Papers
ought to consider admitting not only factual mistakes but also "own up to
structural problems," he said.
Among those structural problems some would see the apparent indifference to
the poor, or at least a less determined coverage than might have been found in
other periods when social issues were pushed to the forefront by protest,
government action or press attention.
There are many reasons for the apparent neglect of the issue: the
conspicuous villains of the kind that cartoonist Thomas Nast skewered when he
was attacking Tammany Hall and Boss Tweed's shredding of the public interest
are today cloaked in respectability; President Clinton has raised the issue of
racism, but there is no ringing FDR- or LBJ-style crusade against poverty that
would carry journalists out on fact-finding expeditions to dramatize poverty
in Harlan County and rural West Virginia or Watts; there are few crusaders in
the daily press, certainly not of the stature of Joseph Pulitzer; much of the
coverage of poverty has been re-channeled, where it appears in stories on
other issues, principally, for many broadcasters and newspapers, crime; some
would argue that the tendency to abandon troubling issues is an expression of
the way journalists succeed in their careers.
Larry McGill, Director of Research for the Media Studies Center in New York
City, suspects that editorial career tracks influence coverage of poverty.
Back in the 1980's he heard reporter J. Anthony Lukas tell an audience that
the impoverished "underclass" was not covered by the press "because
journalists cover power." Anyone who doubted that, Lukas said, should look at
how editors become editors.
McGill investigated the proposition in a Northwestern University doctoral
dissertation and found in a survey of 400 editors that among top newspaper
editors who had been reporters, 85 percent had covered politics. The lesson:
you don't get promoted by covering the poor.
As newspapers aim higher on the income scale for prospective readers, the
so-called "underclass" drops almost entirely out of sight. Only a truly feisty
newspaper will devote much effort these days to a strong series on poverty and
only the feistiest will look seriously at the growing disparity between rich
and poor, which in some places and in the view of some observers seems to
threaten the very existence of the bedrock middle class, a major source of
social stability and economic prosperity.
The problem is not re sources. Newspaper companies have been doing quite
well financially. Nor zeal. More than 1,100 reporters and editors attended the
recent annual conference of the Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE) in New
Orleans, and although the top-ten list of investigative stories recognized at
the conference contained none specifically on poverty and wealth, clearly
there are many reporters and editors who could do a good job exposing the
issue.
Several developments in journalism suggest that it is now possible as never
before to monitor the situation of poor Americans and find at least some
support with a public that professes, at least, to be tired of sleaze and
eager for a better kind of journalism.
Through its emphasis on the disaffected, who often live in poorer
communities where the local newspaper may arrive at one in five homes, the
still-controversial movement called civic or public journalism should be able
to direct the press's attention to the unrepresented. The further development
of "precision journalism," called "computer-assisted reporting," allows
statistical information to be studied with ever-greater exactness by reporters
and editors who are willing to endure a little training. Phil Meyer, a
professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and
originator of "precision journalism," the application of social science
research techniques to journalism, said of recent developments using the
computer to gather and correlate information, "Precision journalism makes it
possible to report on social problems with power and precision. Poverty is
among the major issues."
It wouldn't be fair to suggest that poverty has been overlooked entirely.
Fifteen Pulitzer Prizes for investigation that involved poverty have been
awarded over the last six decades, including several in the 1990's. IRE
provided Nieman Reports with a list of more than 170 newspaper, broadcast and
magazine projects in the past decade that report on the persistence of poverty
in a number of respects, including failures of poverty agencies, misuse of
food stamps, poor schools, Medicare scandals and lack of health care, the
abandonment of poor neighborhoods by banks and savings and loans, violence in
poor neighborhoods, homelessness, devastated families and exploitation of
children, corporate squeezing of the poor, and high disease rates, infant
mortality and early death among the poor. The list is both a record of
journalistic accomplishment and a profile of the persistence of poverty in the
United States.
The issue has been put in a constructive context of reform by forthright
voices within journalism. At a keynote speech at the 1998 annual Institute on
the Ethics of Journalism at Washington and Lee University, Maxwell King,
retiring Editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, provided a pessimistic
conclusion tinged with hope for a "new professionalism" that would guide
journalists back to fundamental responsibilities.
"What does it mean for a democratic society like ours, in which there has
been a 25-year trend of the poor growing poorer, the rich growing richer, the
divide between the have more and the have-lesses growing steadily?" King
asked. "A society in which 45 percent of those filing tax returns in 1993 met
the federal government's guideline definition of working poor. A society in
which the richest one percent of the population owns almost one third of the
nation's resources? The United States today has the widest gap between rich
and poor of any industrialized nation. How will such a society, already being
split along class and capital lines, be affected by a media environment in
which the rapidly growing poor segment has little access to relevant
information?"
The widening gap between rich and poor is not easily straddled by the daily
press, even by newspapers that try to uphold their principles, King said. In
spite of efforts to cover the city as well as the suburbs, newspapers find
themselves moving with the wealth into suburban coverage. "The economic
pressures inexorably push the newspaper toward more detailed coverage of
sectors with the sort of demographics that support the effort," King said. "We
have struggled hard at The Inquirer to keep a strong commitment to city
coverage, to keep a strong team of reporters assigned to the city, and to
provide the sort of neighborhood, lifestyle coverage for the city it so
clearly needs. But, frankly, there's no real comparison; the city
neighborhoods and the poorer sectors of our region are getting coverage that
isn't even close to the suburban `neighbors' coverage."
And it's not only the newspapers that have migrated. King observed that
"the situation is even bleaker when one looks at other media serving the
poorer communities: most of the weeklies follow the same pattern as the
dailies.... Television and radio, the primary sources of news in poor
neighborhoods, rarely cover any community news whatsoever, other than crime
and violence."
John Seigenthaler, an editor of great experience and founder of the First
Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, agreed that "journalists are not
looking at the gap between rich and poor," and implied that the lapse was an
aspect of the press's persistent problem with credibility. He said that the
press ought to continue to investigate its values and practices internally and
"if these studies dig deep enough they will find that at root anytime the
press ignores an issue it robs the public and betrays itself."
What is needed for the press to direct some steady coverage to the economic
polarization of the United States? Seigenthaler recalled the urban riots of
the mid-1960's when poor districts of American cities were the focal points of
a continuing national discussion of racism and poverty. "Suddenly we were all
on a guilt trip," Seigenthaler said; editors across the country had to
recognize that they "had never paid any attention to the inner city, and as a
result there was no constructive reporting of the quality of life. This was a
gap in coverage. The ghetto had been ignored."
Common sense and some knowledge of the complicitous habits of American
journalism might suggest that the press could use another political crusade
that would justify greater coverage of poverty. Seigenthaler disagrees.
Government action should not be needed: "The press doesn't need political
leadership on this issue. It would seem to me that the opportunity would come
as naturally for the press in an administration that ignored black candidates
for cabinet positions and nominated Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court."
Neglect of economic and social problems during the Great Depression should
remind journalists that when the press waits for political leadership on an
important issue, it may wind up misleading the public. In the early years of
the depression the lack of national relief and reform allowed the press to
ignore the real consequences of the stock market crash of 1929 and instead to
publish palliatives from Wall Street, the White House and congressional
conservatives. This lapse, said press critic George Seldes, was the press's
"greatest failure in modern times." In his book, "Freedom of the Press,"
published in 1935, Seldes scolded newspapers for following the Wall Street
line.
By following the Wall Street line, journalists wound up deceiving the
nation in a way that seemed almost deliberate, he wrote. When the stock market
crashed after a series of drops called "technical corrections," the daily
press, Seldes said, "instead of furnishing America with sound economic truth,
furnished the lies and buncombe of the merchants of securities, which termed
an economic debacle a technical situation, which called it the shaking out of
bullish speculators, which blamed everything on lack of confidence. The press
accepted the declarations of the President of the United States, a famous
engineer, and also the economic viewpoint of the economically illiterate
ex-President Coolidge, who blamed 1929 on `too much speculation' and 1930 on
`dumping from Russia' and 1931 on `the economic condition of Austria and
Germany' breaking down."
Ignored during this period of paper prosperity and collapse were "American
economists who proved that in the boom years there was no national prosperity,
that there were two million unemployed; that the farmers were bankrupt, that
30 million of them were suffering; that 71 percent of the population was
living on a scale hardly above the margin of necessities. But such economists
were considered traitorous radicals in 1928 and 1929; the newspaper would not
touch their anti-American ideas or facts.
"Meanwhile the booming industry of advertising kept intimidating the public
into more installment buying, kept inculcating the theory of more waste more
prosperity, fostered the idea of living-beyond-income and kept up the `new
standard of living' by high pressure salesmanship. The nation's press was
party to this achievement of the advertising profession."
Seldes detected no desire to expose the weakness of the economic system. He
found only self-interest: "Obviously just as stores and corporations are the
sacred cows of certain smaller newspapers, so Big Business is the great Sacred
Golden Bull of the entire press."
Seldes quoted The Nation, which said editorially that the daily press is
unable "to see, hear, or know any evil in advance of catastrophic events which
implicate the mighty."
There is another possible analogy between the journalism of 1929 and the
journalism of 1998. About the time of Seldes's indignant outburst, other
critics were daring the newspapers to step out in the open and express clear
standards of accountability to the public. Protected by the First Amendment,
therefore free of outside interference, the press was accused of practicing a
"negative freedom" without clear purposes beyond the protection of profits.
This, the critics said, was a form of social irresponsibility. This criticism
has been restated recently by some editors as a way of encouraging public
allegiance for clear journalistic purposes--even though forthrightness about
journalism's purposes makes newspaper lawyers nervous.
In his Washington and Lee speech Maxwell King said that what was needed is
a "new professionalism in which we combine a commitment to issue-oriented
explanatory journalism with a bold, aggressive articulation of American
journalism's professional ethics and obligations. This new professionalism
would harness the newspaper's distinctive strength--the capacity to organize,
articulate and explain complex issues--to the power of professional ethics."
King said that during much of this century, "journalists in this country
have eschewed professionalism, preferring to rely solely on the power of the
First Amendment. In fact, we often have hidden behind the First Amendment's
protection of free speech, taking a legalistic position on our professional
obligations."
He criticized the caution that turns newspapers away from expressing their
responsibilities for fear of retaliation in libel cases, where their professed
standards might be used against them in court. This "timorous posture" has led
to a "relative lack of professionalism among journalists; compared to
physicians, scientists, academics and even lawyers, ours is a poorly
articulated profession in terms of standards and codes."
Seigenthaler agrees with King. Like King, he is a critic of public
journalism and believes that change in newspapers should come from within the
profession in projects such as the American Society of Newspaper Editors'
three-year investigation of "the root causes of journalism's dwindling
credibility," rather than through broader social efforts such as those
supported by the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, whose involvement with some
newspapers Seigenthaler believes has "discredited" public journalism. About
the ASNE effort, Sandra Mims Rowe, Editor of The Portland Oregonian, said that
the project would be devoted to "long-range actions that can advance our
credibility and increase public trust."
Like Seldes before him, Seigenthaler is uneasy with the optimistic tone of
news about the economy. It seems, he said, that "all economic news is good
news. It's not reporting on the economy to say that a corporation has had a
bad quarter and the stock has dropped," Seigenthaler observed. This is an
incomplete picture: "In an economy where there's not much tolerance for the
poor, journalists are not looking at the gap between the rich and poor...."
Given that failure of coverage as evidence of shortcoming in professional
standards, how do journalists approach the new professionalism?
One way is to practice the old professionalism vigorously.
A careful analysis of public or civic journalism that appeared in the
winter issue of Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly suggests that public
or civic journalism can best be defended as an innovation when its active
citizenship and community-rousing efforts are supported by sound,
old-fashioned objective investigation of important topics.
An article by Peter Parisi, an associate professor in the Department of
Film and Media Studies of Hunter College of the City University of New York,
suggested that by encouraging people to think of themselves as citizens,
seriously involved in solving the problems of their communities, public
journalism "promise[s] an ambitious explanatory journalism on the largest
questions of public policy and a journalism rich in features so frequently
bemoaned as missing in journalism--cause, context, compassion, background,
perspective, issues, underlying structure."
But the promise is betrayed by another assumption of civic journalism, one
that reveals its devotion to sincere good will and seems satisfied with
community involvement as a solution to social problems. "In practice,
however," Parisi wrote, "civic journalism retreats from this promise. One
might expect that its critique of the cynicism that results when journalistic
narratives ignore `solutions' would be to structure reporting around concern
for the wellbeing of society. In other words, journalists would not simply
report public problems in their dramatic, conflictful outlines, but would ask
a variety of sources: `What can be done about this social problem?' `What are
its causes?' `How have other countries and other historical periods confronted
the problem?' `What are the best ideas of contemporary authorities who have
studied it?' `What obstacles stand in the way of solution?'... This would
produce the long-absent reporting of the news within a framework of cause,
compassion, and context."
Instead, Parisi writes, civic journalism's proponents seem satisfied to
have provoked a community response, even though it may do little to solve the
problem.
The phrase "long-absent ..." suggests that in their pursuit of new values
that might draw attention to poverty and wealth, journalism should try to
revive the accomplishments of more successful periods. The importance of
personal journalism certainly must be acknowledged, but one noticeable
characteristic of any productive period in recent American journalism has been
the effective use of the style of reporting that is called "objective." The
criticism of objective reporting as a sterile, power-serving form of reporting
has become routine. But seen not as unwanted relic but as one among several
indispensable means of observation, it remains a bedrock of investigative and
explanatory journalism. The public appreciates its value more than many
journalists do, and when it is practiced by a great reporter who respects the
hard-won fact, nothing surpasses it. Reporting that is dismissed as being
sterile because it is objective often is not objective at all. It is
superficial. It's possible to dislike superficial reporting and be uneasy
about its value to citizens without using it to enthrone other
not-thoroughly-tested forms that, to an astute analyst like Parisi, have their
own faults.
It appears, though this is just a glimmering, that newspaper journalism may
be approaching a moment of synthesis, in which a number of recent developments
begin to make sense in combination. Maxwell King is another prominent editor
who has jabbed at public journalism because members of the movement seem to
him to push journalists to "drop your posture of independence, of distance
from the civic process, they urge, and join the battle on behalf of the public
good.... Unfortunately, in so doing, the leaders of this new movement have
rejected--in fact, have scorned and derided--one of the ethical cornerstones
of modern American journalism: the neutrality, the independence, of the
newsroom." He suggested that those devoted to public journalism "forget about
organizing meetings; forget about activism; do not destroy the independence
and neutrality of the newsroom," and instead join in a new professionalism.
But many editors recognize the value of reaching out to the public in ways
that are constructive and not merely ingratiating, and while they may not wish
to mobilize public opinion, they see that it is necessary to find ways to
build a devoted readership.
Jeannine A. Guttman, Editor and Vice President of The Portland Press Herald
and Maine Sunday Telegram, appears to be one of those editors whose paper is
joining the outlook of public journalism with the power of objective reporting
on important issues. A series in The Sunday Telegram in 1996 suggests as much.
It was a thorough piece of objective reporting on the gap between rich and
poor in Maine.
Guttman strongly supports public journalism and suggests that when the
public is allowed to talk frankly with journalists about news judgment,
reporting and editing, stereotypes dissolve and connections are made that
increase the confidence of readers and the competence of reporters and
editors. The newspaper, she says, must learn to "value all citizens," and
organized contact with readers, or prospective readers, seems to lead in that
direction: "When you're in a group talking to a mother on welfare, you're
talking to a real face, not a stereotype. That's what's been missing in our
coverage. Until we value all citizens as much as we do legislators, spin
doctors, power brokers and lobbyists, we won't be doing our jobs."
Of King's criticism she says, "That's ridiculous. It does not speak well of
the individual journalist to assume that if we get near the public we will
lose ethical judgment and besmirch the great institution of journalism." In
the forums that her newspaper has organized, on alcoholism, for example, the
paper has reserved the right to withdraw if it finds that its neutrality is
jeopardized by public involvement. Members of the public understand this
stance.
Through the leadership of then-editor Lou Ureneck the Maine newspapers have
been involved in public journalism since 1994, Guttman said. The philosophy of
public involvement has, she said, "taken root over time." The series on the
gap between rich and poor seems to be one in which a combination of public
involvement and thorough objective reporting has accomplished an important
piece of explanatory reporting--not a bad model for other papers.
To complete the series, reporters Eric Blom and Andrew Garber did 200
interviews over five months and used computers extensively. For example, they
created a master occupational data base that revealed changes in Maine's
occupational profile. Another data base contained tax statistics that allowed
reporters to see the sources of income for various groups.
The paper found that the gap between rich and poor is growing in Maine,
with the top 20 percent of Maine households earning 10 times as much as the
bottom 20 percent in 1994, up from 8 times as much in 1979. They also found,
and reported in individual cases, that corporate profitability is being
increased through layoffs that "are eroding Maine's middle class" and that a
"glut" of lower-skilled workers is driving down wages, and that "low-wage,
semi-skilled workers overseas are taking the jobs of Maine people."
All those who talk about new purposes for journalists ought to keep in mind
the fact that they have been discussed before, and in similar terms.
Decades-old discussions may yield some answers. To unattached observers
journalism must often seem to be comfortably troubled; who but several
generations of journalists could spend 60 or 70 years arguing about
objectivity, without ever changing the terms of the argument or expecting to
settle the question? The staying power of journalistic issues--objectivity or
not, pandering to advertisers or not, hiding behind the First Amendment or
proclaiming firm principles--is so remarkable that it must appear to the
uninitiated that journalists cultivate their complaints as a way of pretending
that they're trying to solve them.
It also may appear that journalists have a hard time phrasing their
problems in ways that allow solutions because the profession itself rests not
on bedrock but on a shifting ambivalence about nearly everything it touches,
including the public, which in journalism's tory periods is seen as a mob of
six-pack slingers, and in periods when Jeffersonian idealism is revived as a
font of wisdom.
Ambivalence produces an ethical opportunism that infuriates those who
expect journalism to follow a steady vision of social justice and sound public
interest. Ethical opportunism allows journalists to grab off important stories
without worrying too much about fixed ethical standards, and it also gets them
into trouble when journalism oversteps.
Can journalism, so easily distracted, articulate standards that it truly
intends to follow? Perhaps most easily when the identity of the ideal
individual journalist is under discussion. Here, some of the most inspiring
characterizations come from other periods, and even though they may include a
touch of bravado, they are worth considering if they suggest how the elements
of outstanding professionalism are combined in the pursuit of poverty,
injustice and other important issues. In these characterizations the suspect
word "conscience" appears frequently, as perhaps it should. Only through the
insistence of a hard-working democratic conscience will any journalist ever do
a good job exposing the roots of injustice; only the professional conscience
will allow the journalist to try to do what has become very nearly impossible:
recognize the indispensable importance of seeing in the midst of
fragmentation, selfishness and indifference, a whole public interest.
More than 50 years ago Robert Lasch, an editorial writer for The Chicago
Sun, wrote in the Atlantic Monthly of the professional conscience that
journalists today seem to want to recover and, except for the use of the word
"newspaperman" to describe newspaper journalists, expressed himself in
language that might have stirred excitement in the ASNE think tank or at the
last forum of the Committee of Concerned Journalists:
"The newspaperman's problem is to reconcile heart and head: to discipline
the impulses with an intellectual regard for truth, and at the same time to
inflame curiosity with a social purpose. This marriage takes place when he
sincerely represents, in judgment, in selection, in emphasis, in the responses
of his news sense, the whole people and not any one section or class; and when
he devotes the whole of his technical competence to the pursuit of the truth
as best he can perceive it.
"Given such a union, differences of approach can be tolerated."
Disagreements among journalists become significant "only when professional
judgment gives way to emotional prejudice or to unseemly attachment to a set
of preconceived ideas, or to an overweening desire to make good with the front
office. One does not ask that the control of news content be divorced from
human nature; only that it be free and pledged, in the broadest sense, to the
public welfare."
Lasch said that a free press requires a free owner, and proposed, in 1946,
that the publisher should recognize "that he is selling circulation and
prestige, not an economic point of view or service to special interests; and
who, above all, recognizes that selling something is not his first obligation
at all, but is subordinate to his responsibility to represent the
unrepresented. A man who can divorce himself from the associations and outlook
that normally go with wealth; a man who can sacrifice even his own short-range
interest as a business entrepreneur in favor of his long-run interest as the
champion of a greater cause; a man whose passion for the general welfare
overcomes his desire to impose his own ideas upon the community; a man of
wisdom and humility, character and devotion, courage and modesty--here is the
kind of newspaper owner who can make the press free."
We will scoff and say that not a word of this creed is in the job
description of any publisher or broadcast station owner. But if we scoff it's
because we have learned to think that ideals are impractical and unprofitable,
because we don't believe that the public will respect professional integrity
or pay for it. But it does suggest that when the next "new journalism"
arrives, as it does every 30 years or so, it might have to include publishers.
Even if it didn't, is there a program of reform implied in Lasch's
description of the ideal journalist? Or in The Chicago Tribune Editor Jack
Fuller's workaday but no less inspiring definition in his speech to the
Committee of Concerned Journalists: "To me, the central purpose of journalism
is to tell the truth so that people will have the information that they need
to be sovereign." Lasch's description of the ideal reporter or editor could be
achieved often enough to change the business, whether or not she or he
practiced civic or public or old-fashioned objective journalism at a serious
level of inquiry.
A profession, friendlier with the public but still not identified with the
public, itself publicly devoted to the study of important social issues such
as the disparity between rich and poor, and most of all devoted to the truth,
not afraid of its own inherited ideals--isn't this a program for credibility?
The real challenge of reporting on poverty is it requires that society be
seen whole, as a great body of citizens with common public responsibilities,
as, in Lasch's words, "the whole people."
We come at last to the question of professional conscience, or simply, of
conscience. This is a question best left for last because journalists have a
hard time admitting its existence in work devoted to factuality, even though
it permeates a profession that likes to think of itself as hardheaded.
But some observers believe that on a question such as the existence of
poverty, conscience is precisely the door that needs to be opened. In the
absence of political leadership or crusades, journalists may find that the
voices raised against social injustice, including persistent poverty, are
those of religious or moral authorities who, whatever the temperature of
political discussion on the issue, find the persistence of poverty in the
United States to be simply wrong.
Charles Haynes, senior scholar for religious freedom at the First Amendment
Center in Arlington, Virginia, suggests that the discussion of moral topics in
the United States has taken a plunge into division, discord and neglect and
that journalists are only among the many who cannot find their bearings on the
moral disorder that must beset a society that cannot recognize in a consistent
way the wrongness of suffering caused by poverty. "I find a tone deafness
among journalists when it comes to religion or morality or conscience," Haynes
said in an interview.
"It's impossible for most reporters to follow anything if it has to do with
conscience," Haynes said. "We are in sad shape when it comes to moral
discourse and understanding the claims of conscience. We can't seem to get
beyond stereotypes." Reporters and editors, he said, "are not prepared to deal
with this kind of discourse when it touches on public policy."
In the United States, he said, "we are struggling to recover a sense of
moral consensus on race, poverty, foreign policy and other issues." But when
religious leaders speak out on poverty, he said, "there's not a ripple" of
press attention, though he hastens to add that religious leaders themselves,
who see the world "through a secular lens," have lost their ability to speak
prophetically in a language that "touches the conscience of the people."
After columnist Murray Kempton died in 1997, Calvin Trillin wrote a tribute
in which he said of Kempton: "He had the true reporter's eye for facts that
had to be faced."
A simple statement, but a simple dedication to the facts that are not
immediately apparent, or fashionable or unbearably exciting to the
over-excited millions may be the journalistic expression of conscience that
the press is looking for as it tries to improve its public standing and do its
job.
RELATED ARTICLE: How to Make Poverty Disappear
Poverty is clearly something of our own doing, but the non-poor are no longer
moved to take concerted action to 'alleviate it. This is not because they
think the solution is too difficult or expensive, but because they have lost
confidence that any large-scale plan will work. They may, of course, lend
assistance on a personal level, doing good in minute particulars. But the
notion that this can be part of a program with more cosmic meaning, a program
that promises to eradicate poverty for once and for all, founders on the
apprehension that humans exercise very, little control over the course of
development of the social reality they themselves have created.
Not everyone, of course, is willing to live with this uncomfortable and
paralyzing combination of ideas. Religious faithful who seek to tailor
themselves to a God-given reality' persist, as do social reformers who seek to
tailor reality to a utopian vision. But if the growing indifference to
poverty, is any guide, it points to the conclusion that these groups no longer
represent majority opinion or sway public policy. Those among the non-poor who
are unmotivated to grapple with a problem for which they can discern no
solution find it more bearable simply not to think about it. This choice
includes ordering where they live, where their children go to school, what
they read and what they expose themselves to in such a way that poor people
intrude minimally upon their lives and consciousness.
Actually, this strategy does entail a solution of sorts to the problem of
poverty,, and a remarkably clean and cheap solution at that: to make poverty,
disappear by the simple expedient of not acknowledging it.
F. Allan Hanson, Professor of Anthropology, University of Kansas, in The Cato
Journal, Volume 17, Number 2, fall 1997 [C] Cato Institute.
RELATED ARTICLE: Radical Right `Bust' Feared From Poverty
I'm deeply troubled in America that the chasm between those who have wealth
and those who don't is getting wider and wider. There re more people who are
the have-nots than the haves. As some kind of a kooky radical Christian it
troubles me. As someone who lives in what we like to to call a democracy it
bothers me, too. Because I fear down the road, not in my lifetime, maybe not
in my children's lifetime, but in my grandchildren's lifetime ... that can't
last, you know. That's gonna bust. And I fear that the bust will come from
what is now called the radical right.
Will Campbell, writer, preacher, social activist, farmer, at a Nieman Fellows
seminar, May 5, 1998.
[GRAPHS OMITTED]
Michael Kirkhorn was a Nieman Fellow in 1970-71. He has worked for five
newspapers, including The Milwaukee Journal, and he has taught at several
universities. He is director of the journalism program at Gonzaga University
in Spokane, Washington. Through December of this year he will be living in
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with his wife, Lee-Ellen, who has a postdoctoral
fellowship in nursing research at the University of North Carolina, and with
their three-year-old daughter Amelia. He has been working for some time on a
long manuscript on the question of the independence of the press and hopes
that it might turn out to be an acceptable book.
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