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In the summer of 1964, high-ranking law enforcement officials armed with secret tape transcripts made the rounds to selected journalists in Washington. The tapes had conclusive evidence that one of the nation's most respected and powerful political figures was cheating on his wife.
When the transcripts weren't enough, no less a figure than the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation got involved directly. J. Edgar Hoover invited some reporters to FBI headquarters to actually listen to the tapes themselves. There, you can hear it. He's having sex there. Out of wedlock. Adulterer.
The man caught on the tapes was controversial in his own right. A minister. A man who used the Bible in nearly every speech. A man whose primary tactic was to use guilt, morality, and an appeal to goodness as forces for persuasion. To Hoover, the hypocrisy was overwhelming; it was proof that Martin Luther King Jr. could be considered a fraud and a hypocrite. This is precisely the kind of criticism of officials that journalists in the 1990s feel they are obliged to make.
Hoover's intent was to "expose" King, the FBI director said, to "disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize" the black leader.
Not one reporter wrote a story, even those friendly to Hoover and unfriendly to King. Evidence of the campaign against King and the direct use of the tapes did not emerge for nearly two decades.
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How different would American history be had the press operated differently in 1964? It is impossible, of course, to place the behavior of a political figure from one period into the context of another period, or impose the judgments of one time on those of another. Perhaps King would have behaved differently.
But imagine Hoover sharing his tapes with professional Internet gossip Matt Drudge. How would Cable News Network handle the leaked tapes if the network knew MSNBC [the all-news, cable-TV joint venture of NBC and Microsoft] was about to be given the same information? Would rumor of King's extramarital activities be "Issue One" on the McLaughlin Group? Or ferried into a debate on talk radio or Crossfire? What would the Attorney General have done if a special prosecutor were investigating evidence Hoover was peddling of King connections with the Communist Party, and King were asked under oath about adultery?
Bill Clinton is not Martin Luther King, and Kenneth Starr is not J. Edgar Hoover. The King incident did not involve a lawsuit, a special prosecutor, or allegations of perjury and obstruction of justice. Nor was King an elected official. But the basic issue of what the press is willing to publish today compared with a generation ago is unmistakable.
The culture of news is changing rapidly. Journalism is in a state of disorientation brought on by rapid technological change, declining market share, and growing pressure to operate with economic efficiency. In a sometimes desperate search to reclaim audience, the press has moved more toward sensationalism, entertainment, and opinion. In only the last year, journalism has suffered a host of embarrassments over press ethics and still further declines in audience size and public confidence, and has engaged in new levels of self-examination. No event signals the changing norms as much as the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal that led to the impeachment proceedings against William Jefferson Clinton. To that degree, we need to try to understand the new media culture through that event.
The lewinsky story did not change everything in the american media culture. Instead, it represented a convergence of long-standing trends, which came together with the political culture and clarified in part the consequences of both.
To understand these changes, it is helpful to recognize what the Clinton scandal represented for the press: the moment when the new post-O.J. media culture turned its camera lens to a major political event for the first time. What do we mean by the post-O.J. media culture? It is a newly diversified mass media in which the cultures of entertainment, infotainment, argument, analysis, tabloid, and mainstream press not only work side by side but intermingle and merge. It is a culture in which Matt Drudge sits alongside William Safire on Meet the Press and Ted Koppel talks about the nuances of oral sex, in which Hard Copy and CBS News jostle for camera position outside the federal grand jury to hear from a special prosecutor.
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Previous major political scandals such as Iran-Contra predated this merging of news cultures. Other recent incidents such as Gennifer Flowers were too fleeting to offer more than a glimpse of the new world of competition that batters down the very notion of journalist as gatekeeper. After Monica and Bill, the cultures were merged into one, not merely in the minds of a distracted public but in fact. NBC News owns MSNBC, which merged its own identity with the Clinton scandal. Its Meet the Press program turned pamphleteer Matt Drudge into a pundit, and Fox News made him into a TV show host. Newsweek reporter Mike Isikoff covered the story for Newsweek and is under contract with MSNBC and NBC to offer punditry about it--to the delight of his managers at Newsweek, which encourages reporters to become pundits and pays them for each radio and TV appearance. From NBC Nightly News to MSNBC's "The Crisis in The White House" to Dateline's infotainment as journalism to Matt Drudge--the line is more blurred than the Mixed Media Culture likes to admit.
In the new Mixed Media Culture, the classic function of journalism to sort out a true and reliable account of the day's events is being undermined. It is being displaced by the continuous news cycle, the growing power of sources over reporters, varying standards of journalism, and a fascination with inexpensive, polarizing argument. The press is also increasingly fixated on finding the "big story" that will temporarily reassemble the now-fragmented mass audience. Yet these same characteristics are serving only to deepen the disconnection with citizens, diminish the press's ability to serve as a cohesive cultural force, and weaken the public's tether to a true account of the news. The long-term implications are that the role the Founders saw as most important for the press--that of being a forum for public debate and, as such, a catalyst for problem solving--is being eroded.
During the Clinton scandal, the press, the group with the biggest stake in maintaining the integrity of facts and accuracy, further succumbed to the ethos of pseudofacts. The Mixed Media now elevate to the status of celebrities, and in some cases embrace as journalists, the same spin doctors and dissemblers--people like George Stephanopoulos or Tony Blankley--once paid to manipulate them. They create pseudoexperts, people who look good but have limited expertise, to appear on their talk shows. They create news networks without reporters, relying instead on argument to pass as journalism. In the process, the Mixed Media Culture contributes to the blending of fact and assertion, real events and pseudoevents, news and entertainment--what journalist Richard Reeves has called "the Oliver Stoning of America."
As noted above, the new Mixed Media Culture has five main characteristics.
A Never-Ending News Cycle Makes Journalism Less Complete: In the continuous news cycle, the press is increasingly oriented toward ferrying allegations rather than first ferreting out the truth. Stories often come as piecemeal bits of evidence, accusation, or speculation--to be filled in and sorted out in public as the day progresses. The initiating charge is quickly aired. Then journalists vamp and speculate until the response is issued. The demand of keeping up with and airing the to-and-fro leaves journalists with less time to take stock and sort out beforehand what is genuinely significant. This gives the reporting a more chaotic, unsettled, and even numbing quality. It also makes it more difficult to separate fact from spin, argument, or innuendo, and makes the culture significantly more susceptible to manipulation.
Sources Are Gaining Power over Journalists: The move toward allegation over verification is compounded by a shift in the power relationship toward the sources of information and away from the news organizations that cover them. Sources increasingly dictate the terms of the interaction and the conditions and time frame in which information is used, and set the ground rules for their anonymity. This shift in leverage toward those who would manipulate the press is partly a function of intensifying economic competition among a proliferating number of news outlets--a matter of a rising demand for news product and a limited supply of newsmakers. It is also a function of the growing sophistication in the art of media manipulation.
There Are No More Gatekeepers: The proliferation of outlets diminishes the authority of any one outlet to play a gatekeeper role over the information it publishes. One of the key features of the Mixed Media Culture is that the press is now marked by a much wider range of standards of what is publishable and what is not. On one hand, journalism is richer, more democratic, more innovative, and, given the possibility of narrower targeting of audiences, has the potential of becoming closer to its audience. On the other hand, the loss of market share, fragmentation of revenue, and disorientation have meant an abandonment of professional standards and ethics. What does the news organization that requires high levels of substantiation do with the reports of those with lesser levels of proof?
Argument Is Overwhelming Reporting: The reporting culture (which rewards gathering and verifying information) is being increasingly overrun by what Deborah Tannen has called the "argument culture," which devalues the science of verification. Many of the new media outlets are engaged in commenting on information rather than gathering it. The rise of 24-hour news stations and Internet news and information sites has placed demands on the press to "have something" to fill the time. The economics of these new media, indeed, demand that this product be produced as cheaply as possible. Commentary, chat, speculation, opinion, argument, controversy, and punditry cost far less than assembling a team of reporters, producers, fact checkers, and editors to cover the far-flung corners of the world. Whole new news organizations such as MSNBC are being built around such chatter, creating a new medium of talk-radio TV.
The "Blockbuster Mentality": As the news audience fragments, outlets such as network television that depend on a mass audience are increasingly interested in stories that temporarily reassemble the mass-media audience. These big stories might be analogous to a hit movie or song that crosses over traditional audience divisions, and their appeal creates a "Summer Blockbuster" mentality in the media. These blockbusters tend to be formulaic stories that involve celebrity, scandal, sex, and downfall, be it O.J., Diana, or Monicagate. Part of their appeal to news organizations is that it is cheaper and easier to reassemble the audience with the big story than by covering the globe and presenting a diversified menu of news.
These new characteristics of the Mixed Media Culture are creating what we call a new journalism of assertion, which is less interested in substantiating whether something is true and more interested in getting it into the public discussion. The journalism of assertion contributes to the press being a conduit of politics as cultural civil war. The combatants in that war can employ the piecemeal nature of news and the weakened leverage of the gatekeepers to exploit the varying standards of different news organizations. These combatants also flourish amid the growing reliance on polarized argument. The role the press has played in the fight over values is not new. Television is well suited to symbolic, polarizing issues. And the growing heterogeneity of the press, while it more accurately reflects the diverse interests of the audience, makes it difficult for the press to find cultural common ground.
The solution, to the extent that one can be identified, is not in trying to enforce a lost homogeneity on journalism. Rather, it is in individual news organizations becoming more clear-headed and courageous about what their own purpose and standards are, and then sticking to them.
Those who fare best in this new culture, at least in classic journalistic terms, are those who do their own research. These news outlets are governed by their own internal standards because they are having to make their own judgments about when a story is verified, what is true, and what is relevant. They are less susceptible to repeating others' mistakes, and they are most careful about accuracy because they bear sole and original responsibility.
Increasingly, news organizations will be forced to distinguish themselves not by the speed and accuracy of their reporting, their depth, or even the quality of their interpretation. The perpetual news cycle will synthesize virtually all news reporting and interpretation into a kind of blended mix. Scoops remain exclusive for only a matter of seconds.
Instead, newspapers, magazines, websites, and television stations increasingly will have to distinguish themselves--and establish their brands--by what they choose to report on and the values and standards they bring to their journalism.
Some will publish only what they know is true. Others will publish rumor and innuendo to have the most startling and comprehensive account. Some will separate information carefully from opinion. Some will separate fact from fiction. Others will blend them into a kind of infotainment.
Those who want to maintain historic standards of journalism will have to make them explicitly part of their identity. When and how do they use anonymous sources? Will they publish charges they cannot substantiate simply because others have? When is someone's private life publicly relevant? This means news organizations should do more to think through in advance what their news values and policies are on a variety of key journalistic matters. And as newspapers did a century ago, in a time of similar intense competition, they will do well to articulate and market themselves to the public according to those values.
Whether traditional news values--such as verification, proportion, and relevance--survive depends ultimately on whether they matter to the public. News outlets that aspire to high standards on such matters as proof of accuracy and proportionality distinguish themselves by more than self-censorship. They offer the public reliability and save people time. In a world with growing choices, and one where the depth of information is potentially infinite for every user, the highest value may be given to the source whose information is most accurate, most dependable, and most efficient to use.
In the end, the importance of having an accurate, reliable account of events is profound. "Public as well as private reason depends on it," Walter Lippmann '10, Litt.D. '44, noted 80 years ago. "Not what somebody says, not what somebody wishes were true, but what is so, beyond all our opinion, constitutes the touchstone of our sanity."
The question before us now is whether the search for what is so, the journalism of verification, will be soon overwhelmed by the new journalism of assertion.