Deadline (42 page)

“You expect this nonsense with television, because everybody figures ‘let’s do whatever it takes to get ratings.’ But the printed page is different, Woods. We’ve got to have some integrity. Instead of holding the television news teams accountable for these farces, we’re following their lead. Like McNews over there.” Leonard gestured toward a marked up issue of
USA Today
on the side of his desk.

“I found out one of these reporters with a front-page story about the gay march is a gay activist who marched in the parade. Not as an observer, a participant! I know for a fact the same thing has happened at the
Post
—reporters have joined in the pro-choice marches. I mean, I’m as pro-choice and pro-gay as anybody, but how can you march advocating one position, then deal with the story with any objectivity? In the old days the reporters that pulled those kind of stunts would have been keelhauled. I mean, it would have been a scandal, Jake—using your post as a journalist to shamelessly promote your own cause, and lying to boot. Their editors and their peers would have lost trust and respect, and the other daily in town would have hung them out to dry in front of the public. Nowadays?” Leonard thought about it. “They probably got an award for excellence in journalism and invitations to speak at banquets.”

“You’re not helping me with this, you know, Leonard. I was hoping you’d tell me it was just the
Trib
, that the overall state of journalism is a lot better than what I’m seeing.”

“You know what bugs the heck out of me? When I point out this stuff to people and they act like I’m betraying the cause. I was a liberal before these half-wits were born. You know what it used to mean to be liberal? It meant to be open-minded, to not buy into the status quo just because it’s the status quo. Well now, guess what? We’re the status quo! I’ve always liked to read stuff that challenges my perspective. Like the
National Review.
Usually I don’t agree with the Review, but on some issues it makes a lot of sense. Used to be people didn’t think anything to see the
National Review
on my desk. Now I see their raised eyebrows and you know what I feel like? I feel like a little boy whose mother caught him with a
Playboy.
They’ve been taught it’s a sin to consider anything that violates their creed. Their viewpoints are so weak they can’t even stand up to scrutiny. The liberalism we’ve got in the newsroom today is different than old-time liberalism. It’s a house of cards, where you don’t dare let one card topple.”

Leonard paced the floor, as if each step clarified his next sentence. “You know what really hurts us now? In the old days there was always the second major newspaper in town. If the other paper was more fair and accurate than we were, we’d lose readers and credibility and money. Our competitors were a real pain. But we knew we weren’t the only game in town, and that keeps you from getting smug and arrogant. People had a choice. You had to earn their loyalty. But today there’s no one to keep us honest. Almost every major city in America used to have at least two dailies, often more. Take Austin, Texas. My dad worked there for three years when I was a boy. It had fifty thousand people then. You know how many daily newspapers it had? Six. Now it has half a million people and only one daily. It’s the same story everywhere. I do a lecture on this. Fifteen hundred cities with daily papers in America, and less than fifty have local daily competitors. It’s like a monopoly on ideas.”

Leonard ran his hand back through his thinning gray hair, as troubled as Jake had ever seen him.

“I don’t know how to break this to you, Leonard, but the
Trib’s
got a multicultural concerns committee, and somehow I got on it.”

Leonard groaned. “Those committees are springing up all over the place. They started with the sensitivity training, which is the absolute worst thing you can do to journalists. We get sensitive to certain people, and then we don’t take them to task. We stop doing journalism and resort to protection and advocacy. Now the seminars aren’t enough, we have to have committees. Multiculturalism? Diversity? Let people worship diversity or Buddha or Christ or anything else they want, but keep it out of the newsroom!”

Jake was surprised at how similar Leonard’s analysis was to Clarence’s, despite their radically different beliefs. Leonard flicked the butt of his cigar in the ashtray and hopped off his desk in an agitated motion.

“I don’t even take the invitations to speak at journalism schools anymore, not many of them anyway. It’s a bunch of clones, an army of automatons. The saddest part is they think they’re thinking for themselves. You know why they think so? Because they’ve been told they’re thinking for themselves! The real problem with journalism schools is they’re located on college campuses. So they’re in the shadow of all those speech codes and sensitive language and all that hogwash. The journalism department becomes an extension of the college’s philosophy of ‘don’t say anything that could offend the wrong people.’ Offenders go to sensitivity training until they repeat the party line like a bunch of zombies. What a place to learn journalism! We grab hold of one perspective, and we get as dogmatic and preachy as the religious right!”

“An interesting comparison.”

“It’s true. We’re so much like the church in the Middle Ages it’s scary. Anybody who comes up with unpopular data or discoveries or ideas is like Galileo, a heretic. Instead of looking at the facts, researching and investigating them, we reject them because we don’t want to believe what they’re saying. They didn’t want to know the earth revolved around the sun, so they wouldn’t listen. We don’t like discoveries that could discredit our world view. So we don’t listen.”

Leonard paced more furiously, in a well-worn section of carpet he’d obviously walked many times before.

“The more I think about that analogy, the more I like it. Young newspaper reporters are as indoctrinated as any religious fundamentalist. Most of them don’t know how to think. They come out of journalism schools believing a good story is any combination of homelessness, AIDS, crack babies, single mothers, and some social program that’s being unfairly cut. It’s formula news, just like romance and science fiction and westerns and gothic—it has to have certain ingredients. Stories have to have a victim, and if there isn’t a real victim you have to find one. People are never lazy and it’s never their fault. It’s always some businessman or landlord or citizens or the community who’s exploiting them or isn’t doing enough. We’re social workers masquerading as journalists.”

Leonard looked at his watch. “We’ve got twenty-five minutes left. I need some coffee, Jake.”

Leonard kept right on talking as he walked toward the lunch room across the massive newsroom, three or four times bigger than the
Trib’s.
Like any newspaper man he was always aware of the clock, always aware of limited space into which the maximum story had to be stuffed.

The two stretched their legs and enjoyed the familiar and comforting environment of the newsroom, the background music for both of their lives. After pouring two cups, Leonard sat on the edge of the Formica countertop, took a sip, and looked at Jake in an almost fatherly way, as if he were talking to a young son about the facts of life.

“Fairness used to be our goal. But now we decide in advance which side deserves to be treated fair. To be fair to the wrong side is actually to do the wrong thing because their values could end up being advanced. And the ‘right side’—we can’t critically analyze them because if we did, some readers might not sympathize with their agenda.”

Leonard looked at a half dozen reporters sitting around the room, a few of whom appeared to have overheard him. Self-consciously he gestured a “Let’s go” to Jake. Clearly he didn’t want others hearing this discussion. That was fine with Jake. Neither did he. Leonard went to the door, heading back toward his office.

“Something on my wall I want to show you.” They reentered Leonard’s office, where he immediately became animated again and led the way to the left of his window, behind his desk. He pointed to some papers thumbtacked to a cork bulletin board.

“Here’s Robert Bazell of NBC. He says, ‘Objectivity is a fallacy. There are different opinions, but you don’t have to give them equal weight.’ Linda Ellerbe says, ‘Any reporter who tells you he’s objective is lying to you.’ Leonard pointed at a statement highlighted in yellow. “Tom Oliphant of the
Washington Post
says, There’s no such thing as objectivity, so there’s no use wasting time striving for it.’

“On the one hand, I applaud their honesty. At least they’re admitting they aren’t objective. But I resent that they’ve given up on objectivity, that they feel no compulsion to even try. Just look at the narrative style of a lot of lead articles, you know, that Gay Talese or Tom Wolfe fiction-feel. It’s like storytelling. When your goal isn’t just to relate the facts but tell a good story, it’s a quick slide from fact to fiction. Reporters know a story has to be engaging and readable but it doesn’t have to be entirely factual. And once you depart from the facts, the writer’s moral prism inevitably refracts the story.”

Leonard wasn’t just responding to Jake’s concerns. He’d been plagued by the same thing, and had given it a great deal more thought.

“There may be no ultimate moral standards, Jake. I really don’t know. But I do know that whenever we go beyond reporting a group of abortion-rights marchers had a march, and then write as if we know their moral cause is right, we’ve ceased to be objective. We’ve become preachers, indoctrinators, propagandists. Just as much as the religious right. We’re not looking for readers, we’re looking for converts. We’re dispensers of doctrine. The committees, like this one you’re on, they’re like little church councils that determine orthodoxy and heresy.”

Jake stood up, wanting to inject a little hope into the dialogue. “We’ve got a guy named Clarence. He’s a real comer. You should hear him, Leonard. He’s a conservative, a black guy. I guess I’m supposed to say African-American now. But Clarence doesn’t care. To him, skin color doesn’t matter one way or the other. They don’t know what to do with him at the
Trib.
He’s sharp, one of the best writers we’ve got and he won’t kiss anybody’s feet, or any other part of their anatomy. It’s hurting his career, but I think he’s too good to be held down. He’s on the Multicultural Committee with me. Actually, he’s the one who makes the meetings worth going to.”

“Hope he sticks it out. A lot of good people just get fed up and leave.” Leonard rubbed what looked like a day’s growth of salt and pepper beard.

“Then there’s the hiring quotas, spoken and unspoken,” Jake added. “The
Trib
committed itself seven years ago to having at least 10 percent homosexuals on staff, and we achieved it, even surpassed it. Then next thing you know the Guttmacher study comes out proving homosexuals are less than 2 percent of the population. So now we’ve got over five times the homosexual representation society does. To be honest, it never bothered me till recently. And it still wouldn’t bother me if it didn’t tilt the
Trib.
But it definitely does.”

Both men instinctively looked at the door, barely ajar. Leonard went over and closed it.

“The philosophy behind all these quotas is the same, Jake. It’s like the only way we can insure fair treatment of every group is to have every group represented. What happens is exactly the opposite. We hire people now not just because they can write well and do good research and are disciplined and energetic, but because they’re part of a certain group. So now it’s like having that group as an in-house censor, telling us what is and is not sensitive, what is and is not acceptable. One of our basic goals in the old journalism was to train writers to separate themselves from their vested interests. Now we hire people precisely because of their vested interests. Some of these people are good reporters, but some are there to make the paper an arm of some cause. And that compromises the integrity of the paper. If they want to go serve their cause, fine, let them join the ACLU or NOW or the Church of the Hokey Pokey or whatever, but get out of journalism!”

Jake recounted to Leonard the story of the rape crisis center piece killed by the
Trib’s
multicultural committee, feeling some shame he hadn’t voted completely with Clarence to let the story stand. “I guess my point is, advocacy doesn’t just happen in writing stories, but in selecting them.”

Leonard nodded. “And you think other reporters don’t get the message? This woman had maybe invested twenty or thirty hours on that story. She probably used some of her own time. Think she’ll do it again? Why bother? Save your investigative skills for something you know will make it in, like scandals in the Salvation Army. It’s censorship with a capital C. Most of it’s self-imposed, but that’s the worst kind of censorship. Why waste your time and energy on a story that’s so politically incorrect it doesn’t have a chance of seeing the light of day? What’s the point?”

“Exactly. I thought the same thing after that meeting.”

“I mean, reporters are only human. We want to be liked. I remember Susan Okie at the
Post.
She wrote a story that wasn’t even about abortion, it was about new methods to save premature babies. Some of the other reporters took her aside and warned her this kind of story wasn’t good for the abortion rights movement. Never mind that it was 100 percent true. Susan said she felt herded back in line.”

“When did all this happen, Leonard? I feel like I’m just catching on.”

“It’s been gradual. The sixties were part of it, of course. Then came Watergate. Everybody hated Nixon. So did I. Then we threw the bum out. And who pulled it off? Two journalists. All of a sudden journalism had a new image, Woodward and Bernstein, or more precisely, Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. Journalists were movers and shakers, shapers of public opinion. Now we had power to dethrone people, to change the shape of politics. I deal with this in one of my lectures. Did you know that in the single decade between 1968 and 1978 enrollment in journalism schools quadrupled? Everybody was a Woodward and Bernstein wannabe. Journalism was no longer showing the world what it was. Now it was making the world what we thought it should be.”