Here's the thing about today's media, at least from the perspective of someone who's been a part of it for more than four decades.
It's lazy. And it lacks courage.
Let's take lazy first. It is an axiom of both public relations and political consulting that the easier you make it for reporters, the more they'll like you and the more they'll say good things about you. Seems contrary to what journalists are supposed to be, of course, but in the main it's true. (There are always exceptions and there are truly courageous, remarkable reporters still working in mainstream journalism — Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe comes to mind, for instance.)
Why did John McCain become a media darling in 2000? He had an easily-understandable hero story, and he brought the media hoards onto his bus to talk face to face. The more relaxed the candidate, the more conversational, the easier the stories are to gather — at least for some reporters. That general laziness is what makes the inside-the-beltway D.C. pool a bunch of stenographers. And listen, this is the pot calling the kettle here, to be perfectly honest. I have been, in my day, a remarkably lazy journalist but it passed as I matured — at least I hope it passed and I think it has. So I realize I might be throwing rocks that could well be thrown back, but that doesn't change the basic truth of this laziness crisis.
When laziness is fed by timidity, you have a bad combination and you also have a reporter who ought to be in another line of work. Sometimes it takes courage to look a bad guy in the face — or a good guy, for that matter — and ask a tough question. It takes special courage when that person is a high-ranking government official, or the President of the United States.
But a free press depends on the willingness of reporters to ask those tough questions. And when was the last time you saw that willingness on display at presidential press conference? (Again, there are exceptions. David Gregory can be one of them at times, but you dance with a presidential advisor, you risk your credibility.)
David Halberstam was a reporter's reporter and, by definition, a courageous person, too. Here's what he said was his proudest moment at a journalist:
"By the fall of 1963, I was one of a small group of reporters in Saigon — we had enraged Washington and Saigon by filing pessimistic dispatches on the war. In particular, my young colleague, Neil Sheehan, and I were considered the enemy. The President of the United States, JFK, had already asked the publisher to fire me.
"One day that fall, there was a major battle in the Delta (the Americans were not yet in a full combat role; they were in an advising and support role). MACV — the American Military Command — tried to keep all reporters out so they could control the information. Neil and I spent the day pushing hard to get there — calling everyone, including Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and General Paul Harkins. With no luck, of course.
"In those days, the military had a daily late afternoon briefing given by a major or a captain, called the "Five O'Clock Follies" because of the generally low value of the information. On this particular day, the briefing was different, given not by a major but by a major general, Dick Stilwell, the smoothest young general in Saigon. Picture, if you will, a rather small room about the size of a classroom, with about 10 or 12 reporters there in the center of the room. And in the back, and outside, some 40 military officers, all of them big time brass. It was clearly an attempt to intimidate us.
"General Stilwell tried to take the intimidation a step further. He began by saying that Neil and I had bothered General Harkins and Ambassador Lodge and other VIPs, land we were not to do it again. Period.
"And I stood up, my heart beating wildly — and told him that we were not his corporals or privates, that we worked for The New York Times and UP and AP and Newsweek, not for the Department of Defense. I said that we knew that 30 American helicopters and perhaps 150 American soldiers had gone into battle and the American people had a right to know what happened. I went on to say that we would continue to press to go on missions and call Ambassador Lodge and General Harkins, but he could, if he chose, write to our editors telling them that we were being too aggressive, and we were pushing too hard to go into battle. That was certainly his right.
"So: Never let them intimidate you. Never. If someone tries, do me a favor and work just a little harder on your story. Do two or three more interviews. Make your story even better."
That little speech by Halberstam was given to students and staff at the Columbia School of Journalism in 2005. It ought to be required reading for not just journalism students, but every journalist still on the job.
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