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By David Shaw
Los Angeles Times
NEW
YORK, May 8, 2005 — As the list of media miscreants continues
to grow — with the name of a new fabulist or plagiarist added
almost daily, it sometimes seems — the inevitable question
arises: Are there more lazy, careless, duplicitous, dishonest
journalists working today than in earlier generations?
And the companion question: Or are their blunders just easier to
discover and more likely to be disseminated, dissected and disparaged
now, in the era of the blogosphere and the highly competitive 24/7 news
cycle, when everyone who wants to be can be a media critic?
I think it's entirely possible that the answer to both these questions
is yes — albeit a qualified yes to the first question,
because I would certainly not issue a blanket condemnation of today's
journalists.
The vast majority of journalists — today as in yesteryear
— are not Jayson Blairs. They're not lazy, careless,
duplicitous or dishonest. They work hard and do their best to report
the news accurately and fairly, to write the facts as they find them.
In fact, most of today's journalists are better educated and more
ethical than their predecessors, in part because most news
organizations are more likely than in earlier generations to have
strict ethics codes and rules prohibiting conflicts of interest
— real and potential.
So, apart from the bigger, faster, more resonant echo chamber, how to
explain the seeming epidemic of fictionalizing, plagiarism and factual
errors that have sullied the media's reputation in the past few years
— including, I learned on the day I began thinking about this
column, fabricated material in the Tampa Tribune and plagiarism in the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution? There are, I believe, several answers.
When I was a kid, every time I told my dad that I wanted to be a journalist when I grew up, he tried to discourage me.
"You'll never make any money," he said. "Newspapers don't pay. Be a
plumber or an electrician. You'll get a good hourly wage and have a
union to give you job security."
Because I liked to write and to ask questions — and because
my sole electrical/plumbing skills consist of changing a lightbulb and
turning off a water faucet — I ignored my father's advice.
And I've never gotten rich.
But journalism has given me a decent living — and it now
gives many big-city journalists, especially television news anchors and
correspondents and some syndicated columnists — a
far-more-than-decent living. And many are able to parlay the success
and celebrity born of these jobs into even more lucrative careers
writing books and going on the lecture circuit.
Overweening ambition — the appeal, the irresistible lure of
this fame and fortune — must be at least partly responsible
for some of the journalistic malfeasance we've seen of late. I'm no
psychiatrist, but I certainly think it played a role in the serial
fabrications committed by Stephen Glass at the New Republic and Jayson
Blair at the New York Times, to name just two.
Indeed, Hayden Christensen, the actor who portrayed Glass in the movie
"Shattered Glass," attributed the writer's pathological lying in print
to "the amount of pressure Glass felt … to go above and
beyond what his family would expect him to achieve … and
just really kind of loving the taste he got from the first success of
his fabricated article."
Blair and Glass were young — in their mid-20s — and
still relatively inexperienced when they hit the big time (and screwed
up big time). They were reaching for multimedia stardom. Mitch Albom
was 46 and already a big multimedia star — a sports columnist
at the Detroit Free Press for 20 years, the author of two
mega-bestselling books that had been made into TV movies, the host of a
daily radio show — when he screwed up.
I don't think Albom's mistake, as I wrote here two weeks ago, was
anywhere near as bad as those of Blair and Glass. He wrote about two
former Michigan State basketball players who told him they would attend
an NCAA semifinal game that Saturday night to root for their alma
mater. Knowing that his column would appear in the Sunday paper, Albom
wrote about their "attendance" at the Saturday night game in the past
tense. But the Free Press Sunday section in which that column appeared
was actually printed in advance, so when the two players decided not to
go to the game, Albom was left with a published column that described
as fact something that did not happen.
Albom didn't respond to my queries, so I don't know what was going
through his head. But I wouldn't be surprised if part of the
explanation for his mistake (and for mistakes made of late by some
other journalists) derived not, as in the cases of Blair and Glass,
from the desire for fame and fortune but from his already having fame
and fortune, perhaps too much for a workaday journalist.
Maybe he was just careless, too busy with his book writing, radio
hosting, ESPN appearances and the other demands of celebrity to pay
attention to the fundamental rules of journalism. Maybe journalism, and
adherence to its rules, is no longer the first priority for journalists
who become multimedia celebrities.
Three other possible explanations for the recent increase in journalistic blunders leap to mind:
- Competition.
The increasingly fragmented news audience, the 24/7 news cycle, the
omnipresence of cable TV news and the Internet sometimes prompt
journalists to act without thinking. Dan Rather has always been
intensely competitive. It's in his DNA. He would want to be the first
to break a story if there were no Internet or cable TV. But his
awareness of the new competitive environment probably helped push him
to broadcast the now notorious story on George W. Bush's National Guard
service before he'd properly authenticated the documents on which he
based the story.
- Bottom-line corporate pressures.
Declining newspaper circulation and network television news audience
shares create more pressure to do stories that attract attention. At
the same time, editors are often so busy dealing with budgets and
personnel matters to meet the increasingly tough bottom-line demands
from corporate headquarters that they may not spend enough time
supervising reporters and making sure that these attention-getting
stories meet strict standards.
- New journalism.
Some of the stumbles of recent years have come about because the
reporters were trying to make their stories more engaging, more
riveting. As long as the stories remain accurate, that's an admirable
objective. But some journalists have decided that mere facts are too
limiting to their prose style and their imagination.
I
trace this dangerous mind-set to the birth in the 1960s and early '70s
— and the extension today — of what came to be
called new journalism, the application to journalism of the tools and
techniques of fiction: narrative story lines, good pacing, the
depiction of sources and subjects as full-fledged characters, not just
names with titles but protagonists and antagonists complete with
detailed physical descriptions and, sometimes, psychological analyses.
Some practitioners of new journalism — Tom Wolfe and Gay
Talese, to name two — produced brilliant work without
compromising the underlying truth of their stories. But some new
journalists — and some of their spiritual heirs today
— decided they could tell a "larger truth" by inventing
scenes and characters, conflating events, creating composite characters
and re-creating verbatim, on the printed page, conversations that they
had not heard firsthand.
There is no doubt that fictionalization and other mistakes made now are
spotted more quickly and reverberate in the media echo chamber in a way
that was not possible when, say, Rather began his journalistic career
in 1950. Or when I began mine in 1963.
Bloggers, second-guessers and self-styled media critics aside, perhaps
the biggest difference between Then and Now in this regard is the
Poynter Institute's daily online media clearinghouse, known in the
industry as "Romenesko" (for its creator/author Jim Romenesko). Romenesko,
which began as Obscure Store in 1998 and transmogrified into
Mediagossip.com in 1999, picks up, posts and receives comments on
virtually everything of significance (and some not) that happens in the
media today. The Romenesko factor both magnifies small flare-ups and
provides a purchase and a megaphone for large-scale controversies. Many
in the media think, for example, that it was Romenesko's posting of
leaked internal memos, daily developments and e-mail debates among many
interested parties during the Blair scandal at the New York Times that
ultimately led to the ouster of Howell Raines as the paper's executive
editor.
Unfortunately, I think Romenesko will have more opportunities like this
in the future. As newspapers — increasingly threatened by the
Internet and increasingly worried that they're seen as boring and
irrelevant — scramble to attract young readers more
comfortable with the speed, flash and attitude of MTV, videos and the
blogosphere, more reporters may find the temptation to cut corners,
fabricate and dazzle increasingly irresistible.
—
Pulitzer Prize-winner David Shaw is a nationally recognized media
critic with more than 35 years of experience as a reporter and analyst.
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