On Monday, I discussed some of the background in the ongoing journalistic argument about the tactics used by James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles in their ACORN takedowns, first released here at Big Government. This is part two of that discussion.
Since the freewheeling days of the 1920s celebrated in The Front Page, there has been a profound shift in the way journalists view themselves and their societal role. We might locate its origins in the 1947 report by the Commission on the Freedom of the Press, known today as Hutchins Commission after its chairman, Robert M. Hutchins, of the University of Chicago, and funded by Henry Luce of Time Inc. In answer to the question, “is the freedom of the press in danger,” the commission answered yes, and issued “five ideal demands”:
1) A truthful, comprehensive, and intelligent account of the day’s events in a context which gives them meaning.
2) A forum for the exchange of comment and criticism.
3) The projection of a representative picture of the constituent groups in the society. (“The Commission holds to the faith that if people are exposed to the inner truth of the life of a particular group, they will gradually build up respect for an understanding of it.”)
4) The presentation and clarification of the goals and values of the society.
5) Full access to the day’s intelligence.
The high-minded commissioners were dissatisfied with the grubby, dirty business of shoe-leather newsgathering (“Those who direct the machinery of the press have engaged from time to time in practices which the society condemns and which, if continued, it will inevitably undertake to regulate or control”) and sought to comb its hair, shine its wingtips and take it out for a night on the town.
I think you can begin to see where the problem lies, and where our conversation picks up.
Calls for the professionalization of journalism, – or even the governmental control thereof — go back even farther, to Walter Lippmann’s 1922 book, Public Opinion. Lippmann, a radical socialist in his youth who stepped from Harvard (of course) into journalism via his mentor, the muckraking Lincoln “I Have Seen the Future, and It Works” Steffens, also drifted in and out of government (think of him as the George Stephanopoulos of his day), serving as an assistant to the Secretary of War, as the Secretary of Defense was then called, and in other capacities. But he made his mark, and his career, as one of the original pundits, first at the New York World and later at the New York Herald Tribune, where his column “Today and Tomorrow” was required reading, the way Walter Winchell’s radio program was required listening.
After examining the deficiencies of the press, Lippmann declared: “… analysis of the nature of news and of the economic basis of journalism seems to show that the newspapers necessarily and inevitably reflect, and therefore, in greater or lesser measure, intensify, the defective organization of public opinion. My conclusion is that public opinion must be organized for the press if they are to be sound, not by the press.”
To me, those words remain as chilling today as they when I first read them years ago. Organized for the press? Surely, Lippmann would be proud today to see MSM and MSNBC pundit/parrots like Howard Fineman, Jon Meacham, Evan Thomas and Jacob Weisberg – whose unintentionally hilarious piece in Slate the other day on “Obama’s Brilliant First Year” stunned liberals and conservatives alike with its sheer lickspittle delusionality – happily chirping away on shows like Morning Joe. But the rest of us might prefer a little more independence of thought. Further, the ongoing decline of printed newspapers and magazines has even led some to call for the subsidization of the press by the government – a prospect that ought to have every First Amendment patriot up in arms.
And this is, I believe, the heart of the disagreement. Is “journalism” a profession, in the same way science medicine or the law is, given to grave, bonze-like chin-pulling and an inside-the-Beltway search for “consensus?” Thanks to “Climategate,” we’re all witnessing right now where that leads, as the monstrous scam known as “global warming” has been exposed for the malevolent shakedown racket that it is. Hide the decline!
Or is reporting a craft, a calling, a game that anyone and any number can play once you master a few simple storytelling rules (mostly having to do with the way a news story is constructed), without a government license, a journalism degree or even a “legitimate” media gig?
I come down on the “craft” side of the ledger. When I got my first job, on the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, the managing editor asked: “Have you ever studied journalism?” When I replied that there were no journalism courses at the Eastman School of Music, where I had studied composition, history and piano, he smiled. “Good. Now you don’t need to unlearn anything.” A few months later, I was on the police beat and on my way to a first prize in reporting, shared with two D&C colleagues, in the 1972 New York State Publishers Association contest for a series on heroin. Prior to taking over as the paper’s classical music critic the next year, I covered floods, fires, spectacular (and very gruesome) murders, and federal court. Later, on the San Francisco Examiner, I found myself in the middle of the “White Night” riots that followed the Dan White trial in San Francisco; at the second eruption of Mt. St. Helens in Washington State: and, for Time, at the fall of the Berlin Wall. The point being that if I could do it, anybody can do it.
In retrospect, several factors came into play in the 1970s, all of which contributed to the current image of the “professional journalist.” One was the changeover from manual typewriters, clattering teletype machines and clangorous presses to the current buttoned-down, insurance-office atmosphere that prevails in increasingly silent (because increasingly empty) newsrooms. Even on the most routine day, there was a sense of excitement in the newsroom: the shouts of “copy!” to summon the copyboys (the old shout of “boy!” had been retired, for obvious reasons); the curses of the reporters as they ripped sheets of triplicate out of their typewriters, wadded them up and launched them toward an already overflowing wastepaper basket, only to crank up a fresh sheet and start pounding the Smith-Corona again; the clang of the linotype machines in the composing room and the hammering of type on the plates; the rumble in the bowels of the building at two o’clock in the morning as the presses started their run and spit out the bulldog edition.
More important was Watergate, during which reporters learned that they could bring down a president; idealists and ideologues who had formally considered the law as an instrument of social change realized that the Washington Post was a quicker ticket to reform, fame and fortune than the Southern Poverty Law Center. Before Watergate, hardly anybody knew a reporter’s name; after Woodward and Bernstein (full disclosure: Carl is a former colleague and friend), it was a straight shot to Celebrity Journalism, in which one’s opinion about the news was as newsworthy, if not more so, than the actual news itself, viz: the McLaughlin Group, Reliable Sources, and the Fox All-Stars.
Still, the old fighting, working-class spirit lived on for a while. So let’s hop back in the Wayback Machine and fly back to Old Chicago – Chicago, 1978, that is, when some enterprising editors and reporters at the Chicago Sun-Times, led by reporter Pamela Zekman and editor Jim Hoge, opened the Mirage Bar on the Near North Side.
This was no ordinary watering hole: it was a sting operation, designed to do one thing, expose corruption in America’s most corrupt city, and it did it well. Like ants to a picnic, the faux tavern immediately attracted a host of Windy City municipal inspectors who happily overlooked (deliberate) code violations in exchange for a greased palm.
Posing as repairmen, Sun-Times photographers recorded everything from a hidden loft. As Time Magazine put it:
Cheating was not restricted to public officials. Six local accountants taught the proprietors how to save taxes by hiding income. But the best teacher was a “Mr. Fixit” named Philip Barasch. Unaware of the investigators’ true identity, Barasch, a big Chicago landlord and self-styled “business broker,” guided them every step of the way, telling them the hour inspectors would show up and the exact amount to give them (with Barasch’s business card enclosed). The only officials he did not advise bribing were police because, he said, “if you pay off a cop, they keep coming around every month, like flies, looking for a payoff.”
The Mirage was the most famous Chicago journalistic sting, but not the only one. Chicago newspapers routinely infiltrated reporters into suspected rackets – spec stings, you might call them – such as morgues, ambulance companies and prisons, anyplace where graft and corruption might well be found. Was there “probable cause?” In a court of law, probably not. In the court of public opinion – are you kidding?
True, not everybody in journalism approved. Ben Bradlee, the editor of the Washington Post, famously dinged the Sun-Times’s shot at a Pulitzer in 1979, saying: “In a day in which we are spending thousands of hours uncovering deception, we simply cannot deceive. How can newspapers fight for honesty and integrity when they themselves are less than honest in getting a story?”
That, however, was the post-Watergate Bradlee talking, basking in his heroic portrayal by Jason Robards in All the President’s Men with Nixon’s scalp still dangling from his belt. And yet it was the same Ben Bradlee who, in 1971, sent Ben H. Bagdikian, under a false identity, inside the Huntingdon State Correctional Facility in Pennsylvania for five weeks to write an eight-part series called “The Shame of the Prisons.”
Contemporary reporters use the hidden-camera tactic all the time. Indeed, NBC’s Dateline show – the home of To Catch a Predator – boasts openly about it, for example here, in a story about sweatshops in Bangladesh (“With our hidden cameras we’ll find out who sews those pants, and under what conditions”); here, in a story about insurance agents taking advantage of befuddled seniors (“Join us in a ground-breaking hidden-camera investigation, as we go behind the scenes to uncover the techniques they use: inside sales meetings — where we catch the questionable pitches; inside training sessions — where we discover agents being taught to scare seniors; and, finally, inside senior’s homes to reveal the tricks some agents use to puff their credentials to make a sale”) and – oops! – here when they got caught sneaking a mole into a computer-hackers conference (“DefCon security on Friday warned attendees at the annual hacker conference that Dateline NBC may have sent a mole with a hidden camera to the event to capture hackers admitting to crimes. DefCon says it was tipped off by their own mole at Dateline who sent them a pic of the undercover journalist who DefCon employees identified as producer Michelle Madigan.”)
In this, Dateline is only following in the hallowed footsteps of CBS’s 60 Minutes, which not only employed hidden cameras as it unhorsed various squirming miscreants, but indulged in checkbook journalism as well, notoriously paying for interviews with Eldridge Cleaver, G. Gordon Liddy and Nixon henchman H.R. Haldeman. The 60 Minutes ethos was captured in this portrait of the late Don Hewitt, the show’s producer, in Rolling Stone:
Take a recent Thursday afternoon, for example, when Hewitt pointed to a television set in his office and said, “Watch this. You won’t believe it.”
We both stare at the tube as Mike Wallace appears and informs us that the following piece is “not ordinary family fare,” the kind of “warning” that makes it impossible to turn off your set.
The piece is called “Kiddy Porn,” and it is vintage 60 Minutes: a gut-grabbing story featuring sleazy characters and shot with hidden cameras.
Sleazy characters? Hidden cameras? Sound familiar? (For a good roundup of the pros and cons of hidden cameras, go here).
In his recent piece in the L.A. Times, media writer James Rainey argues from authority as he advises his readers not to call what O’Keefe and Giles did journalism, citing the Society of Professional Journalists’s guidelines on the subject. So, as long as we’re arguing from authority, let’s check out the widely used textbook, Journalism Ethics by Philip Seib and Kathy Fitzpatrick (Harcourt Brace, 1997), in which we find these rules concerning undercover journalism:
* Undercover efforts should be undertaken only as a last resort, when conventional reporting techniques have been tried and failed
* The story should be of vital public interest.
Given that the MSM has thus far shown a profound disinterest in investigating an organization with a decidedly hinky past featuring embezzlement at the highest levels (the sum has since been reported as up to $5 million) that is also closely tied to president Barack Obama, you’d think the “fiercely independent” MSM would be all over allegations against the many-headed hydra. But no: since ACORN disguises itself as a defender of the poor, it gets a pass. And as for “vital public interest,” the organization was recently de-funded by Congress, for crying out loud, although the ever-reliable attorney general, Eric Holder, has managed to find a way around the ban.
Because, believe it or not, there was a time when the media challenged the government, instead of acting as (in Andrew Breitbart’s phrase) part of the “Democrat-Media Complex.” There was a time when the media stood up for the real Forgotten Man (read Amity Shlaes’s brilliant book), who was neither an elected official nor a picturesque beggar but the poor schnook caught in the middle, the man who paid his taxes and got almost nothing in return – except the privilege of supporting Democrat constituencies indefinitely.
So it seems only reasonable to ask just who Mr. Rainey considers a model journalist. Luckily, he’s already provided us with the answer: TMZ’s Harvey Levin:
My 1st Amendment hero brings close-up photos of celebrity rear ends to the world, under the witty, witty headline “Beach Bums.” My 1st Amendment hero delivers us the news any time someone famous looks fat, drunk or plain gaga. My 1st Amendment hero posts Mini-Me’s sex tape and treats the Kardashians as if they were America’s first family. And my hero also lands real scoops that the rest of the media, including this newspaper, would love to have. Yes, Harvey Levin is my 1st Amendment hero, and I’m not (that) embarrassed to admit it.
Thanks for sharing!
Rather than being the first of a new breed, Woodward and Bernstein were, in many ways, the last of the old breed, before reporters became journalists and the search for the facts became overwhelmed by the desire to appear on television. Far from chasing tabloid trash and calling it news, today’s citizen-reporters are instead a throwback to an older, better kind of newshound, the kind of guy who couldn’t be bought, and whom corrupt officials and organizations rightly feared. We all have our First Amendment heroes, and mine is symbolized by this guy:
That’s the great Cagney, as Frank Ross in Each Dawn I Die, one of the hundreds of slice-of-life movies made by Warner Bros. in the 1930s. Not for Warner’s were the larger-than-life, impossibly glamorous heroes of the other studios, especially MGM. Rather, Warner’s scripts – and stars – were drawn from the same milieu: the streets. Cagney’s Ross is a two-fisted newspaperman trying to get the goods on a corrupt gubernatorial candidate; when we first meet him, he’s literally sneaking around, spying on the bad guys as they destroy evidence in advance of an investigation his stories have provoked – hello, ACORN!
Ross, however, is framed for vehicular manslaughter and sent up the river, where he makes an uneasy alliance with a big-time gangster, “Hood” Stacey, played by George Raft. It all ends in a blaze of gunfire during a prison riot, in which Stacey dies a noble death, Ross is cleared and the crooked governor gets what’s coming to him.
Sure, “Frank Ross” was a fictional character, but he was emblematic of hundreds, maybe thousands of reporters like him, driven by a burning sense of justice and fair play. They picked their teeth with scuzzy pols and gold-plated rackets, and they didn’t much give a damn how they did it. They had no time for high-toned moralizing or a Code of Ethics handed down by a bunch of bigdomes. They already had a code, the code of Get the Story. We could use more of them today.
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