Examining Warts On Journalism

For the American press it has been a fun few days, with Connie Chung to kick around. And the press, print and electronic, was also able to get a delicious dividend - the glow of showing that it could so be real critical of journalistic practice.

Chung says she thought everybody would know she was being playful when she told Newt Gingrich’s mother that her answer about what he said about Hillary Rodham Clinton would be “between you and me.” After all, not only were the mike and camera lights on but earlier in the interview Chung and Kathleen Gingrich had jokingly “whispered” an exchange about Gingrich being born a Yankee and Chung said she wouldn’t tell anybody.

So the part about Mrs. Clinton does not seem a journalistic entrapment when seen on the full tape of the broadcast, as it does on the widely shown excerpts that omitted the “Yankee” whispers. Still, Gingrich’s mother may have had no idea that the Clinton comment would be broadcast along with the rest - even though she did repeat it for the CBS “American Journal” program a few days later.

Anyway, as the press attacks a breach of confidence that a little inquiry shows may not have taken place, here’s a stunning thought. Maybe the episode could inspire us to look at a few malpractices we do know are committed every day in the year, including the peculiar ways of a new branch of the craft.

I am hardly a press flagellator, having spent a lifetime in the news business and blessing the day I started, but I can’t pretend I do not see what I do see:

The exploding movement in newspapers, magazines and TV toward the specialized form of garbage collection known as gossip.

The “Gee, Dad, they did it first” syndrome - picking up damaging, unsubstantiated stories from gutter press and TV.

The foul spread of unnecessary and deliberate cruelty and meanness.

And across the country the increasing politicization of news by editorialization in the news columns.

I do not understand why mainstream editors and publishers, except those of a few circulation-frantic tabloids, permit any of these journalistic deformations to flourish. In time, trends toward editorialization, gossip or dirt meanness are picked up by readers and advertisers. Out the window then go the three basic items that make up the stock in trade of a newspaper or magazine: trust, trust, trust.

Most of the things that bother me I have complained about before and will again. But something else has crept up on journalism. It is particularly dangerous to the print press, but it happens on TV - the networks every Sunday and CNN every day.

On these programs, specified print journalists hire out to play specified political roles. A couple always perform as the show’s conservatives, a couple as its liberals.

They interview real politicians, asking questions usually designed to make liberal or conservative points, to put a liberal or conservative squeeze on the guest or get a liberal-conservative screaming exhibition going panel-wide. Between questions they fight among themselves, giving each other liberal or conservative digs.

Some of the journalists write from a liberal or conservative point of view consistently. Others did not take up their ideological positions publicly until they appeared as regulars on the shows; they may have been a bit of a surprise to their editors. In either case, press brothers and sisters, the question is the same: This is journalism?

Print reporters and columnists originally appeared on TV news shows to talk or ask questions straight. The assumption was that their expertise would bring out interesting information, not concentrate on their own political beliefs. On some shows, like “Meet the Press,” that is still usually true, for reporters and for columnists like William Safire and David Broder.

But on the sock-‘em-rock-‘em liberalconservative confrontations like CNN’s or the NBC McLaughlin Sunday show, the viewer sees print columnists and reporters surrender any acceptable journalistic role, to cavort around flailing at each other with the clappers of their ritual political rages.

Sometimes I wonder, as I watch, or click away in embarrassment, what the public thinks of journalists and journalism when they see this kind of paid, staged ideological brawl. But I guess I know.

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