Newspapers Must Be Skeptical, Truthful

Editors of newspapers spend a lot of time pondering what to do next to round up more readers or to keep the ones they have.

That’s a normal and natural part of the job, but it’s been becoming a bit of a bore the last decade or so. You cannot go to an editors conference without coming away with a profound case of the blahs. A terse summary of the situation would say that the shape of communications is open to so many different possibilities that no one has a good sense of just what the future holds.

Consequently, we - as in the editorial “we” - are darting hither and yon, trying this, sampling that and turning to others to define our mission for us. In some circles, a systematic reliance on focus groups and opinion surveys - a part of what has become known as public, or civic, journalism - is pursued as a solution to all that ails the newspaper industry.

If we only give readers what they want, they will want newspapers, the logic of this argument maintains. Newspapers, this argument goes, have become too self-involved, writing and editing for what journalists are interested in, and too inattentive to the public whom newspapers say they wish to serve.

This is the message that is trotted out relentlessly at annual gatherings, so editors have every right to wonder whether their role somehow has been mistaken for that of a marketer of a product or commodity.

A recent American Society of Newspaper Editors meeting in Washington is a case in point.

There seemed to be no way out of the cul-de-sac of once again bemoaning our condition. It was instructive, to the say the least, that the most compelling statement about the mission of journalism came not out of the mouth of a practitioner but from a guest speaker, a person who is not a journalist.

It was left to novelist Salman Rushdie, still under Iranian death threat because he offended fundamental Islamic religious sensibilities, to put the emphasis where it justly belongs.

He said, “The great issue facing both the writers of journalism and of novels is that of determining, and then publishing, the truth.”

Because of radio and television, newspapers no longer are the first source of news they once were. While conveying the first word of news largely has fallen to the electronic media, the responsibility for explaining the news, for setting it in context, has become the province of newspapers and magazines.

Rushdie got to the heart of the matter when he said, “In any vision of a free society, the value of free speech must rank the highest, for that is the freedom without which all the other freedoms would fail.”

He generously added: “Journalists do more than most of us to protect those values.”

But with that last sentiment, he was too kind because, in part, the drive for wider public acceptance is to enshrine so-called community values over the sometimes harsher and less attractive truth.

It is a segment of the good-news syndrome that consciously would redefine reality to make everyone feel better about himself or herself - for the greater good, of course.

The novelist himself saw similar dangers emerging.

“We live in an increasingly censorious age,” he said. “Many special-interest groups, claiming the moral high ground, now demand the protection of the censor. They do so by demanding ‘respect’ for their causes and ideologies, and they range over the political spectrum from anti-pornography feminists to religious fundamentalists.”

He continued: “Very few people would object to the idea that people’s rights to religious belief must be respected, … but now we are asked to agree that to dissent from those beliefs - to hold that they are suspect or antiquated or wrong, that, in fact, they are arguable - is incompatible with the idea of respect.”

It is especially in the concluding words of Rushdie’s formal speech that editors should rediscover what they ought to be talking about with one another when they meet.

“Skepticism and freedom are indissolubly linked, and it is the skepticism of journalists - their show-me, prove-it unwillingness to be impressed - that is perhaps their most important contribution to the freedom of the Free World,” Rushdie said.

“It is the disrespect of journalists - for power, for orthodoxies, for party lines, for ideologies, for vanity, for arrogance, for folly, for pretention, for corruption, for stupidity - … that I urge you all, in freedom’s name, to preserve.”

These, sad to say, are the very qualities that far too many editors and publishers have come to doubt.