The Willow Glen Resident

Point of View

Carl Heintze

A proud calling wallows in trash

I have to confess that I was once a newspaper reporter. I also have to confess that I felt good about it. I was, in fact, proud of it. But lately, sitting sort of on the sidelines of what sometimes is called the newspaper game, I've been feeling, sadly, somewhat differently. And I have been wondering why.

For awhile I thought the problem lay in television reportage, something that was just coming into full flower when I got out of the business.

But then those paragons of journalistic virtue, the New York Times and the Washington Post dealt in the Monica Lewinsky affair and in what I can only call trash journalism, and I wasn't as sure as I had been about my pride of profession.

I hope I'm not harking back to the good old days simply because I am growing old, but I think what's happened to American journalism is more than a difference in time. I think it is a difference in attitude and responsibility.

I also think it is the result of several factors.

Television is certainly one of them. Most people get their news from television, not newspapers. Television all too often treats news as spectacle. It deals mostly in news which is visually dramatic, forgetting that important news is no less important just because there's no eye-popping footage to go along with the story.

Television news is a hungry monster. It now encompasses CNN, the Fox network and the three other "old" networks--some of which deal in "news" all day and all night--not to mention such trash as Larry King, Hard Copy, American Journal and their ilk, which grab the titillating scraps from the regular news table and gobble them up.

Television reportage is centered, for various reasons, in Washington, D.C. (I know CNN is headquartered in Atlanta, but it is a Washington- oriented news system, and New York doesn't count all that much any more.)

Television news constantly seeks ratings, something newspapers did not do when they existed by themselves. To get higher ratings, to gain viewership, television news must consistently find ever newer and more dramatic stories to tell, even, alas, at the expense of exaggeration or untruth.

The recent CNN-Time nerve gas fiasco is an example, but this kind of thing is not confined any more to television. Witness the Chiquita banana mess in Cincinnati recently and the not-yet-forgotten apology by the San Jose Mercury-News over supposed Central American-CIA cocaine links.

Everyone wants to get a bigger and better story with visual effects to keep readers and viewers or just stay in the public eye. There's nothing wrong with getting a big story, but there's a lot wrong with getting a big story that's not really a story at all. There is even more wrong with getting stories which are untrue.

Even William Randolph Hearst, certainly no paragon of virtue in the newspaper "game," had as his motto: "Get it first, but first get it right."

Finally, there is what I call the Woodward-Bernstein syndrome. Forever after Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward took down President Nixon (although we now tend to forget they didn't do it by themselves), up and coming reporters have accepted as truth that someday they'll be able to bring about a story as big as the impeachment of the President of the United States.

That certainly echoes through a lot of the coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. Setting aside for the moment the truth or lack of it in that mess, suffice it to say that deposing a president is something likely to happen only once or twice in a century. Managing it single-handedly is less and less likely.

So where does this leave us?

Well, for one thing, badly in need of a reassessment and reconsideration of how the news is to be reported, what news really is and what reporters are supposed to be. Though it is unlikely that the television news media will mend its ways rapidly or that reporters, especially those in Washington, are going to stop trying to be television stars, the networks and newspapers need to reform themselves before someone else does it for them.

Reporting the news is an awesome responsibility, a task not to be taken lightly. It ought to be something pursued with guts and not for glory but for the achievement of having been fair and honest. It ought to be a calling a cut above those about whom reporters report. It ought to have integrity. Above all, it ought to be the truth.

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