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Journalism: In Transition, or In Peril?
William Allen White Day, Feb. 11, 2005
Jerry Seib
To the Board of the William Allen White Foundation, faculty
and students of the School of Journalism, other students,
and visitors:
Thank you for this honor. You have hosted here at KU a truly
glittering list of recipients of this award: Walter Cronkite,
George Will, Cokie Roberts and Bob Woodward, and last year
my fellow Kansan Marlin Fitzwater. I was here a few years
ago when my Journal colleague Al Hunt received this award,
and shared vicariously in his day.
I am honored to be in their company. More than that, I am
humbled.
But of all the imposing figures in journalism who grace the
list of William Allen White award winners, I’m sure
there has never been a recipient to whom this honor means
more than it does to me.
Because in honoring me, you honor one of your own--a fellow
Jayhawk, and one whose heart has never really left Lawrence.
A KU plaque hangs in a place of honor in my office in Washington.
The friends I made over in Flint Hall—many of whom have
done me the honor of joining us here today—are more
dear in my heart than any I have made before or since. Nothing
makes me prouder than to say: I am a Jayhawk Journalist.
I haven’t merely come to Lawrence. I have come home.
So let me begin by telling you a story.
It will be 30 years ago this summer when my brother Jeff
and I climbed into my car—a gold-colored Dodge Coronet,
fast-backed, pretty hot stuff at the time—and drove
from my hometown of Hays to Lawrence, traveling east along
I70. We were two Western Kansas rubes trying to sneak
into the big-time via the University of Kansas.
I made two stops that day. I didn’t realize it at the
time, but in so doing I entered the very special family known
as KU journalists. A KU journalist who happened to live in
Hays at the time—Mike Walker of Fort Hays State University—sent
me to meet Larry Knapp and Marla Gleason at University Relations.
Somehow I proved to them that I could write press releases.
So they gave me a job doing just that for the university,
and I knew I could pay the tuition.
Next, at the arrangement of another KU alumnus, John Lee,
then of the Hays Daily News, I went to the William Allen White
School of Journalism. There, I met this gruff, hardnosed young
professor named Susanne Shaw. She gave me a writing test to
see whether the one year I had spent studying journalism at
Fort Hays State had qualified me to bypass Introduction to
Journalism. She must have liked something she saw that day,
because I was indeed moved up into Reporting I. And I surely
liked what I saw, because from that day forward Susanne has
been friend, mentor, and counselor. To many of us, she IS
the William Allen White School of Journalism. She is a treasure,
and I wanted to acknowledge her today.
I went on to meet a remarkable family of teachers and inspirational
figures: a dean, Del Brinkman, who was a rock of integrity
and good judgment; two legendary and inspiring professors,
John Bremner and Calder Pickett; a young professional in residence
named Bob Giles, who we considered cool beyond words and the
ultimate role model; and gifted teachers such as, Rick Musser
and Paul Jess, who became as much friends as teachers. I went
to work for the Daily Kansan, and had so much fun it seemed
sinful.
One day I met a pretty young fellow reporter on the Kansan
who was upset with me because she thought I had stolen a story
off her beat—I hadn’t of course, though you’ll
have to ask her for her version—and I had met my best
friend in life and future wife, Barbara Rosewicz. I got myself
an internship at the Salina Journal, and encountered the legend
of Whitley Austin, father of Dan Austin. Dan is a fellow Jayhawk,
a member of the White board, and soon enough would be my colleague
at The Wall Street Journal. Then, solely because I was from
the William Allen White School of Journalism, The Wall Street
Journal decided to take a chance and hire me as an intern—and
when I arrived for my job in the Journal’s Dallas bureau
I found myself sitting in front of yet ANOTHER Jayhawk, Bob
Simison, who already was with the Journal.
I mention all this at the outset today, not because my own
background is so important or unusual—surely, it is
not--but because I want the journalism students here to know
something that may not be obvious: You are part of a family,
really. You are part of a tradition, and, like me, you stand
on the shoulders of not just William Allen White, but a long
line of gifted and generous forebears who make this a special
place. Do not take them for granted.
Fortified by those who made this a great school, I left Lawrence
and embarked on careers in what I consider the great and honorable
vocation of journalism. I’ve been lucky. I’ve
circled through Dallas, and Washington, and Cairo and back
to Washington for the Journal. I’ve covered wars and
kings and presidents and campaigns, and there have been some
wonderful moments. I remember one day when Barb and I were
sitting in a hotel room in Amman, Jordan, when the phone rang
and someone from the Jordanian palace was on the line wanting
to know whether we could have dinner with the King and Queen
of Jordan that night—just the two of us.
I interviewed Yasser Arafat of the PLO at midnight, which
was pretty much the middle of his working day. I interviewed
Ronald Reagan in his last week in the White House, and remember
him saying that people always had this misperception that
lots of people in Hollywood were divorcing and remarrying
in the 1950s, and that it just wasn’t true—seemingly
oblivious to the fact that he had done exactly that. I first
met the current President Bush in 1987 in an obscure little
office on 14th Street in Washington, where he sat, cowboy
boots on desk and Skoal can handy, starting work on his father’s
presidential campaign. And no, I didn’t think: Some
day this man will be president. He looked a lot more presidential
when we interviewed him again last month.
While I was having all this fun, the profession of journalism
has changed—a lot. There were no online publications
at the outset of my career, because there was no Internet.
There was no CNN because there cable television was an infant.
Dallas, where I worked, had two ferociously battling newspapers,
as did Washington, where I went next.
Technology and the winds of economic change have since roared
through our profession, of course. And it is scary. Those
two-newspaper towns are dying off, and newspapers now compete
not just with television broadcast networks, but with dozens
of cable outlets and hundreds of Internet news sites. Wire
services used to be the only news outlets that worked a 24/7
schedule, but now we all do. The competition is now both elusive
and pervasive. Bloggers now open shop as world-be news producers
with nothing more than a laptop and a broadband connection.
The business model for the news industry has been shaken to
its core, and nobody knows for sure where it goes from here.
When you read that Google—which I hardly think of as
a news outlet—sold more than $3 billion of online advertising
last year, you can’t help but wonder how deep the blow
is for the mainstream news industry.
But there is nothing unusual or inherently frightening about
change. Solid news organizations shouldn’t fear change,
but should embrace it. They should recognize that what we
do is cover, analyze and explain news. The vehicles for delivering
that news and analysis have changed many times before, and
will change yet further. But at its core the practice of journalism
hasn’t.
Indeed, in an era of 260 cable channels and an Internet that
will deliver—and I’m not making this up—9,320,000
hits when you Google “Bush and Social Security,”
sorting through the sea of information and making sense it
will become more important, not less. If journalists are doing
their jobs right, their skills will not only be needed in
the long run, but will be more valuable than ever.
In my own life, I feel this change every day. I now start
out my day every day by appearing on cable television, as
part of the Journal’s cooperative arrangement with CNBC.
During the day we deliver stories not just to Journal editions
in Europe and Asia, but to wsj.com, the Journal’s online
edition, which is the largest paid site on the Internet. Only
at the end of the day do we file stories for the traditional
Wall Street Journal, which remains the foundation of the company.
Barb, meanwhile, has moved from news service reporter to print
reporter to, today, managing editor of an online publication.
It is indeed unsettling that news organizations haven’t
yet figured out the magic business formula to make serious
money publishing news online, but I’m quite sure that
day will come.
So I’m not here to bemoan change. But while change
itself shouldn’t worry us, another trend is afoot that
should be of deep concern. For me, last year--the election
year of 2004--is the year when this troubling trend crystallized.
And the occasion of William Allen White Day is, as I’ll
try to show in a minute, the perfect time to talk about it.
Briefly put, I fear that 2004 became the year when many Americans
decided they could go out and get the news not as it is, but
as they want it to be. Technology and the proliferation of
pseudo news outlets on the Internet and cable TV have made
this possible. Our country’s intense political polarization
has fed the urge. Mainstream journalism’s own failings
have fueled it.
And left unchecked, I think this trend is extraordinarily
dangerous, not merely for journalism. I fear it is dangerous
for our society.
What do I mean, specifically? Well, if you don’t like
the facts as presented by the mainstream press, you now can
cruise around cable television or the Internet and find somebody,
somewhere, who will present the facts not as they are—but
as you WISH they were. If you’re a liberal and you want
to think that John Kerry really won the vote in the state
of Ohio and therefore should have been declared the winner
of last year’s presidential election, you can find somebody
on the Internet masquerading as a journalist who will tell
you it is so. And then you can choose to ignore the findings
of the squadrons of real reporters who dug into that question
and found out otherwise.
If you are a conservative and you want to believe that Democrats
planted votes on electronic voting machines in Pennsylvania,
or broke into Republican party offices, you could find that
last fall too. These things are the kinds of rumors that float
into newsrooms every day, but don’t come out. But now
they are distributed by people who care little, or not at
all, whether there is any evidence to support a charge, or
have no system for checking it out..
Obviously, editorial pages of newspapers have always taken
positions and argued for one side or the other in great national
debates. The great newspaper for which I work has one of the
clearest and most unflinching of all editorial pages. But
I’m talking here about something different. I’m
talking about consciously coloring news to support one side
or the other in national debate.
And that’s only the beginning of the problem. If you
can find comfortable confirmation of your preconceived notions
somewhere, you then feel compelled to attack the mainstream
press for not presenting the news in that same way. Thus liberals
think the press was used by Republicans to hound President
Clinton into impeachment, and has been cowered by relentless
conservative attacks into meekly accepting flawed Bush administration
arguments for going to war in Iraq. Conservatives argue that
the mainstream press is hopelessly liberal in its outlook,
mindlessly in love with big government and taxes, and deaf
to social conservatives’ deeply held beliefs on issues
like abortion.
In this environment, the most basic--even innocuous--facts
are contested. Journalists who risk their lives every day
to report what’s happening on the ground in Iraq find
that their reports are attacked by those who blithely charge,
from their comfortable seats thousands of miles away, that
they are exaggerating the problems in Baghdad. Not long ago
one of my reporters wrote in a story that the Social Security
system will start paying out more in benefits than it takes
in tax revenues in the year 2018—which is a simple fact
according to the objective bean-counters at the Congressional
Budget Office. Yet she was attacked in emails from someone—a
PhD, no less—who charged she was spreading partisan
propaganda to help the Bush administration make its case for
partial privatization of Social Security.
This tendency is exacerbated by a new arrival of those bloggers.
Now, some bloggers do quite good research, and they have in
fact admirably shone light in some dark corners of public
debate-–most notably the controversy over CBS’
notorious story about alleged letters showing President Bush
copped out of National Guard duty. But others are simply crusaders
masquerading as journalists, providing comfort to those looking
not for truth but for confirmation of preconceived prejudices
and notions.
The task of journalism is to convey information honestly,
not to confirm pre-existing prejudices. Real journalism is
harder and less comfortable than the fake kind. That’s
precisely why democracy has depended upon it.
So we’re now on the edge of a dangerous slope. With
economic pressures high right now, we in the mainstream press
will be—indeed, already are—tempted to play to
the crowd and package the news to please one side or the other.
If cynical activists think nobody is really objective anyway,
the path of least resistance is to please one side or the
other—the right or the left, conservative or liberal—by
providing it what it wants. Then nobody will be playing it
straight.
And if that happens, society will lose is the notion that
there is objective truth. Can anybody believe that the national
debate will be better off if Fox News is viewed as the network
of the right, say, and The New York Times the newspaper of
the left? In that world, what happens to the very concept
of straight news? What happens to journalism’s important
if unenviable task of telling citizens uncomfortable truths
that they may not want to hear, but need to know?
Some will argue that there’s nothing wrong with this
trend, and they will make two arguments. First, they will
say that this is nothing new—in fact, that it merely
takes journalism back to a model that exists today in much
of Europe, and one that existed earlier in this country’s
history, where newspapers were openly partisan voices of one
party or another.
In fact, some will say that this is the way the news business
was in the day of William Allen White. But a closer look at
his career puts the lie to that notion. In preparation for
today, I re-read the Autobiography of William Allen White
and it’s quite instructive on this point. When William
Allen White took his first full-time job in the newspaper
business, it was in Eldorado, Kansas, and it was indeed a
time when papers were openly partisan, in their news pages
as well as their editorial pages. Indeed, in Eldorado there
was one newspaper called the Eldorado Democrat and another
called the Eldorado Republican, and they were what their names
implied—papers published on behalf of the parties. William
Allen White, being a Republican, went to work for that one.
But in the ensuing years, Mr. White came to see this as a
deeply flawed model for the kind of public-spirited journalism
he came to embody. He went to work for a truly great newspaper,
The Kansas City Star, and was shaped by the example its great
owner, Col. William Rockhill Nelson. As Mr. White later wrote:
“He had no more use for corrupt Democrats than he had
for corrupt Republicans. He was absolutely independent politically,
and in every other way I knew. My admiration for him rose,
and I tried to make his ways my ways.”
By time Mr. White bought his own paper, the Emporia Gazette,
he wrote in his first editorial to his readers that he would
support Republicans on the editorial page, but that political
leanings would stop there. Politics, he wrote “will
be confined to the editorial page—where the gentle reader
may venture at his peril…The editor will do his best.
He has no axes to grind He is not running the paper for a
political pull.” And indeed, while William Allen White
played in politics all his life, he stayed true to his pledge
to be first and foremost an honest newsman.
Putting aside history, some will say that the idea of impartial,
objective journalism always has been a myth, or at least a
mirage. Press critics will say there is no such thing as real
objectivity. Reporters always bring their personal prejudices
into their writing, they will argue.
And let’s be honest—we in the mainstream press
have fed this belief with our own shortcomings over the years.
We need to admit that there has too often been a liberal slant,
consciously or unconsciously, in our presentation of news
over the last generation. Every time we have blithely referred
to right-wing extremists without stopping to think that we
never refer to left-win extremists, we’ve fed the sense
on the right that the media deck is stacked against them.
Every time we dismiss or ridicule the arguments of good, honest
people who think abortion is a moral wrong, we undermine our
credibility in the eyes of a broad swath of largely silent
Americans.
By the same token, anybody who thinks all the tilting has
been to the left should have the chance to listen to former
President Clinton bitterly complain about the press treatment
he received in the 1990s, as I have, and to read the emails
I now receive referring to the mainstream press as lapdogs
of the Bush administration.
But I have always believed that if mainstream journalism
is colored by anything, it’s been colored more by the
lust to find controversy and conflict, than by a partisan
agenda. And if we’ve failed in the past, is that an
argument for throwing in the towel—for simply surrendering
our public trust to serve not one side or the other in political
debate, but to serve the broader public?
I think not.
What an objective, neutral press can do that nobody else
can is this: It can shine a light on dark corners of our public
life, and do so with credibility. I have spent some considerable
hours in recent weeks helping assemble the Journal’s
nominations for this year’s Pulitzer Prizes, and I’ve
never been more proud of our news coverage, nor more convinced
of the need for tough and honest reporting. This was especially
true of our coverage of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal.
While others, including bloggers, put out the first photos
of abuse, we went deeper. We broke both the story of a Red
Cross that detailed the extent of the abuse at Abu Ghraib,
and the story of internal administration memos that laid out
a legal case to justify the use of torture. Taken together,
those stories caused not just the administration but the country
to stop and rethink its direction on this important subject.
Such information would never have made it into print in an
honest and believable way if not for the honest reporting
of our objective journalists.
So what do we do to keep that kind of press alive and thriving
in the changed environment I’ve described? Far from
conceding, we need to redouble our efforts to show our objectivity
and independence and credibility. Far from buckling under
to intimidation from one side or another, we need to show
courage.
We need to believe that in the long run, the broad swath
of the American public will hunger for an institution that
can sort through political charges and ideological broadsides,
and find the underlying truth. In an era of information overload
and political hyper-ventilation, this role as honest broker
will become more important, not less important. In short,
we need to do our own jobs right, and trust the American people
to appreciate it if we do so. Let us take solace from the
fact that one of the most popular web sites last year was
named, simply, factcheck.org, and its sole mission was to
do honest fact-checking of political claims by one side or
the other.
But we also need to learn something from those bloggers.
Let’s use technology to stay in better touch with our
readers. Let’s use it to give our journalism the same
sense of immediacy and urgency. We all either will embrace
change, or get run over by it.
There is no doubt that this is a time of unease, of soul-searching,
of doubt in the journalism profession. My friend Ellen Hume,
formerly of the Journal and now at the Center on Media and
Society at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, felt compelled
to start a recent essay in Nieman Reports with this simple
sentence: “Journalism will survive.”
I, too, believe, journalism will survive, and, yes, thrive.
Let us have faith in our mission, even as we explore the ways
technology and an information avalanche can make traditional
journalism not only more relevant, but more important.
We can take solace in the words William Safire of the New
York Times wrote a few weeks ago. In a column headlined: “The
Depressed Press,” he walked through the challenges our
profession faces. “Cheer up,” he advises. “Mainstream
journalism has a future.” He explained: “On national
or global events…the news consumer needs trained reporters
on the scene to transmit facts and trustworthy editors to
judge significance….Clean government needs a snooping
adversary, not a cheerleader. The Outs need help from the
press to hold the Ins accountable…Pulitzer-quality journalism
lies just ahead.”
Thank you.
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