The Newspaper Man is Defunct - Part 20

By TRB

One way you could always tell you were working on a big story was when the TV news guys called you. Thinking back on it now, it was a kind of confession on their part that they were not real journalists, but rather news readers. They would often call reporters for details on a story. Some would even nag you like you were some kind of public-funded institution with a legal obligation to tell them everything you knew. I don't know why I didn't tell them all to go to hell. But I was young. And they were something new to our business: "news celebrities."

When I think about it, that's another indicator of when it all began to go down hill,

You can see it back around the time when journalists discovered "fairness" and "balance" wrapped neatly in gold foil somewhere out in back of the Journalism Department at the University of Maryland, after the investigative journalism era fell on it's sometimes terribly inaccurate sword. That was not the way it was supposed to go.

After the Washington Post destroyed the Nixon presidency with stories written by the equivalent of what would have been called "cub reporters" just 30 years earlier, reporters around the country couldn't wait to get involved in this new kind of undercover journalism, using "sources" and generally behaving like a spy. I knew a fellow reporter who wouldn't even tell us where he lived. And I thought I was weird.

You needed it all back then in the early seventies. Sources had to be cultivated. You needed someone inside virtually every city department, someone you could trust who would tell you if something was up, if someone was about to be fired, or got his hand caught in the till. You had to have everything first.

Well, you always had to have everything first, and in most ways you still do. But back when city rooms were spilling over with journalists calling themselves "investigative reporters," you really had to have it first. The competition was great; the pressure was unrelenting. And for a time it seemed like we just weren't going to have regular reporters anymore. It was almost like we'd turned into some kind of journalistic police corps.

Frankly, I could only take it in small doses, and then only when it was staffed with senior reporters who double and triple checked everything, and even then it was still "alleged."

I don't know if we were innocent back then or if we were just a little too anti-establishment. Hell, a lot of us had been hippies just a few years back. And we had a high number of eccentrics in our ranks. I knew a reporter who was convinced Boston Mayor Kevin White was corrupt. But he couldn't prove it. He had sources all over the place in City Hall just waiting for White to trip up once. I believe White even did make a few bad decisions in his time. But bad decisions are one thing, corruption is another.

Looking back now, I believe, in many instances, we, the journalists, were more corrupt in our thinking than the people we were investigating. First of all, you can never go after someone just because you "think" he might have done something wrong. But it seemed that some reporters were doing that. That was bad journalism. It is very true that if a newspaper accuses someone of something on the first page one day, it can't take it back on the last page the next.

Publishers and lawyers killed the investigative reporter. You have to understand their roles at the newspaper to know why it would be in their best interests to do this. The Publisher is the owner of the paper, that's all. He is to a newspaper what a producer is to a motion picture. The Publisher is the money man. Sometimes he's an editor and a reporter too but that's usually confined to the very small weekly town papers. Generally, the big city dailies have always had a publisher whose interests are less about the news and more about whether the paper is making any money.

Newspapers were making money. There was no internet. There was no real competition from local television news. We were the news.

Then corporations and individuals began to fight some of those investigative series that had appeared in various newspapers. The sad thing is, they were not even winning many of the libel or slander suits. They had figured something out. Something the newspapers already knew because the legal departments had talked to the publishers and had told them. "If they begin to file suit, all bets are off."

When a newspaper was sued, all it could do was line up as many expensive lawyers as possible and win the suit, which they quite often did. But "win" can be interpreted in other ways too. For example, how much money did the newspaper lose fighting that suit brought against it? Believe me, newspapers lost big, and the more people sued the more legal services began to show up on the bottom line.

And that is when the whole thing came to a screeching halt. "Fairness" and "balance" became the new code words. It seemed you could write something bad about a corporation as long as you balanced it out with something good. At least you were less likely to be sued, Some of the stories you wrote now were actually read by the newspaper's lawyers first. Paranoia prevailed.

Mike Wallace and "60 Minutes" started things rolling in 1982 when their correspondent, Wallace aired a piece entitled, "The Vietnam Deception - The Uncounted Enemy." In the piece Wallace, a very confrontational reporter charged that MAC V Commander General William Westmoreland was lying to his superiors in the U.S. about the number of American deaths in Vietnam, providing them with low numbers that were inaccurate. Westmoreland immediately sued CBS for libel.

TV Guide followed this up with a report on the CBS "60 Minutes" show that indicated it was done in a sloppy manner, that figures were not collected in the proper way. That the show was edited to make Westmoreland look like he was lying. Several days before the suit was due to go to court Westmoreland and "60 Minutes" made a joint announcement that Westmoreland was a patriot soldier and a good man. It is believed they even gave him a bundle of money. Many also believe that if he had taken them to court, he would have won.

"60 Minutes" itself seemed to change overnight. The once confrontational Wallace became far less confrontational, almost laid back. The investigative nature of the show also changed, Suddenly it had become a series of news features.

U.S. newspapers went through very similar changes The investigative departments were slowly led out the door or locked into a back room to do research forever, and generic wouldn't-hurt-a-flea news products like "USA Today" began to appear. The message was clear. Please journalists, don't offend anybody. It is just too damn expensive.

And as we all know, there has been very little public and private corruption since. Or should I say, there's been a lot less of it reported.