I ran across this in the Post and thought you might find it interesting.
First, the Bad News
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 18, 2002; Page C01
David Broder was against publishing the story, Bob Woodward very much for it.
Leonard Downie Jr., The Washington Post's executive editor, was against running it. His managing editor, Robert Kaiser, sent him a memo saying the paper would look like it was trying to affect the presidential campaign by sitting on the story.
It was 1996, and the dilemma was whether to report that candidate Bob Dole had had an affair some 28 years earlier. Downie decided not to publish -- and the story leaked before Election Day, as Kaiser had warned.
This behind-the-scenes debate resurfaces now because Downie and Kaiser have written a book about news values -- not just about intruding on a politician's personal life, but about how much of journalism has lost its way.
It's unusual for two newspaper executives (Kaiser is now associate editor) to assail their own profession while in office, rather than from the safety of retirement. "The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril" doesn't much criticize The Post -- indeed, the authors say they are "probably blind to many of its shortcomings" -- except for its "embarrassing" failure to break the Iran-contra story. But the book sticks it to many news organizations, particularly the television networks.
In fact, the book often drips with disdain for electronic journalism. Most real news, Downie and Kaiser declare, comes from newspapers.
"The decline of serious, ambitious television news over the last two decades of the 20th century cannot be called surprising," they write. "Ours had become a celebrity-besotted culture, with television the single most powerful promoter and ratifier of celebrityhood."
Newspapers, of course, have also been pulled down this glittering path. "In some cases we've made unfortunate judgments," Downie says in an interview. "We went way overboard on the death of JFK Jr. I joined the crowd on that."
Some of their complaints are buttressed by the Big Three anchors. "We do have more celebrity news in the broadcast than I would like," CBS's Dan Rather tells the authors.
Peter Jennings blames ABC's "much slimmer" overseas presence on "our own uncertainty about who we are and our commitment in this new marketplace." Tom Brokaw says NBC News's mission now is "to survive."
The anchors also take shots at one another. "Dan is always complaining about the hard-news thing," Brokaw says. "Well, what does that mean? . . . Some hard news -- so-called -- has almost no meaning."
Rather says if he'd tried to cover more foreign news in 2000, his bosses would retort that Brokaw's newscast gets the biggest ratings and "they do the least."
Jennings says he resisted heavy coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial while NBC "created an enormous hole in its broadcasts into which it fed simply everything about O.J." Admits Brokaw: "We did do more on O.J. and I wasn't completely comfortable with it at the time."
Downie and Kaiser don't think much of local stations: "Local television does little original reporting of significant community issues."
They don't think much of CNN and the other cable news networks, calling them "a headline service, a sort of radio news with pictures," with "lots of chatter about the news, much of it mindless or tendentious."
They don't think much of the network newsmagazines. When The Post was collaborating on a project with "Dateline," an NBC producer described the ideal story: "a villain, a victim and a confrontation."
They're also dismissive of Slate, Salon and the Drudge Report.
Downie and Kaiser offer some praise for such papers as the New York Times and the News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C., but skewer the Gannett and Knight Ridder chains for trying to "ratchet up the profit margins . . . at the expense of quality and ambition."
While they try to avoid "preaching from Mount Olympus," Downie says, "some people will not be happy with the book. Others will be happy that the book is pushing forward issues that they would like help pushing in their own news organizations. No one we interviewed in network television really quarreled with the conclusions we were coming to."
"Inevitably," says Kaiser, the authors criticize "from the position of lifelong newspapermen who are prejudiced in favor of the kind of thorough, serious reporting that the best newspapers do."
As recounted in the book, Woodward wrote a 2,500-word memo on the Dole story, saying that "The Post has taken an aggressive position on Clinton and his sex life" and could be accused of a "double standard. . . . Withholding the story breaks the contract with the reader." Kaiser wrote in his own memo that "we have put ourselves in a weird box" because Dole was "paralyzed with anxiety" about the potential piece.
But Broder strongly opposed the story, writing: "I know of no instance in which we have reached back almost three decades and made a news story of a consensual, extramarital affair involving someone in public life." Then-Publisher Donald Graham also opposed publication, but left the final decision to Downie.
The National Enquirer broke the story a week later. |
