The controversy at the Washington Post over pay-to-play schmooze-fests between lobbyists and government officials and newsroom staff, all to be "facilitated" by publisher Katharine Weymouth at her home, is making me feel old. Like dinosaur old. (Though hopefully with a brain larger than a walnut.)
Thing is, I'm not really that old – though a career in journalism ought to be measured in dog's years, with one year counting for seven in most any other profession.
When I started out in radio in the late 1980s (that's not so long ago, really-is it?) we wrote on typewriters and brandished Wite-Out, and I used a "word processor" for the first time at my second newspaper. When on the road, we printed out copy and faxed it to the newsroom to be typed into the system, or dictated our pieces live (and out of breath) to a rewrite man after running to find a working pay phone, a lá Clark Kent looking for a changing room. Never mind trying to get in touch from some overseas posting.
Oh, and we wouldn't take even a cup of coffee from a source for fear of crossing an ethical boundary.
But one generation passeth away, another cometh, and things can look very different in a very short time. Looking back, it seems the "wall" between the news side and the business side started falling around the time the Berlin Wall did, as the industry started to contract – when the next empire falls, will anybody be there to cover it? – and bottom-line capitalism won out over all. The gaudy profit margins of the 1990s seemed to blind news executives to the coming digital revolution, and ghastly leveraged takeovers left media outlets shouldering huge debts just as those profit margins began shriveling to the width of Ann Coulter's middle finger.
At the same time, grad schools began training journalists who then had to go to a newsroom to learn the skills they would actually need to practice their craft – and to learn that journalism is a blue-collar trade as much as it is a white-collar profession.
Too many corporate types don't understand that, or realize that all that stands between us and ethical problems are our scruples. (And as cheeky little Tatum O'Neal said to Ryan O'Neal in "Paper Moon," way back in 1973, in answer to his declaration that he has scruples, dammit: "If you got them, I sure bet they belong to somebody else!") In fact, we did get them from somebody else – from those who trained us in the biz, raised us to know where the line was, and would drum us out before we could get fired if we transgressed.
With fewer journos finishing their careers in newsrooms, fewer journos in newsrooms at all, and more of us sitting in the splendid isolation of home offices, the transmission of wisdom – at least as important as knowledge – is interrupted. And so things happen.
As my colleague Melinda Henneberger has been doggedly reporting, the ethical reflexes trained by years of conditioning don't seem to have been developed in Weymouth and the WaPo superstructure. But we live in hope, and there's nothing like a near-death experience to spark a conversion.
What killed the dinosaurs? Science shows there have been several mass extinctions throughout the history of the planet, usually caused not by a satisfyingly catalcysmic event like a meteor but by long terms changes that kill you before you realize it – like the proverbial frog put in cold water who is then slowly cooked by gradually raising the temperature to boiling. (Or golden frogs, as the New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert recently showed.)
The good news is that biologists have shown that frogs will in fact jump out of the pot if they can - and will flourish if they find a hospitable environment elsewhere.
Her name was Anaika St. Louis, and she was 11 years old. Her story is just one among thousands in Haiti last week.
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Hooray to you and Henneberger! Keep the water boiling, though, I fear these slimy eels will slip out and into someone's pocket before you know they are gone. Ethics? Weymouth might confuse the word with something on an Este Lauder bottle. If she has ethics, they belonged to someone else. (Pundit, thanks to the Paper Moon quote).
RATE THIS COMMENT: (1)
Jack Fuller
5:01PM Jul 6th 2009
Why is this a story? Everyone knows the press has sold out, now they just want paid. The Dems have been willing to sell themselves to the unions and wacko envirionmentalists under the nom de plume of "green" so why not expect the big news boys to go a whoring too?
RATE THIS COMMENT: (3)
Jack Fuller
3:34PM Jul 6th 2009
Why Dave, I remember a time when reporters actually reported the news. If they had an opinion it was under own bi-line. It used to be a big sin to slant the news to favor your political views. I know, it sounds fanciful and a bit crazy but it really happened that way - once. There was a time when reporters asked hard questions of the president and not with the intent to make him look good. No sir. Reporters wanted real answers to their questions. There were times when honesty, integrity and where the country was headed were real issues. Its hard to believe now days but it really was that way - once.
RATE THIS COMMENT: (3)
giles chauvin
6:10PM Jul 6th 2009
oh por favor, I know for a fact that at least since the 50's, one of journalism's aphorisms has been: "you don't have to lie if you carefully word the truth to lead the reader to believe whatever you want."
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JefFlyingV
9:16PM Jul 6th 2009
I keep reading about the nostalgia for good "old fahioned journalism", but at what time was journalism dominated by ethics? Or just reporting news?
The biggest problem that has developed in the Main Stream Media is the lack of competition and the consolidation of news outlets in the hands of large corporations.