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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
June 1, 2003
By-line-ism
For people who practise journalism especially the original "dead tree" print kind under siege from all the new blinking technologies the last couple of weeks have offered a glimpse into something like heck. We have been watching the meltdown of the editorial department of the New York Times with horrified fascination. The Times is the New World's "newspaper of record" and has a long and to my mind rather mixed reputation as our "grey lady" of fact. I think she has been doddering for some time seriously infected by post-modern gliberalism and never so wantonly as since Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger the rather dim son of a family dynasty became publisher and appointed Howell Raines as his editor. The serious trouble began when an internal inquiry established that some shooting-star of a young reporter one Jayson Blair had faked his location interviews and all sorts of colourful details in a large number of prominently-placed "news" stories. That Mr. Blair had been an underqualified "equal opportunity" hire an editor's pet and the subject of one warning memo after another from those who had worked with him were among details that couldn't be fit into four broadsheet pages of corrections the Times ran to admit its embarrassingly serial misjudgements. First Internet bloggers and then competing print journalists were happy to flesh out these details. Mr. Blair was an extreme case but a more modest exemplar of reportorial sleight-of-hand Rick Bragg was soon also suspended (and then quit). Mr. Bragg was one of the newsroom gods and openly admitted to frequently using stringers and other "go-fers" to gather material for him which he then reported as if he were an eyewitness. He has gone very public in claiming that what he did is commonplace and accepted. The national bureau of the paper in Washington D.C. does not agree and its reporters insist they do their own footwork. (An intrepid media journalist Seth Mnookin made cold calls to a number of them to confirm all were sticking to this party line.) An angry Mr. Bragg for his part is attempting to undermine them by digging out examples of where they may have failed; and human nature is such that there are now many hands whipping accusations and counter-accusations towards many whirling fans. As I know from coming up against them here and there reporters for the New York Times enjoy rather fulsome budgets. My reader should appreciate that I for instance could never do specifically what Mr. Bragg suggests his former colleagues commonly do for I couldn't afford it. From my slight knowledge of the trade I would say that the practices he alleges are not yet all that common. And more broadly while journalists may be incapable of seeing what is in front of our eyes we lack the imagination to make things up. To my mind a more egregious flaw in the Times's news coverage exhibited daily on its front page is its twisted worldview. The paper represents the outlook of an especially self-satisfied and incurious class of America's "progressive elite". It is an elite which has suffered too little intellectual challenge for too long. We read too much "political analysis" and pure speculation invariably reflecting the same lazy worldview. We get a lot of mostly pointless "local colour" and mostly failed attempts at "fine writing". We get surprisingly little hard news and must read sceptically to extract it. This is a failing hardly unique to the Times or even unique to the worldview it represents which I might characterize as "whole-earth-leftie-zomboid". The Times simply does it better and more plausibly than other papers thanks partly to its inherited prestige. On this last point it continues to benefit from the services of some fine old-fashioned fact-hunting journalists embedded in the mix -- people like John Burns and Judith Miller presently clashing in the Baghdad bureau (their duelling e-mails got out last week too). Mr. Raines the editor has been justly criticized for the obvious editorial-page slant he has spread through the rest of the newspaper; and for the cronyism and favouritism he has practised within. And while the man is now acknowledged by many of his staff to be the worst disaster that ever befell them I think he deserves more criticism on another score. He has taken the cult of "by-line-ism" to its final absurdity. He has been turning his remaining reporters into effete "writers" and thus turning news into "features". It is perfectly natural that a new rank of nameless stringers should grow up under these reporter "stars" to do the work they no longer have time for or which is now beneath them -- the work of actually gathering the news. In this new world of daily magazining the stringers dig out the small stuff the facts; and the "reporters" do the styling. Coal miners do not get by-lines and traditionally reporters did not get by-lines in newspapers. In previous generations newspapers everywhere were full of news. The New York Times itself was once capable of reporting a fairly important item in less than a dozen lines because that was all the hard information available. They assumed the reader would grasp the significance from having read the paper every day. He wouldn't need a huge headline to confirm the importance. He wouldn't need a by-line because the paper itself was the guarantor of the accuracy of its reporting. An "analytical" article was something else and could use a by-line to stipulate the writer's point-of-view. The author might be given some space and allowed to delve into subtleties. The difference between "news" and "analysis" was so obvious no one could be fooled. The old idea inherited from Britain was that a reporter who is not anonymous is a reporter who is for sale. Telegraphy was anyway charged by the word the editor back home could add a few connectives but would generally avoid inserting "bilge" such as adjectives and adverbs. The reader thus received his news almost unvarnished. He is now as likely as not turning to the Internet to get unvarnished facts: for what is old becomes new again with each advance of technology. But there he is afloat in an ocean of blinking words. His newspapers have abandoned him but may begin to win back his allegiance when they relearn the art of separating the colour from the black-and-white. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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