“Honorable Estate” or “Enemies of the People”? — A life in journalism

By Chris Edwards
2.3.2019

Readings

“But February made me shiver
With every paper I’d deliver
Bad news on the doorstep
I couldn’t take one more step”
Don McLean, from the song, “American Pie”

“I’d love to rise from the grave every ten years or so and go buy a few newspapers.”
Luis Buñuel, Spanish filmmaker (1900-1983)

“War reporting is still essentially the same – someone has to go there and see what is happening. You can’t get that information without going to places where people are being shot at, and others are shooting at you. The real difficulty is having enough faith in humanity to believe that enough people be they government, military, or the man on the street, will care when your file reaches the printed page, the website or the TV screen. We do have that faith because we believe we do make a difference.”
Marie Colvin (1956-2012), American foreign affairs correspondent for The Sunday Times, a British newspaper. Subject of biography, In Extremis, The Life and Death of the War Correspondent Marie Colvin, by Lindsey Hilsum (2018).

“Go where the silence is and say something.”
Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!

The first part of my strung-out title comes from a book, “An Honorable Estate: My time in the working press,” by the late Louis Rubin, my professor at Hollins. Louis called journalism, the Fourth Estate, “honorable.” Way earlier, he and our friend, the late Jim Geary, had worked together for the Associated Press. Writing about the hot lead typesetting of their time, Louis said the technology changed less in the first five centuries after Gutenberg than in the late 20th. The book came out a day before 9/11. He didn’t hope for many reviews – knowing a day’s monster news swallows all else. He was right.

As to “Enemies of the People,” here are some typical complaints, from a letter in The Daily News-Record: “Watching the news these days is so depressing. All the media seems to do is focus on the negativity in the world. Personally, I blame the media for blowing everything out of proportion.” 

Painfully, these complaints have a grain of truth. I hear people of both right and left persuasions say “the media” make up “fake news” and exploit misery. They may want to “kill the messenger.”

What is the media? It’s the New York Times, the DN-R (disclosure: I once worked there), Channel 3, Salon, Al Jazeera, the BBC, Daily Kos, Infowars, supermarket tabloids, your Facebook posts, or mine. What’s changed: 30 years ago if we wanted to buy a car or see a movie, we’d check the paper – now we look online. Google and Facebook upended the revenue stream. Old media is shrinking. Traditionally it was the “gatekeeper,” made up of wise, neutral, household-word names who gave us all we needed to know — so we thought. Then came the Internet and “citizen journalism,” where anyone who’s online can send anything halfway around the world. A new Age of Enlightenment — So we hoped.

Actually, those old gatekeepers could be hidebound. Now, by tapping a key, you can translate from most languages, learn about the Peloponnesian War, or any disease, get directions to a B&B in the Tasmanian Wilderness, find an ancestor, an old friend, or maybe, love. You might also find flat-earth believers, bomb-making instructions, racist, sexist, homophobic vitriol, and 1.3 billion references to the current president. Oh – and your identity might be stolen.

Since 1990, nearly 65% of newspaper jobs have disappeared – proportionately more than in the coal industry.

Digital media, the only kind growing, hasn’t nearly offset that. And digital companies did another round of layoffs this week. In a recent survey, only 16 percent of Americans said they trust “internet news” – just slightly below newspapers and television.

How do we cope? Where can we find information we all recognize as true? It takes some shared, common ground to sustain that Fifth UU Principle, democracy.

China just launched the world’s first A.I. news anchors. They can blink, raise eyebrows, work 24/7 on many assignments at once, and don’t need salaries. News is fed them from government announcements. Coming soon?

Meanwhile, more than 250 journalists worldwide are in jail for their work.

Last year, 63 died doing their jobs. The late American war correspondent Marie Colvin, whose quote we read you, wore a patch after being shot in one eye in Sri Lanka. She worked in all the major war zones until being killed in 2012 in Syria, believed intentionally. An American judge just ordered damages for her family, which Syria predictably ignored.

It was disconcerting, three years ago, to arrive in London the day most British papers had a top front-page story about the former TV cameraman near Roanoke, Va., murdering two ex-colleagues, filming it live, then shooting himself. His grudge sounded personal, like that in the killing last summer of five journalists at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis. That shooter took revenge over a minor story the Gazette once did about his court order to cease stalking a woman.

My great-great-grandfather Theodoric Bland was murdered in the small town where he’d edited the newspaper. The crime was never solved, but our family suspected the motive was something in his paper. I once spent days in that town pouring through records, with no answer. We’ve liked to think he wrote something courageous, but was it, more likely, something trivial? You may have no idea how angry some brides’ parents could get if we left the bouquet description out of their daughter’s wedding announcement!

We keep hearing the buzzword, “fake news.” It can mean several things.

• A joke. (Here’s one of my favorites, from an issue of The Onion dated 2000. “Christian Right ascends to Heaven.”)
• The audience must be in on a joke to make it funny. In the un-funny “Pizzagate” of 2016, a conspiracy theory went viral about a presidential candidate (who would lose) and a restaurant owner in D.C., holding children captive in a creepy sex and Satanist ring. Although the rumor was thoroughly checked and found baseless by law enforcement agencies, there were death threats, and a young man who believed it drove from North Carolina to fire a gun in the restaurant.
• Fake news can be highly effective propaganda.
• It can also mean any news a self-serving politician doesn’t like.

Politicians routinely quarrel with the press, but not like now. The current president’s “enemies of the people” tag for journalists was also used by Stalin and other autocrats. He’s promised to “revisit” the First Amendment so he can sue critical media. He isolates journalists at his rallies, where he ridiculed one reporter’s disability, and joked about another getting body-slammed and his glasses broken by a candidate, now serving in Congress. In a grudge match, the president revoked press credentials for JMU graduate Jim Acosta. This so-called “leader of the free world” seems mostly indifferent to human rights violations, including Saudi Arabia’s killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Pulitzer-winner Eugene Robinson, whom we met last year at Bridgewater College, said that to his knowledge, no newspaper endorsed this president’s candidacy. Later I read somewhere that two obscure papers somewhere in America actually did. Commentators say the media is blindsided by him. We see strong critical coverage, but his ego drives the conflict, his brand name is the story. He thrives on the media he trashes.

My entry into journalism was unconventional – it’s a young person’s job, but I’d turned 40, looking for a way to earn a living that wasn’t just putting in time. In Charlottesville, I read that a new editor of The Observer, a weekly, said they wanted to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” That’s where I landed, in 1988. Took a big cut in pay and benefits from the safe, dull job I left.

Our weekly could not compete for breaking news with the local daily, or TV, so our niche was investigative. At best, a micro version of The Post, All the President’s Men, Spotlight or Good Night and Good Luck. I think each of those movies got it basically right. “Investigative” mostly entails finding things some people with power don’t want found. Unfortunately, media owners can be leery of that approach – they can make more money “comforting the (already) comfortable” — but we had a good run. When a local company went out of business and tried to hide that, employees vented to us (sometimes crying), but wouldn’t dare go on record. Before we could publish, I had to call a contraband list of maybe 100 until finally, one confirmed it. At the bankruptcy hearing, an ex-employee told me if that company’s owner was killed, “there might be 100 suspects.” I wrote that in my story (as color), but the editor took it out (wisely).

It’s exciting when you make some small difference: On Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall, I helped get a lovely cedar saved from a developer’s bulldozer. Later, another developer felled it. At the DN-R, when I had the school beat in the early days of SOL tests, I revealed two misleading test questions shown me by a local high school student. A state official was furious that my story had cost her department $25,000, since it forced the two bad questions to be cut. But reliable sources (students) say they still get misleading SOL questions.

I hope I didn’t make much difference for one politician, by covering him as likeable and centrist – which he seemed, until a chance to move up changed him drastically. He seems to have been out of politics the last few years, fortunately.

I’d like to share some of my pet media peeves:

The “hoss race” habit dominates political coverage – strategies and gaffes instead of issues and policy.

Objectivity can’t be absolute: A reporter working any story must make choices. You can’t use every quote or every detail you get . . but you need to be fair.

“False equivalence” can be a way to fake fairness, especially in politics now. So, you’ve aimed to give exactly as many minutes, or keystrokes, to the scandals about Candidate X as Candidate Y. But what do you do with one that tells, on average, 15 bona fide “untruths or false claims” a day? (Fact checkers, who tally those, are of two minds about using the simpler word, “lies.”)

Anecdotal evidence can be deceptive: If a killer has red hair, does that make all redheads suspect? Seems silly . . . unless you substitute a more marginalized group.

Confirmation bias means believing what confirms our pre-existing biases. Five years ago, I believed the Rolling Stone story, “A rape on campus,” before it was debunked. I should have spotted the red flags, but maybe it confirmed my bias against fraternities. The way that “victim’s” story fell apart reminded me of an assignment I once had that fell apart. That victim wanted us to educate the public on police insensitivity with victims (a real issue). But among other discrepancies, she told police her attacker was black, but told me he was white.

Trading access for objectivity. When journalists get close to sources and socialize with them, they might acquire important knowledge they can’t report, and compromise their credibility. As The Post (the movie) shows, Katherine Graham and Ben Bradlee coped with that issue well. But some heads of media simply don’t care.

Under-reported news! Much of the public doesn’t know these three facts, and demagogues take advantage of that:

• That there has been a long-term drop in violent crime since the 1990s.
• That immigrants on the whole commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans.
• That immigration, legal and undocumented, has dropped substantially.

Two vocabulary issues:

Terrorism means committing violence to promote an ideology. When will we accept that not all “terrorists” are foreign? They might be named Timothy McVeigh or James A. Fields Jr., or belong to an “American” terrorist group such as the Klan.

Religious freedom. Conservatives frame it as “religious freedom” when a bakery refuses to supply cakes for same-sex weddings or a court clerk denies them licenses. But what about the four women, members of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Tucson, convicted last week for supplying water to border-crossers in a desert where many have died? I haven’t seen “religious freedom” mentioned for those women or others in their organization, “No More Deaths,” also awaiting trial. They could get prison terms for their civil disobedience, acting on values that seem universal. (See https://www.uusc.org/giving-water-to-the-thirsty-now-officially-a-crime-no-more-deaths-volunteers-convicted/. )

How can you tell what information is credible? Here are some questions to ask – from sources including the American Press Institute: (https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/six-critical-questions-can-use-evaluate-media-content/) —

What is the content? News, opinion, advertising? A mix?

Who are the sources? Why should I believe them?

How was evidence verified?

What’s missing?

Check other media’s treatment of the same story.

Be leery of multiple exclamation points.

It’s a good sign when sources correct their own errors or admit what they don’t know.

Go to fact-checkers. Two good ones: the website Snopes.com, and Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post.

Have you ever had a home, a place where you’d known its quirks, vibes, people and everyday life intimately, then seen a disaster turn the name of that place into media shorthand for the worst in humanity? Birmingham. Oklahoma City. Sandy Hook. Charlottesville.

The Observer newsroom was an old pink warehouse downtown. One summer evening, my first year, three of us crossed the railroad tracks behind it to the project, Garrett Square. Notorious, scary, Ground Zero of the crack trade! Our assignment: parents meeting with the city school board. The scene of kids underfoot, moms serving refreshments, and the concerns they expressed for their kids seemed more like, than different from, what I’d known at my kids’ schools.

In August 2017, with horror, I glimpsed my old pink workplace on CNN as the Klan and neo-Nazis who’d stormed into town strutted along those same tracks. The night before, they’d been chanting “blood and soil,” “Jews will not replace us,” and other hate slogans, on the University of Virginia Lawn where my late father, and my son Eddie, each had graduated.

Another memory: Watching cameras on the Mall pan police and brawlers, I remembered doing a ride-along with a city cop. He said he was picking up “one of the regulars”: Jay, a well-known fixture, had gone berserk in a diner. But all the way to the shelter where the cop took him, Jay kept telling that cop, “I love you. I love you, man.” He’d once been a graduate student. Another time, in a different, quite rational state of consciousness, Jay contacted The Observer and put me in touch with a Chinese student whom I interviewed about Federal immigration policy.

The photographers seemed too near the men swinging sticks. We used to make fun of the Daily Progress (“the Prog”). (Disclosure: years before then, I’d delivered a route for The Prog.) But that weekend, young Ryan Kelly won the Prog a Pulitzer. Ryan filmed the surreal seconds when a white supremacist from Ohio ran down a crowd of counter-protesters, killing young Heather Heyer and injuring many more, a few short blocks from my old newsroom. His photo has been called an “American Guernica,” referencing Picasso’s rendition of a bombed village in the Spanish Civil War.

https://www.pri.org/stories/2018-04-18/ryan-kelly-s-pulitzer-prize-winning-photograph-american-guernica

It was good to return, long after both CNN and the racist thugs had gone, and see life enduring. We were touched by the bouquets and tributes in the street now named for Heather.

Charlottesville was a very imperfect, expensive town, but I get disgusted when someone knowing nothing about it calls it a redneck stereotype. I moved here from there in ‘93 when the Observer’s fate was wobbly (it folded in 2004); I worked at the DNR for seven years, then freelanced. Frankly, when I first moved to Harrisonburg, it seemed so conservative, I went into real culture shock. But the ‘Burg has changed . . . and by the way, it’s lucky to have never had Confederate monuments downtown.

A total solar eclipse came the same month. Robin and I drove to Kentucky to see it with some friends. We watched on television as darkness crossed Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri, while crowds cheered and listened to Bill Nye the Science Guy. Outside, as totality neared, we heard neighbors cheering through the foliage, and answered. All together for that moment. It was good. In an eclipse 1,000 years ago, with no news media, we might have been terrified the world was ending.

Yes, there is good news.

Back to the complaint in that letter: There is an old adage, “Shoot the messenger.” Yes, news has a bias in favor of conflict. The plane that crashes gets coverage when the thousands that land safely don’t. You can say that’s because we’re enemies of the people, or that human beings just feel more of a need to analyze and process the bad than the good.

You can’t count on the outcome of a story. Journalists are not missionaries. Ben Bradlee, in The Post, said “let the chips fall where they may.” To me that means being open to truth. (Our Fourth Principle.)

The DN-R while I was there implemented a “Good News” logo for a “positive” story:” a cartoon dog with a paper in its mouth. If you think reporters were proud when an editor slapped that dog on our stories, sigh, you’re mistaken. Cynicism is an occupational hazard, and “good news” stories often amounted to free advertising.

But good news IS real, and doesn’t need a corny logo. The rescue of the boys from the cave in Thailand. Last month’s Super Blood Wolf Moon Eclipse. And autocrats getting push-back from activists and media.

Even news about news isn’t totally hopeless. Local and state coverage show the most decline, but check out the new HBURGCITIZEN.COM. Some analysts think the future may depend more on philanthropy, grants, and subscription payments, less than on advertising. It’s unsettled, but not dead.

Of course, news is not all of reality. To stay sane you need breaks from it. Smell flowers, watch sunrises, spend quality time with pets or children, hoe a garden, play music, do acts of kindness. In my newspaper years I never traveled much. Once later, in Brussels, I was delighted to find a rack with papers in seven languages — none English. Thrilled to be so far from home.

So take breaks – but think before you kill a messenger.