April 26, 2004
The journalist doll
I saw famed actress Maggie Smith onstage enacting a play, "Night and Day," by Tom Stoppard. "The journalist doll," she said in an slashing and bitter aside. "Wind it up and it gets it wrong."
For most of my early, post-Watergate journalism career in the United States, journalism had a reputation of containing at least some pockets of integrity. Meanwhile in Britain, where playwright Stoppard operates, the "hack" label seems to have stuck through the centuries.
The scandal of Jack Kelley's made-up stories for USA Today, on top of the Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass and Janet Cook travesties, seem to have allowed the hack label to apply to journos on this side of the Atlantic, too.
There is at least one Jack Kelley, on a minor scale, right now at the Washington Post. This reporter, who has manned a number of foreign bureaus and gets lots of acclaim, makes his copy editors shudder when each story lands and they attempt to excise the fantasy aspects of the piece. The exact same modus operandi, of underlings well aware of a star's falsities, is described in USA Today's internal memo on Jack Kelley.
What is fascinating is how the public and informed public officials display no surprise whatsoever at reporter lies. Jayson Blair wrote in the New York Times of the views of cow pastures and tobacco fields from Jessica Lynch's front porch in West Virginia, when he never even went to her home town for the story. If he had, he would have noted no such pastures visible. The Lynch family reaction? They just assumed reporters made up stuff all the time. So what?
The USA Today report (remarkable how poorly written and difficult to follow it is) similarly suggests that Defense Department officials, as well as national security and intelligence officers, for example, decided to just ignore Kelley's lies unless they would harm national interest, because complaining to the editors got them nowhere. Isn't that pitiful? As with the Lynch family, newspaper readers came to assume -- correctly -- that reporters lie and newspapers don't care.
You will get a big truckload of lip service by editors at all the nation's top newspapers that they care passionately about accuracy. But star reporters (and others) get away with sloppy work all the time, caught by lower-level copy and assignment editors.
The root of the problem?
Newspapers have perhaps the worst management across the board of any segment of the private sector. Reporters get promoted to editor, editors get promoted over other editors, and there is never a hint of management training along the way or even a reasonable lay grasp of common sense ways to manage people and tasks.
It's no wonder star reporters get away with so much for so long, their shenanigans well known to their colleagues -- and to readers -- but not the top people.
For more, read Howard Kurtz, who notes the jaw-dropping lack of remorse by top editors at the New York Times and USA Today:
But when news organizations screw up, their executives often fail to admit culpability or tell readers and viewers they're sorry. In many cases, they merely issue canned statements and slink into the shadows without answering questions from the sort of nosy reporters they employ to harass everyone else.And as the implosions at USA Today and the New York Times make clear, newsrooms are sometimes more dysfunctional and paralyzed than the government agencies they cover, with top editors uninformed about problems with subordinates, missing obvious warning signals or intimidating their staff against bringing them bad news.
When Karen Jurgensen was prodded into resigning as USA Today's editor last week in the wake of Jack Kelley's serial fabrications, she did not address her staff or take questions from the press. Neither she nor the two top editors who are also leaving their posts assumed blame or apologized. Managing Editor Hal Ritter said in a statement that he was "upset" about the Kelley situation.As for Jurgensen, her statement said of Kelley, "I wish we had caught him far sooner than we did" -- not all that far from Bush saying that, like everyone else, he wished he had known the 9/11 attacks were coming.
