( Dal The Washington Post)
At some point or another, everyone
needs journalists
Ted Koppel is the author of “Lights Out” and senior
contributor to “CBS Sunday Morning.”
Once upon a time, long, long ago, during his second campaign
for the presidency of the United States, Richard M. Nixon made sporadic
appearances before live audiences, during which he would take questions from
selected citizen panels. Several of us covering that 1968 campaign were
convinced that the panels had been stacked in Nixon’s favor. Much as we poked
and prodded into their makeup, however, we never found anyone particularly
partisan. The panelists were just ordinary people with mixed political
pedigrees. What they were not, which gave the former vice president a
significant advantage, was experienced in the cross-examination of a seasoned
politician.
The organizer of this arrangement, a fellow by the name of
Roger Ailes (yes, that Roger Ailes), provided additional insurance of these
events’ success by a deceptively simple sleight of hand: He stacked not the
panels, but the audiences, with Nixon supporters. Whatever the question,
whatever the answer, each audience responded with unbridled enthusiasm. The
impression was of a candidate knocking questions out of the park.
Some years later, but still long before the advent of the
Internet and social media, the Nixon administration invited radio talk show
hosts from around the country to set up their remote broadcasts directly
outside the White House. They were given access to high-ranking officials. Some
were even granted interviews with the president himself. All were told that
they didn’t need network correspondents and anchors as intermediaries. They
were assured of their own high qualifications to report on the White House.
There is no record that any of the local radio hosts disagreed. They were
flattered and probably a little more compliant in the interviews granted them
than their more jaundiced, Washington-based counterparts might have been.
Memories of these simpler times have come rushing back since
the election of Donald Trump. First was his post-election news conference, with the
unfamiliar sound of cheering and applause in the background. While members of
his staff are always on hand during a president’s news conference, there is no
occasion I can recall when they gave vent to their vocal support of the home
team. Stacking the audience still works.
Perhaps Ailes has gone into retirement, but I sense his
invisible hand in the plan, floated but as yet not implemented, to move the
White House press room across the street to the Old Executive Office Building
in the interest, we are told, of greater space. My instinct tells me that the
motivation had less to do with geography than with flooding the zone. To the
degree that a more commodious media space would permit multiplying White House
reporters to several times their current number, and with the Trump
administration controlling accreditation, the relevance and clout of the
mainstream media would be even further diminished.
But why resort to 20th-century tactics and practice when
21st-century technology lies so close at hand? At his second White House briefing — recall that
he took no questions during his first — press secretary Sean Spicer dispensed
with the tradition of calling first on the senior wire service reporter and
broadcast network correspondents, choosing instead to take his maiden questions
from the New York Post, the Christian Broadcasting Network and Fox News.
More recently, Spicer has bestowed the honor of first question on
LifeZette, a website founded by conservative commentator Laura Ingraham. The
press secretary has also begun taking questions via Skype; and, through the
magic of the Internet, the restraints of a cramped White House press room
disappear altogether. How Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson would have envied
the tools available to Team Trump.
It sounds dangerously undemocratic to argue against
broadening the scope of the White House press corps. But we are already
knee-deep in an environment that permits, indeed encourages, the viral
distribution of pure nonsense. It does not help that so many in the media
establishment have allowed themselves to be goaded into an uninterrupted
torrent of quivering outrage. Roughly half the country already questions the
motives, intentions and goodwill of the other half. We are increasingly
inclined to consume only the product of those news outlets that resonate with
our own biases. Whatever is put forward by one side is instinctively rejected
by the other.
The only appropriate response is an even greater emphasis on
professional standards; factual reporting, multiple sourcing and careful
editing. Our system of government depends on nothing so much as the widespread
availability of credible, reliable reporting of important events. Rarely in the
nation’s history has there been a greater need for objective journalism that
voters and legislators alike can use to form judgments and make decisions.
The process is routinely undermined, these days, by nothing
more than the casual attachment of a “fake news” label, or Kellyanne Conway’s
more recent suggestion that we live in an era of “alternative facts.” There may be temporary
political advantage to be gained by tearing down public confidence in critical,
nonpartisan journalism, but it is only temporary. At some point or another,
everyone needs professional finders of facts.
As John Adams noted: “Facts are stubborn things; and
whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion,
they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” That has been a guiding
principle for most of us who have spent our lives in journalism.
There are no alternative facts.
