Seven Events That Made America America (33 page)

Both the demands of obtaining rapid, accurate reports and the difficulty of sending long-winded messages by telegraph, with its maddeningly slow Morse code transmissions, imposed a new discipline of syntax and vocabulary on the news and enhanced the value of the new Associated Press, which could distill a variety of reports in one location and forward them to all newspapers. The AP adapted its reporting to the technology of the telegraph, which “was superimposed on a news-gathering system that
already
placed a premium on the apparent factual accuracy.”
¹⁰
The telegraph, in particular, was a blessing and a curse, replacing verbose writers with “stringers” who economically submitted bare facts.
¹¹
Wire service reporting required an abbreviated journalistic style. AP, United Press, and other wires each served dozens of newspapers of every political slant, thus requiring the wire service itself to remain as “value-free” as possible.
¹²
The demands of brevity meant that “wire service journalists focused on crafting stories without overt bias or a strong political point of view.”
¹³

John Thrasher, the superintendent of the Press Association of the Confederate States of America, instructed his association’s reporters to submit clear and concise telegraphic stories, free of opinion or comment.
¹⁴
Thrasher insisted that correspondents eliminate extraneous words and instructed them to “see where you can use one word to express what you have put in two or three.”
¹⁵
He provided an example in which he italicized the words to be omitted:

This transmission process gave birth to the “inverted pyramid” of reporting, in which the most important facts were stated at the beginning, followed by less important ones, and so on throughout the story.
¹⁷
The “lead,” or the main point of the story, always went in the headline, and from there, “it was not a long distance to reserving the first paragraph of [the] stories . . . for the most newsworthy facts and then organizing supporting material in descending order of newsworthiness.”
¹⁸

The impact of the war and the influence of the wire services transformed journalistic styles and introduced a powerful emphasis on fact over commentary.
¹⁹
By 1866, Lawrence Gobright, the AP’s Washington agent, concluded, “My business is merely to communicate facts. My instructions do not allow me to make any comments upon the facts which I communicate. . . . My dispatches are merely dry matters of facts and detail.”
²⁰
In the decade after the Civil War, “objective” stories still only made up about 40 percent of all news articles, but that share rose to more than 66 percent by 1900, and according to journalism researchers, stories described as “biased” declined sharply after 1872.
²¹

After the Civil War, journalists themselves called for standards to purge the profession’s excesses. This was nothing new: as early as 1843, editors called for a national convention to establish standards, “enter[ing] into mutual pledges . . . [and] form[ing] a virtuous resolution, that they will hereafter control their passions, moderate their language,” in order to “pursue truth.”
²²
Horace Greeley, editor of the
New York Tribune
, established rules for contributors to his paper, assuring that “all sides” to an argument received attention.
²³
In 1889, an article criticizing the press used the word
ethics
in the title for the first time, and a year later the first code of conduct for journalists appeared.
²⁴
Adolph Ochs, who bought the struggling
New York Times
, symbolized the ascent of “objectivity” over partisanship when he arrived in New York in 1896 and instructed the staff “to give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect or interests involved.”
²⁵
Oswald Garrison Villard, publisher of
The Nation
and the
New York Evening Post
, reiterated the concept of “fairness,” emphasizing that the objective journalist had to report “both sides of every issue.”
²⁶
Other subjects besides politics were increasingly covered, and whatever interested “any one hundred people” merited reporting, but the centrality of fact was established.
²⁷
Even many Progressive-era muckrakers believed that consumers were competent to judge for themselves a product’s worth if given reliable information.
²⁸

Of course, a certain number of elitists, who thought “the people” could not be trusted with the news, remained, with one of their most outspoken members, Edwin Godkin of
The Nation
, maintaining that the columns of newspapers should be “gentlemen writing for gentlemen.”
²⁹
Journalists “entered the thriving ranks of professional elites by subscribing to the prevailing tenet that political decision-making required insulation from ‘mobbish’ and ‘irrational’ voters.”
³⁰
Casper S. Yost, for example, the first president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE), wrote that “no people have ever progressed morally who did not have conceptions of right impressed upon them by moral leadership.”
³¹
By “moral leadership,” Yost meant himself and his colleagues.

But even allowing for political bias, publisher Richard White in 1869 explained that a journalist should make the “strongest argument” he could for his political party, but was not “at liberty to make intentionally a single erroneous assertion, or to warp a single fact.”
³²
(Hailing Keith Olbermann!) And it’s equally true that some crusading journalists, or muckrakers, pompously saw themselves as the moral voices of society, allowing their activism to bury any traits of basic reporting ethics they may have had. Journalists,
Collier’s
blared, needed to cast their beam of light “forward up on the way that must be followed.”
³³
This is the same
Collier’s
that insisted, “Truth is the very kernel of the reporter’s art,” leaving it unclear as to what happened when the kernel of truth suggested the forward beam was aimed in the wrong direction.
³⁴

Partly in response to the muckrakers, the Society of Professional Journalists was founded in 1909, followed by a more serious response in 1922 when Malcolm Bingay, of the
Detroit Free Press
, organized the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) to unite editors “on the common ground of high purpose.”
³⁵
Bingay and Casper Yost of the
St. Louis Globe-Democrat
feared that “general attacks upon the integrity of journalism as a whole reflect upon every newspaper and every newspaperman.”
³⁶
Editors responded, initially, with ASNE’s membership swelling to 100,000 (including editors and editorial page writers) before the numbers started to shrink because of internal disagreements over policy.

A code of ethics or conduct, which ASNE established as the “Canons of Journalism,” played a key role in establishing the news business as a profession. The “Canons” embraced the objective position by stating that the “primary purpose of gathering and distributing news and opinion is to serve the general welfare by informing the people and enabling them to make judgements on the issues.” Article IV said that “every effort must be made to assure that the news content is accurate, free from bias and in context, and that all sides are presented fairly.”
Editor & Publisher
magazine (launched in 1901 and merged with
The Journalist
in 1907) predicted the new standards would eliminate the “Typhoid Marys of Journalism.”
³⁷
A reporters’ counterpart to ASNE, the Society of Professional Journalists, was also established, stating that “public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy” and that journalists should further those ends by “seeking truth and providing a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues.”
³⁸
As if to underscore the point about seeking truth, the Society insisted journalists be “honest, fair, and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information,” and test the accuracy of their information to avoid inadvertent error. “Deliberate distortion,” the Code of Ethics added, “is never permissible.”
³⁹

The Associated Press also had a managing code of ethics, which any modern reader of AP reports would have difficulty recognizing:

Already, however, reporters and editors were experiencing a tension between what they viewed as their call to be a “constructive critic” of society and still tell the truth and be fair. For example, what if accurate and honest news did
not
criticize society? Cracks in the ethics of journalism began to appear in 1947, with the Hutchins Commission on Freedom of the Press (formed out of concern that wartime coverage was too patriotic).
⁴¹
The Hutchins Commission claimed in its publication,
A Free and Responsible Press
, “it is no longer enough to report
the fact
truthfully. It is now necessary to report
the truth about the fact
.”
⁴²
Merely allowing facts to establish the truth wasn’t sufficient: journalists had to establish the truth before they could present the facts!
⁴³
Of course, this raised the question “whose truth?” and earned the answer, “the journalists’ truth.”
⁴⁴

Still, to many journalists of the World War II era, these were radical ideas. Consider the comments of beat reporter Lou Guzzo, who worked for the Cleveland
Plain Dealer
from 1937 to 1942, then again after the war, and recalled the near-dogmatic commitment to objective reporting at his paper: “When a reporter on any beat dared fracture the barrier of objective reporting, his copy was tossed back to him for immediate revision.
⁴⁵
Neither of his city editors, Guzzo recalled, “tolerated even the slightest hint of bias in news reporting.” Further, “the newspaper itself espoused so subtle an editorial stance that virtually no one could state with authority that the
Plain Dealer
editorial board or the staff was conservative, liberal, or whatever. . . .”
⁴⁶
“Balance in reporting,” he later said, “was not simply a textbook venture for the entire
Plain Dealer
staff; it was a badge of honor.”
⁴⁷
Guzzo recalled “the devotion there to balanced and truthful reporting, regardless of the issues or persons involved,” an expectation made clear in the “Journalist’s Creed.”
⁴⁸
It is important, though, to recognize that the majority of journalists in the 1950s saw themselves as professionals who dealt in facts, not the “framing” of news events.

But some exceptions had already started to appear—Murrow, on television, was the most famous. In print journalism, James B. Reston, the Washington bureau chief for
The New York Times
, started to write “news” columns in 1953 that “clearly reflected his own judgments.”
⁴⁹
Soon, other
Times
reporters began to write similar articles reflecting their own interpretation of the facts. And there was an even more troubling trend: the large journalism schools, such as Columbia, were gaining an inordinate degree of influence over those aspiring to careers in the news, just as New York and Washington had attained unparalleled levels of opinion-making power in the United States. One cannot underestimate how swimming in this self-selecting gene pool affected the media. Sociological studies confirmed that “political choices . . . were dominated more by active personal influence and face-to-face communications than by the mass media.”
⁵⁰
When those influencing others’ political choices were members of the media, a significant in-breeding started to develop. Contrary to the notion that the elites were always “conservative,” in journalism the predominance of the peer group ensured that primarily liberal views would triumph.

Reporting itself was transformed, giving rise to the notion that journalists should not only serve as messengers but also provide a source of authority, credibility, and power. Journalism’s homogeneity went beyond a commonly shared view among reporters about gaining, and extending, the authority of the news media. Rather than diversifying, media elites homogenized even further. From 1964 to 1976, the percentage voting for the Democratic candidate in national elections
never fell below 81 percent
. ABC reporter Frank Reynolds, in an attempt to refute the notion that the network news reflected the attitudes of a group of eastern elites, wound up confirming the fact: “Sure, I suppose there is an Eastern Establishment, left-wing bias. But that just happens to be because the people who are in [the media tend to] feel that way.”
⁵¹
Theodore H. White commented on the exclusionary social milieu in which the eastern journalists operated: “These people drink together, talk together, read the same esoteric and mad reviews . . . [and] they control the cultural heights. . . . [O]ne who does not agree with them has enormous difficulty in breaking through.”
⁵²
Such a bias could prove critical in 1969, when 90 percent of the population watched a television news show regularly.