Few have embodied the American way of cautious, even-handed journalism
so totally as veteran Washington Post reporter and columnist David
Broder. His death last week seemed like the end of an age, an Atlantis
slipping beneath the waves.
And yet, on Mediagazer, the hottest, hippest, seemingly most comprehensive media news aggregator, there was nothing. At 7:17 p.m. on March 9, eight hours after the news of the death of “the dean of political writers” broke, I counted 95 links to stories dissecting the resignation of National Public Radio’s CEO, Vivian Schiller (105 if you added in a separate trove of commentary on whether NPR should receive federal funding); a plethora of links to stories on Zite, a personalized magazine for the iPad; al Jazeera launching an English-language children’s channel; buyouts at Newsweek; and yet more stories about the iPad.
It seemed a peculiar sign of the times, an update on the old saw that “today’s news is tomorrow’s fish wrap”: Dead newsmen are no more interesting than dead fish. But if Broder symbolized a distinctively measured and conventional style of journalism, was his absence on Mediagazer equally symbolic of the irrelevance of that style? I e-mailed editor Megan McCarthy, who was en route to Austin to moderate a panel at the South by Southwest festival, titled, propitiously, “Humans versus Robots: Who curates the real time web?”
She replied the next morning, by which time a smattering of links had appeared. “Symbolic news, while important,” she said, “doesn’t have the urgency that other stories may have. Odds are, you’re not going to make a business decision that affects how the media industry will grow based on the death of a reporter who was famous for covering the Nixon administration.”
Mediagazer, she said, was about the future and not the past. “I needed time to evaluate all of the coverage and see if it was just a sad story or something more symbolic of the industry.”
If McCarthy’s response was almost Broderian in measure, it packed together all the ironies and aspirations of our over-mediated times: the urgency of news about the news business; the newsroom as the trading room of the knowledge economy; Huffington or Zuckerberg as our new Gordon Gekko.
To many, the very measured character of Broder’s journalism was a casus belli in the war between new media and old, one that would end the milquetoast servings of reporting and insight that propagated a corrupt system of co-dependence between reporters and their subjects. Broder did not hold truth to political power; he held truth hostage to political power, by giving politicians too much respect.
As the great critic Desmond McCarthy once observed, there is a time when every clever young person prefers to show how clever he is by attacking a writer’s faults rather than celebrating his virtues. New media provided the tinder for this bonfire, a Trojan horse to sack Old Fogeydom.
But being measured involves understanding the incompleteness of journalism — and how reporters could end up behaving, as one presidential candidate observed, like blackbirds on a telephone wire. First one takes off, then another, and soon the whole flock is in flight toward a certain and, for the politician, unwelcome destination. When a handful of journalists ruled the fate of politicians, the temptations of journalistic power had to be consciously resisted. This was, perhaps, easier for Broder than for others, because he was exceptionally kind in an otherwise unkind profession.
But even as new media reinvented journalism, it simply repackaged the same old problem: No matter how diffuse influence is now, journalists are still birds on a wire. The campaigning politician is prey to the flap of a YouTube video or a twittering blogger as he or she was from critical dissection in the age of Johnny Apple, Haynes Johnson or Bob Novak. The fundamental problem — is this right? — hasn’t gone away.
Skimming through the very first history of American journalism — by James Melvin Lee — is a useful reminder that nothing much changes in journalism. The press of the early republic? A confederacy of scum, if you believe half of what the Founding Fathers wrote. The early presidents? Cold-thinking villains, if you believe half of what the press wrote. And on it goes, by turns bitter and sweet.
“Journalism is a mirror of the times. It is a mirror of the people,” concludes Lee, and worthies and heavyweights are summoned to concur.
“To say that the newspapers are getting worse is to say that the people are getting worse,” says Whitelaw Reid, editor of the New York Tribune.
“If we are to have responsible newspapers, the reform must begin with the readers themselves,” declares Arthur Twining Hadley, president of Yale University.
Style, in other words, is character. But whether today’s journalism is just a mirror to our ill temper, or poxing us with madness, it is clear, for now, that this is no country for old newsmen.
And yet, on Mediagazer, the hottest, hippest, seemingly most comprehensive media news aggregator, there was nothing. At 7:17 p.m. on March 9, eight hours after the news of the death of “the dean of political writers” broke, I counted 95 links to stories dissecting the resignation of National Public Radio’s CEO, Vivian Schiller (105 if you added in a separate trove of commentary on whether NPR should receive federal funding); a plethora of links to stories on Zite, a personalized magazine for the iPad; al Jazeera launching an English-language children’s channel; buyouts at Newsweek; and yet more stories about the iPad.
It seemed a peculiar sign of the times, an update on the old saw that “today’s news is tomorrow’s fish wrap”: Dead newsmen are no more interesting than dead fish. But if Broder symbolized a distinctively measured and conventional style of journalism, was his absence on Mediagazer equally symbolic of the irrelevance of that style? I e-mailed editor Megan McCarthy, who was en route to Austin to moderate a panel at the South by Southwest festival, titled, propitiously, “Humans versus Robots: Who curates the real time web?”
She replied the next morning, by which time a smattering of links had appeared. “Symbolic news, while important,” she said, “doesn’t have the urgency that other stories may have. Odds are, you’re not going to make a business decision that affects how the media industry will grow based on the death of a reporter who was famous for covering the Nixon administration.”
Mediagazer, she said, was about the future and not the past. “I needed time to evaluate all of the coverage and see if it was just a sad story or something more symbolic of the industry.”
If McCarthy’s response was almost Broderian in measure, it packed together all the ironies and aspirations of our over-mediated times: the urgency of news about the news business; the newsroom as the trading room of the knowledge economy; Huffington or Zuckerberg as our new Gordon Gekko.
To many, the very measured character of Broder’s journalism was a casus belli in the war between new media and old, one that would end the milquetoast servings of reporting and insight that propagated a corrupt system of co-dependence between reporters and their subjects. Broder did not hold truth to political power; he held truth hostage to political power, by giving politicians too much respect.
As the great critic Desmond McCarthy once observed, there is a time when every clever young person prefers to show how clever he is by attacking a writer’s faults rather than celebrating his virtues. New media provided the tinder for this bonfire, a Trojan horse to sack Old Fogeydom.
But being measured involves understanding the incompleteness of journalism — and how reporters could end up behaving, as one presidential candidate observed, like blackbirds on a telephone wire. First one takes off, then another, and soon the whole flock is in flight toward a certain and, for the politician, unwelcome destination. When a handful of journalists ruled the fate of politicians, the temptations of journalistic power had to be consciously resisted. This was, perhaps, easier for Broder than for others, because he was exceptionally kind in an otherwise unkind profession.
But even as new media reinvented journalism, it simply repackaged the same old problem: No matter how diffuse influence is now, journalists are still birds on a wire. The campaigning politician is prey to the flap of a YouTube video or a twittering blogger as he or she was from critical dissection in the age of Johnny Apple, Haynes Johnson or Bob Novak. The fundamental problem — is this right? — hasn’t gone away.
Skimming through the very first history of American journalism — by James Melvin Lee — is a useful reminder that nothing much changes in journalism. The press of the early republic? A confederacy of scum, if you believe half of what the Founding Fathers wrote. The early presidents? Cold-thinking villains, if you believe half of what the press wrote. And on it goes, by turns bitter and sweet.
“Journalism is a mirror of the times. It is a mirror of the people,” concludes Lee, and worthies and heavyweights are summoned to concur.
“To say that the newspapers are getting worse is to say that the people are getting worse,” says Whitelaw Reid, editor of the New York Tribune.
“If we are to have responsible newspapers, the reform must begin with the readers themselves,” declares Arthur Twining Hadley, president of Yale University.
Style, in other words, is character. But whether today’s journalism is just a mirror to our ill temper, or poxing us with madness, it is clear, for now, that this is no country for old newsmen.
