The Watergate Scandal marked a turning point in political journalism, and led to the ‘both sides’ model that so often casts intense heat but little light on public policy. (More)
Informing the News, Part I: Watergate and the Decline of Source-Interview Reporting
This week Morning Feature considers Thomas Patterson’s new book Informing the News: The Need for Knowledge-Based Journalism. Today we begin with how the Watergate Scandal eroded the source-interview model that was the bedrock of political journalism, and spawned the ‘He Said, She Said’ model we see today. Tomorrow we’ll see the limits of ‘He Said, She Said’ journalism, and why generalist reporters are hamstrung by asymmetrical knowledge. Saturday we’ll conclude with what kind of news audiences really want, and how our media might better offer it.
Thomas Patterson is the Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is the author of several other books on politics and the media, including Out of Order, awarded the American Political Science Association’s 2002 Doris Graber Award, and The Unseeing Eye, named one of the fifty most influential books of the past half century in the field of public opinion by the American Association for Public Opinion Research.
“Most news is not what happened, but what someone says has happened”
So wrote Leon Sigal in 1973, in Reporters and Officials: The Organization and Politics of Newsmaking. Sigal captured the most basic challenge in journalism, that reporters can rarely witness firsthand the events on which they report. Some newsworthy events happen in private, for valid or self-serving reasons. Others leave no living witnesses, or at least none who want to be honest. And others happen in plain sight, but are so vast and diffuse that no one person could possibly witness all or even a significant sample of them.
Thus journalists rely on sources: second-hand reports from inside private rooms, from investigators examining a crime scene or disaster area, and from pollsters and individuals who offer personal experiences of societal events.
The basic ‘pyramid’ news story
Like most journalism students, I was taught how to interview sources and shape their accounts into an 800-word ‘pyramid’ news story. At the top of the pyramid is the lead – spelled lede in industry jargon – a single sentence that presents the essential facts, ideally in a manner that draws readers into the rest of the story. But even if they don’t read past the lead, we were taught, they should know the Who, What, When, and Where of the event.
For example, a well-written lead would tell you that, in a meeting yesterday (When), your city council (Who and Where) passed a new ordinance that bans women’s health clinics within 1000 feet of a school or daycare (What). Only later in the story – if the reporter included the details and you read that far – will you learn How the new law affects existing clinics, How it may affect women seeking health care, Why four of the seven council members voted ‘Aye,’ or Why the other three voted ‘Nay.’
Yet Dr. Patterson argues that those How and Why details are often the most important elements of a public policy news story. So why are they subordinate in the ‘pyramid’ news story structure?
One answer is that a reporter who sat through the city council meeting can relate the Who, What, When, and Where from first-hand observation. But the How and Why will require a lot more digging. The reporter would have to interview a city attorney who can explain the law’s details, and interview a city manager or review street maps to see what clinics will be forced to close. Next might be clinic spokespersons or women’s advocacy group leaders, to explain how the law will affect women seeking health care, and in which neighborhoods. The reporter might also contact the leaders of the groups who advocated for the new law, if those groups acted publicly, or try to ferret them out if they acted behind the scenes. Then, finally, the reporter would be ready to interview the city council members and ask them to explain their votes.
That’s too much work for an 800-word story, especially if the reporter is expected to cover the two other ordinances the city commission also voted on, and write three other stories about events at city hall that day.
“The air was thick with lies, and the president was the lead liar”
Because reporting is so labor-intensive, and because time and space are limited, journalists must prioritize sources. Dr. Patterson quotes Michael Schudson’s Why Democracies Need an Unlovable Press:
The news, explains Michael Schudson, flows from the top down, “favoring high government officials over lower government officials, government officials over unofficial groups and … groups of any sort over unorganized citizens.”
Dr. Patterson writes that this approach once worked well. Journalists trusted officials to be truthful about public news events, and officials trusted journalists not to pry into private peccadilloes. And many reporters still basically transcribe what public officials say and present it as “the news,” especially in local stories.
Then came Watergate where, as Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee wrote, “The air was thick with lies, and the president was the lead liar.”
Dr. Patterson cites Newsweek’s Meg Greenfield writing that, before Watergate, “the worst thing we could do … was [to] falsely accuse someone of wrongdoing.” But after Watergate, Greenfield wrote, “the worst, the most embarrassing, humiliating thing is not that you accuse someone falsely but that you … fail to accuse someone of something he ought to be accused of.”
“You go shopping”
The result was a more skeptical press eager to publish any breach of the public trust, and more defensive officials anxious to avoid or deflect such reports. More and more, officials and agencies hired public relations experts to both distribute self-serving press releases and coach the principals before interviews. And with ‘objectivity’ as a cardinal value, reporters could not personally challenge public officials’ claims without risking accusations of bias.
As Dr. Patterson writes, that left few tools at hand:
Investigative reporting was not a realistic alternative. Time-consuming and expensive, it was not a type of reporting that news organizations were equipped to do on a daily basis. Reporters needed an expedient alternative and by the late 1970s had devised it. When a politician said or did something newsworthy, journalists reached out to an opponent to attack it. The critical element was supplied not by careful investigation of whether a proposal was sound or sincere, but by seeking out an opponent who would rip it apart. “You go shopping,” is how Los Angeles Times reporter Jack Nelson described the practice. It was as ingenious in its safety as in its simplicity. It allowed the journalist to orchestrate the attack while staying out of the line of fire–politicians would do the dirty work of tearing each other down.
Thus was born the ‘He Said, She Said’ model of political reporting, and tomorrow we’ll see the narrow and counter-democratic limits of that model.
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Happy Thursday!
“She said, she said” describing the Lt. Gov. of New Jersey and the Mayor of Hoboken would seem to indicate progress in a weird way.
The concept of two sides to the story doesn’t account for the sizes or weight of the two sides relative to each other. More than 99% of climate scientists agree and way less than 1% are deniers yet a lack of understanding about the scientific process and the differences among the 99% leads some reporters to equally weight the deniers and the vast majority of the scientists.
“Why Climate Deniers Have No Scientific Credibility: Only 1 of 9,136 Recent Peer-Reviewed Authors Rejects Global Warming”
The peer reviewed scientific literature is an important qualifier for me. For those who want to believe the deniers it makes no difference.
Fascinating series. Good journalism as described here requires lots of time and money. I hope the profit motive doesn’t kill off journalism. We’d be much poorer as a country without it.
If “good journalism” is the hypothetical process I described for the reporter covering the city council vote on that ordinance, I should mention that was never standard practice for public policy reporting. It’s too time-consuming, and the resulting stories would fill too much space. Unless there’s Something Really Big lurking beneath or driving the story – an alleged bribe, a huge protest – few editors will commit that much reporting time. They can’t afford it.
So yes, as we’ll discuss tomorrow, we end up with ‘He Said, She Said,’ usually with the reporter avoiding any stance or presenting evidence to bolster either side.
Good morning! ::hugggggs::
This was a fascinating explanation of how we got here: lies upon lies and no one left to dig them out. Reporting, sadly, is considered a cost center in modern news. It costs a lot and the bean counters don’t see what it adds to the bottom line. The idea that people might simply stop reading or watching if there was no news, thus damaging the revenue of the news outlet, seems to escape them.
To survive, news outlets now must take the “cheap” way of reporting: tell one side then find someone to counter it. “Both sides must be represented” is the modern cry of journalism, and little about it is likely to yield much in the way of factual information.
It’s sad. It’s bad for the country. Every so often you find a paper willing to allow a reporter to put more time (and thus money) into investigation, but there’s little motivation to do so. I know plenty of reporters who spend their own time pursuing investigations because they can’t do it on the clock.
This whole situation needs some serious repair work.
In fairness, the ‘He Said, She Said’ model mirrors the adversarial process we use in law. The theory is that each side will prepare and present the best available evidence and arguments, and the finder of fact (judge or jury, or news readers and viewers) can then weigh them and decide.
When that works in court – and it doesn’t always work – it works because we have and judges apply rules of evidence and procedure. Witnesses are under oath and subject to perjury charges if they intentionally misstate facts. Scientific experts must be vetted and their theories (and motivations, if suspect) presented and explained. And the lawyers and other parties can’t simply shout over each other, as so often happens in ‘He Said, She Said’ interviews. A lot of that is very tedious, and real trials are never as entertaining as they are in the movies.
But the court budget doesn’t hinge on how many people attend trials (or watch Court TV). Most newspaper, news station, and news blog’s budgets do hinge on the size of their audience, and that gives them a very different set of incentives in the adversarial process. They profit – or think they profit – by attention-grabbing heat, not by problem-solving light.
Good morning! ::hugggggs::
I give reporters more credit. The paper is shaped by the editors. They are the folks that say add a “She said” to this. Take out this side issue and only talk about the subject I assigned to you.
I’m not blaming the reporters, Jim. Few reporters have the depth of subject-matter expertise they would need to assess officials’ claims about public policy issues. That problem has become even worse as newsrooms cut staff over the past decades. Most newspapers and local broadcast outlets no longer have full-time beat reporters covering specific offices or agencies. The ‘city hall’ reporter probably also covers crime stories, trials, and other local news.
The Bergen County Record broke the BridgeGate story, in large part, because they still have a full-time traffic reporter. That’s a luxury most news rooms can’t afford.
Good morning! ::hugggggs::