Much that is commonly “understood” among journalists is rarely voiced in public. A pre-convention event this week in Cambridge — where network anchors went on the record about the partisan and corporate pressures they feel — was a bracing exception. The Shorenstein Center program was mostly noted in the news for Jim Lehrer’s chastisement of the big three anchors for their stinted convention coverage. But even rarer was the theme kicked off by Dan Rather at the start: “Fear has increased in every newsroom in America.” The three anchors (Rather, Peter Jennings, and Tom Brokaw) sparred with one another about whether it was “fear,” “caution,” or “anxiety,” but its existence seemed clear.
Rather started by noting this: When you’re a reporter contrasting what someone in the administration says with what you know to be the facts, pointedly laying out the differences, “You’re gonna catch hell.” “And those who are willing to pay the price,” Rather said, are fewer today than before. In a later remark, he said the strong feelings nationwide and the guarantee that they’ll be voiced not only calls up more caution than ever — sometimes a good thing — but causes some to ask: “You know what? We run this story, we’re asking for trouble. Why do it?”
Peter Jennings, having rejected fear, said shortly thereafter, “I think there is anxiety in the newsroom, and I think it comes from the corporate suite.” He hears more from conservative critics than in the past, he said, and “I think it creates concern in the corporate suites. This wave of resentment rushes at our advertisers, it rushes at our corporate suites, and it gets under the newsroom’s skin.”
Then it was Rather’s turn to demur, saying that had “not been (his) experience at CBS News, at least in recent years.” To which Jennings responded: “I can take on anything. But I feel a presence of anger in the air all the time.”
Tom Brokaw soft-pedaled this angle, noting that there had previously been “a kind of tyranny of the left” that only naturally had been succeeded by its opposite. But when the three were pressed by Congresswoman Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) about what they would have done differently in the coverage of the run-up to war in Iraq, the original topic revived.
Judy Woodruff cited “voices listened to but not given the prominence of the flood of voices from the administration.” She described a “hyper-patriotic … mood that had taken hold to some degree in the media.”
Rather went further with the specific results: “We did not do our job of pressing and asking enough questions often enough.” He said there is “more reluctance now than 35 to 40 years ago to stand up and look ’em in the eye and ask the hard questions.”
Brokaw said he thought “the big failure” was that “we didn’t connect enough dots. We didn’t raise enough questions about the political process.”
“Where are the hearings in the House? Where are the hearings in the Senate?” he asked.
Lehrer’s only comment on the topic: The fact that views today are “strongly held is terrific for us,” he said, because “viewers will watch with more vigor.”
Woodruff’s thought about the powerful partisan outpourings: “We want to be responsive, but it can never govern what we do.”
As the ensuing debate acknowledged, the country’s political mood, translated through the corporate suites, HAS been affecting what the media was doing. Here’s hoping the welcome level of candor in Cambridge is a signal that this is ceasing to be true.
