WHEN BILL KOVACH STARTED WORK as a reporter in the summer of 1959, America’s white-owned newspapers typically ignored the black people and the black communities in their towns. That segment of the community was, in effect, invisible.
The news media of that era also turned a blind eye to public officials who drank too much or got involved in extramarital affairs.
“Those things were not considered newsworthy,” says Kovach, who has earned a reputation as a press critic and even as the “conscience of journalism” after a 40-plus year media career that has included covering civil rights for The (Nashville) Tennessean, heading up the Washington bureau of The New York Times, running the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and, for the past 10 years, serving as curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University.
Kovach, now 67, will depart the Nieman Foundation this month to return to Washington, D.C., where he plans to continue writing books and articles and commenting on media performance. His next book on the media, written with Tom Rosenstiel, is due out early next year.
In an interview with Poynter.org, Kovach offered his observations on how the definition of news — and the ethical issues embedded in covering the news — have been transformed over the nearly half century that he has been in the media. He also talked about what it means to do journalism today.
Let’s talk about ethics. What is the biggest ethical problem today for the news media compared to when you started in journalism?
I’ll answer that by going back to when I started, in 1959 in Johnson City, Tennessee (at the Press Chronicle). At that time, no one worried about blacks being in the news. They were, in effect, invisible, and it was totally accepted. Pot Likker — the part of Johnson City where the blacks lived — had the only unpaved streets in town and they were lined with shacks. The schools were segregated. Blacks and whites didn’t see each other. But that wasn’t anything that anyone worried about. It was outside the purview of journalism. It was a part of life that was of no importance to us.
And the idea that you would inquire or write about the private life of a public official was almost nonexistent. We spent a lot of time in the newsroom trading gossip and stories about the drinking habits of public figures, about the mistresses that one or two had or their visits to houses of ill repute. Those things were not considered newsworthy. It was a much different sense of what was newsworthy and what people had the right to know. There were things that were accepted and that were not seen as being the public’s business.
When did this begin to change?
When I moved from Johnson City to The Tennessean in 1962. How much of that change was due to The Tennessean’s progressiveness in opening the public debate and how much of it was the civil rights movement? I am not sure. Probably it was a bit of both.
But beginning about 1962, being in Nashville was, in my experience, just like watching a flower open. We were covering — aggressively covering — stories about the civil rights movement and writing about it with the understanding that it was our obligation to let the people who read our newspaper understand what this meant to the region and what it had cost the region.
In addition, we were challenging the ways of the government. We wanted government opened up to closer inspection. We won a federal lawsuit that became the beginning of the “sunshine laws.” But it was because the editor and the publisher decided that journalism had accepted too narrow a view of what the public interest was and what the public right to know was. A lot of this was stimulated by what the kids in SNCC (Students for a Non-violent Coordinating Committee) taught us about being more open and more knowledgeable about understanding what journalism needed to do
What were your personal feelings at the time about the changes that were taking place in the society and in journalism?
It was pretty painful to realize in your late 20s and early 30s — as I was at the time — that you had spent your life totally oblivious to (black) people who were there and around you every day.
This realization (on the part of journalists throughout the country) totally changed the view of what journalism needed to do. And this changing view led the anti-war movement and Watergate.
So I would say that looking at the world of journalism in 1959, when I started, compared to 1972-73, is comparable to looking at one of those maps of the North American continent drawn by cartographers before Columbus came. The whole world that journalism dealt with as a matter of routine by the 1970s was entirely different from the late 1950s. We all knew (in the ’60s) about the drinking habits of senators like Estes Kefauver, but no one wrote about that. The New York Times didn’t write about the drinking problems of major public figures until the 1970s when Wilbur Mills drove into the Tidal Basin with Fanne Fox.
It was that process of discovery of new areas that were judged to be of importance to the general public.
The other part of this expanding area for coverage was driven by the movements — the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, other movements. Whole segments of society were saying, “You have to write about us and talk about us if you are going to do your job.”
Describe the ethical issues that emerged as the definition of news changed.
There was a resurgence of concern about the ethics of journalism in the 1970s as old taboos began to erode and we began to report on public officials’ behavior in new and more aggressive ways. The consensus in the news media was to report on these things (a politician’s drinking problem, for instance) but do so in the context of ethical procedures. There was the sense that there needed to be balance in the reporting.
Then as we got into the ’80s, many newsrooms began to feel the impact of the economic changes that were developing as a result of public trading of newspapers and news organizations. There was a whole new sense of economic responsibility embedded in the thinking of the newsroom that hadn’t been there before. Morphing into these trends were the collapse of the Cold War and the new technology.
Where are we now?
We are at the point of trying to decide what journalism is in this new atmosphere. Now nothing is not grist for the mill of a journalist. But the question is, What is journalism? Is there a difference between what Matt Drudge produces and puts on the web or what Chris Matthews puts on cable television or what the St. Petersburgh Times puts in its newspaper? Are they all the same thing? If someone calls herself a journalist, is that all it takes? What is a journalist? That is the question that confronts us now.
We are going through a difficult time now, especially when we are caught in an Elián Gonzalez story or an O.J. Simpson story or a Clinton-Lewinsky story where the entertainment value of the news, or the celebrity value of the news, makes it more infotainment than information. This frustrates a lot of us. But it has forced us to finally ask the question: Who the hell are we, and what does it mean to say we are doing journalism?
How would you characterize the job of a reporter today who wants, as you put it, “to do journalism”?
The job of a reporter — which I think is the heart and soul of journalism — is finding out the information, organizing it, and trying to present it in a fair and balanced and factual way. And the job of a reporter is built on seeking out people who know things and listening to what they have to say. The more people you listen to, the more thorough your knowledge about a subject will be. It really is that simple.
What about the news organization where a reporter works? Given the changes that are transforming the news media today, as a result of mergers and technology, what is important about the way a news organization operates?
The space within a news organization has to be as open and as encouraging of debate and argument and discussion as possible. The space in a newsroom has to be a space in which everybody feels free and encouraged to engage in the discussion, to express their opinions, their reservations, their arguments about a decision or about how the work is being done. I think the newsroom has to be a marketplace of ideas so we are not suppressing the experience and the viewpoint and the ideas of other people. Otherwise, all this effort toward diversity, all this effort toward balance and perspective, is artificial.
