This essay also was published in The New York Times February 1, 1998.
When an earlier President’s conduct was mesmerizing America, we reporters sometimes got into pitched debate with our editors about how far our articles could go in fixing blame for Watergate on Richard M. Nixon. The editors kept insisting it was inappropriate for the press to predict Nixon’s indictment. If it was to happen, it would be framed in due time by facts. As, indeed, it was.
Where is journalistic restraint now? Almost from the first instant that we’ve been served the Monica Lewinsky stew, restraint has been the missing ingredient.
First-day accounts–first day!–included speculation about whether President Clinton would be impeached for perjury. Never mind that no one has been charged with any crime in this case, that perjury is hard to prove, that even if it were proved it might not be found in these circumstances to constitute high crimes and misdemeanors.
The investigation of President Clinton’s conduct may–please stress that may –determine that he had an affair and tried not merely to hide it but to cover it up criminally. The investigation is not close to having proved so. And it surely had not been made the case before television anchors and pundits and news editors began hyperventilating about a “crisis in the White House.” Much of the press is rushing to the wrong judgment.
It’s news judgment we need. We tend in newsroom discussions to separate news judgment from other aspects of the craft, as if it were something only a few people can master and for which they should be paid extra.
But making sound judgments is a responsibility of every journalist at every level in broadcast, print or new media. We constantly exercise news judgment in choosing what to report, whom to interview, whom to trust, how to illustrate, what to amplify, what to omit, how to make the story interesting, when to quote or paraphrase, when and where–or whether–to run the article, what the headline should be, when to follow up, and how to correct inevitable errors.
The problem nowadays is that we’re expected to make the right calls on the run. We used to spend some of our time working to double- or triple-check information, to verify, to research context, to scour complementary and contradictory data, to think and then to craft an accurate and coherent account. Many journalists now spend valuable time scanning the Web and surfing cable channels to be sure they’re not belated in disclosing what someone else just reported, breathlessly, using sources whose identity we’ll never know.
The digital age does not respect contemplation. The deliberative news process is being sucked into a constant swirl of charge and countercharge followed by rebuttal and rebuttal succeeded by spin and counterspin leading to new charges and countercharges
Now there are no cycles, only Now. A journalist today is apt to be wedging someone else’s information into a story nanoseconds before air time or press run, without the debate about tone and propriety we Watergate geezers could have with our editors.
When it’s all-news-all-over, the demand is too often for the new, not necessarily for news. We need to elevate, not debase, news judgment. Sound judgment pays homage to speed but reveres accuracy. News judgment can abet courage or invoke caution. News judgment is conscious and conscientious. It is authoritative but not judgmental. It relates the new to the known.
And it must not go out of fashion, no matter how difficult the circumstances now. Ignore “Hard Copy.” Read Matt Drudge for entertainment, not sourcing. Muster courage to pursue your own story, one that can be vouched for. Tell the viewer or reader what we don’t know, can’t prove, didn’t have time to figure out.
News judgment is knowing when not to put the President’s sex life on Page One. News judgment is remembering that “drive-by” should describe the crime, not the coverage.
