ALL THE THAT’S FIT TO PRINT By Walter Karp Who decides w ha t is news in America? The answer lies right on the surface, as obvious as Poe's purloined letter. Reporters themselves know the answer, and talk o f it candidly enough in their memoirs. Newspapers carry the answer in almost every news story they publish. What keeps us looking in the wrong direction, as I recently discovered while wading through an ample supply o f media studies and books by working journalists, is a deep-seated linguistic habit. Instead o f speaking o f news, we speak o f "the press" and "the media"—corporate entities with wealthy owners, paid employees, profits, holdings, forests in Canada. And, thinking o f these, it is almost impossible not to speak o f "the press" doing this or that—which is exactly what hides the purloined letter. For to say that the press does things conceals the fundamental truth that the press, strictly speaking, can scarcely be said to do anything. It does not act, it is acted upon. This immediately becomes clear when one considers how and where reporters find the news. Very few newspaper stories are the result of reporters digging in files; poring over documents; or interviewing experts, dissenters, or ordinary people. The overwhelming majority of stories are based on official sources—on information provided by members of Congress, presidential aides, and politicians. A media critic named Leon V. Sigal discovered as much after analyzing 2,850 news stories that appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post between 1949 and 1969. Nearly four out of five of these stories, he found, involved official sources. Had Professor Sigal limited his study to national political news, and had he been able to count all the stories that had been instigated by official sources who went unmentioned, nearly five out of five would probably be closer to the truth. The first fact of American journalism is its overwhelming dependence on sources, mostly official, usually powerful. “Sources supply the sense and substance of the day’s news. Sources provide the arguments, the rebuttals, the explanations, the criticism,” as Theodore L. Glasser, a professor of journalism, wrote in a 1984 issue of the Quill, a journalist’s journal. To facts derived from sources, reporters add “ a paragraph of official-source interpretation,” according to Tom Wicker, for powerful people not only make news by their deeds but also tell reporters what to think of those deeds, and the reporters tell us. David Broder, in his recent memoirs, recalls that while covering the Democratic party for the Washington Post in the late 1960s he learned that the grass-roots rebellion against President Johnson and the Democratic party establishment, as he then put it, “degrades the Democratic Party”—having been told so by his sources, that is, by members of the Democratic National Committee, Democratic leaders in Congress, and local party officials. Covering Congress means talking to the most powerful legislators and their legislative aides. For years, recalls Broder, the Associated Press covered the House of Representatives for scores of millions of Americans through daily chats with Representative Howard W. Smith, a conservative Virginia Democrat who chaired the powerful Rules Committee. Covering the White House means dancing daily attendance on the President’s aides and spokesmen. “We’re in small quarters with access to only a small number of officia l people, getting the same information. So we write similar stories and move on the same issues,” says a White House correspondent interviewed in The Washington Reporters. A dozen great venues of power and policy—Defense, State, Justice, Central Intelligence, FBI, and* so on—form the daily beats of small claques of Washington reporters “whose primary exercise is collecting handouts from those informational soup kitchens,” as Alan Abelson once put it in Barron’s. Sources are nearly everything; journalists are nearly nothing. “ Reporters are puppets. They simply respond to the pull of the most powerful strings,” Lyndon Johnson once said. Reagan’s secretary of state, Alexander Haig, explained to an interviewer in March 1982 that “ even if they write something that I think is terribly untrue, I don’t consider that it was a writer who did it. It’s always someone who gave that writer that information.” So pervasive is the passivity of the press that when a reporter actually looks for news on his or her own it is given a special name, “ investigative journalism,” to distinguish it from routine, passive “ source journalism.” It is investigative journalism that wins the professional honors, that makes what little history the American press ever makes, and that provides the misleading exception that proves the rule: the American press, unbidden by powerful sources, seldom investigates anything. Under the rule of passivity a “ leak” is a gift from the powerful. Only rarely is it “ an example of a reporter’s persistence and skill,” as William S. White noted in these pages more than thirty years ago. “ Exclusives” are less a sign of enterprise than of passive service to the powerful. When Reagan’s State Department wanted to turn its latest policy line into news, department officials would make it an “ exclusive” for Bernard Gwertzman of the New York Times, former State Department spokesman John Hughes recently recalled in the pages of TV Guide. Hughes could then count on “ television’s follow-up during the day,” since TV news reporters commonly used the Times reporter as their source, knowing that he was the trusted vessel of the highest officials. It is a bitter irony of source journalism that the 18 Clinton St. Quarterly—Fall, 1989 Clinton St. Quarterly—Fall, 1989 19
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