American Society of Newspaper Editors
San Francisco, California
October 8, 1998
By Robert M. Berdahl
Chancellor,
University of California, Berkeley
Thank you for that kind introduction. It is always a great pleasure, and sometimes a surprise, to receive such generous words from a member of the press. I will savor them, for not always am I treated in this way. When I was appointed Chancellor of Berkeley, the Daily Californian, with the kind of charity characteristic of student newspapers, wrote the following:
True, Robert Berdahl comes with impressive recommendations….But even though he used his Midwest personality to get himself hired, the sad fact is that on this campus Chancellor Bob must immediately work to overcome his appearance and his unremarkable history. At the most ethnically diverse campus in America, Berdahl is just about the whitest man on Earth. His background reads like the description of the villain in a Spike Lee movie. |
I appreciate your inviting me to join you tonight to offer what perspectives I may have on the status and credibility of American journalism. I am not certain that I can offer much to enlighten you. Most of my concern about the current state of journalism is not related to newspapers. Clearly newspapers vary widely in quality; but even in that variation, the serious print journalists are more thoughtful, offer a more complete context for their stories, are less likely to sensationalize, and are more careful than the other forms of mass communication in our society. Last Sunday, in the Austin-American Statesman, which I happened to read because I was back in Austin for the weekend, Rich Opel wrote about the fact that newspapers had survived and were thriving despite all of the dire predictions of their demise. That may be. But we all know of some great newspapers that have disappeared or at least are not so great as they once were. And we all recognize, I believe, that most Americans do not form most of their impressions of current events from the newspapers.
We are all aware of the power of television. That power has been accelerated with the advent of instant news, available around the clock, through cable television. It has been augmented with multiple channels looking for the means of filling time. And it has been augmented by the expansion of talk radio, which makes everyone with a telephone into an authority on any subject. And now the internet promises to pump enormous amounts of information out without any form of restraint concerning authenticity. The major news organizations have to contend with this glut of information, accurate or not. I was appalled, for example, to see Matt Drudge, author of the now famous Drudge Report, which boasts 80 percent accuracy, as one of the talking heads on a Sunday morning news hour this spring.
Whatever my criticisms of the mainline newspapers may be, they pale in comparison to the mischief, indeed damage, to our civil society that I think are inflicted by these other forms of dissemination.
As I thought about what I might say here tonight, I was struck by how much you and I, as representatives of newspapers and universities, have in common. Both newspapers and universities require extraordinary degrees of freedom in order to fulfill their function. Yours comes with a constitutional guarantee in the form of the First Amendment, ours in the tradition of academic freedom which, clearly related to the First Amendment, has also been assured by tradition and court rulings.
Both of us are engaged in the pursuit of truth, although with somewhat different deadlines. We both are involved in the acquisition and dissemination of information. Perhaps the standards for judging or testing our success in defining truth are different, but the task is similar.
Both newspapers and universities are viewed as essential to the preservation of democratic institutions, for the recognition that democratic society cannot be sustained in a state of ignorance goes deep into our history. Thomas Jefferson believed profoundly in both a free press and universities. "To preserve the freedom of the human mind…and freedom of the press," he said, "every spirit should be ready to devote itself to martyrdom; for as long as we may think as we will and speak as we think, the condition of man will proceed in improvement." Some today might not entirely share that optimism born of the Enlightenment. It should also not be forgotten that one of the things of which Jefferson was most proud was his founding of the University of Virginia.
And both of us see ourselves as having a role in the preservation of democratic institutions by being critics of contemporary society. Universities are inherently subversive institutions in that they are constantly challenging inherited wisdom, the current explanations of the world. Newspapers, too, are in the constant process of challenging authority, of questioning official explanations.
It is this activity, the intrinsically subversive role that we each play, that I propose we talk about tonight. For it is in this critical capacity that we are least understood and that, in the defense of our role as critics, we are also least willing to examine our own practices.
Universities have been charged, not merely with subversion, but with the outright undermining of democracy. Alan Bloom's best seller of a few years ago, The Closing of the American Mind, which carried the subtitle, How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Soul's of Today's Students, took universities to task for failing to teach western values, for fostering a relativist ethic that considered all ideas, all cultures of equal value. This pervasive "cultural relativism" is undermining the belief in the fundamental values of democratic institutions in America. Many of the other criticisms of American universities, especially those coming from the conservative flank occupied by Bill Bennett, Lynn Cheney, Dinesh D'Souza and others voice similar criticisms. The huge controversy that surrounded Stanford's change in the western civilization requirement revolved in part around whether universities should be teaching materials that came from outside the mainstream of western civilization and were critical of it or whether the task of such a course was to develop an appreciation for the fruits of western civilization. To conservative critics, universities are educating a generation of students with few convictions, no appreciation for the values upon which American society is grounded, and the belief that truth is relative.
Journalists face similar criticisms. Journalists are commonly viewed as the most cynical of professionals. To those on the receiving end of many of their inquiries, the questions we face on difficult issues seem laced with the assumption that we do not want to be forthcoming, that we have something to hide. There rarely seems to be the presumption of innocence or good intent. When I was President of the University of Texas at Austin, we received a very controversial gift from a named donor. After the controversy concerning that gift, we subsequently received an anonymous gift from someone else. Suspicious of the origin of the anonymous gift, the Austin-American Statesman, filed an open records request to get all of our donor records in order to ascertain the names of anonymous donors. Despite the incredible sensitivity of these records and the potential for their misuse, we were required to turn them over. None of the anonymous gifts had come from the controversial donor; indeed, only two anonymous donors were turned up in the search, both of whom had valid reasons for requesting anonymity. Despite the damage revealing the name of the donor might cause the University, the Statesman concluded that the public's right to know overrode all other considerations. But throughout the affair the legitimate interest of the University in respecting its promise to keep the identity of the donor confidential seemed to be viewed as a refusal to disclose information vital to the public interest.
Now journalists develop a skeptical, perhaps even a cynical view of human nature for good reasons. People lie. People in high places lie. And journalists catch them. And it makes them skeptical if not cynical. As an experiment, watch some of the Sunday morning talk shows -- especially Sunday Morning with Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts -- and try to measure the cynicism quotient. It seems to me to be extremely high.
In the time we have for discussion, I would be happy to discuss the role universities may play in contributing to the growth of skepticism and cynicism. The phrase, "Don't trust anyone over thirty," was, I believe, coined on the Berkeley campus. But since time is limited and you asked me here to discuss the issues related to the press, I'll concentrate my remarks on that side of the question.
I don't for a moment think that the media and newspapers are the sole source of cynicism in our society. Politicians who bend the rules, who campaign with false and misleading negative advertisements are also responsible; corporations that measure the cost-benefit of fixing a product as against settling lawsuits because it is faulty; health-care providers that are more interested in profits than in health; the gun and tobacco lobbies that can defeat any significant reform by promising the defeat of any candidate who crosses them; radio talk-show hosts with no regard for truth or fairness -- clearly these are even more responsible for the wave of cynicism that has overtaken us.
But a wave of cynicism is upon us and it is very damaging to the institutions of civil society. And we need to ask whether the cultivation of cynicism is not, by some, intentional, a means of diminishing the role of public life, of government, in America. For the kind of corrosive cynicism we are witnessing leads to apathy and indifference. It leads to withdrawal. It leads to the focus on individual satisfaction at the expense of concern for the larger community. It leads to the primacy of the private over the public. Cynicism, I believe, is corroding the quality of civil discourse in America and threatening the basis for democratic institutions.
Jim Carey, of the Journalism School at Columbia, and a friend of mine from the days we were together at the University of Illinois, is one of the most perceptive commentators on the current state of the media. Commenting on the impact of the media frenzy over the Lewinsky-Clinton scandal, Carey said of the growing consequence of cynicism:
A central belief of the Founding Fathers, based on the experience of history, was that republican institutions are fragile, the moments of their existence fleeting in historical time, and the threat of lurching back into a life of repression always present. These institutions are now taken for granted as if they were indestructible. Journalists seem to believe that democratic politics, which alone underwrites their craft, is a self-perpetuating machine that can withstand any amount of undermining. They are wrong. ...We are not in an imaginative proximity to revolution. Americans love change but hate revolution. But revolution is not the only option. People can also retreat deeper into private life, inside gated-communities, seeking private solutions to public problems, consigning politics to the realm of game and spectacle for mass distraction. But who is most hurt by this? The weakest and most vulnerable among us. 'Nations are the skin of the poor,' a Latin American economist says, understanding that nations are most precious to those orphaned and defenseless. |
Carey has said something very profound, I believe. We are living through a massive withdrawal from public life. The percentage of voters declines with each election, the lowest of any of the democratic societies. The affluent increasingly withdraw to the private sphere, not only into gated communities with their own security forces, but to private communities that provide all of their public amenities -- parks, tennis courts, golf courses, private schools, organized activities of all kinds, but all of them, in fact, private. This represents a privatization of life on a substantial scale, and it accounts for much of the unwillingness to be taxed to support public facilities, such as parks. Those on the other end of the economic spectrum have also privatized public spaces. Gangs and drug dealers have taken over the neighborhoods, the streets, and the parks in many of our cities. They, too, look after each other, but no one else.
We have had a case on our campus that illustrates the point. After being admitted to Berkeley in the spring and before enrolling in the fall of 1997, a young man named David Cash was in a Nevada casino with his friend. He saw his friend take a seven-year-old girl into a restroom, followed them into the restroom and saw his friend begin to molest the little girl. He did little to try to stop his friend and left the restroom. His friend murdered the girl and told Cash about it shortly thereafter. Cash did nothing to report the crime. His subsequent explanations of his behavior show little remorse for his failures and he has indicated that he felt a much stronger obligation to his friend than he did to the little girl. In short, he felt no public obligation. Cash has been charged with no crime, has violated no rules of the University since enrolling here; the University has no basis for bringing charges leading to dismissal, despite substantial public clamor for his expulsion.
Time doesn't permit a full discussion of the role of the media in the creation of the clamor (shock jocks on LA radio hyping the story, then paying for busloads to come to protest at Berkeley), then the reporting of the protest, and the subsequent broad media interest in the story. There used to be a joke among university presidents that a nightmare was coming to work and finding "60 Minutes" waiting to interview you. It is no longer very funny to me. I have now watched my 30-minute interview with Ed Bradley aired as a sound bite. "60 Minutes", as with all of the coverage, has focused on Cash's self-serving statements, on the demands for his dismissal, with some reference to the need for a good-Samaritan law. Virtually none has focused on the social implications of the story in the way that the press considered the deeper implications of the Kitty Genovese murder in New York City several decades ago. Little focus has been directed, in the David Cash affair, to the University's insistence on due process as an essential protection for everyone's rights, even someone whose behavior is abhorrent.
What has all of this to do with the credibility of the press? I submit that the basic reason for the lack of credibility that the press suffers, indeed the lack of confidence in our institutions generally, is the profound cynicism or cultural pessimism that pervades our society. Unless we can address this more basic problem, the effort to improve credibility, even through such commendable efforts as those articulated in your "think tank" project are ultimately, I believe, merely rearranging deck chairs on a ship that is in danger of foundering. Unless we are capable of restoring a measure of confidence in the integrity of our institutions, the struggle to restore credibility in our messages about them will be futile.
That is a very tall order. It means that campaign finance reform may have as much to do with your credibility as the nature of your reporting. Now that is a truly depressing thought! But it does mean that we should consider as well the radical hypothesis that there are those who benefit from a cynical citizenry because it prevents the demand for change from being generated. The Frenchman Georges Bernanos once said, "Democracies cannot dispense with hypocrisy any more than dictatorships can with cynicism." It may be that the hypocrisy of the one leads to the cynicism producing the other.
Are there things that the press can do to address this tall order? Perhaps. Let me list a few, then throw the discussion open.
First, we need to work to restore a sense of civility in our civil discourse. Democracy is based on a fundamental compromise between the majority and the minority. It is ultimately a pragmatic form of government. It insists that the right of the minority is to work to become a majority through persuasion, and that the obligation of the majority is not to act in such a way as to drive the minority out of the compact. This means that compromise must be the mode by which the majority and the minority function. Compromise, however, becomes impossible if every issue is raised to the level of a moral imperative. The founders of the Republic understood this and therefore sought to limit the role of religion in government. Americans could not compromise the slavery issue for that reason and fought a civil war over it. Over the last twenty years, more and more issues have been elevated to fundamental matters of morality, issues upon which no compromise is therefore possible. Abortion, gun control, affirmative action, to name some of the issues that have taken on this dimension. They are treated by politicians as wedge issues, meant to divide. Thus, they make compromise difficult and the rhetoric increasingly moralistic and uncivil.
I believe the press has an obligation to educate the American people to this democratic reality, that it needs to help people understand the importance of compromise, the intention of wedge politics, and the cost of incivility in our discourse. Political compromise in a democratic society should not be viewed as moral abdication, but as an essential means of sustaining the democratic process. The press can help teach us that.
Second, the press needs to understand the broadest meaning of the term "frame of reference." It does not merely mean, as the ASNE Journalism Credibility Project paper I received puts it, calling for a "deeper understanding of their community" by journalists, or a "deeper knowledge of the communities in which they live and work." It is, I believe, much more than "writing and editing stories in ways that resonate with readers," to quote again from the document.
I'm not a journalist, but that is not what I think of when I think of story framing as a means of increasing credibility. To me, framing a story means putting it in context, framing an incident reported in such a way that the readers do not draw the wrong conclusions from the story. If you go back and read the stories about the "indirect cost scandal" at Stanford, you will find that they were never framed in a manner that educated the public to the complexity of the issue. They were framed in a way to produce ultimate shock value. And, of course, at the end of the day, when the investigation was complete, and Stanford was basically exonerated, the exoneration barely appeared in the press. At Berkeley, no issue has brought more press to our doors than the issue of admissions in the post-Proposition 209 environment. This is a complex issue that has profound implications for society, but it has more often been treated like a daily story, where the numbers are more important than the issue they raise.
Story framing, it seems to me, should work to avoid leading readers to draw general conclusions from anecdotal evidence. This is always the most difficult problem that I have to deal with when a bad news story hits the press. When a faculty member is guilty of some form of misbehavior, or a student or group of students do something outrageous, it is difficult for people to distinguish aberrant behavior from normal behavior.
In Austin, Texas, the director of television news at the ABC affiliate, the late Carole Kneeland, who was in my book a fantastic journalist, decided that the frequent use of crime stories to lead the news, or even to report, gave a distorted picture of crime, created fear and division between the races in the city, and that many of the stories, on analysis, were simply not newsworthy. She imposed some rigorous guidelines on the airing of crime stories. That is what I mean by framing the story so that the impression it gives is not ultimately a distortion.
Finally, I do not believe that the independence of the press requires detachment. People respect the importance of the independence of the press. What they find less defensible is the detachment of the press, the sense that the press views itself not merely as reporters or observers, but occasionally as observers with no stake in the issue at hand. There are times when people feel that reporters suffer from what the Germans call Schadenfreude, which means taking pleasure at the troubles of others. Magnifying the difficulties or embarrassment provided by the story makes reporting it more interesting and rewarding. It hypes the story. It sells. This is what Jim Carey meant when he wrote about the press and the current Clinton-Lewinsky scandal: "…in the midst of this, journalists, particularly on television, seem to derive unusual pleasure from the national trauma, suggesting that they no longer have a stake in the Republic. After all, if it is good for journalists, it ought to be good for the country."
Credibility clearly involves telling the truth. It involves being just. But it may also involve being merciful, being empathetic. Someone, I believe a theologian, has said: justice is getting what you deserve; mercy is not getting what you deserve; grace is getting what you don't deserve. Recognizing and reporting on human frailty and tragedy without exploiting it for the sake of the story, or worse, for the sake of market share, will ultimately help address the problem of cynicism and credibility.
Let me close by reminding you again of what Jefferson said: "To preserve the freedom of the human mind…and freedom of the press, every spirit should be ready to devote itself to martyrdom; for as long as we may think as we will and speak as we think, the condition of man will proceed in improvement." Few will martyr themselves for a free press if they believe the freedom enjoyed by the press is license; few will martyr themselves for a free press if they believe the press cynically undermines the institutions upon which freedom is built; few will martyr themselves for a free press if they no longer understand or believe in the institutions upon which freedom is built. The goal you have set yourself is not merely important; it is vital to the future of civic discourse in a free society. Good luck.