After the Tall Timber (51 page)

And they resume:

The agents tell him he is going to be fired (he is fired two days later), that his wages will be garnished, that he will lose his retirement, his clearance, his chance for other employment, his friends, his freedom. The only thing they mention more frequently than the article in the
Times
is his polygraph, and every mention of it is something they know to be false: that he “failed” it. They tell him this lie more than thirty times. Sometimes they mention it in conjunction with the
Times
article:

Then they get to the Rosenbergs:

Dr. Lee pleads with them, several times, not to interrupt him when he is trying to answer a question: “You want me, you want to listen two minutes from my explanation?” Not a chance:

Now, it may be that the editors of the
Times
do not find this newsworthy, or that they believe their readers would have no interest in the fact that the FBI conducts its interrogations in this way. The
Times
might also, fairly, claim that it has no responsibility for the uses to which its front-page articles may be put, by the FBI or any other agency of government. Except for this. In both the editorial Overview and the “Note from the Editors,” as in Mr. Stewart’s op-ed piece, the
Times
’s sympathies are clearly with the forces of prosecution and the FBI. “Dr. Lee had already taken a lie detector test,” the editors write, for example, in their assessment, and “FBI investigators believed that it showed deception when he was asked whether he had leaked secrets.”

In the days when the
Times
still published transcripts, the reader could have judged for himself. Nothing could be clearer than that the FBI investigators believed nothing of the kind. As they knew, Dr. Lee had, on the contrary, passed his polygraph—which is why, in his interrogation, they try so obsessively to convince him that he failed it. Even the editorial Overview, shorter and perhaps for that reason less misleading, shows where the
Times’
s sense of who is victimized resides. After two paragraphs of describing various activities of Dr. Lee’s as “improper and illegal,” “beyond reasonable dispute,” it describes, of all people, Louis Freeh, the director of the FBI (and Janet Reno, the attorney general) as being “under sharp attack.” Freeh was FBI director when agents of the Bureau, illegally detaining Monica Lewinsky, were conducting “investigations” of the same sort for the Office of the Independent Counsel. Freeh was also advocating, not just in government but directly to the press, more Special Prosecutors for more matters of all kinds.

But enough. The
Times
feels a responsibility to correct misimpressions it may have generated in readers—how names are spelled, what middle initials are, who is standing miscaptioned on which side of a photograph, which butterfly is which—is satisfied, in an important way, in its corrections. For the rest, it has looked at its coverage and found it good. The underlying fact, however, is this: For years readers have looked in the
Times
for what was once its unsurpassed strength: the uninflected coverage of the news. You can look and look, now, and you will not find it there. Some politically correct series and group therapy reflections on race relations perhaps. These appear harmless. They may even win prizes. Fifteen reporters working for one year might, perhaps, have been more usefully employed on some genuine issue of fact. More egregious, however, and in some ways more malign, was an article that appeared, on November 5, 2000, in the Sunday
Times Magazine
.

The piece was a cover story about Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Everyone makes mistakes. This piece, blandly certain of its intelligence, actually consisted of them. Everything was wrong. At the most trivial level, the piece said Moynihan had held no hearings about President Clinton’s health plan and no meetings with him to discuss welfare. (In fact, the senator had held twenty-nine such hearings in committee and many such discussions with the President.) At the level of theory, it misapprehended the history, content, purpose, and fate of Moynihan’s proposal for a guaranteed annual income. It would require a book to set right what was wrong in the piece—and in fact, such a book existed, at least about the guaranteed annual income. But what was, in a way, most remarkable about what
The New York Times
has become appeared, once again, in the way it treated its own coverage.

The Sunday
Magazine
’s editors limited themselves to a little self-congratulatory note. The article, they reported, had “prompted a storm of protest.” “But many said that we got it right, and that our writer said what had long seemed to be unspeakable.” (“Unspeakable” may not be what they mean. Perhaps it was a paraphrase.) They published just one letter, which praised the piece as “incisive.”

The Corrections column, however, when it came, was a gem. “An article in the
Times Magazine
last Sunday about the legacy of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan,” it began, “misidentified a former senator who was an expert on military affairs. He was Richard Russell, not Russell Long.”

The “article also,” the correction went on, had “referred imprecisely” (a fine way to put it) to the senator’s committee hearings on President Clinton’s health care. (Not a word about welfare.) But the Corrections column saved for last what the
Times
evidently regarded as most important. “The article also overstated [another fine word] Senator Moynihan’s English leanings while he attended the London School of Economics. Bowler, yes. Umbrella, yes. Monocle, no.”

No “malignant” misspellings here. But nothing a reader can trust any longer, either. Certainly no reliable, uninflected coverage of anything, least of all the news. The enterprise, whatever else it is, has almost ceased altogether to be a newspaper. It is still a habit. People glance at it and, on Sundays, complain about its weight. For news they must look elsewhere. What can have happened here?

“The turning point at the paper,” I once wrote, in a piece of fiction, “was the introduction of the byline.” I still believe that to be true. I simply had no idea how radical the consequences of that turning point were going to be. Until the early seventies, it was a mark of professionalism in reporters for newspapers, wire services, newsmagazines, to have their pieces speak, as it were, for themselves, with all the credibility and authority of the publication in which they anonymously appeared. Reviews, essays, regular columns were of course signed. They were expressions of opinion, as distinct from reporting, and readers had to know and evaluate whose opinion it was. But when a reader said of a piece of information, “The
Times
says,” or “The
Wall Street Journal
says,” he was relying on the credibility of the institution. With very rare exceptions—correspondents, syndicated columnists, or sportswriters whose names were household words, or in attributing a scoop of extraordinary historical importance—the reporter’s byline would have seemed intrusive and unprofessional.

In television reporting, of course, every element of the situation was different. It would be absurd to say “CBS (or ABC, NBC, or even CNN) says” or even “I saw it on” one network or another. It had to be Walter Cronkite, later Dan Rather, Diane Sawyer, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings—not just because no television network or station had the authority of any favorite and trusted publication, but because seeing and hearing the person who conveyed the news (impossible, obviously, with the printed byline) was precisely the basis, for television viewers, of trust.

Once television reporters became celebrities, it was perhaps inevitable that print reporters would want at least their names known; and there were, especially at first, stories one did well to read on the basis of a trusted byline. There still existed what Mary McCarthy, in another context, called “the last of the tall timber.” But the tall timber in journalism is largely gone—replaced, as in many fields, by the phenomenon of celebrity. And gradually, in print journalism, the celebrity of the reporter began to overtake and then to undermine the reliability of pieces. Readers still say, “The
Times
says,” or “I read it in the
Post
” (so far as I can tell, except in the special case of gossip columns, readers hardly ever mention, or even notice, bylines), but trust in even once favorite newspapers has almost vanished. One is left with this oddly convoluted paradox: As survey after survey confirms, people generally despise journalists; yet they cite, as a source of information, newspapers. And though they have come, with good reason, to distrust newspapers as a whole, they still tend to believe each individual story
as they read it
. We all do. Though I may know a piece to be downright false, internally contradictory, in some profound and obvious way corrupted, I still, for a moment anyway, believe it. Believe the most obviously manufactured quotes, the slant, the spin, the prose, the argument with no capacity even to frame an issue and no underlying sense of what follows from what.

At the same time, a development in criticism, perhaps especially movie criticism, affected print journalism of every kind. It used to be that the celebrities featured on billboards and foremost in public consciousness were the movie stars themselves. For a while, it became
auteurs
, directors. Then, bizarrely but for a period of many years, it became
critics
who starred in the discussion of movies. That period seems, fortunately, to have passed. But somehow, the journalist’s byline, influenced perhaps by the critic’s, began to bring with it a blurring of genres: reporting, essay, memoir, personal statement, anecdote, judgmental or critical review. Most of all, critical review—which is why government officials and citizens alike treat reporters in the same way artists regard most critics—with mixed fear and dismay. It is also why the subjects of news stories read each “news” piece as if it were a review on opening night.

There is no longer even a vestige or pretense, on the part of the print journalist, of any professional commitment to uninflected coverage of the news. The ambition is rather, under their bylines, to express themselves, their writing styles. Days pass without a single piece of what used to be called “hard news.” The celebrityhood, or even the aspiration to celebrity, of print reporters, not just in print but also on talk shows, has been perhaps the single most damaging development in the history of print journalism.

The second, less obvious, cause of decline in the very notion of reliable information was the proliferation of the “anonymous source”—especially as embodied, or rather disembodied, in Deep Throat. Many people have speculated about the “identity” of this phantom. Others have shown, more or less conclusively, that at least as described in
All the President’s Men
, by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, he did not, in fact could not, exist. Initially introduced as a narrative device, to hold together book and movie, this improbable creature was obviously both a composite, which Woodward, the only one who claims to have known and have consulted him, denies, and an utter fiction, which is denied by both Woodward and Bernstein—the better writer, who had, from the start, a “friend,” whose information in almost every significant respect coincides with, and even predates, Deep Throat’s. But the influence of this combination, the celebrity reporter and the chimera
to whom the reporter alone has access
, has been incalculable.

The implausibility of the saga of Deep Throat has been frequently pointed out. Virtually every element of the story—the all-night séances in garages; the signals conveyed by moved flowerpots on windowsills and drawings of clocks in newspapers; the notes left by prearrangement on ledges and pipes in those garages; the unidiomatic and essentially uninformative speech—has been demolished. Apart from its inherent impractibilities, for a man requiring secrecy and fearing for his life and the reporter’s, the strategy seems less like tradecraft than a series of attention-getting mechanisms. This is by no means to deny that Woodward and Bernstein had “sources,” some but far from all of whom preferred to remain anonymous. From the evidence in the book they include at least Fred Buzhardt, Hugh Sloan, John Sears, Mark Felt and other FBI agents, Leonard Garment, and, perhaps above all, the ubiquitous and not infrequently treacherous Alexander Haig. None of these qualify as Deep Throat, nor does anyone, as depicted in the movie or book. Woodward’s new rationale is this: the secret of the phantom’s name must be kept until the phantom himself reveals it—or else dies. Woodward is prepared, however, to disqualify candidates whom others—most recently Leonard Garment, in an entire book devoted to such speculation—may suggest, by telling, instance by instance, who Deep Throat is
not
. A long list, obviously, which embraces everyone.