Seven Events That Made America America (34 page)

One cannot overstate the similarity among the editors and publishers of the nation’s top papers. In a study of the leadership at four major papers—
The New York Times
(seven subjects),
The Washington Post
(two),
The Boston Globe
(six), and the
Los Angeles Times
(five)—since the 1960s, the biographies reveal that there “is not a single graduate degree among them outside of journalism, and only a handful of years spent doing anything other than reporting and editing.”
⁵³
They had, in the process, been “thoroughly inculcated in the creed of newspapermen. They are important. They are privileged.”
⁵⁴
Virtually none have had military experience, and aside from running a magazine or two, none have ever had to meet a real payroll where profits counted. (Increasingly, they all came from the same narrow strip, the New York-Washington corridor, which accounted for some 40 percent of Columbia Journalism School students.)
⁵⁵
When Hugh Hewitt surveyed a Columbia Journalism School class of sixteen students, he found that none owned a gun, all supported same-sex marriage, and only three had been in a house of worship within the previous week. Only one of twelve eligible to vote had voted for George Bush in 2004, eleven for John Kerry.

In the early 1960s, some vestiges of fairness and objectivity still remained, but John Kennedy’s election, administration, and assassination seemed to sweep those away. If anything, the assassination boosted television reporting, even though virtually none of the reporters covering the assassination had witnessed the event. In fact, few reporters on the scene—or anywhere close to the assassination area—saw anything. They failed to follow traditional, reliable news reporting techniques when it came to interviewing eyewitnesses, gathering evidence, and transmitting information from the spot. Many, if not most, of the fifty journalists covering the president never personally saw the attack or heard the shots at Dealey Plaza. Most of the television reporters were “huddled outside Parkland Hospital . . . clutching notepads and pencils, listening to radio journalists paraphrase intermittent wire-service accounts of what had happened.”
⁵⁶
That did not stop them, particularly CBS’s Dan Rather, from promoting themselves as “eyewitnesses” and making themselves “central players in the record of Kennedy’s assassination.”
⁵⁷
The media also immediately labeled Lee Harvey Oswald as the “assassin” before the evidence had proven his guilt. After Jack Ruby shot and killed Oswald, the
New York Times
headline read “President’s Assassin Shot to Death.” Oswald had not even stood trial, much less been convicted.
⁵⁸
Newsweek
, reacting to Oswald’s statement that he had not killed anyone, termed Oswald’s denial “a lie.”
⁵⁹

The failures associated with poor assassination coverage (never tracking down the witnesses who saw “other shooters,” or explaining the discrepancies in various stories of multiple ambulances and caskets at the Bethesda Naval Hospital) took its toll on reporting as a profession.
⁶⁰
In 1968, pollster George Gallup told an audience, “Never in my time has journalism of all types—book publishing, television, radio, newspapers, magazines, movies—been held in such low esteem.”
⁶¹
Rather than returning to objective, fair, and balanced reporting, the news media began to sharply drift in the direction of “gotcha” journalism, as epitomized by the CBS show
60 Minutes
. As David Frum noted, “nothing on television worked harder to spread mistrust” than
60 Minutes
.
⁶²
As the press sought to reclaim its credibility, it scoured the landscape to expose scandals.
The Charlotte Observer
even subjected squeaky-clean evangelist Billy Graham to a hit piece (which proved to be completely without merit).
⁶³

Vietnam played a role, too, though not the one people generally think of in which brave reporters led the opposition to an “immoral” war. Rather, much of the change came as a result of the news industry feeling that the Kennedy administration, followed by the Johnson administration, was not providing honest and accurate information. Certainly the media did little to cover the troops. As one historian of
The Washington Post
put it, “especially after LBJ’s 1964 landslide, the . . . Great Society programs were highly exciting to
Post
editors, reporters, and editorial writers. The war . . . was an annoying distraction.”
⁶⁴
Television news had a more significant impact than the major news magazines, which according to one study dedicated only about 7 percent of their coverage to the war.
⁶⁵
Whatever the press’s role in achieving a defeat in Vietnam, James Reston, of
The New York Times
, claimed the media was responsible: the “reporters and cameras were decisive in the end. They brought the issue of the war to the people . . . and forced the withdrawal of American power from Vietnam.”
⁶⁶
The Tet Offensive provided a shocking transition during which reporters began to be more sympathetic toward the North Vietnamese. Comments in the media about the North Vietnamese plummeted from 100 percent negative prior to the event to only 29 percent negative afterward. On the other hand, negative comments about both the Johnson policy and the South Vietnamese rose by 70 percent and 600 percent, respectively.
⁶⁷
The failure of journalists to follow even basic rules of objectivity during the Vietnam War should have been obvious to even the most casual observers. Reporters
never
relied on documents or statements from “official” sources in the North, or from any of the Communist participants, because they knew them to be false, controlled, or contrived. Yet it never dawned on these journalists that there was a disconnect in their criticism of the administration—the same system that allowed reporters to criticize government openly by creating and maintaining a free press was deemed less credible than the totalitarian governments that repressed such freedom.

Until the arrival of George W. Bush, no president was more hated by the media than Richard Nixon, who won election in 1968, then reprised that with a massive 1972 victory. In the later campaign, Nixon realized what the Democrats had handed him with the nomination of George McGovern, telling his staff, “Here is a situation where the Eastern Establishment media finally has a candidate who almost totally shares their views.”
⁶⁸
The president noted that the nation would “find out whether what the media has been standing for during these last five years really represents majority thinking.”
⁶⁹
Nixon won a crushing landslide over McGovern, who carried only the District of Columbia and Massachusetts. The magnitude of Nixon’s victory stunned and terrified elite journalists. McGovern’s popular vote total—29.1 percent—was the lowest ever by a major party’s candidate. The reaction was predictable and chilling: one powerful editor responded to Nixon’s election, “There’s got to be a bloodletting. We’ve got to make sure that nobody ever thinks of doing anything like this again.”
⁷⁰
When he referred to “anything like this,” he meant
winning an election
. Historian Paul Johnson said the aim of the powerful editors and publishers was “to use the power of the press and TV to reverse the electoral verdict of 1972 which was felt to be, in some metaphorical sense, illegitimate.”
⁷¹
Watergate handed them their issue—their means—to force Nixon out.

With coverage of the scandal reaching “saturation levels . . . on the front page and on the evening news day after day,” Nixon’s popularity finally fell.
⁷²
As Nicholas von Hoffman wrote, “It wasn’t journalism; it was lynching. Not only were the pretentious canons of the trade chucked overboard; so were fairness and common sense.”
⁷³
Moreover, the journalists never came close to investigating the
key
allegation, namely whether the order for the break-in actually came from Nixon, or, as G. Gordon Liddy has argued, from Nixon’s White House counsel, John Dean.
⁷⁴

Nixon never forgot, or forgave, his treatment by the press. In 1989, when advising the newly elected president, George H. W. Bush, Nixon warned him that reporters were “inherently adversarial”:

Ripping the façade off objective journalism, Nixon told Bush, through a “memo” published in
TV Guide
, that the “media don’t have to be convinced. They have to be outfoxed, outflanked and outperformed . . . [and] will use his failures to pursue [their own agendas].”
⁷⁶

If reporters expected applause for their destruction of Nixon, they were in for a surprise (although they certainly applauded each other). By 1966, the media was already held in low regard, with a 29 percent approval rating, falling still further to 18 percent by 1971. A slightly different survey about press “leaders” in ten institutions showed that they had indeed gained a little ground in public levels of confidence, but by 1980 their “respect levels” had plummeted to 16 percent.
⁷⁷
A similar Gallup poll revealed that journalists and reporters ranked below pollsters and funeral directors as having honest and ethical standards, although reporters came in ahead of lawyers and insurance salesmen! Yet it was hardly a joking matter: overall, the composite surveys used by Harris to examine overall institutional leadership showed a complete collapse of public confidence after the Kennedy assassination.
⁷⁸

Journalists’ assault on Nixon had come at a great cost—the integrity of journalism itself. Rather than reestablishing its credibility, the mainstream press had lost the trust of the public. In the process, journalism fought back by attacking the public itself and moving further left. In a 2001 study of business and media elites, nine out of ten business leaders said that “people can be trusted,” while only seven of ten of the top editors, reporters, and publishers in the study thought people were trustworthy.
⁷⁹

Peter Brown, an editor at the
Orlando Sentinel
, conducted a survey in which he sent a professional pollster to reporters in five midsize U.S. cities, as well as the large metro area of Dallas-Fort Worth. Brown and pollster Bill Hamilton devised two separate surveys. One polled 500 residents and 478 journalists in five cities: Dayton, Ohio; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Syracuse, New York; Roanoke, Virginia; and Chico/Redding, California; while the other survey used a massive (by polling standards) database of 3,400 home addresses of journalists in thirteen news organizations—including the Minneapolis
Star Tribune
,
The Washington Post,
Denver’s
Rocky Mountain News
, and many other large- to midsize city papers. In the first survey, the pollster phoned residents in those areas at random and asked the same questions posed to the reporters.

They found that journalists were more likely “to live in upscale neighborhoods, have maids, own Mercedes and trade stocks, and less likely to go to church, do volunteer work or put down roots in a community.”
⁸⁰
Taken together, the profile revealed a class of people far removed from the lifestyles of “average” Americans. Journalists were “twice as likely as others to rent foreign movies, drink Chablis, own an espresso maker and read magazines such as
Architectural Digest
and
Food & Wine
.”
⁸¹
They did not have many children, lived in expensive urban neighborhoods, avoided rural areas, bowling, auto races, yard sales, coupons, or pickups. With this patchwork of shared elite values, “advocacy of elite interests comes so easily that it scarcely seems like bias at all,” said one media observer.
⁸²

Michael Kelly, the late writer and editor for
The Atlantic
and other publications, confirmed the cultural uniformity of journalists, especially those in Washington:

Joel Kotkin and David Friedman, two researchers who specialize in studying high-tech businesses, said “the news media have come to resemble a modern-day caste, largely dominated by a relative handful of individuals sharing a common background and, in most cases, common real estate.”
⁸⁴
Despite hiring more minorities and women, “in their class and education . . . the media have become ever more rarified.”
⁸⁵
Journalists appeared to prove Bernard Goldberg’s assertions that there was, indeed, leftward media bias: a 1981 Brookings survey of journalists found that 51 percent said the Washington press corps had a political bias, and 96 percent of them perceived it as a liberal bias.
⁸⁶

Journalists are paid substantially more than the average American (42 percent of journalists earn $50,000 or more, compared to 18 percent of the general public); are almost twice as likely to support abortion (82 percent to 49 percent, according to a separate
Los Angeles Times
survey); and are far less likely to support prayer in schools or attend church. Most important, while the media elites live more like the rich than they did “average Americans,” they held a deep-seated hostility to capitalism and conservatism
.
A subsequent study by Indiana University scholars found that median income among journalists has continued to increase, rising nearly 40 percent since 1992.
⁸⁷