Just a Journalist: On the Press, Life, and the Spaces Between by Linda Greenhouse

Author:Linda Greenhouse [Greenhouse, Linda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Editors; Journalists; Publishers, Language Arts & Disciplines, Journalism, law, Media & the Law, Political Science, Political Process, Media & Internet, Social Science, Media Studies
ISBN: 9780674980334
Google: nupODwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Harvard UP
Published: 2017-10-30T22:47:56+00:00

Michael Oreskes, a former New York Times editor who is now the top news executive at NPR, has strongly discouraged use of what is referred to at the network as “the L-word.” Shortly after the inauguration, he explained his position to the NPR ombudsman: “Our job as journalists is to report—to find facts, establish their authenticity and share them with everybody. And I think that when you use words like lie, it gets in the way of that.”95

And at least at the Times, the management was quick to make clear that the rules for individual conduct had not evolved to match the new climate in the news columns. The conflict-of-interest rule devised in the wake of my abortion-rights march more than a quarter century earlier still applied. In late December 2016, with Inauguration Day approaching, Philip Corbett, the standards editor, sent a memo to the staff entitled “Reminder on Impartiality.” “As we cover the transition and the aftermath of the election, it’s more important than ever for readers to see The Times as fair, impartial and independent,” it began. “All of us in the newsroom—including those who don’t cover politics or Washington—should do our part to protect that reputation.”

That meant, the memo went on, that no one, no matter how remote their professional duties from the controversies of the day, should take part in any “activities that could raise doubts about The Times’s impartiality, including the planned women’s march in Washington in January.”

This makes little sense. Could the presence of a New York Times sports reporter or music critic standing with hundreds of thousands of other Americans on the National Mall to protest the inauguration of a president the newspaper’s news columns have repeatedly labeled a liar really present a threat to the reputation of the Times as “fair, impartial and independent”? Or the presence of the newspaper’s Supreme Court correspondent, for that matter? After proceeding to warn the staff against making contributions to “various nonprofit groups” that could “raise questions about our neutrality,” the memo ended on a sanctimonious note: “We should remember that one of the best contributions we can make to our communities and our country is to protect and enhance the important work of Times journalism.”

When I first read Michael Schudson’s history of the origins of modern journalism ethics, I was skeptical of his assertion that the objectivity norm began as a management tool to control the behavior of the newspaper’s employees. I have set aside my doubts: what was true in the early years of the twentieth century appears still to hold true in the twenty-first.

Old norms or new? Would my Radcliffe speech, with its objectively verifiable criticisms of Bush administration policies, be condemned as universally by the journalism establishment if I were still a reporter, giving a similar speech today to my fellow graduates about the policies of President Trump? Probably yes—but I’m not completely sure.

A month after the election, DeanBaquet was interviewed by Terry Gross on her NPR program, Fresh Air. The “Trump Lied” headline was a major topic of the hour-long interview.

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