Reporters on TV : Is Stardom Weakening the Press?

He made no secret about it. Chris Matthews wanted to be a pundit, a player, a face on the Sunday political talk shows.

He discussed it with friends when he was speech writer and spokesman for House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill Jr., and he even described writing his book, “Hardball,” as a way of establishing his credentials.

So, two years ago, he and executive editor Larry Kramer of the San Francisco Examiner struck a deal to make it happen. Matthews would become an Examiner columnist, complete with the prestigious title of Washington bureau chief. “He needed to be a journalist,” Kramer explains now, “to have the kind of respectability to be on TV. That’s what we brought to the table.”

A Talent for TV

On the other side, Matthews brought the talents that work on TV. Kramer needed visibility for his afternoon newspaper, and Matthews could provide that by appearing on “any one of the 50 shows . . . with our name under his picture.”

Today, the success of their bargain offers a lesson--disturbing to some--about the growing importance of appearing on television if one is to be considered important and influential in print.

Even though few in Washington see his column, Matthews has become such a familiar face on the TV talk shows that, earlier this year, Washingtonian magazine named him “one of the top 50 journalists,” in the city. Says Kramer, with the candor of an editor who knows business: “I should be paying him out of the marketing budget.”

Coaches for Television

The Matthews case is not the only sign of the times. The Chicago Tribune now employs a media consultant to coach and promote its Washington correspondents for television. USA Today regularly features its newspaper reporters as experts on its TV show, hoping that one helps sell the other. And when one newspaper chain recently asked columnist Jack Germond to recommend candidates for Washington bureau chief, it noted that being a regular on TV was a prerequisite.

“When that happens,” said Germond, “things have clearly gotten screwed up.”

Some reporters fear the culture of the TV programs may even be changing the basic values of print journalism, downgrading by degrees the traditional skills of reporting, neutrality and objectivity while elevating the skills that get one and keep one on TV--a knack for asserting opinions, a talent for thinking in sound bites rather than nuance, and a skill for honing an attention-getting public persona.

The impact of TV opinion journalism, some worry, may go deeper yet:

--Is it making public discourse more rancorous, for instance, if the rewards go to those willing to stake out more controversial positions?

--Is it mirroring the devaluation of substance that has occurred in politics if reporters’ interpretations of events become more important than covering the events?

--And, when print journalists who appear on TV become as well known as the officials they cover, does that move the press away from the arm’s-length, sometimes adversarial relationship with government that was underscored with coverage of Vietnam and Watergate?

“It is a whole new world,” said Sue Ducat, producer of “Washington Week in Review.” “The whole phenomenon of journalists realizing that visibility can boost their careers in a number of ways has really taken off.”

Ducat, in fact, is inundated with requests from print reporters who want to appear on the show. Some send her same-day faxes of their stories; others deliver videotapes of their previous TV appearances.

So powerful is television’s invisible wave, the medium changes not only the message but also the messenger.

A Changing Format

The appearance of print reporters on TV is hardly new. “Meet the Press,” which uses reporters to interview politicians, is NBC’s longest-running show, and “Washington Week in Review” 22 years ago began having newspaper and newsmagazine journalists report and then analyze the week’s news.

But the rise of the political talk programs more rightly dates back about 10 years, to when “Agronsky & Co.” and later “This Week with David Brinkley” started asking reporters not merely to interview officials and offer a little analysis, but to assert their own opinions flat out.

The success of such shows soon led to reporter round tables on “Face the Nation,” “The Today Show,” “Nightline” and others. Today, the National Journal’s guide to Washington lists 21 public affairs programs that have print reporters as guests.

What’s more, TV audience-share figures suggest that the more gusto reporters give their opinions, the better. “Agronsky,” for instance, was quickly overwhelmed in the ratings by “The McLaughlin Group,” a kind of opinion-entertainment program that appears on both commercial and PBS stations. And that has influenced others.

2 Faces for the Nation

McLaughlin regulars Patrick Buchanan and Robert Novak recently started CNN’s “Capitol Gang” in the McLaughlin mold. Even CBS’ venerable “Face the Nation” now has two kinds of round tables, executive producer Karen Sughrue said, “one where we use people as analysts--’Do you think Jim Wright will last?’--and others where we ask ‘Should he last?’ ”

To many in print journalism these shows do not signal anything dangerous. For one thing, only about 50 print reporters appear regularly on TV, and most of them are veterans at reporting who seem unlikely to be corrupted by the experience.

What’s more, if people don’t take the shows seriously, some argue, they pose no danger. The key, said Germond, a nationally syndicated political columnist and regular on the televised McLaughlin show, is whether people recognize that “it is a half hour of being a dancing bear to make a better living and . . . not a serious journalistic exercise.”

Not all participants consider themselves dancing bears--”It is just a different kind of journalism,” said fellow McLaughlinite and New Republic writer Fred Barnes. And many say that to dismiss the TV programs as mere entertainment is self-deluding.

Books, Speaking Tours

At least in degrees, TV already has changed which print journalists are rewarded and why. Although payment for a single appearance on most shows ranges from $200 to $1,000, being on TV today is the surest way for a print reporter to get rich. It leads to book contracts and, most lucrative of all, to the lecture circuit.

Lecture circuit appearances have become sufficiently common that they now are an issue in the Senate press gallery, which grants credentials to reporters covering Congress. The gallery has long limited press passes to those whose primary income comes from a news organization. Today, many long-standing press gallery members are making so much money speaking that they no longer qualify, and there is pressure to change the rules.

The discovery that TV can turn reporters into sought-after celebrities has not been lost on the news organizations they work for, either. Today reporters who appear on television can command better assignments, more prestige within their organizations and higher pay.

Newsweek, which gives reporters cash bonuses for television appearances, hired Morton M. Kondracke as Washington bureau chief after he became a regular on TV, just as U.S. News & World Report found an editor in TV commentator David Gergen. (Kondracke has since returned to the New Republic; Gergen remains at U.S. News as editor at large but is no longer the editor.)

Several prominent bureau chiefs in Washington also appear regularly on television. They include Jack Nelson of The Times, on “Washington Week in Review,” Albert Hunt of the Wall Street Journal, on the “Capital Gang,” and Strobe Talbott of Time magazine, on “Inside Washington” (formerly “Agronsky & Co.”).

Matthews’ career may be the most unusual. Examiner Editor Kramer not only found someone he thought would be good on TV and gave him the title of bureau chief--though his domain is just himself and one reporter--Kramer also arranged to have Matthews’ column syndicated by King Features. He says that was “the only way to get even half” of what Matthews had been making as a Washington consultant. Matthews now has more than 60 client papers, many of them picked up when the King syndicate’s other liberal writer, Nicholas Von Hoffman, stopped writing his column.

Many publications, such as U.S. News and USA Today, see having their reporters on television as good business. They believe having them on the air will persuade readers to buy their publications.

And some editors think it helps their staffs do their jobs. The Chicago Tribune, for instance, pays its reporters’ TV coach out of its news budget. “We don’t circulate heavily in this town,” Washington bureau chief Nicholas Horrock said. But the TV talk programs do, so appearing on the shows enhances access to sources for the Tribune’s correspondents in the capital.

The New York Times’ policy concerning TV appearances is about the most restrictive of any news organization, and it asks only that a reporter not “appear with the frequency that would suggest you have become a regular” on any one program, according to Assistant Managing Editor Warren Hoge. Yet how often is too often is decided case by case, and in the case of really big-name reporters, according to TV producers, it gets a little fuzzy.

The Los Angeles Times also asks its reporters not to become regulars on any program, the editor, Shelby Coffey III, said. Nelson’s appearances on “Washington Week,” according to Coffey, comply with the policy.

Values Under Question

To some, the institutional rewards TV appearances can bring send a signal to all print journalists, a signal that bears examining. “What bothers me is the message (in part) of what it is we value and esteem,” said Washington Post writer David Broder.

And the values that at least some TV programs esteem are not necessarily those that make a good print reporter.

“I need someone who is glib, colorful, whose thoughts can be condensed into a conversational style,” “Face the Nation” executive producer Karen Sughrue says.

Other producers mentioned irreverence, wit, a colorful manner or an ability to spark “a good fight,” or, as McLaughlin producer Kennedy put it, “someone who is not afraid to go out on a limb.”

In the climate of at least a few of the shows, some journalists say, staking out a point on the political spectrum seems more important than finding an argument that is reasoned or persuasive.

And journalist Hodding Carter III wonders about “the effect on public discourse, generally. Do Americans think they are getting anything of substance from any of this?”

Stirring Up Rancor

Writing in the New York Review of Books two years ago, reporter James Fallows suggested that the values of the talk shows were making public debate more rancorous if, to build audiences, the shows were rewarding those who made for a good fight rather than a plausible argument.

“Everything depends on the tone of the show,” argued Broder, echoing a widely held sentiment. Are reporters showing up on TV to analyze why things happened or “in the role of policy advocates” saying what should happen?

With the success of the more entertaining shows, even that distinction may be getting blurry. How many viewers, for instance, recognize the difference between the advocative versus the merely analytical panels on “Face the Nation”?

To those who participate in the programs, the most obvious danger is that the more lucrative side of their activities comes from something other than reporting. And the more one wants to build one’s empire, the less time one has to cover the beat.

“We both know there are a lot of people in this town who write columns and engage in journalism on the run,” said Paul Duke, moderator of PBS’ “Washington Week in Review.”

Again, it may come down to how seriously journalists and the public take the political talk shows.

Those who appear on the programs sometimes talk about having a sense that their words vanish like soap bubbles; they say that people who recognize them from their TV appearances rarely comment on what they said.

“It all invites a sort of lazy opinion-mongering,” said Rolling Stone Washington editor William Greider, who has appeared on the the programs. “My sense,” Greider said, “is that some people are confusing it with reporting.”

Matthews, at least, is quite open in his attitude toward reporting: he rarely does any for the twice-weekly column and weekly analysis that he writes.

“I don’t think interviewing people or doing basic snooping is that much of a pure form of information-gathering,” Matthews explained.

New Job Definition

Instead, he believes that, “Every time I give a speech I get challenged, or every time I talk on TV. The process of writing is formative, and to say that you are not thinking, not developing information, I don’t think that is valid.”

It is a novel approach--a journalist who doesn’t believe in doing reporting--but Matthews goes further. He describes what he does--on TV, in lectures or in print--as providing audiences with a “colorful expose,” a term that once meant investigative reporting.

It is an attitude, in a sense, that reflects what has occurred in political campaigns: The way an event is interpreted can have more effect than the event itself. In the new news-media culture, in which reporters’ opinions are more highly rewarded than their ability to uncover what has happened, the “spin” put on events becomes more important than the events themselves.

There is also one other problem with the rise of the shows and their influence, said Broder of the Post. The programs are helping to blur the line between journalists and the officials they cover, he says. This raises the danger of journalists allowing themselves “to become androgynous Washington insiders,” as he put it in a speech last December, “all of us seeking and wielding influence in our own ways.”

The journalist as Washington insider--rendering opinions, offering advice--is indeed part of the ethos of these programs.

And now some of the shows also mix journalists with partisans and officials as equal players on their panels.

On “Capital Gang,” not only does the “gang” make no distinction between Patrick Buchanan, conservative advocate and sometime government official, and Al Hunt, Wall Street Journal Washington bureau chief, but each week, a different politician joins the panel as an equal, not as a guest to be queried. “Welcome, Charlie,” Buchanan tells Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.), insider to insider.

Even on the more staid programs, the symbols of distance between reporter and official are no longer considered important. Gone are the desks that once separated the supposed interrogators from their subject on “Meet the Press” or “Face the Nation.”

Greider, of Rolling Stone, worries that the ethos of the Washington celebrity-insider on screen “translates into a sort of social corruption” off screen, in which journalists become the social equals of the officials they cover, in effect, “distancing themselves from the public.”

Friendships With Sources

“There is no doubt in my mind that where you develop special relationships (with officials) that there are times when you are willing to turn a blind eye to minor criticisms,” said John McLaughlin, a former White House aide now best known for his TV program.

A reporter does that, he argues, “in order to preserve a source for a major expose or major policy issue . . . . It is a question of preserving the connection for the greater good.”

To others, such as New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, this kind of talk is a dangerous sign that the press is becoming weaker and less responsible.

“The established press in this country has to a large extent reverted” to an old relationship with government, Lewis argues, that predates Vietnam and Watergate. “We are an adversary only on the margins, not on the fundamentals that challenge power.”

The celebrity status of the press is only one factor, Lewis believes, but it is a problem, nonetheless.

‘Top 50’ Analyzed

Whether Lewis is right or not, the political talk shows have left their mark on print journalism. Though it was a self-appointed and subjective judge, Washingtonian magazine’s selection of the “50 most influential journalists” in the Capital this year included only nine print reporters who did not appear on television. Another 11 were editors or bureau chiefs included by virtue of their jobs. The other 30 were all TV reporters or print reporters who regularly appeared on television.

“I can’t prove this,” said Barbara Matusow, the author of the Washingtonian article who, with the editors of the magazine, compiled the list of influential journalists’ names. “But I really think that you find young people in print journalism hustling themselves as a product . . . in a way you wouldn’t have before . . . . The pot of gold is so much bigger today (than ever before), it is just unimaginable.”