A Negative Spin on the News

U.S. Sen. Paul Simon is fond of saying that when he was a young reporter, long before he became a politician, “the great weakness of journalism was whiskey”--a fifth of which his boss always kept in a desk drawer that he frequently opened.

But today, Simon says, “The great weakness of journalism is cynicism.”

Simon is by no means alone in this judgment.

The Illinois Democrat is one of 13 senators not running for reelection this year--a number as unprecedented as the 29 members of the House of Representatives who are also voluntarily leaving Congress; a considerable number in both groups have cited the growing cynicism of the news media as a factor in their decision.

The media’s permanent posture as a hostile, knee-jerk adversary, spewing out unremitting negativism and snide attacks on their motives and character have, they say, taken the pleasure and satisfaction out of public service.

There is now “a total disregard and distrust by politicians of the media and a total cynicism and distrust of politicians by the media,” says another departing senator, Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.).

Many journalists--in interviews and speeches, in stories and columns and books--are also worried that cynicism is poisoning their profession, eroding public confidence in, and respect for, the media. “If we continue to see only the darkest side of whatever is going on,” says Tom Brokaw, anchor for the “NBC Nightly News,” “viewers and readers will begin to dismiss us as . . . Johnny one-notes.”

Many of Brokaw’s colleagues are even more alarmed by the corrosive effects that they think journalistic cynicism and a “gotcha” mentality are having on the political process and on society at-large.

Peter Jennings, the anchor for ABC’s “World News Tonight,” told a convention of radio and television news directors last fall, “The general tendency in the press to treat all public figures as suspect” is a far greater threat to “this great Republic” than tabloid or even “gutter journalism.”

Under the headline “Cynicism Run Amok,” Alan Murray, Washington bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, said early this year, “The writings of many political reporters today read like a perpetual sneer. Little wonder that truly thoughtful and conscientious politicians from both parties are throwing in the towel.”

The most scathing--and most widely publicized--indictment of the news media by the news media has come from James Fallows, Washington editor of the Atlantic Monthly, in his book “Breaking the News.”

“Step by step,” he writes, “mainstream journalism has fallen into the habit of portraying public life in America as a race to the bottom, in which one group of conniving, insincere politicians ceaselessly tries to outmaneuver another.”

The journalistic implication--and often it’s more than an implication--that all politicians are liars and hypocrites who invariably act out of self-interest and self-aggrandizement rather than out of a commitment to the public good, has created a self-fulfilling phenomenon.

As Fallows puts it: “By choosing to present public life as a contest between scheming political leaders, all of whom the public should view with suspicion, the news media brings about that very result.”

When John F. Kennedy was president, 75% of the American public said they trusted their government to do the right thing most or all of the time; today that figure is about 25%.

With so many people having decided that all politicians are either dishonest or incompetent--or both--it’s no surprise that they have also decided it’s a waste of time to vote. Voter turnout nationally declined steadily from a high of 63.1% in 1960 to 50.2% in 1988 (although it did increase to 55.1% in 1992, seemingly because of voter fears about the economy).

When the public views its leaders--and the very process of governing--with suspicion and mistrust, the social contract breaks down. A pervasive climate of cynicism leads to a sense that a whole range of problems are beyond the control of mere politicians, beyond solution altogether; this breeds frustration, hopelessness and a lack of faith in nongovernmental institutions, and in each other, as well.

The most oft-cited example of the untrustworthiness of politicians is the broken campaign promise. But studies have repeatedly shown that “the record of campaign pledges largely reveals a trail of promises kept,” says Thomas Patterson, a political scientist at Syracuse University.

In his book “Out of Order,” Patterson cites four studies, each spanning a minimum of seven presidencies, that conclude, by and large, “presidents keep the promises they made as candidates. . . . When they fail to deliver on a promise, it is usually because they cannot get Congress to agree; because the pledge conflicts with a higher-priority commitment, or because conditions have changed.”

Despite some notable exceptions, President Clinton has actually kept--or tried to keep--more of his campaign promises than he has generally been credited with by the media. Similarly, House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his fellow Republicans in Congress have made every effort to fulfill the major tenets of the “contract with America” on which they ran in 1994. Critics may fault Clinton or Gingrich for their objectives or their tactics, but both--for the most part--have been trying to do just what they had told the electorate they would do.

The public continues to believe that politicians break their promises, though, and that’s largely attributable to the coverage they receive in the media--to the “gotcha” mentality of most journalists, to their tendency to put the most negative interpretation possible on events and to magnify the slightest misstep or equivocation. In fact, studies of the network evening news programs have shown that each of the last five full-term presidents has received more negative coverage than his predecessor.

Journalists have always been skeptical--famously, notoriously skeptical. A journalist “wears his skepticism like a medieval knight wore his armor,” says Shelby Coffey III, editor of the Los Angeles Times. Indeed, for most journalists, skepticism is both an occupational hazard and an occupational necessity.

Is that because many people with a skeptical turn of mind are naturally drawn to journalism? Or does the day-in, day-out experience of journalism--covering crime, corruption, hypocrisy and betrayal--inevitably, ineluctably, make its practitioners skeptical?

In a country whose Constitution is rooted in skepticism toward power and authority, how could journalists--political journalists in particular--be anything but skeptical? It could even be argued, as Thomas B. Edsall argues in the current issue of Civilization, that skepticism--like its natural byproduct, discontent--is “an essential ingredient of progress . . . a sign of health and vitality, and a precursor to creativity or advancement to higher levels of achievement.”

There is, however, an important distinction between skepticism and cynicism. As Thomas Friedman wrote in a New York Times column last week, “Skepticism is about asking questions, being dubious, being wary, not being gullible. Cynicism is about already having the answers--or thinking you do. . . . The skeptic says, ‘I don’t think that’s true. I’m going to check it out.’ The cynic says, ‘I know that’s not true. It couldn’t be. I’m going to slam him.’ ”

Robert Lichter, co-director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington, D.C., argues that this impulse stems not from cynicism but from disappointed idealism. True cynics believe that everyone is irrevocably, unalterably “base and low,” Lichter notes. Journalists think people can be--should be--decent and altruistic.

“Negativism . . . arrogance . . . self-righteousness and moral sanctimony” in the media are actually manifestations of most journalists’ “idealistic vision,” Lichter says. “They’re critical of politicians for representing political interests. They want a political world that rises above self-interest.”

Some defenders of the press say that what is often called cynicism is just “aggressive reporting,” as Alex Jones, who hosts a National Public Radio program on media issues, said in New York last month. Jones thinks raising this issue is not only wrongheaded but dangerous. He told media leaders that their complaints about “cynicism” could encourage major news organizations to abandon such reporting in an effort to avoid such criticism.

Other journalists say this risk is especially acute at a time when fears about dwindling readership and viewership and the increasing tabloidization of the news media have made many profit-oriented corporate managers less committed to important reporting projects that are costly, time-consuming and potentially controversial.

Although this concern is certainly valid, many journalists and politicians fear that the media’s healthy, indispensable and potentially productive skepticism has indeed given way to an unhealthy, unnecessary and potentially destructive cynicism.

Do we increasingly substitute snideness for skepticism--and smart-ass pontification for legitimately aggressive questions?

The answer, too often, is yes.

“In order to seem tough, the press has become cheaply querulous and skeptical about everything,” says Walter Isaacson, managing editor of Time magazine. “We find it sometimes easier to take cynical-seeming shots at people, rather than to do the truly tough or hard analysis of issues and ideas. . . . We adapt a tone of sort of condescending irony. . . . We miss the fact that these are important issues and important ideas which should be taken seriously.”

An Unprecedented Climate of Mistrust

Mistrust between politicians and the news media is not new. Presidents at least as far back as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson have criticized the press--and been criticized in turn--and it was more than 60 years ago that Frank Simonds, a New York journalist who won the first Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 1917, reflected the reportorial wisdom of the ages when he said, “There is but one way for a newspaper man to look at a politician, and that is down.” (Not surprisingly, the remark is generally, if erroneously, attributed to the most famous journalistic cynic of them all, H.L. Mencken.)

But the climate today, as we approach the Third Millennium, may be unprecedented. As the Washington Post documented in a six-part series of articles published this year, American society is experiencing a “collapse of trust in human nature” and an “erosion of trust in government and virtually every other institution.”

It is not just that people have lost faith in politicians; they’ve lost faith in their fellow man. Only about a third of the American people polled by the Post (in conjunction with Harvard University and the Kaiser Family Foundation) said “most people can be trusted,” one-third fewer than those who said most people could be trusted in 1964.

Mounting cynicism in this country even has global repercussions, Isaacson told a gathering of media and opinion leaders in New York last month. American ideas and ideals have long been a source of inspiration, enlightenment, support and salvation for people everywhere; they are what the journal Foreign Affairs recently called our “soft” power in the world.

“That source of power comes basically from the authority and credibility we can have as journalists,” Isaacson said. “I think if we become more cynical about our institutions here, we also risk people around the world becoming more cynical about the true power and values of the American society.”

There is a chicken-and-egg question involved in this equation, though. Does journalistic cynicism simply mirror a wider, deeply rooted public cynicism? Or is journalistic cynicism the cause of that public cynicism?

“The media are a reflection of the people, more or less,” says Mario Cuomo, the former governor of New York. “They reflect the culture of their time.”

In fact, the public is even more cynical and mistrustful of elected officials than are journalists, according to a survey last year by the Times Mirror Center for the People & the Press (now the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press). That survey found that 77% of the public--compared to 40% of national journalists--gave Washington officials a low rating on honesty and ethics.

There is, of course, much for Americans to be cynical, mistrustful--and fearful--about.

The 1960s assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. permanently disillusioned many Americans. Vietnam and Watergate created a semi-permanent credibility gap. Violent crime, while down the last two years, is still more than quadruple what it was in 1960. A radical restructuring of the economy, combined with a widespread breakdown in the traditional family unit, have undermined the basic sense of security that most middle-class Americans long assumed, almost as a birthright.

Divorce, single-family households, teenage pregnancy and out-of-wedlock births have all increased dramatically. The rich have continued to get richer, while median household income has remained relatively stagnant and the gap between rich and poor has grown steadily since the early 1970s. Large companies once regarded as invulnerable have downsized, merged or collapsed, taking with them hundreds of thousands of jobs and slashing benefits and stagnating salaries for many of the jobs that remain.

The “root cause” of the public’s cynicism is that “we have entered an age of anemic growth in peoples’ living standards, at least for the majority of the population that did not go to college and even to some extent for those who did,” says David Lauter, political editor of the Los Angeles Times. “People feel that the political system, therefore, is not working, because it’s not delivering the kind of economic security that people want and that they feel they have a right to want.”

Our political, social and economic problems notwithstanding, much in American society has, however, gotten undeniably better in recent decades. The Cold War is over. Deaths from heart disease, stroke and most other major diseases have declined substantially. Infant mortality has been cut in half since 1970. Our much brooded-over environment has grown measurably healthier. Women and minorities, while still victimized by discrimination in many ways, enjoy a much fuller share of rights and rewards than they did in the halcyon days of President Kennedy’s New Frontier.

Many people who bemoan the state of society today may simply be too young--or too lacking in historical perspective--to realize that the magnitude of the problems we face today are not unprecedented but all too common in our history.

Too many of today’s Cassandras seem to misperceive the happy years between the end of World War II and the social turmoil of the 1960s, the years that Mario Cuomo calls the “Doris Day era . . . of positivism and sweetness and the American dream.”

Americans achieved a great deal during those years, in part because we emerged from a war against a common enemy to embark upon a common objective--peace and prosperity--with a newly created middle class in a country physically untouched by the devastation that scarred much of the rest of the industrialized world.

But Richard Wald, senior vice president at ABC News, says that much of what we now look back on, longingly, as normal about that period was, in fact, “abnormal”; it was, he says, perhaps the only period in our history that a national magazine (Time) could have described as “The American Century,” the only time when we “bestrode the world . . . with our economic power and military might,” when most Americans--at least most white, male Americans--felt that anything and everything was possible.

“We were a blessed nation in our recollection,” Wald says, but even then, “there was a lot wrong. We just didn’t pay any attention to it. Our sense of the time is not necessarily matched by the reality of the time.”

So is the glass half-full today--or half-empty?

To most journalists, it would seem, the answer is half-empty--if not completely empty. Journalists may not have created public cynicism, but they have surely exacerbated it.

Giving People What They Want?

In one public opinion survey after another, readers, listeners and viewers often complain about negative news. But for all their protestations and all their clamoring for positive news, surveys--and television ratings--also show that people seem more interested in negative news, sensational news, news about crime and violence and corruption than in what we customarily think of as “positive” news.

To remain in business, the news media must--to some extent--give people what they want. The better, more responsible news media are also supposed to give people what they need--and while few people say they want or need more cynicism, the cynicism continues to mount.

Journalists should remember that “the positive is just as much a part of the truth as the negative,” says Kenneth Walsh, longtime White House reporter for U.S. News & World Report and the author of “Feeding the Beast: The White House Versus the Press.”

“I’m not talking about being a Pollyanna, but I think we often lose sight of the idea that life for many Americans . . . is not all crime and corrupt politicians and evil. That’s the part of American life we miss, and especially in the mainstream media, I think we do our readers and listeners and viewers a disservice by not realizing that.”

Paul Taylor, a longtime reporter for the Washington Post, found himself so frustrated and disillusioned by the cynicism he found in his colleagues and in himself that he left the Post last year after 26 years in journalism. “‘I really do believe as a journalist we are not painting an accurate picture of who we are as a people and what our political institutions are like,” he says.

Taylor’s former boss, Leonard Downie, executive editor of the Post, thinks that what many people perceive as cynicism in the media is, in reality, the inevitable byproduct of the growing education, sophistication and professionalism of most journalists. For some time after World War II, he says, “The media were relatively close to the establishment. . . . The big names in the media were . . . by and large . . . not very skeptical about the leadership of government, of industry, anything you can think of.”

Beginning in the mid-1960s and the 1970s, though, as big-city news media--print and broadcast--began to make more money and pay a more livable wage, they began to attract “a lot of smart and ambitious people,” Downie says. “We started covering subjects in-depth that we had barely covered before,” and when these more knowledgeable reporters encountered politicians and others who were determined to “present a different picture than the real picture,” increased skepticism became unavoidable.

Downie is certainly right that, for all the flaws in contemporary journalism, most reporters and editors are better educated and more sophisticated today than their predecessors were. Even veteran reporters such as David Halberstam, the 62-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winner who left daily journalism more than 30 years ago to write books, says reporters today are “better than ever.”

For the most part, these better reporters have produced consistently better reporting.

Paul Steiger, managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, says that business coverage, for example, is now much more nuanced and intelligent--and much less cynical--than it was during the oil crises of the 1970s, when journalists automatically assumed that “everything out of the mouth of an oil company [executive] in particular and business in general was a lie and that everything was being driven by unconscionable greed.”

“There is unconscionable greed, and some business people do bad things, but some business people do good things, too, and some are better than others, and we in journalism have gotten better at seeing the range and the shades of gray than we were in the ‘70s.”

But among political reporters in particular--and in the Washington press corps above all--the increased education, sophistication and remuneration of reporters and columnists has been accompanied by a “smug sense of intellectual and moral superiority,” in the words of Van Gordon Sauter, former president of CBS News and now general manager of KVIE, the public television station in Sacramento.

Many journalists, dating back to the turn-of-the-century muckrakers and the Revolutionary War pamphleteers before them, have seen their work as a higher calling. Fame and fortune have “validated . . . [the journalists’] own high opinion of themselves,” says Lichter of the Center for Media and Public Affairs. “They really do think they have all the answers and they should be giving the speeches because they know better than these politicians.”

Self-confidence--ego--is an essential characteristic for most journalists. As Halberstam said in a speech last month, “I don’t think good reporters can be all that humble. . . . Most of our best reporting . . . taking on a huge and powerful institution . . . doesn’t lend itself to modesty.”

Indeed, some of the best and most important journalism of our time--including Halberstam’s courageous early reporting from Vietnam--would not have been possible had the reporters involved not believed strongly in themselves and in the importance of their work.

Still, in earlier generations, journalists knew they belonged to a different social class than did many of the high-ranking public officials they covered. “It was the received opinion of the world . . . that journalists, if not the scum of the earth, were certainly kind of suspect and crummy people--and by and large, they were,” ABC’s Wald says, with a hint of wicked hyperbole in his voice.

Today, especially in the New York-Washington corridor where the most influential makers and shapers of public opinion live, top broadcast and print reporters and the public officials they cover often have the same Ivy League education, go to the same dinner parties, have summer homes in the same tony resorts and send their children to the same exclusive private schools.

In television in particular, there are a number of journalists who make more money than the public officials--and some are more famous as well. In the 1988 presidential race, when Sam Donaldson of ABC News was assigned to cover Michael S. Dukakis, the Democratic candidate, crowds at virtually every stop on the campaign trail reacted more enthusiastically to Donaldson than to Dukakis, cheering the newsman and beseeching him for autographs and photographs.

Politicians have unwittingly contributed to the increased status--real and perceived--of journalists by essentially abandoning their control over the nominating process in presidential campaigns. Until the early 1970s, elected and organizational leaders largely dictated the nominees of the two major parties. But campaign reforms, the growth of the direct primary and the concomitant diminution of straight-line party loyalty among voters have helped lift the media into the ranks of kingmakers in American politics.

As the power of American political parties has diminished, the press has assumed many of the traditional functions previously exercised by the parties, both screening candidates for the voters and serving as the institutionalized opposition to whatever party is in power.

Sen. Estes Kefauver won 12 primaries in 1952--more than any other candidate by far--but he lost the Democratic presidential nomination to Adlai Stevenson because the party bosses preferred Stevenson. In 1988, with 37 primary states and no party bosses in the traditional sense, it was disclosures in the press, not discussions in the back room, that helped kill the candidacies of at least two strong candidates--former Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado and Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware.

In 1992, disclosures in the press about candidate Clinton’s alleged philandering almost sank his campaign, a campaign that he salvaged, in large part, by taking his case to the people through such media outlets as “60 Minutes” and “Larry King Live.”

With campaigns now being conducted essentially in and for the media, it should not be surprising that many in the media have exalted opinions of themselves. There may be equally valid reasons for journalists to have a low opinion of the politicians they cover.

Many politicians do lie, stonewall, equivocate, shade the truth and put their self-interest above the public interest. There is at least an element of truth in the definition of “cynic” offered by Ambrose Bierce, the satirist and journalist, 90 years ago in his “Devil’s Dictionary” (originally titled “The Cynic’s Word Book”). Bierce defined a cynic as “a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.”

Thus, it could be argued that cynicism is simply another word for realism--for a clear-eyed, rather than romantic view of life.

“We have become a more vigilant, more skeptical press corps precisely because politicians work so hard to manipulate the media,” says Ken Bode, political reporter and analyst for CNN and host of public television’s “Washington Week in Review.”

Every politician has advisors whose primary responsibility is to “spin” the media, to persuade reporters to accept their candidate’s views, even when the facts clearly suggest something else altogether. Many corporate and other special-interest groups have also become adept at spinning the media in recent years.

Interestingly, just as many journalists agree with politicians who say the media have become too cynical, so do many politicians agree with journalists who say that politicians are partly to blame for that attitude.

Too many politicians “pander to whatever the latest public opinion polls say,” instead of being responsive to the genuine needs of their constituents, says Sen. Paul Simon.

Journalists witness this behavior and--no matter how hard most of them may try to remain objective--they cannot help being affected by it.

If journalists are upset by politicians who want to be elected more than they want to serve, they are even more upset by politicians who lie to them. No one enjoys being lied to, but journalists--who see themselves as truth-seekers, first and foremost--regard lying as a personal affront.

Much of the media’s mistrust of politicians “began with politicians who lied to the media, not in the ‘normal,’ self-congratulatory or self-promotional way that politicians have always lied to the media, but in terms of basic issues” involving public policy and public trust in Vietnam and Watergate, says Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.).

“But I also think there’s a generation of journalists that came out of Watergate whose skepticism became honed and to a certain extent voracious, and therefore I think they frequently saw scoundrels where probably they should have seen issues.”

Vietnam and Watergate changed the journalistic rules, perhaps permanently.

Even before these two watershed events, journalists “always took a dim view of Congress,” says political columnist David Broder of the Washington Post. What Vietnam and Watergate did, he says, was change the Washington press corps’ “fundamental attitude toward the most notable figure in public life . . . the president.”

Previously, journalists had generally been respectful of most presidents--not photographing Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a wheelchair, for example, and not reporting on John Kennedy’s philandering. William Prochnau, in his book about the first American reporters who covered Vietnam, “Once Upon a Distant War,” quotes Pierre Salinger, Kennedy’s press secretary, as saying he was able to “contain unwanted stories” in those days by simply telling a joke in response to challenging or uncomfortable questions from reporters. “Everybody would laugh and that would be the end of the story,” Salinger said.

After Vietnam and Watergate, presidential press secretaries found their jokes of little use in deflecting increasingly aggressive and skeptical reporters.

Vietnam and Watergate also prompted many in the Washington press corps to abandon long-standing distinctions between those politicians at every level who had always been regarded as irredeemably lazy and self-serving and those who are honest, conscientious public servants.

As Syracuse’s Patterson puts it in “Out of Order”: “Two presidents had lied; therefore no politician was to be trusted.”

Vietnam and Watergate were followed by the Iran/Contra scandal, the savings and loan crisis, “Iraqgate” and an avalanche--a mudslide--of negative election campaigns. The cumulative effect of these events was to further persuade many journalists of the untrustworthiness of most, if not all politicians.

Vietnam and Watergate changed the basic mind-set of many journalists in yet another, equally profound way.

Before Vietnam and Watergate, says Meg Greenfield, editor of the editorial pages of the Washington Post, journalists felt that “the worst thing we could do, the most embarrassing thing that could happen to us . . . was if we falsely accused someone [of wrongdoing] in a story.”

In part, this attitude derived from an inherent sense of fairness, but for Greenfield and many others, it was further “seared into me because of the political context in which I grew up and became a journalist--a revulsion against [Sen. Joseph] McCarthy” and his false accusations against alleged communists in government and elsewhere.

In contrast, Greenfield says, for the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate journalist, “the worst, the most embarrassing, humiliating thing is not that [you accuse someone falsely] but that you can be ‘taken,’ that you can fail to accuse someone of something he ought to be accused of, that you can be spun by him.”

Although Greenfield says reporters are right to be aggressive and skeptical given the “endemic, widespread deception” of the past 30 years, she says there is an enormous “cultural difference” between these two perceptions of journalistic failure. “I’d rather have it said of me that I got ‘taken’ than that I falsely accused,” she says. “I can always rightly accuse the next day, but I can’t take back” a false accusation.

In the current climate, however--especially in Washington--many reporters seem more worried about being taken than about being fair.

As Geneva Overholser, ombudsman for the Washington Post, noted last fall, “A reporter can soar professionally on a reputation for being tough, even ruthless.” But a reporter is “doomed,” Overholser said, if he or she is seen as “too soft.”

Thus, reporters deemed to be too kind to President Clinton were repeatedly singled out for scorn in the New Republic’s “Clinton Suck-Up Watch.”

No major national publication routinely ridicules reporters for being gratuitously or unfairly critical of Clinton--or of any other politician.

Next: Cynicism on the Campaign Trail.

Jacci Cenacveira of The Times editorial library assisted with the research on this series.

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Voter Turnout

As media cynicism increased, the turnout of registered voters in presidential elections decreased (although it did rise again in 1992 amid concerns about the direction of the economy).

‘88: 50.2%

Source: U.S. Census Bureau