Another painful example of get-it-first journalism

The New York Post’s erroneous Page 1 “exclusive” earlier this month -- that Sen. John Kerry had picked Dick Gephardt as his vice presidential running mate -- is but the latest manifestation of what I’ve long seen as the silliest of all journalistic sports: the rush to be first.

As the campaign season heats up, we’re bound to see more demonstrations of this scoop mentality, culminating in election night, when all the networks -- cable and broadcast -- will vie to see which one can beat the others by nanoseconds in predicting which candidate will win which state.

The Post’s Gephardt gaffe -- which the New York Times now says may have been based on a tip from that intrepid reporter Rupert Murdoch -- caused no real harm. After all, we’re talking about the New York Post of “Headless Body in Topless Bar” fame, not the New York Times or Reuters.

But in the last presidential election, the rush to be first was indeed harmful. All the networks reported that Al Gore had won Florida and, hence, the presidency. When that projection was quickly reversed, it left a lasting impression in many quarters -- including Michael Moore’s fevered mind (and my own, I hope, less fevered mind) -- that George W. Bush, with the help of the Supreme Court, his brother Jeb and Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, had stolen the election. Such perceptions can be enormously corrosive to the credibility of the democratic process and to the ability of a president to govern.

Could that happen again this year? The networks say no. But journalists always promise reform after they’ve stumbled badly. Then they make the same mistakes again, whether they’re focusing on a politician’s sexual peccadilloes rather than his substantive policies or -- well, rushing to be first.

But what’s the rush?

Reporters and editors will tell you that trying to break news first keeps them and their news organizations alert and on their toes. They say it also impresses sources, who are more likely to return calls or initiate contacts -- or even leak valuable information -- to reporters they see as aggressive, well-connected news-breakers. Being first is also supposed to show readers and viewers that a given news organization is on top of things.

Timely, aggressive reporting can break important stories and bring attention to issues that might otherwise be neglected. But too often news organizations want to be first for the sake of being first, and the arguments they advance to justify that objective are “all rationalizations for the ingrained professional pathology of the press,” says Robert Lichter, president of the Washington-based Center for Media and Public Affairs. “At a time when you can find news instantly on the Internet or cable television, no one cares -- or knows or remembers -- which reporter beat another by three minutes. It has zero importance to the public or to any news source.

“When we did a survey a few years ago and asked people about various things they liked about the news media and the services they performed, getting news to them quickly finished at or near the bottom,” Lichter says.

“Speed is now taken for granted. This is a holdover from the days when speed did make a difference. Reporters are like skilled watchmakers competing in an age of quartz crystals. It’s a skill that doesn’t matter anymore.”

News organizations continue to perpetuate the myth of the scoop, though. Just look at how newspapers report the response of television in particular to big news events:

“CBS and NBC were first on the air with coverage [of the initial airstrikes in Baghdad] at 9:35 p.m.”

“CNN got on the air first with a Reuters report at 5:03 a.m. EST Sunday” that Saddam Hussein had been captured. “MSNBC hit the air next at 5:17 a.m.”

“CBS was first on the air with the story [of the transfer of sovereignty to Iraq] at 2:43 a.m. ABC followed at 2:48 a.m.”

Who cares, apart from the reporters, their bosses and publicists? It’s all a big ego trip, and over the years, several prominent journalists have acknowledged as much when we’ve discussed it.

“It’s mostly ego ... mostly bragging rights,” NBC’s Tom Brokaw told me several years ago.

“It’s largely a matter of institutional ego,” Walter Isaacson, president of the Aspen Institute, said when he was managing editor of Time magazine.

Twenty-five years after he broke the story that President Nixon would name Henry Kissinger as secretary of state, Dan Rather broke into a grin of remembered triumph when he called that exclusive “a world beat ... a clean kill” and likened it to “catching a touchdown pass when I was in high school.”

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Right versus first

Ego -- individual and institutional -- is about the only legitimate explanation for the rush to be first, especially in the era of the 24/7 news cycle, when being first is measured in seconds and being wrong is easier than ever.

Reputable reporters agree that getting it right is more important than getting it first. But in today’s overheated news climate, reporters can often delude themselves into thinking they have something right because they’re determined to have it first.

Live feeds and fierce competition among 24-hour cable networks have robbed television reporters of the time they once had to think and double-check before broadcasting their stories, and with newspapers increasingly urging their reporters to post stories on their websites well before their print deadlines, newspaper and newsmagazine reporters face similar problems.

The percentage of Americans who think news organizations generally get the facts straight has declined from 55% to a dismal 35% since 1985, according to a survey released early this year by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. It is not mere happenstance that this decline has coincided with the rise of cable television and the Internet.

I have to admit that when I was a cub reporter, working for a small daily newspaper in one of the Los Angeles suburbs -- long before cable or the Web was even a glimmer on the media horizon -- I was certainly thrilled on those rare occasions when I or one of my colleagues beat the big Los Angeles Times on a story. That kind of David-and-Goliath experience still resonates, so I can certainly understand why the folks at USAviation.com were delighted when they beat all the big boys to the news that Kerry had picked Sen. John Edwards as his running mate. They did so by parlaying a tip from an airplane mechanic who had seen the repainted “Kerry-Edwards” 757 in a Pittsburgh airport hanger.

But at a time when surveys consistently show a decline in media credibility, at a time when the news media are still reeling from the damage done by Jayson Blair at the New York Times, Stephen Glass at the New Republic and Jack Kelley at USA Today, I think major news organizations should stop worrying about being first and focus more on being right.

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David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com. To read previous columns, go to latimes.com/shaw-media.