RH: One of your broad themes is the roots of contemporary journalism's problems in hubris on the part of many of its reporters.
JF: Any institution gets into trouble when its
members start listening only to themselves. It was a
commonplace among reporters twenty years ago that the
carmakers in Detroit were in trouble because they didn't
listen to the customers; I think that's the same thing you
find among political reporters now. Tthey write things
that are interesting to their colleagues about the latest
trick in campaign strategy as opposed to issues that seem,
over the long run, more interesting to ordinary people.
RH: You discuss how higher paid journalists/pundits have
elevated their financial and social status such that they
are no longer part of the middle and working class
environment with which journalists have traditionally been
associated.
JF: A wonderful illustration of that: three years ago
when Bill Clinton was just starting his first term and
there was a big controversy over Zoe Baird, his nominee for
Attorney General, who had hired some illegal immigrants, the
initial reaction from the Washington press was, "Oh yeah,
it's really hard to get good help." You heard a much
different reaction from ordinary people who didn't have a
driver or full full-time housekeepers. I think that
this shift in economic well-being over the last two
generations is important because it's been unrecognized that
there's been a implicit bias towards the "haves" that many
reporters have had as a result.
RH: In the latter parts of the book, you talk about ways
that the media can recapture their connection to the people,
through such things as 'public journalism' or 'issue
oriented journalism'. Let's elaborate on that for the
readers here.
JF: One thing that will change journalism for the better your
readers already know about--the changes in technology. I think that
the Internet is one of several developments that are
democratizing things. Anything which brings a diversity of
voices is a good thing. At the same time, newspapers
necessarily view the Internet as a threat to them, in
particular because certain kinds of advertising are
inherently more effective on the net, like classified ads.
Newspapers feel that their franchise may be taken away. One way
they're trying to offset the economic erosion caused by the 'net
is a new kind of journalism called 'public journalism,' which has been
very controversial in the newspaper world, but which I think most
readers would find attractive when they heard about it.
Essentially, the argument here is that journalism should be
able to give people some useful sense of how the world works
beyond "Politician A complaining about Politician
B and how Consultant C is going to advise them about their
latest tactics." It's about how people can
get better schools, better jobs, deal with the environment,
and have technology evolve in the way they want. Many people
think that this will make journalism more popular
with readers in the long run.
RH: Certainly the Internet has a great potential to offer
that as an alternative to mainstream journalism. What's your
take on what you've seen so far online?
JF: There are some aspects of this which pose
potential problems for the flow of information. For example,
my experience is that your attention is inherently shorter online
than it is with a printed page. You can read a book for a
long time, but it's hard to look at one long document on a
computer screen, because even the nicest screens are a
little annoying. Also, there's the potential that a web-
based information world, or Internet-based world, could be
more fragmented, so people end up just talking with others
who have the same world outlook they do. I believe, however, that
the benefits of the Internet outweigh those risks, especially the
power the Internet gives any individual to find the information that
he or she wants.
One thing that the Internet probably will not
do is eliminate the need for powerful editors and powerful
media filters. The reason I say that is that with so much
information available, it's all the more important for
somebody to give it some order. There will still be a
role for somebody to say, "Here are the four or five most
important things that happened yesterday."
RH: The Internet offers great potential to discuss those
events in terms of issues rather than the ways that
polticians manipulate issues to gain oneupmanship on each
other.
JF: ...It will be a real test for the Internet,
because what TV has specialized in for the last ten, twenty
years is this very high-gloss political spin to
whatever happens. You know, "the latest twist in Lamar
Alexander's advertising campaign." If people on the Internet
mainly offer that kind of perspective, it will just be the
same thing in a new housing. Those who deal with the
Internet can use its tremendous ability to collect people
from a whole bunch of different backgrounds to give us more
information about the substance of various developments.
That will be a really progressive and valuable breakthrough.
RH: What's your sense of what you've seen already?
JF: I've seen the candidates' home pages, and they
seem to me more or less desperate stabs to make themselves
relevant to a world of mainly younger voters they have no
comprehension of. They have the look to me of campaigns flailing
around and hoping somebody will be attracted.
To be honest, I haven't seen a lot of other political
analysis on the Internet yet. I know it's out there, but I
haven't been looking in the last couple of weeks since the
campaign has heated up, so that gives me something to do in
the next few weeks.
RH: The Atlantic Monthly is going to be launching its own
election coverage in the next few weeks. Tell me a bit about
what's planned for that.
JF: The Atlantic Monthly is, I think, now the oldest
continually published magazine in the country. We started
before the Civil War, but we've tried also to be ahead of
some of the other print publications in getting into the
online world. Our theory is that among the things people
will be looking for in the online world is content
enrichment. With our diverse archive of materials, we've tried to
develop links with stories we've done before that in many
cases have changed American history, such as Martin Luther
King's letter from jail, documents about the Civil War.
Our political coverage will try to do something similar.
We're not going to be ahead of CNN in saying, "Here's what
the tracking polls show in Iowa," but I think we can be ahead of
other publications
in saying: "The issue of economic stagnation is coming to
the fore again. Here are the ways this has come up in our
history before, here are the approaches that seem to be
successful, here are the ones that seem not to go anyplace.
Here is what Buchanan has said before, here's what the
Germans do... "So we can add some depth to these issues
that bob in and out of the news.
RH: How did you first get involved in covering online
issues?
JF: I'll answer that indirectly by saying that I got
my first computer in 1978 because I was working on an
article where I had to type the name "Brzezinski" about 50
times, and I thought, "Life is too short, I need to find
some way to automate this," so I bought a computer and had to write
my own code to do word processing with it... In the early 1980s,
MCIMail became the first service where you could communicate
through email, and I thought this was wonderful. It was a way I
could send in articles without going to the airport and having them
shipped; I could keep in touch with friends around the
world. For fifteen years now, I've been in touch with my
friends in the journalistic world through email. As the Internet has
evolved, my interest and fascination has grown.
RH: What's mainstream media's reactions to the charges
you make in Breaking the News?
JF: It's been in most ways surprisingly good, with
one exception. The surprisingly good part is that most of
the mainstream media -- Time, Newsweek, The New York Times,
The Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle -- have
given positive reviews and saying, "Yes, there are some
serious problems." I think in general this can be seen as a
sign of an institution that is aware that there are problems
in the mainstream press. There have been a couple of danger
signs, though, one of which is the very positiveness of the
reaction, because it's a little bit suspicious. "Oh yeah, we
really are terrible...now let's move on to those tracking
polls."
The other worrisome thing is that from some of the most
elite publications, including the New Yorker and some
others, there's a kind of dismissiveness -- "the citizens
are unhappy with the press, but what do the citizens know?
The'yre just average citizens; they don't understand the
complex things that we're doing." It's a sign of complacency that
journalists would ridicule if it were
displayed by Dan Rostenkowski or Marie Antoinette or by
somebody else in an institution that people were mad at.
RH: One criticism I've seen is that you present a very
romanticized notion of journalism that doesn't make sense
when reporters come back to the real world.
JF: In the real world, the kind of journalism they've been dished
out has been failing in the market. Newspapers are folding,
broadcast networks are losing market shares, so in the real
world, what's being done now is not cutting it. In the real
world, there's plenty of evidence from smaller papers and
from programs like Nightline that taking the higher road
has paid off. The spread of National Public Radio, which has a significant audience now, 10-12
million people a day, shows that there are ways to get an
audience without constantly falling back on the latest news about OJ...
RH: The candidates themselves have gotten wise to the
fact that they need to reconnect, particularly with the
middle class that views both media and politics as not
having anything to say to them.
JF: In the 1992 election, when
both the candidates and the public were happy with the
forums that let them connect without going through the
filters of pundits, the mainstream press should have taken that as a
reality check. I expect there will be more of those forums
this year, and I think there should be. It's good to have
these forums where people who are affected by government's
policies can ask questions about those policies, not the
spinology of campaigning.
RH: What do you see as the immediate future of 'public
journalism'?
JF: In the newspaper business, this is a really
bitter issue. Almost nobody outside the newspaper business
has ever heard of it, so this is a debate that is very
intense within its own borders. In a couple of years, this
debate will look silly. The label 'public journalism' will
probably be forgotten, and the basic argument that the
public journalism people are making, namely that this "he
said, she said" attack style of journalism is one people
don't like -- that argument will seem obvious. Newspapers
have long recognized that good journalism
engages the readers in some way that's useful to them. So the
label will be forgotten, but the basic idea will survive.
RH: Interestingly, you and E. J.
Dionne Jr. both make reference to the debate between Walter Lippmann and John
Dewey about how journalism can best serve the people as a
aid to participating in democracy, although journalism is
really only a fraction of Dionne's sweeping thesis.
JF: Neither Dionne nor I, who have been friends since
we were working on the Harvard Crimson together 25
years ago (along with Michael Kinsley and Frank Rich --
RH), knew the other was writing a book, but we ended up
having complementary points about the press and the
Lippmann/Dewey debate. I think the point for people both in
and out of journalism to remember is that there's a reason
the writers of the Constitution mentioned freedom of the
press when our nation was founded. A healthy press is a necessary
part of a healthy government and a healthy democracy, not just
some branch of entertainment.
