LOSING THE NEWS Institutions of American Democracy Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Jaroslav Pelikan, Directors Other books in the series Schooling in America: How the Public Schools Meet the Nation’s Changing Needs Patricia Albjerg Graham The Most Democratic Branch: How the Courts Serve America Jeffrey Rosen The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein LOSING THE NEWS The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy Alex S. Jones 1 2009 1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offi ces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2009 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jones, Alex S. Losing the news : the future of the news that feeds democracy / Alex S. Jones. p. cm. — (Institutions of American democracy) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-518123-4 1. Journalism—Political aspects—United States. 2. Journalism—Economic aspects—United States. 3. Journalism—Objectivity—United States. 4. Journalistic ethics—United States. I. Title. PN4888.P6.J66 2009 071.3—dc22 2009018385 135798642 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper for susan Alice: “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” Cheshire Cat: “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.” —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland acknowledgments The origin of this book was an invitation to write it from Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Geneva Overholser in their capacity as coedi- tors of The Press, a part of the American Institutions of Democracy series of books published through a partnership of Oxford Uni- versity Press and the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands. Losing the News is also part of that series and a complement to The Press, which is a collection of scholarly essays that examine the his- tory, identity, roles and future of the American press. Their confederate in conceiving what became Losing the News was Tim Bartlett, who was the book’s fi rst editor at Oxford University Press and was instrumental in framing what it should be. When Tim left Oxford, it passed into the extraordinarily capable hands of David McBride, who has been its principal guide and editor. But it has also been encouraged and enabled by an array of people at Oxford who believed it had an impor- tant message and have been enormously forbearing and sup- portive throughout. I especially wish to thank Niko Pfund, Oxford’s academic and trade division publisher, for his com- mitment to seeing that the book was published well, and Keith Faivre, Sarah Russo, and Steve Dodson for their special efforts on my behalf. I am grateful to friends who read the manuscript and offered guidance and corrections: Tom Patterson, Steve Oney, Nancy Palmer, John Carroll, Dan Okrent, Dudley Clendinen, Fred x • Acknowledgments Schauer, Floyd Abrams, Nicco Mele, Camille Stevens, and Laurel Shackelford, whose rigor saved me many times. My superb associates at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, and Walter Shorenstein, the center’s principal benefactor, have been my allies throughout. I am also most grateful to Kathy Robbins and David Halpern, my agents, who were my allies from the start and contributed their counsel as well as their editorial wisdom. It is important also to thank some particular people who inspired me along the way: Arthur Gelb, Joel Fleishman, Eugene Patterson, my late grandmother, Edith O’Keefe Susong, and my parents, John M. and Arne Jones. Throughout the making of Losing the News, I have had the sup- port of family and friends too numerous to mention, but who are most appreciated and loved. They bolstered me in some dark days and were essential. I wish also to say that I have drawn strength from my fellow journalists, who share many of my concerns, if not always my views. You are my colleagues. Finally, I thank Susan Elizabeth Tifft, who is my fi rst and last reader, my trusted editor, my boon companion and friend, and my beloved wife. prologue:the crisis My best moment as a journalist took place in January 1986, around 3 a.m. in a hotel room that reeked of cigarette smoke and was littered with half-eaten sandwiches and abandoned glasses of watery iced tea. I was in the Hyatt Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky, and for fi ve days had been working on a story about why the Bing- hams, the town’s most famous family, had abruptly decided to sell the newspapers that had made them Kentucky’s fi rst citizens. Family strife had prompted the sudden announcement of the sale of the Courier-Journal and the Louisville Times, and I had immedi- ately caught a plane to Louisville to cover the story for the New York Times. My beat was the press itself. The collapse of the Bingham empire was big news because the Courier-Journal was regarded as perhaps the nation’s fi nest and most honored regional paper. It was also a catastrophe to the nation’s dwindling number of newspaper-owning families, who had looked at the Binghams as a model of success and determina- tion to remain independent of chain ownership. From my perspective, it was also a great story, and, after writ- ing two fast articles, I’d fought with my editor in New York for the chance to stay in Louisville to report and write a longer, more penetrating account of what had happened to this family. My edi- tor was reluctant because I had been at the Times for only two years. He had a far more seasoned person in mind for the job, but I fought for it and managed to persuade him to give me my xii • Prologue chance. For fi ve days I interviewed frenetically, talking to every- one I could reach who might shed light on why this family had come apart. At night I wrote and rewrote a piece that eventually swelled to more than 6,500 words, which was practically novelistic by Times standards. I sustained myself with sweet tea and Marl- boros and worked almost around the clock. And I got lucky. The Binghams were willing to speak to me, and I happened to catch Barry Bingham Sr., a man not given to psychological self-analysis, at a moment in which he was unchar- acteristically candid about himself and his family. He spoke of the untimely deaths of two sons and the deepening strife among his other three children that led to his decision to sell. And he talked of how the family’s culture of reserve had meant that the anger smoldered and grew without the honest confrontations that might have cleared the air. I interviewed him in his offi ce on the day after he announced his decision to sell, after his surviving son had denounced him. He seemed stunned and sad. Perhaps, he said, the family might have been “much better off if we’d been a more Latin-type family with a lot of outbursts, tears, screams and recon- ciliations. But that has not been the way any of us operates.” The article was to appear on the front page of the Times’s Sunday business section, which was printed on Friday night. My deadline was Thursday, and in the silent, early hours of Thursday morning I pushed the button that sent the fi nal section of the piece to New York by the cumbersome computer technology of the day. And then I called my wife, Susan Tifft, who was a writer at Time, awakening her in our New York apartment. I was unable to contain myself. I declared to my sleep-muddled spouse, “I know it’s the best thing I’ve ever done.” Though it may be a cliché to say it, my heart was soaring. I had done my best. And I knew— I knew—that what I had created was going to make that special connection, was going to grab people and compel them to read it to the very end. I felt that I had learned what had happened and why it had happened, and that I had done the family justice, told their story honestly, and done it well. contents Acknowledgments [ix] Prologue [xi] Chapter 1 The Iron Core [1] Chapter 2 Media and Democracy [28] Chapter 3 The Fragile First Amendment [57] Chapter 4 Objectivity’s Last Stand [81] Chapter 5 Media Ethics—The Painful Balance [101] Chapter 6 The Curious Story of News [125] viii • Contents Chapter 7 Newspapers on the Brink [151] Chapter 8 The New News Media [177] Chapter 9 Saving the News [196] Index [223] prologue • XIII I recount that moment because I feel it important to say that I love being a journalist and believe that journalism offers such transporting moments.