There is a scene - a fictional scene, of course - in Ron Howard’s wonderful 1994 film “The Paper” that has been rendered quaint by subsequent developments in journalism.
Set in the newsroom of a big-city daily over a single 24-hour period, the film’s main story arc concerns the murder of a couple of white businessmen - and the arrest of two young black suspects.
As the paper’s reporters chase the story, details are difficult to come by, facts tough to nail down - and deadline looms as the hours go by.
When the paper’s managing editor wants to run an article parroting city hall’s line regarding the suspects - a line the staff knows is likely false - the metro editor (Michael Keaton) pushes back:
“This is a story that could permanently alter the public's perception of two teenagers who might be innocent, and as a weekend bonus, ignite another race war. How about that? Think about this.”
Today, in far too many newsrooms, that kind of common-sense attitude toward reporting is no longer practiced - at either newspapers or television networks (and don’t get me started on online sites).
Over and over again, we see the media race straight into character assassination with no thought about their responsibilities - not only to the truth, but to the lives of the people they cover.
Back in the film, the lead metro columnist (played by Randy Quaid) makes the salient point: “As far as I can remember we never ever, ever knowingly got a story wrong, until tonight.”
Well.
In the years since, the list of blatantly false news stories, of stories that either were known to have been false or with a minimum investment of professional effort would have been known to have been false, is too long to list. But even a digest version is as sobering as it is depressing:
1996 Atlanta Olympic bombing
2006 Duke lacrosse team
2014 Rolling Stone University of Virginia rape hoax
2016 Oberlin College bakery case
2019 Teenager falsely accused of taunting Native American
2021 Colorado Rockies racist taunt that never happened
2022 BYU volleyball team racist taunt that never happened
And that doesn’t even get into the political reporting, where a sizable portion (perhaps a majority) of supposed “journalists” have planted their flag firmly in one political camp or another, and declared that “truth” is more important than mere facts.
The challenge in addressing these obvious problems is there has been a break, a rupture, between the old way of practicing journalism and the new. The culture has changed, and younger reporters and editors have different notions of what constitutes the proper way of doing the job than their predecessors had.
Too many reporters, and their editors, no longer worry about how their lack of diligence, or even an outright falsehood, will affect others.
They simply don’t think the way previous generations of journalists have, which was always deeply infused with the overarching concern of, “Do I have this right?”
The prevailing value today seems to be (and I’m no longer in a newsroom, so my perspective is that of a reader or viewer): “How will this make my readers or viewers feel?”
A lot of contemporary news coverage - in print, online and on television - possesses the characteristics of a political message, not that of an informed observation.
While a recent survey indicated that Americans trust their media less than the citizens of any other democratic nation, highly partisan outfits like the New York Times are raking in record profits not by the old model of selling advertising to present to their readers, but by selling paid subscriptions through telling subscribers what they want to hear (read). And of course, on the other side of our political divide, Fox News has generated such high ratings that it can still continue to make a handsome profit off of its advertising model.
Providing some hope is that other outlets that have also abandoned the old way of doing things for the new way are bleeding subscribers and viewers - the Washington Post, for example, or CNN.
A further challenge in trying to get the media to course-correct is that the dramatic change in how reporting is done coincides with equally dramatic changes in how consumers get their news delivered. Trying to figure out if the Washington Post’s troubles are due to its increasingly polarized coverage or due to readers no longer wanting to get a printed paper on their doorstep each morning is no easy task.
While the newspaper industry has been warning of its own pending demise due to the rise of the Internet since the late 1990s, the business model itself only began contracting during the recession of 2007. (And, really, what other industry has ever spent so much time and energy proclaiming its own obsolescence?)
The Internet has undoubtedly changed the news business, as surely as it changed the book-selling business. The cost of setting up an online news site is a small fraction of what it costs to purchase or lease a printing press or broadcast tower - and so we’ve seen a proliferation of new online news sites the past decade or so.
With online advertising rates continually diluted by the sheer number of outlets taking a cut of a pie that isn’t growing, there is little immediate financial reward for professional restraint in reporting.
While the above list of character assassinations in the media led to a handful of massive libel awards, in most cases only the outlet that published the initial report was held liable: Those that republished the false accusations were let off the hook.
While much of the national media continues to advocate for government restraint of so-called “disinformation” or “misinformation,” that’s mostly directed at social media posts.
When Gawker, an online news site, was hit with a crippling judgment in a case brought by former pro wrestler Hulk Hogan for publishing a private sex tape featuring Hogan, the same talking heads and columnists so incensed about Aunt Madge posting on Facebook that maybe masks aren’t all that effective against the spread of COVID-19 were aghast that a media outlet could be held responsible for invasion of privacy.
Gawker ended up going out of business (although it’s name was later purchased and the site was relaunched with new ownership).
Maybe that needs to happen a few more times.
For the high school student attending a pro-life rally in Washington, D.C., who was falsely accused of taunting a Native American elder at an adjacent rally, when does he get his life back?
More to the point: Where were the adults when that story was being edited and published or aired? Did anyone not stop to ask, “Even if the allegations are true, how is an underage minor smirking possibly in the public interest?”
Really, what was the newsworthiness of that story?
And for the fan at the Colorado Rockies game who was shouting for the team’s mascot, Dinger; or the special-needs fan at the BYU women’s volleyball game likewise falsely accused of shouting a racial epithet - when do they get their lives back?
There will always be those who will choose to believe them guilty, to feel they “got away with” something.
They will always have a black mark over them, a question mark - all based on a false accusation and sloppy news reporting where no one had the courage to make everyone stop for a minute and “Think about this.”
In 1988, I was a reporter for the twice-weekly Chula Vista Star-News. I was assigned the Imperial Beach and South San Diego beats, including San Ysidro.
And, by default, Brown Field - the commuter and freight airport just north of the Mexican border.
Originally built in 1918 to help train Navy pilots for duty in Europe, Brown Field received an upgrade during World War II when it got a nearly 8,000 foot runway.
In May of 1988, local bigwigs organized and staged a huge aviation show meant to compete with the semi-annual Paris Air Show. The two-day Air / Space America ’88 festival included demonstration flights by U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds, the Canadian Air Force Snowbirds, an Air France Concorde, and a Russian Air Force Antonov An-124 - the world’s largest cargo plane. They even had a Russian Mil Mi-34 helicopter - the first rotary-wing aircraft capable of doing loops and rolls. (It is near impossible to watch a helicopter doing aerobatics without getting butterflies, so counter-intuitive is it.)
Various aviation manufacturers and service firms were there, too, handing out patches, brochures, shirts, hats, and all kinds of swag.
Having grown up in the shadow of the Air Force Museum, the son of an avionics engineer and grandson and nephew of Air Force officers, I was in heaven.
The best part for me was a few days before the show, a World War II B-17 heavy bomber owned by the Commemorative Air Force flew in for the show. The Texas Raiders was the name of the plane.
One-hour flights were $500 - far out of the budget of a lowly reporter, but reasonable given the costs involved in maintaining vintage aircraft.
So when the publicist for the show asked if I wanted a complimentary ride as a member of the press, I was thrilled - but also wary. You don’t take freebies in the media from folks you cover - it can give the appearance that your coverage is being compromised, if not outright compromise your coverage.
So I called my editor - and he almost yelled into the phone, “Take a camera and give me a story about that old warbird!”
So I got to go up. The only other person on the flight, besides the four-man crew, was a WWII veteran whose daughter had bought him the trip.
After the pre-flight instructions were given, we lined up on the runway and started rumbling down that long patch of concrete. Having read dozens of books about World War II and their tales of four-engine “heavy bombers” I was expecting a B-17 to feel like a jumbo jet. But a B-17 is about the same size as a modern fighter jet, and so we were bouncing around the runway quite a bit, swaying side to side in the wind. (We also, of course, carried no bombs - at least not real ones, full of high explosives - so we were lighter than a fully loaded plane would have been.)
Once we were airborne, I chatted with the veteran. He’d flown in B-17s in Europe during the war as a waist gunner - but, obviously, hadn’t been in one since he was younger than I was then. After a few minutes of patiently answering my questions, he looked back toward the dummy 50-cal. machine guns at the two waist positions, touched my arm gently, and said, “I’m going to go visit some friends now.”
I didn’t understand what he meant at the time - it was only some years later, looking back, that I realized he wanted time to remember colleagues who hadn’t come home, or who had passed in the intervening years.
The captain - who was younger than the plane he was piloting - asked if I wanted to sit in the nose seat, where the bombardier would have sat. The Norden bombsight still worked, and the co-pilot showed me how moving the knobs would adjust for airspeed, altitude and cross-winds to let the bombardier know exactly when to release the bombs in order to hit the enemy target. It was a surreal experience watching tract houses, strip malls and industrial parks slip along underneath the cross hairs of the bomb sight.
Skinny as I was then, and short as I was (and am), the CAF insurance carrier was assuredly not letting me ride in the ball turret, nor the tail gunner position. But the navigator’s seat with the topside gun turret was also a revelation.
While the paid passenger was likely remembering what it was like to be under attack over enemy territory, with flak coming up from the ground, and German or Italian fighters dropping from above, my civilian imagination could only barely conjure the fear that must have gripped the crews of those planes - nearly all of whom were younger than my 26 years.
When the plane landed, and we were back on the tarmac, it already seemed dreamlike.
The show itself was pretty amazing, but the business end of things apparently didn’t do as well - because the 1980 show was cancelled, and we never heard of Air / Space America again.
Around the same time all that was going on, the city of San Diego was managing to botch long-term discussions with Baja California officials about building a world-class terminal between the Brown Field and Rodríguez Airport (just across the border from Brown Field) runways for a new binational airport to replace San Diego’s Lindbergh Field (whose runway is too short to accommodate larger passenger jets). Heavy-handed demands from the U.S. side annoyed the Mexican officials, and then a series of legal setbacks in California courts prohibited any future passenger traffic out of Brown.
With much of Marine Corps Air Station Miramar’s grounds set aside for environmental mitigation and banking, it would be nearly impossible to build a civilian airport there now - there simply isn’t enough developable land available for things like terminals, hotels, rental car facilities, taxi stands or bus terminals.
But for two days in 1988, with a Concorde supersonic jet streaking off over the Pacific, its sonic boom giving locals a little faux thunder, San Diegans got a brief glimpse of what life with a large, modern airport could have been like.
-30-
Wonderful essay, Jim.
I had guessed that you were once a newspaper reporter, long before you admitted to having worked at the job.
My guess was based on how tightly written was your article.
Of course the "-30-" at the end was a remark I must have used a few thousand times when I was a newspaper reporter and editor in the 60s and 70s.
Your assessment of our once admired profession is unfortunately accurate.
I enjoyed your addition about the air show. What 80 year old guy who once memorized the stats of every war plane used by us in WW2 when he was a young boy wouldn't enjoy that part of your story?
All the best to you and yours, Jim.
-30-
I was always told to believe nothing of what you hear and only half of what you read. Problem today is who reads?