Editorials

Judy Miller is one disgusting poster child for freedom of the press. We can all agree on that, can’t we? She was the pipeline for the administration’s totally bogus claims that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But on the other hand, nobody thinks that it’s right to jail a reporter who merely received—didn’t even print—a leak from a presumably highly placed source which amounted to the disclosure of the identity of a CIA employee. Can we agree on that?  

The leak itself might or might not have been a crime. (There is some suggestion that at the time of the leak Valerie Plame wasn’t working as the kind of covert operative protected by the anti-disclosure law.) But even so, no reason to send Miller to jail.  

Not every one agrees, it turns out. Andrew O’Hehir (Local Boy Made Good—Berkeley High Jacket Editor, 1979-80) has been presiding over a hot debate on the topic at Salon.com. He’s shocked by how many readers have been ready to throw Miller to the wolves because of her past sins. Some of our own correspondents are in that camp. Here’s why Andrew thinks the leftist public wants to see Miller and most other journalists hanged, First Amendment be damned: 

“Media insiders have become so obsessed by their own internal debates and so mesmerized by their own pseudo-professional codes of conduct that they’ve failed to notice how badly they’ve lost the public trust. The Times’ near-sanctification of Miller upon her imprisonment is a perfect case in point.” 

He’s got the right diagnosis, and now the question is, what’s the cure? 

I’ve spent my life blithely jumping back and forth over the line between insider and outsider, so I can see both internal and external perspectives. I love that “pseudo-professional”—many times “journalism ethics” are right up there with “real estate ethics” in the oxymoronic competition. The much-vaunted concept of objectivity in journalism was invented in the 1920s as a way of placating American advertisers, who were timid about supporting the lusty journals of opinion which before then dominated the American press, and which still comprise the European press. But Americans grew accustomed to wanting their media, especially their newspapers, to be perceived to be as truthful as the Baltimore Catechism, which was the gold standard of information in the Catholic schools of my childhood.  

Catechisms aren’t what they once were, and neither are newspapers. Public trust might still be a good goal, but how to achieve it? 

One way, which we’re experimenting with here, is to move closer to the European model of many competing opinionated voices, not just in the opinion ghetto but mixed into the news pages, signed of course. That’s why we have our Public Eye columns, written by self-confessed participants in the news-making process. But our public still wants to read a certain amount of “professional” news written by staff reporters. As one of the people around here with red pencils, I try to enforce a few rules to make the hard-news pages as neutral as possible. 

First and foremost, no ethereal attributions. That is to say, no “officials say” or “studies show.” We don’t always catch all of those, but we try.  

Similarly, no unsigned stories, even briefs, which differs from the practice at many papers. 

Third, no un-named sources unless it’s a very crucial story which we have absolutely no other way of reporting, and then the reporter in question must have an explicit clear agreement with the source about how far to go to protect his or her identity. There are very few stories worth going to jail for—we haven’t found one in two years.  

Number four, it’s not “both sides,” it’s “many voices.” Of course there should never be a story that has only one source, but even two sources will often neglect to provide key aspects of an important story. And reporters who get information only from one un-named source have a particularly high probability of being spun as Miller was, twice. 

Finally, no conclusory reporting of one point of view in a controversy as if it were fact: “Because the downtown plan prohibits buildings over five stories…” That’s a hard one to police, because after a reporter hears claims by various parties enough times some of them begin to sound true. And of course, they might be true, but it’s not the job of a news reporter to make the call in the context of a news story.  

Will simple rules like these restore the public trust? Or at least protect the press from the embarrassments of the last few years of the Jayson Blair and Judith Miller variety? Maybe. Another good word in O’Hehir’s comment is “sanctification.” The pedestals on which certain segments of the American press have placed themselves since Deep Throat provide a long way to fall when a mistake is made.  

Oh, and this just in, as I’m finishing up this piece. Our advertising salesman tells me that the City of Berkeley is transferring its announcement advertising from the Berkeley Daily Planet to the trash tabloid East Bay Daily News, just launched here by the national Knight-Ridder corporation (also the owner of the San Jose Mercury, the Contra Costa Times and the Berkeley Voice.) The person he’s been talking to at City Hall told him that she thinks this switch is because some people there don’t like the Planet’s editorial content. (If anyone tries to go after her for revealing this, I’m personally willing to go to jail to protect her job, if her union can’t.)  

Lest we forget, the best way to regain public trust, but also to lose some advertisers, is to tell the truth. 

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