1998 Was Dismal Year for Ethical Press

by Randolph T. Holhut

It was horrible year for journalism. Between Matt Drudge's leak of Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff's relentless investigation into President Clinton's sex life and Larry Flynt's $1 million reward for information on Congressmen who had extra-marital affairs -- which led to House Speaker-designate Bob Livingston's stunning resignation -- were months of nasty and brutish behavior by the mainstream press.

The same things that have hobbled the press in recent years -- conglomeration and cluelessness -- still reign supreme. More and more media outlets are being owned by fewer and fewer people, which results in worse and worse journalism. The race to the bottom is now going at supersonic speed.

I thought I saw the worst of journalism with the O.J. and Princess Di frenzies in 1997, but the Clinton sex scandal beat it by a mile. The intense competition that has come with the rise of the 24-hour news cycle has meant that fact-based reporting has been superseded by speculation and unverified reporting.

"The media culture today is oriented around talking about the news rather than reporting it," said Tom Rosenstiel, a media critic and vice-chair of CCJ, when the report was released in February. "The news organizations that had least facts tended to pretend they knew the most."

Though some of the stories -- such as the now-infamous semen-stained dress -- were eventually proven true, we now know that a lot of the information on the story came from Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's office. He freely leaked information to reporters he favored and did so in violation of federal law. Starr is currently being investigated on this, even though you're not hearing much about it in the press.

Between the speculation and the dubious sources, the press failed miserably covering the Lewinsky case. It rushed to judgment and did not attempt to nail down the wild rumors that were swirling around for fear of being scooped by a less-scrupulous news organization. The bar has been definitely lowered.

The professional moralists in journalism wailed about plagiarism and fabrication by journalists such as Stephen Glass, Patricia Smith and Mike Barnacle. While that was disturbing, I was more upset by the trend of editors, publishers and owners who leave their reporters to twist in the wind the minute their work was attacked.

Take the fate of Gary Webb, late of the San Jose Mercury News. His 1996 series on the CIA-backed Nicaraguan contras' role in introducing crack cocaine into South Central Los Angeles should have gotten a Pulitzer Prize. Instead, Webb was sandbagged by his editors, while the three most powerful papers in America -- The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times -- ripped his story and his professional reputation apart. Webb was demoted and eventually quit the paper in disgust.

A few weeks ago, the CIA released a report that went virtually unnoticed by the press. It confirmed that some of the folks in Central America that it worked with in the 1980s, including the Contras, dealt drugs on the side. Webb's reporting was vindicated. Instead, the news of the CIA report was ignored and the book critics savaged Webb's new book on the Contra/drug connection, "Dark Alliance."

Mike Gallagher of the Cincinnati Enquirer met with a similar fate. He did an amazing series of stories on Chiquita Brands International focusing on the abuses in Honduras that help Chiquita profitably put bananas on American grocery shelves. Gallagher was attacked by Chiquita, who eventually filed criminal charges against him for tapping into the company's in-house voice mails. Gallagher's paper, owned by the Gannett chain, chose to write a $10 million check to Chiquita rather than defend Gallagher's work.

The things Gallagher uncovered -- all them documented and true -- were ignored by all the press moralists who protested loudly that an ethical lapse had occurred. The real lapse in ethics, that a powerful multinational corporation was poisoning, bullying and occasionally killing Honduran farm workers, was almost totally forgotten.

And let's not forget CNN's quick retraction of a report by producers Jack Smith and April Oliver that U.S. forces used Sarin nerve gas to kill American defectors in Laos during the Vietnam War. Never mind that the Pentagon has a stockpile of 30 million pounds of Sarin. Or that the Pentagon and the CIA waged a not-so-secret "secret" airwar in Laos, raining bombs and herbicides on the countryside. Or that CNN's story had been confirmed by several highly placed sources in the military. Because CNN didn't want to lose its role as chief cheerleader for the Pentagon, they backed down.

The message this sends to other reporters is clear: stick to safe, innocuous stories and stay away from anything that might cause trouble for the military-industrial complex or multinational corporations. You will not be protected by your superiors or your peers if you try to do tough, probing reporting on controversial matters. Citizens who need to hear the truth about the people and institutions that affect their lives are ill-served by this kind of gutlessness.

But thankfully, there are fearless folks out there who are still doing great journalism. Magazines such as The Nation, In These Times, CovertAction Quarterly and Mother Jones; newsletters such as CounterPunch and The Washington Spectator; alternative papers such as the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Albion Monitor and many other papers and 'zines big and small around the nation; radio programs such as David Barsamian's "Alternative Radio," and all the community broadcasters, legal and pirate, popping up everywhere. And don't forget the Internet, perhaps the greatest news medium ever created.

My advice to you, the news consumer, is the same as last year. Support the journalists that are doing a good job and the publications and programs they work for. Tell the people who're producing distorted, violent or repulsive media to shape up. Push for more media literacy courses in the schools. Take advantage of the new technologies to create your own media. Make the media conglomerates accountable to the communities they serve.

Most of all, remember that not all journalists are creeps. There are still good men and women who believe that journalism is a public service. These are the reporters and photographers who bear witness and try to bring the truth of what happened each day in this chaotic world we live in.

I highly reccommend checking out a documentary entitled "Dying to Tell the Story." It first aired on the TBS cable channel in September and CNN will be rerunning it soon. It was the best thing I saw on television in 1998, a film about photojournalism and the things that happen when people are driven to document the unspeakable in places like Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, South Africa and the Middle East. It will reaffirm your faith in journalism.