Citizen Conversation With… Dan Okrent
by Matt Bieber, News Writer on September 30, 2009 in Citizen Conversation with..., Features
Photo taken by Taylor Chapman, MPP'11
Interview Conducted by Matt Bieber, MPP’11
Daniel Okrent is the Visiting Murrow Lecturer of the Practice of Press and Public Policy. Before his appointment as the first Public Editor of the New York Times in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, he was editor-at-large at Time Inc.; editor of new media for all Time Inc. publications; and managing editor of Life magazine. Okrent was the first Hearst Foundation Fellow in New Media at the Columbia University School of Journalism, and was a Shorenstein Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School in 2006. His six books include Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center, which was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in history, and Public Editor #1, an annotated collection of his Times columns. His forthcoming Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition will be published in 2010. [Biography courtesy of the Shorenstein Center]
Do news organizations have on obligation to ignore? To not to let the crazy fringes – the birthers, say – hijack meaningful public conversations? To keep debate at some level of reason and accuracy? To quote Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “You are entitled to your opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.” I might add that you’re entitled to your opinion, but you aren’t entitled to news coverage.
You used the word ‘ignore,’ and I think there are relative levels of ‘ignore.’ To ignore it entirely would be to deny a reality, which is that that there are a lot of people who believe that Obama was not born here. Whether they are right or wrong is, to a degree, irrelevant. If people are choosing not to vote for him or not to support his policies or not support what his government is trying to do because they have this notion, news organizations have to report that this is indeed so. To give credence to their position is a different matter. To say, “There are some who believe he was not born here” without adding, “Although all the evidence indicates otherwise,” or “They are wrong,” or, “This is a false assertion,” that’s a different matter. But I think ignoring it is more dangerous than giving it credibility.
You wrote a column in 2004 entitled, “It’s Good to be Objective. It’s Better to be Right.” In it, you lament the way that a fear of being labeled impartial leads many journalists to shy away from contradicting their subjects’ or sources’ claims, even when those claims are patently deceptive or inaccurate. I notice a parallel phenomenon in the way much of the media focuses on controversy - the emphasis is often on the fact of a controversy rather than an inquiry into which – if any – of the parties are in the right. How do you think about these issues, about the moments in which journalists come into an obligation to correct for inaccuracies?
We have a perpetual obligation to correct inaccuracies. If there is one thing that we can ask of journalists, it’s, “Get the facts right.” And whether that means, “How do you spell my last name?” or “Was Obama born in the United States?” the assertion of fact that is contrary to the impression left by partisans on one side is a necessary part of doing your job. But I get back to the point that liars are news. The misinformed are news. Hitler said that the Jews were an inferior race - does that mean we don’t cover Hitler? Pretty dangerous.
A Pew Research Center study published this week indicated that Americans now rate the accuracy of media coverage lower than at any point in nearly 25 years. Do you think the proliferation of partisan cable news shows, blogging, and other new forms of media have altered Americans’ overall view of media? And - perhaps given these changes - are Americans right to be more skeptical of media accuracy today?
We have greater access to the public square because of technological change, and greater access to the public square means more divergent voices. We are way past the era when all of America listened to Walter Cronkite at 6:30 every night. This is an America with thousands of different voices and thousands of different views, so of course that’s going to undermine the authority of what once was the established view. So I’m not surprised that the Pew study had that finding, even if it dismays me. I don’t think there’s been a material decline in the quality of news coming from the major news media. But there’s also the matter of what news media were they asking about?
The questions covered the major news networks, Fox, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and CNN….Respondents’ assessments of news outlets’ trustworthiness broke down pretty cleanly on partisan lines….From that same study: “…only about a quarter (26%) now say that news organizations are careful that their reporting is not politically biased, compared with 60% who say news organizations are politically biased. And the percentages saying that news organizations are independent of powerful people and organizations (20%) or are willing to admit their mistakes (21%) now also match all-time lows.” There’s a fairly stark partisan division in the way Americans see news outlets - roughly speaking, Fox News and the WSJ on one side, and the rest of the networks, the NYT, and NPR on the other.
What’s really interesting to me about The Wall Street Journal particularly is, I don’t think there’s been a material decline. I think their stories are getting shorter, but there hasn’t been a material change in the partisanship of their news coverage. But people have an impression of the Journal and trust or mistrust its news because they like or dislike its editorial page — which tells us a lot about how people are coming to their conclusions. Which is to say that the same facts may appear in the Journal and in the Times, but if you’re on the right, you’re going to trust them more in the Journal because you make this association with the editorial page. There’s no justification for that, but we have lined up in partisan camps. Rupert Murdoch did a brilliant thing with Fox - by setting up on the right, that suggests that everything to the left of that is… the left. There is no center. If you start where everything is in the presumed center, and then you create something on the right, then the center becomes the left.
Would you suggest that no news organizations on the left have tried to deliberately position themselves in opposition to -
Well, no. Clearly MSNBC has done so. MSNBC saw a market opportunity. It wasn’t, I don’t think, that the people at MSNBC had this passionate belief that Keith Olbermann was the voice of god. No, they saw the success of the ranting on the right, and decided to try some ranting on the left. Which has been good for CNN - to have somebody positioned to the left of CNN suggests that CNN might be toward the middle — even though Fox has been trying to maintain since they were created that CNN is the left. There are absolutes, and there are relatives, and readers and viewers have come to believe that everything in the news media has become ideologically relative: is it to the right or to the left?
If I remember correctly, CNN had the highest overall favorability rating among respondents. But on the same topic, it’s worrying to me - and I’m wondering if it’s also worrying to you - that we don’t seem to have a media outlet that’s trusted relatively equally across partisan lines.
I think this is a terrible, terrible thing. And I think that those media who are in a position to do so have not responded to this. This is an expression of my own personal issue, with my beloved New York Times. If you have an op-ed page and an editorial page that is so consistently mainstream Democratic left, then that affects the perception of the whole newspaper, just as The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page affects the perception of The Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times newsrooms - really, they’re not that different, but we have these perceptions because of something that is extrinsic to the news reporting, namely the editorial policy. And, in fact, in both places…the editorial pages, and the people who manage them, have nothing to do with the news coverage.
You wrote about that in some of your columns when you were public editor, about how there’s this perception that the editorial board dictates the tone of news coverage.
Right, there’s a real wall. Now it’s true, and some of the critics when I wrote about it pointed out that the same Arthur Sulzberger who runs the newspaper and appoints Andrew Rosenthal to be the editorial page editor also appoints Bill Keller to be in charge of the news operation. So to say that they are from different planets isn’t fair - they have the same genealogy. But, you know, cousins and siblings sometimes don’t think the same way, and there is nothing to suggest that because Andrew Rosenthal and his colleagues at the editorial page think a certain way that Bill Keller and his colleagues think a certain way. Now there is, as I wrote - quite controversially - there is a general worldview that journalists have, and particularly journalists in New York have, and that’s an inescapable reality, very hard to get around. But I think they make an effort, just as the reporters at the Journal make an effort, to do work that has nothing to do with the editorial views of ownership or of the people who edit the editorial page.
I’m not quite sure how to phrase this, but I want to resist what you said just now a little bit. I can imagine that journalists from, say, the far right and from across the country would be more than happy to move to New York to take a job at the Times. In other words, it’s not as if there’s a shortage in -
Oh but there is a shortage of conservatives working in the news media — or, I should say, an imbalance between liberals and conservatives. The last survey I saw was on the ‘04 election - I don’t know what it was in ‘08 - but in ‘04 something like 75 percent of working journalists at daily newspapers voted for the Democrat. I mean, you can’t deny this. It’s a reality.
In recent years, the Times made what I took to be a pretty blatant effort to change the public perception about the paper, and about the editorial board in particular -
How?
By hiring, say, Bill Kristol a couple of years ago.
But Bill Safire had been there for 30 years. And so he leaves, and management thinks we have to hire somebody to replace Bill Safire. Now I’m not equating Safire with Kristol exactly, but in fact there’s long been a conservative spot on that page.
Almost like the Supreme Court.
Yeah, that there’s a view that the columnists can’t all be to the left . There are some who make an arguable case that they’re in the middle, but generally it’s a left-tilting page. There’s always been the presence of at least one, and sometimes two - depending on how Brooks feels that morning - conservatives on that page, as it is now. Kristol’s gone and now it’s Douthat. Now, why they picked Kristol specifically is a different issue altogether, but there was an acknowledgement, just as The Boston Globe chose Jacoby to hold down its right flank, they don’t want to be exclusively left on that page.
Do you think if there were fewer unsigned editorials by the editorial board - basically if the page were just a series of individual columns signed by individual authors - might the page seem more like a general marketplace of ideas rather than a place in which the paper speaks as a monolithic institution?
Well, it depends who the authors are. When I was at the Times - my term there ended four years ago - everybody on the editorial board was a Democrat. I asked Gail Collins, who was then the editorial page editor, “Why don’t you have a greater ideological variety and philosophical variety so you can have richer debate on the page?” And she said, “If I had a couple of conservatives on this page, they’d be unhappy all the time. They’d either have to write something that wasn’t their view, because we decide our view consensually, or they’d never get to write. So, what’s the point?” Now, Gail knows a lot better than I the dynamics of coming to an editorial position, but it would seem to me that, if for no other reason than to challenge the conventional thinking that may - and I stress the may - dominate the conversation on the editorial board, it’d be nice to have somebody else there who might say, “Well, here’s another point of view.” Now if your editorial page was like an op-ed and offered a wide range of opinion, that would be, to me, a much more satisfactory way to go. But it’s ingrained in the American tradition that there is an editorial voice that is the voice of ownership or the owner’s designee, that endorses candidates, that takes positions on legislation, that uses the one word which as a journalist just makes my skin crawl, which is ’should’: Congress should do this, the State Department should do this, Israelis and Palestinians should do this. It sounds like my mother telling me how to behave. I can’t argue that mine is a sensible position, but I’m a believer in facts and reporting and analysis that leads the reader to arrive at his or her own conclusions, rather than having the conclusions presented to them as if tablets from Mount Sinai.
A lot of ’should-ing’ goes on in individual op-eds as well; why is it meaningfully different in the case of a collectively produced, unsigned editorials?
Because if you have a wide variety and the individuals are saying ’should do this,’ ’should do that,’ then you’re going to have - I mean, I’m not crazy about their doing it either - but at least its gets a dialogue going. Editorials are not a conversation; editorials are pronouncements. Maybe that was really important in the era of a less informed public, but I think we’re pretty informed today. This is not to say that a lot of the analysis they do on editorial pages isn’t really fine analysis, but you know, keep it to the analysis, don’t tell me what to think. The one place where I do think the editorial pages of America do perform a function is in endorsements for down-ballot positions. How am I to know whom to vote for for civil court judge in Brooklyn? So, if I’m aware that The New York Times thinks the way I do [and] The New York Post does not, I’ll vote for the guy the Times tells me to vote for.
So back to the question about the fact that we don’t have a news outlet that’s relatively equally trusted across partisan lines. If we can’t agree on what the news is and what the facts are, it’s difficult to have a productive conversation about what to do in response. So what can we do about that problem?
I would turn to the people who run the news organizations of America and ask them to be absolutely assiduous about the way they present the news and avoid giving a logical opening to the inevitable criticism from the other side. If you have an editorial page and an op-ed page that seem to be working in behalf, or against, the Obama Administration, it’s going to color the way people view your news coverage. So I suppose one answer is, get rid of editorial pages, or have much more varied op-ed pages.
It sounds like you’re not committed to preserving op-ed pages at all.
Well, certainly not in the form they are now. If I owned the Times I would really have a balanced range of views in there. I would not have - you know, I listen to people say, “I love the Times, but that guy, that Douthat, he’s a conservative, and David Brooks is a right-winger - well, if you only want to read people who agree with you, read The Nation. If it’s to survive and flourish, the Times has to be an honest broker, and the perception left by that op-ed page and the adjoining editorial page is that it’s not.
But we’re not starting from a blank slate and creating wholly new perceptions. How to contest the fact that there’s already this deep-seated, widespread distrust?
You can only contest it with the work that you do. And so that means maybe changing the lineup of op-ed writers and also being really careful in the news pages….We see what we see because of the way we stand. If we’re facing east in the morning we see the sun rise, and if we’re not facing east the sun isn’t rising. So when you put together a news staff, you have to ask where do your people stand? Are you getting people who are, together, looking in all directions? Are we getting a really representative newsroom? When I was at the paper I criticized it pretty strongly for not having ideological diversity or religious diversity on the staff. The same reason we would want racial diversity , to provide different perspectives on the world, would suggest that we want the same thing religiously and ideologically and philosophically. And I was very roundly criticized by some people on the left about that, people who thought it was an outrage that I was suggesting that the Times hire more conservatives. Why is that an outrage? Why is it an outrage to get a more varied view of the world? We want a varied view if we’re going to be good citizens, if we’re going to have a functioning democracy. We must have a varied view.
Thank you.
Is that persuasive?
I think you and I probably disagree about the extent to which we’re capable of arriving at best answers and then describing them in a public forum. To my mind, at least with regard to some public questions, there are best answers, and in other cases there are best choices among unpalatable choices.
I don’t disagree with that.
Perhaps I misinterpreted, but it did sound a bit like you don’t want newspapers playing that role - of not only providing analysis but also coming to some recommendation about what to do as a result of their analysis.
I think if the analysis is good, then the recommendation is implicit, and you don’t need to come out and say ’should’. I disagree only…from a rhetorical point of view. I think that the language one uses to make one’s recommendation needn’t be prescriptive to make the same point. I think you’re more effective if you’re not prescriptive….Did you read the clean water series they did last week?
No.
Almost nobody did. [T]hat’s one of the problems with these big acts that go on for four pages. But it presented an inarguable description about how awful our water systems are and what needs to be done, but there wasn’t a ’should’ in it. If you just give the facts - obviously we all select our facts, and we can select one set or the other - you’re much more likely to be persuasive with those people who don’t trust you because you disagree with them on other issues. You tell me how you think on same-sex marriage and I’ll tell you how you think on many other issues — unless you’re Theodore Olson. This comes across in the way that people perceive our news media. ‘Well, I know they take this position and therefore, they’re over there and I’m over here. I don’t need to listen to them, I don’t trust them, I don’t trust their facts.’ They [the news media] undermine their own authority by declaring themselves.
I’m wondering whether - with the rise of what you called ‘the ranting right’ and ‘the ranting left’ - whether Americans turn to news organizations as much for facts as they do for opinions.
I worry about that. I think that has been one of the consequences of the fractionalization, and its particularly visible online and at the cable news networks. You know, my friends watch MSNBC to agree with Olbermann and Maddow. That’s not about facts.
It’s much more about partisan solidarity, finding a community of like-minded people.
I suppose here’s an argument you can make that, well, if I’m on the left and I read The Nation, my arguments will get stronger. And people on the right can probably say the same thing about National Review or about The Weekly Standard. But beyond that, it is affirmation and community that people are after when they’re watching cable news.
There’s something troubling and dangerous about the prevalence of media organizations that are now in business basically to make you feel more comfortable with your own opinions.
Yes — it’s terrible! One of the things that most upset me during the presidential campaign was that moment during the primaries when Fox was going to host a debate, and there was an outcry among Democrats, and the debate was cancelled. These Democrats might as well have said, “Let’s not try to persuade the people who disagree with us. Let’s only talk to our own people.” Here they had a chance to be watched by people who don’t vote Democratic - well, don’t you live for that opportunity, if you’re a politician? To change minds?
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5 Responses to “Citizen Conversation With… Dan Okrent”
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Across the normalized mainstream spectrum, there is partisan, bipartisan, nonpartisan, center, centre, independent, and then, though muted, there exists an informed philosophical space above it all:
Which means, having access to too much evidence, too much analyzing capability, too much historical grounding to be able to assertively and dynamically dictate solutions with probability values that allow the reader to trust, or not.
Opinion diversity is best offered by a variety of columnists, not by introducing intellecual chaos to the editorial page.
The two best newspapers in the United States, the NYTimes and the WSJournal, each has a strong, mostly monodic editorial page viewpoint. What’s wrong with that?
Otherwise, if one follows Okrent’s rumination, the editorial page one day would endorse X and the next day anti-x. Rather silly, if you think about it.
Dan
Daniel Okrent says a lot of sensible things. He acknowledges the disconnect in the political demographics of the public at large vs. the population of newsrooms, for instance. The interviewer gives a tiny, but telling example of the mind-set by citing the ‘birthers’ as examples of people who should perhaps be ignored by conscientious journalists. But as has been wearily pointed out, 9/11 ‘truthers’ are even more ubiquitous in the Democratic Party, and have a lot more voice in the culture, from Rosie O’Donnell and other show-biz figures (always a little kooky when they venture into politics, like many people to who fame and riches have come at an early age) to the crazy documentaries given the imprimature of public television. The partisanship and narrowcasting that both Okrent and the interviewer describe is absolutely the creation of a mainstream media that was too urban, too liberal, and too out of touch with the concerns of too many Americans. The technology has assisted this development, but find me a Fox News or Limbaugh fan, and I’ll show you someone who came to believe, as a rational consumer, that the established news organizations were presenting events in a narrative and with a vocabulary that was (perhaps understandably) reflective of an urban middle class view of the world. For all the griping about Fox, it does highlight news that the other news channels ignore as ‘not a story’ - meaning it is embarrassing to liberal groups and individuals. The mind-set of orthodox reporters is reflexive and unthinking - they really don’t think they have a political agenda, most of them.
There is a wonderful and sobering object lesson on trust in the first chapter of that worthy book titled, “The Elements of Journalism – What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect,” by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel.
In the early 1980s, as the Solidarity movement was making an impact in Poland, citizens protested their news environment in many ways. In one village, they put their televisions in their front windows – facing out into the streets – during the traditional evening newscast. An underground press began to grow (alternative media!).
As Kovach and Rosenstiel note, this marked a “new phenomenon …. The rise of Polish public opinion.”
Think about the behavior of the traditional news industry in this country. In a NYT op-ed piece published in April 2003, Eason Jordan (then head of CNN News — with its brand promise as “the most trusted name in news”) admitted that CNN had suppressed the news out of Iraq under Saddam Hussein for 12 years (YEARS). He said he feared for the safety of CNN employees — but for 12 years couldn’t figure out a plan to deal with the situation he said he “felt awful” about.
Contrast that with John Burns, who was the NYT Baghdad Bureau chief then and a two-time pulitzer prize winner for foreign reporting. He reported how Saddam had turned Iraq into a slaughterhouse. Read his scathing assessment of his journalistic colleagues in “The Moral Compass of Iraq,” pp. 155-164, from the book titled, “Embedded — The Media At War in Iraq,” edited by Bill Katovsky and Timothy Carlson.
Among other comments, Burns said: “There is corruption in our business. We need to get back to basics.”
How did the rest of the news industry watchdogs respond to Eason Jordan’s staggering admission about the supression of news? It passed into the ether with barely a notice. Shortly after, Brian Williams spoke at a luncheon and took questions. I asked him his opinion of Jordan’s admission. With one hand on his chin, he studied the ceiling, then the floor, then shook his head and announced, “I don’t know why Eason wrote that. He must have been feeling very introspective.”
Is that all there is to watchdog journalism?
We have Newsweek Editor Evan Thomas under the previous administration saying, in effect, that it is the job of the press to bash the president (at that time, Bush). Under the current administration, however, the standard appears to have changed. Now Thomas asserts that Obama is “sort of God,” a “great teacher,” who “stands above everybody.”
Just when we thought we were past the religious right, we end up in the arms of the religious left. Theology comes in many forms, including journalism. As NYT Bureau Chief John Burns reminded us, power corrupts — always has and always will.
Here is your final test. Public trust in the press has been falling through the basement floor for more than 20 years, as reported by Pew. Many journalists get this, but most do not.
Now what is the industry’s response to its own dismal poll results? Stop reporting on it.
This behavior comes at at time when surveys on everyone else are treated as hard news. When I ask broadcast and print media colleagues about this response, they study their shoes and sadly acknowledge that they are not practicing what they preach about transparency and accountability.
This happens when an industry substitutes platitudes for what were once its principles. There is much more to this than “partisanship.” It is a broken brand promise. That’s why citizens are leaving the Church of Journalism.
What happened to the principles of “Speak truth to Power” and “Comfort the Afflicted and Afflict the Comfortable.”
Daniel,
I read with great interest your story “Notown” in TIME October 5, issue. I agree with almost everything in the article except the point about the white flight from the City. I lived and worked there all my life! Some white flight did occur after the 67 riots however, the main flight took place after the 72 election of Coleman A Young. The whites in Detroit who voted him in saw what he was really about, then the flood gate opened. I saw and lived this first hand. Great article!
Thanks,
Alan F. Kment