Similar clashes in this period took place at other publications. They revolved around civil rights, gender equality and diversity in the newsroom. All generally pitted older, stodgy traditionalists (mostly white and male) against more diverse younger journalists seeking to test the boundaries of how much viewpoint and even activism they could get into print.
In our dismal times, it may be encouraging to note that a détente, of sorts, was reached—suggesting there may be a satisfactory way forward as newspapers face a similar crisis today.
One reason quality journalism survived after the 1960s is that institutions like the New York Times bent so as not to break. Under pressure to make room for more subjectivity and analysis, they innovated, permitting in their publications a greater range of topics and writers, more personal voice, more political opinion and more in-depth exposés—but each in its proper place. These developments allowed journalism to become more interesting, useful and appealing to audiences without sacrificing its bedrock principles.
The sheer number of experiments in news-writing that emerged in the late ’60s and early ’70s would surprise anyone who thinks of our internet age as unprecedentedly revolutionary. There were the virtuosic riffs of the “New Journalism,” which tossed out the reporter’s well-thumbed rulebook in favor of brash subjectivity and chatty or stylized language. A new vogue appeared for investigative journalism, as newspapers like Newsday and the Washington Post built special teams to probe stories that required multiple reporters and months of work. (CBS’s “60 Minutes” debuted in 1968.) And while mainstream newspapers mostly shied away from what was called “advocacy journalism”—journalism openly championing a cause—they were challenged by publications that felt freer to brandish a political viewpoint, like the New Left magazine Ramparts, which reported on the CIA’s funding of a national student organization, or the New York Review of Books, which ran Seymour Hersh’s account of the My Lai massacre.
The era also witnessed an explosion of press criticism and in-house ombudsmen, as editors realized that walking readers through journalists’ professional and ethical dilemmas made more sense than pretending those dilemmas didn’t exist. One of the period’s most influential new magazines was the journalism review (MORE), which, as Kevin M. Lerner recounts in his recent history Provoking the Press, grew out of the conviction of Times reporter J. Anthony Lukas and a self-styled “cabal” at the paper that its “emphasis on objectivity kept it from accurately reflecting the state of the world”—including with respect to groups like the Black Panthers.
Some of the efforts to bend without breaking produced lasting contributions. One brainchild of these years was the Washington Post’s Style Section. Ben Bradlee, one of the greats in journalism history, took the paper’s old “women’s section”—that’s what they were called—devoted to shopping, homemaking and the social scene, and reinvented it. He found young writers who wrote with flair, edge and humor, like those who were pioneering the New Journalism in Esquire and New York magazine. A half century later, the Style section has perhaps lost some of its verve and originality, but is still remembered as a smashing success.
The Times made changes too. It introduced more “news analysis” pieces to allow reporters to interpret events instead of just dryly describing them—a label it debuted in the late 1950s but began to dole out more generously. (Then, as now, “analysis” was meant to help readers understand the issues, not to plump for personal or political preferences, which fell under “opinion.”) As important, in 1970 the paper rolled out its Op-Ed page. Though other newspapers had previously included—facing their editorial pages—forums for outside contributors, the Times’ choice to do so marked a grand step in opening up the hoary institution. The idea was to air a broad diversity of voices—feminists, leftists, conservatives, humorists, novelists, artists. Even back then, the idea of including a Tom Cotton-like figure for his views on military force wasn’t considered beyond the pale. As journalism historian Michael Socolow has recounted, the page’s editor Herbert Mitgang early on solicited a piece from Curtis LeMay, the right-wing Air Force general (and Buck Turgidson inspiration) who was notorious for having talked loosely of bombing North Vietnam “back to the Stone Age.” Mitgang wanted LeMay “to comment on the role of the Air Force in Vietnam and whether it should be doing more, less, or something different to expedite the war,” though no contribution from LeMay ever appears to have run. It short order, Op-Ed became an indispensable part of readers’ daily diets and a reliable generator of buzz.
Most of the editors who led the Times in these and succeeding decades believed, like their colleague Sydney Gruson, in keeping the news columns free from reporters’ personal politics. “Take out the goddamn editorializing,” A.M. Rosenthal would bellow. And while the strait-laced tone of the news pages in time loosened up as well, allowing for more a bit more personal voice, individual style and even evaluative language, the Op-Ed page and other new features provided not just a symposium to chew over policy ideas but also a safety valve for social tension—satisfying readers’ and writers’ hunger for more viewpoint-based commentary.
The new regime wasn’t wholly satisfactory. Female and minority journalists continued to face slights and discrimination at many news institutions, sometimes resulting in lawsuits. As Matthew Pressman notes in On Press, his study of how mainstream journalism changed between 1960 and 1980, Grace Lichtenstein of the New York Times, a feminist who strove to reconcile her political views with the rules of objective reporting, struggled against editors like Rosenthal, who thought advocacy crept into her writing. Her bosses forbade her from covering the historic 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston on the grounds she’d be biased—a situation echoed recently when Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editors kept two black staffers, Alexis Johnson and Michael Santiago, from covering the George Floyd protests. Still, over time, newsrooms have—slowly—diversified.
Many people also continued to question the basic rules of journalistic engagement. With the rise of the internet, early 21st-century bloggers revived the old but sometimes-valid critique that editors confused objectivity with neutrality or, worse, “balance”—pointing out the absurdity of giving equal weight (in the most common example) to scientists inveighing against global warming and business-friendly politicians dismissing its threat. Still, even as news professionals and their audiences renegotiated their understandings of the journalist’s role, journalists weren’t regularly losing their jobs over politically charged editorial decisions. (If anything, Pressman notes, those most likely to suffer then were those like the Los Angeles Times’ Ed Guthman, who was deemed too “aggressive and assertive” in rewriting the journalistic rules.) Thus, in the past 50 years, while questions of objectivity and the proper boundaries of debate have clearly persisted, hashing them out has tended to resemble, most of the time, a university seminar more than a barroom brawl.
Now brawls are breaking out again. But if 2020 thus resembles 1970 in the challenges that media outlets face—dealing with younger employees’ activist bent and their suspicion of time-honored journalistic values—it also differs in a key respect. The advent of investigative journalism and New Journalism, the creation of the Post’s Style section and the debut of the Times’ Op-Ed page, all sought to open up mainstream journalism to new and different voices. Today, in contrast, even as we retreat into bubbles of the like-minded, and even as many complaints center on insufficient diversity in our journalism institutions, the response to controversy is often to constrict the range of permissible opinion including by punishing those who transgress ever-stricter political orthodoxies. Replacing editors for a bad editorial call, even if there were earlier points of controversy in their tenures, will diminish the likelihood that leaders will take the editorial risks of the sort that allowed American journalism, in the crucible of the late 1960s and early ’70s, to stay vital and relevant.
That doesn’t mean that journalism must stand pat with the innovations of the 1970s. The effort to bring more racial and gender equality to news outlets clearly needs a new push and more aggressive measures. If reporters are itching to express their opinions, moreover, newspapers and magazines might now consider hiring a few well-chosen journalists who are granted the freedom to mix it up in their own voice on Twitter, much as those institutions survived the advent a decade ago of blogging and data-crunching by hiring and acclimating bloggers and quants into the mainstream-media ethos. Doing so would also make it easier for papers concerned about their imperiled reputation for non-partisanship to ensure that straight-news reporters never send out a sentence on social media that wouldn’t fit comfortably and unnoticeably into a just-the-facts print-edition news story.
The reality is that advocacy and objectivity, which have both animated American journalism for ages, will always be in some tension. Men and women in every era have gone into journalism to make a difference in the world—to expose corruption, hold power to account, tell the stories of the ignored or oppressed, shock the public into reforming business or government, or use the power of the press to right wrongs. But American newspapers and news networks have also since the early 20th century consistently prided themselves on truth and accuracy—striving as much as possible to prevent individual biases and prejudices from slanting the news coverage. Like poets who fashion beauty and meaning within the confines of a strict meter and rhyme scheme, the best journalists find a way to call attention to urgent social or political causes even as they preserve a reputation for fairness and open-mindedness.
Source: politico.com
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