They reflect our taste, values, prejudices, opinions and conveniences. Then what are your prejudices, tastes, opinions, conveniences …? I have certain prejudices, obviously. They interest me more than stuffed shirts. I like the Washington Redskins. I love the outdoors. Well, in some ways. Any editor knows how accidental and arbitrary some of the small decisions are. At the Post, Howard Simons is our managing editor. And since many of the day-to-day decisions of how the newspaper plays a story are his, it seems to me that stories about the ozone layer and the latest discovery of Dr.
Leakey get played more prominently than if I were doing it. But he knows more about that than I do. I love stories about low doings in high places. I always have. I love trial stories. You have no ideological interest in politics? When President Nixon was elected and came to Washington, people said that the Washington Post would go crazy, we would all go crazy.
It would be boring. I mean, the only discouragement I have about Watergate, really, is that Nixon was a Republican and not a Democrat. Never mind Wayne Hays and never mind Wilbur Mills and a few other people like that. That brings up a related subject. What should the relationship be between the person running the news department and the person running the editorial page? In our paper it is as separate as church and state.
And I believe in that strongly. And editorial writers have never been to a meeting of the news department. Well then, what about when they write editorials about the news side? The Post eventually apologized, and then it editorialized about the incident. It makes for kind of a family scrap. I think a newspaper should be a vibrant, not totally structured, enterprise.
Well, this is a terribly important thing about our business. The first difficult circumstance is time. Including those people who think they are telling you the truth. One of the really glorious aspects of modern history, for me, is to read the versions of participants in major events and to see how they differ. Obviously you try to screen out the deceptions.
I think if Washington has changed in any way in the last twenty years, it is in the increased deception by the government.
Under the veil of national security the government tries to slip past the people an awful lot that has nothing to do with national security. The truth should emerge from a newspaper.
It may not be all there in one day, but it comes out. Walter Lippmann said that truth emerges day after day, and if you have a situation like the Falkland Islands or a situation like Nicaragua or El Salvador, you do the best you can today and you go back at it tomorrow and learn different facts that change it slightly.
And the readers have got to trust you, got to go with you on that. And I think editors over the years have been reluctant to admit that newspapers at their best are incomplete, and at their worst they are wrong. I think the best ones do, and by the time a reporter in this town has been hitting the best pitching, he understands it. Do you think your reporters make that assumption?
But I think that the public should take some time to understand. Life is terribly complicated now. I hate to have as important a question as that absolutely closed to me. Does the public believe what it reads in the paper? Not your paper or my paper but any paper. The overwhelming majority of the information in the newspapers is not susceptible to any kind of misunderstanding. Baseball scores, weather, crossword puzzles, comics, Buchwald, you know. The issue is not even joined over more than a small percentage of the paper.
Goddamn it. Let me try to fix a parking ticket the way you do. The power of the Washington Post lies mostly in its ability to focus national attention on certain subjects. Our readers are not typical.
They have better resumes than most newspaper readers. The assignment editors of the network news operations read us and respond. So do the bureau chiefs of other newspapers and of the newsmagazines. I mean, I once ran a newsmagazine bureau in this town, and I know damn well how important the Washington Post is. Do you think about that when you launch something? No, not a damn bit. Not for five seconds. We just kept everybody at it. Most of you editors from out in the boondocks thought we were out of our goddamn mind.
But who sets the agenda for the nation? The Washington Post and who else? Her old man elected her. And who elected him? He bought the paper at an auction on the steps of a building two blocks from the White House. Also, I was in the foreign service for a couple of years. I know something about serving my country, and I care a helluva lot about it. Well, I think it has to do with our role as the messenger bearing bad news. One misses, and we are there by the scores.
We did a survey of our paper once. We got three stamps printed. One with the corners of the mouth upturned for good news. One straight for not good or bad, and one mouth downturned for bad news. And the paper was overwhelmingly filled with good news. And the bad news was restricted to almost a few pages—the obit page, for instance. Why do people trust television news more than they trust newspaper news?
Because it comes coated and in very small doses and it disappears. The time people spend worrying about whether Dan Rather should wear a sweater or not bothers me because a vastly more important thing is the network decision not to go to an hour of news. What about celebrity journalism—the newsman as a star? No, no, no. People are a little more interested in answering the phone, I think, than if I were some faceless mole.
I mean, I live by that—somebody answering the phone. But that kind of notoriety is fascinating because it seems to be concentrated on the Post. I admit that could be my paranoia, but that kind of attention is not concentrated on CBS. It is not concentrated on the New York Times. The world fed for days on our Janet Cooke story, and every single bit of information about that story was put out first by the Post. There was no coverup.
Another newspaper, sometime later, gets in exactly the same trouble—a story which was very prominently featured, totally made up, and nobody is investigating it. The Times Magazine piece? But you broke the story with a certain amount of glee. Brash, charming editor who can speak fluent French or gutter English? Abe Rosenthal [executive editor of the New York Times] is a famous person.
Explain this to me. And they should stay away from the editorial page. The Atlantic, for example, has published several stories that put the latest coronavirus-related events into a larger context and explain how the facts work together to form the best understanding of the truth that is available at a given time.
News organizations, of course, have developed systems for correcting themselves when they are provably wrong about something they have published. As my own research has shown, these systems, however, are something that newsrooms have historically entered into reluctantly.
The New York Times required significant prodding before it began, in , publishing a regular corrections section. Former presidential adviser and future U. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan first floated the suggestion in an essay in Commentary magazine.
Still, most of the corrections The New York Times publishes are in the nature of a misspelled name rather than about putting facts in the wrong context or explaining how the common understanding of a situation has changed in subtle but important ways.
More recent studies have shown that this focus on correcting fact at the most basic level is true of news organizations in general. My research into how that process worked in relation to a controversial profile of a white nationalist that The New York Times published, showed that the results of the effort were, at best, spotty. I conducted that research guided by the work of a scholar named James Carey.
Writing in the s, Carey believed that conversation was the best metaphor for the way that news should work. By announcing that its story was immediately subject to revision by new facts, the Los Angeles Times took a major step in that direction and set an example of how to handle such uncertainty. I just think that journalism, like all fields, should be careful with what they promise, and give credit to what made their jobs possible.
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