Journalistic Arrogance
Rhetorica calls attention to a feature story by a journalist about his three years as a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and especially to this paragraph:
Andrew Cline of Rhetorica comments, "This paragraph is about so much that is wrong with American newspapers and journalism. And I can simplify it with one word: arrogance."
Yes, that's the word. I never worked in a big city newsroom, but I spent the back half of the 1980s working for a suburban daily in Chester County, Pennsylvania. The place was within the coverage zone -- barely -- of the Philadelphia Inquirer. And it was on the crest of the tsunami wave of suburban sprawl from the big city. Townships that had had the same population of 1,000 or so, give or take 70 or 80 people, since the 1810 census ballooned to 25,000 in eight years.
Meanwhile, the big city was shrinking -- bleeding off residents into the safe, clean, new suburbs. The solons at the Inky, capable of reading a demographics chart, tried to follow their readers out to the suburbs, and before long we were competing with them in coverage. At first, they intimidated us because they had resources and they had the confidence air of professionals much higher up the journalism food chain than we were. Their bosses might send them on assignment to Caracas on a day's notice. Ours might send us to Coatesville. Most of us, this was our first daily newspaper job; their stringers had more years in newspapers than our editors did. Our stringers were housewives and college kids.
But then we read their coverage. And every single article about Chester County contained, usually in the lede, a gratuitous reference to cornfields, cows, or both. No matter the topic: if they had discovered something sophisticated going on among our citizens, it would be, "Here in a place where cows graze peacefully by the side of the road, you wouldn't expect to find ...." If it was a local issue of long-standing, it would be "Joe Schmoe has run the gas station at the corner of X and Y since 1950, watching the corn grow ...."
These reporters were sent out to cover the county for the people who lived in it. But they couldn't stop writing it for the ears of the sophisticates in the big city. It was beyond arrogance. Not only did they not have the local connections that would really bring them the meat of a story, they didn't care to cultivate them. They'd wave the big city newspaper business card -- which did open a certain number of doors for them. Then they couldn't wait to get back downtown, and it was clear they felt demeaned by being sent out to this pathetic burg.
Yet, as the demographics reveal, land development and suburban sprawl were the stories in that time and place. The cows and cornfields were signifigant exactly because they were disappearing, not because they were ubiquitous. And they were part of the larger Philadelphia story that the Inquirer was supposed to be telling. It was the other side of the see-saw to "the decline of the urban center."
That big story was damned difficult to pin down. It didn't break; it oozed all over the place. A zoning board hearing here, a school district realignment there. Development plans that took two or three years to come to fruition. It was hard enough for us who lived inside it to keep track of the big story -- and mostly we didn't bother. The people in one neighborhood wanted to know about the townhouse development going in up the street from them more than they cared about the one three townships away.
So day by day we presented all the chips, but rarely assembled them into the mosaic. The Inquirer had the chance, and the resources, to do that, but they mostly failed through the arrogance of their staff. Journalism was less than a first draft of history, in this case. The future historians of Chester County will look back on the 1980s as the decade when an old rural culture rooted in William Penn's vision died and was plowed under for the sake of bedroom community tract housing and strip malls. The facts will be there, in our old clips, but future readers will have no idea we understood what was happening.
The yes-no, push-pull environment of the newsroom confused and embittered some reporters and took its toll on morale. It was often easier to produce less, to simply do the stories editors suggested. Yet if your stories got too safe, you could get marginalized and stuck with a low-priority beat like suburban government.
Andrew Cline of Rhetorica comments, "This paragraph is about so much that is wrong with American newspapers and journalism. And I can simplify it with one word: arrogance."
Yes, that's the word. I never worked in a big city newsroom, but I spent the back half of the 1980s working for a suburban daily in Chester County, Pennsylvania. The place was within the coverage zone -- barely -- of the Philadelphia Inquirer. And it was on the crest of the tsunami wave of suburban sprawl from the big city. Townships that had had the same population of 1,000 or so, give or take 70 or 80 people, since the 1810 census ballooned to 25,000 in eight years.
Meanwhile, the big city was shrinking -- bleeding off residents into the safe, clean, new suburbs. The solons at the Inky, capable of reading a demographics chart, tried to follow their readers out to the suburbs, and before long we were competing with them in coverage. At first, they intimidated us because they had resources and they had the confidence air of professionals much higher up the journalism food chain than we were. Their bosses might send them on assignment to Caracas on a day's notice. Ours might send us to Coatesville. Most of us, this was our first daily newspaper job; their stringers had more years in newspapers than our editors did. Our stringers were housewives and college kids.
But then we read their coverage. And every single article about Chester County contained, usually in the lede, a gratuitous reference to cornfields, cows, or both. No matter the topic: if they had discovered something sophisticated going on among our citizens, it would be, "Here in a place where cows graze peacefully by the side of the road, you wouldn't expect to find ...." If it was a local issue of long-standing, it would be "Joe Schmoe has run the gas station at the corner of X and Y since 1950, watching the corn grow ...."
These reporters were sent out to cover the county for the people who lived in it. But they couldn't stop writing it for the ears of the sophisticates in the big city. It was beyond arrogance. Not only did they not have the local connections that would really bring them the meat of a story, they didn't care to cultivate them. They'd wave the big city newspaper business card -- which did open a certain number of doors for them. Then they couldn't wait to get back downtown, and it was clear they felt demeaned by being sent out to this pathetic burg.
Yet, as the demographics reveal, land development and suburban sprawl were the stories in that time and place. The cows and cornfields were signifigant exactly because they were disappearing, not because they were ubiquitous. And they were part of the larger Philadelphia story that the Inquirer was supposed to be telling. It was the other side of the see-saw to "the decline of the urban center."
That big story was damned difficult to pin down. It didn't break; it oozed all over the place. A zoning board hearing here, a school district realignment there. Development plans that took two or three years to come to fruition. It was hard enough for us who lived inside it to keep track of the big story -- and mostly we didn't bother. The people in one neighborhood wanted to know about the townhouse development going in up the street from them more than they cared about the one three townships away.
So day by day we presented all the chips, but rarely assembled them into the mosaic. The Inquirer had the chance, and the resources, to do that, but they mostly failed through the arrogance of their staff. Journalism was less than a first draft of history, in this case. The future historians of Chester County will look back on the 1980s as the decade when an old rural culture rooted in William Penn's vision died and was plowed under for the sake of bedroom community tract housing and strip malls. The facts will be there, in our old clips, but future readers will have no idea we understood what was happening.
Labels: journalism
