The Real New Journalism

...He found that the office that distributes workmen’s Compensation is generally regarded by people who write their congressmen as the worst in the government...

...Almost all of the intense reporting was devoted to the search for a smoking gun, so that when the Comptroller’s first report showed many dubious practices but nothing illegal, Carter could blithely declare the case closed...

...The Man-Bites-Dog Days To understand what a change this represents, it’s worth taking a brief look at what newspapers were like back in the old man-bites-dog days of 20 years ago, when tradition reigned unchallenged...

...The Washington Post has lately become one of the foremost practitioners of this new kind of journalism...

...On the other hand, the townspeople of Calhoun could have made Lance’s apparent transgressions understandable in human terms by making clear that an overdraft policy can work in a small town where the banker knows everyone although it would be impossible in larger cities, by explaining that the overdrafts were not just available to the Lance family but to reliable members of the community generally and that the policj had actually aided the bank’s growth...

...Although New Journalism has mostly been the province of magazine and book writers, it too can be a way for daily reporters to get away from the stranglehold of immediate events-but like investigative reporting, it too is resolutely nonevaluative...

...All that interviewing would have produced a full-scale portrait of the man, but that portrait didn’t emerge until mid-September...

...And as recently as two years ago, The Washington Monthly ran an article by James Fallows complaining that the Post was overly wedded to the breaking story...

...The traditional method of finding out about the workmen’s compensation programinterviewing its director when he had something to announce-would surely not have produced this information...

...The second much discussed trend is the “New Journalism,” which involves using the techniques of realistic fi c tion-dialogue, telling detail-in writing non-fiction...

...A reader of the newspapers would until recently have had powerful reason to believe that these movies were a case of art imitating life...

...There’s no case that makes the ongoing failure of the press to evaluate and to seek out information in lessthanobvious places more plain...

...A zealous assistant in the U.S...

...In 1970, when three British journalists came out with a book on the space program, it was a near-complete surprise to American readers to learn how the pressures of NASA and aerospace industrialists and the desire of John Kennedy to rebuild his dynamic political image in the wake of the Bay of Pigs had overridden scientific objections and made going to the moon a top priority...

...The great focus of investigative journalism is on finding smoking guns, evidence of illegality-in other words, maneuvering the subject so that the criminal code’s evaluations can take the place of the writer’s...

...Even when Lance got into trouble, it was only because he had made extraordinary financial divestiture pledges that he later had to renege on, not because of the initiative of reporters...

...Middle-level employees of the office of the Comptroller of the Currency, like those in the U.S...

...Anything that smacked of a reporter saying, “I’m independently making a qualitative judgment” or “I’m writing about this because I deem it newsworthy” just never appeared...

...So what we need is a wholesale step beyond, a kind of daily journalism that would include not only enterprising and assiduous fact-finding, not only vivid writing, but also a willingness by reporters to make their own informed evaluations of people and institutions...

...and “House investigators reported yesterday...

...As time went on, change came only very slowly...

...We need a combination of initiative, factgathering, and evaluation that will tell us what the people and institutions that run our society have done-and what they are doing...

...Even the wire services are getting away from being wedded to events...

...Janet Hook was a summer intern at The Washington Monthly, and is doing graduate work at the London School of Economics...

...In the last few years, however, that state of affairs has begun to change...

...Every day the Star prints a feature on its front page called “In Focus ” which gives “complete background...

...We need reporters who would have told us last January, for instance, what was good and what was bad about the record of a new man in the government named Thomas Bertram Lance...

...Attorney’s office in Atlanta, knew enough to question Lance’s qualifications...

...The Times, while inferior to the Post in its coverage of the federal government, is fairly vigrlant in most other areas...

...The daily press no longer feels bound to wait until a tanker explodes before it will report on the dangers of ships carrying liquefied gas...

...Attorney’s office in Atlanta had wanted to prosecute Lance...

...At a time when the New and Fair Deal bureaucracies that President Eisenhower had promised to reduce were larger than ever, nobody noticed...

...Laudable But Limited It’s necessary, in heralding this new kind of daily journalism (to magazines, it’s not entirely new), to separate it clearly from two other trends, both laudable but limited, that have gotten much more attention...

...Similarly, the smoking-gun mentality prevented a cumulative picture of Lance that was truly accurate and full form emerging...

...Classic examples are Gay Talese’s book on The New York Times and Aaron Latham’s New York magazine story on the Saturday Night Massacre...

...the Reid series revealed the complex pressures and procedures that are usually more important components of a piece of legislation than its intrinsic merit...

...And reporters’ terrible fear of expertise in financial matters-the fear that they didn’t know enough to pass judgment-was another factor in the failure to present the case against Ldnce as well as the case for him...

...Being up-to-date on the breaking news of the day-reported accurately and fairly, of course-was virtually all that mattered to journalists of the fifties, and, editors presumed, all the public wanted from newspapers...

...This approach naturally skewed the news toward what officials wanted it to be, since it was only what officials said or did that got reported...

...Both these strictures grew out of honest assumptions about what people wanted from newspapers, but they meant that trends absolutely could not be pointed out and statements absolutely could not be evaluated (except, perhaps, by columnists, who didn’t anchor their opinions in factual reporting...

...One of the biggest stories of the sixties, and one of the richest in terms of political and cultural meaning-the manned space program that culminated with the 1969 moon shot-was reported either completely deadpan or with gushing enthusiasm...

...Rival bankers in Georgia have always spoken quite frankly about Lance...

...Thus two gaping holes were left in frontpage coverage, especially of government...

...As a result, the stories on the front page of the Post in August 1957 often seem, on rereading today, to raise more questions than they answer...

...Maybe the Lance case has taught the press that Cabinet nominees need closer scrutiny than they’re accustomed to getting...

...We certainly can’t make that complaint today...

...Stories on contemporary issues and non-breaking news...

...What should have been the most persuasive anti-Lance materialevidence of his inattention to his duties as budget director-appeared nowhere at all, save brief mentions in this magazine and a scattered few other places...

...To cite two especially noteworthy examples : Where was a series of articles this summer by T. R. Reid that detailed “the progress of a typical bill through Congress...

...But when Eisenhower nominated Neil McElroy, president of Proctor and Gamble, to replace Charles Wilson as Secretary of Defense, nobody official raised any questions about his qualifications-so neither did the Post...

...Maybe the press has also learned that the banks bear looking into...

...The only time there was a hint of stepping back and looking things over was when somebody who reporters could quote did it...

...Reporters are more likely now than a decade ago to inquire into the effectiveness of a government agency before a blatant foul-up makes its ineptness newsworthy in the traditional sense...

...Overly Wedded A look at the Post of August 1967 still shows a preponderance of “yesterday” leads and Defense Department stories that cry out for elaboration...

...In a broader sense, it shows that any key public official, not just a Cabinet officer, and any important institution, the schools and insurance companies and foundations and government agencies as much as the banks, bears looking into...

...Because all these people have turned out to be willing and valuable sources, it’s now painfully obvious that somebody should have interviewed them early on...

...but there are also cases where the investigative reporter needs to apply his independence and zeal to a situation where there’s no smoking gun, and he doesn’t...

...Valuable Sources We now know who could have provided the details of Lance’s operations to any reporter back in January...

...While investigative reporters have admirably crossed the hurdle of being tied to yesterday’s events and will look into things on their own initiative, they are still often prisoners of the fear of evaluation...

...To cite two noteworthy examples, The Washington Star and The New York Times regularly run in-depth front-page stories that have no immediate newspeg...

...When Maxwell Gluck, the Ohio chain-store owner who was Eisenhower’s nominee as ambassador to Ceylon, made a fool of himself in confirmation hearings, the Post reported that he couldn’t answer the simplest questions about his new post...

...Instead, Lance got the same kind of coverage any Cabinet official gets when he’s appointed-a straight and respectful recounting of his resume and of the nice things his friend Jimmy Carter said about him...

...Reporters resolutely refused to write about anything that wasn’t just breaking, and to express anything that might conceivably seem to be their own opinion...

...Because of the nature of news and a general lack of imagination, reporters never bothered to talk for publication to the middlelevel, on-line personnel who have proven such a boon to investigative reporters in ensuing years...

...Newspaper readers are used to finding out about legislation only when it’s passed, and even then they hear only about the final vote...

...In cases of illegality, that’s fine...

...The first is the kind of investigative reporting that aims to find officials breaking laws, whose praises have been sung at great length and in a great many places...

...For a variety of reasons (not least of which is the increased self-respect its Watergate victories brought on) the press in general and the Post particularly are unafraid to initiate their own stories that illuminate the workings of government in a way that event-oriented reporting does not...

...The stories are all on the order of “A top Administration official said flatly yesterday...

...But those two perceptions shouldn’t be the only ones spawned by the affair...

...but nobody did...

...David S. Broder read about a White House effort to find out which government programs were working and which weren’t and went to the trouble of finding out what kind of information the Carter people were getting...

...Adlai Stevenson charged today that...

...In a year when the Cold War was raging, it was never questioned...

...The Post is far from alone in the trend...

...Hence stories about what was really going on inside an agency-as opposed to what its director said was going on-were never written...

...The front page was a very reliable guide to what happened yesterday which wasout of the ordinary, but that was about all, If in the course of dogs biting men-that is, in America's ongoing operations-there were interesting lessons to be learned, the newspapers did not .Provide them...

...The papers are a world populated by harddriving reporters and tough editors whose news judgment can be summed up in a single ironclad, oft-repeated creed: if a dog bites a man it's not news, but if a man bites a dog-that's news...

...Thus when congressional subcommittees, reputable journals, scholars, or budget offices issudd reports that made value judgments, those judgments were soberly reported...

...When the House Appropriations Committee said the military was financing overly luxuiious construction, the Post’s readers knew about it...

...To handle Lance as it should have, the press needed not only initiative, but also some reporting techniques that it still doesn’t usually use...

...But the Pentagon’s own statements about its budget were reported with an equally straight face...

...Even when Lance’s financial maneuverings began to surface and the press scrambled into hot pursuit, there were telling flaws in the coverage...

...Reporters should have gotten the news about Lance not just from high officials and their press secretaries, but also from more knowledgeable and more obscure .people in the lower reaches of government, in business, and in the towns where Lance worked...

...As a result, the emphasis was far more on the promulgation of policy and the enactment of legislation than on their implementation...

...Newspapers are devoting increasing space to stories whose interest and relevance do not depend on events that happened the day before...

...During two weeks in early August of this year, nine Post front pages carried one or more articles that were unrelated to particular events of the day, on subjects from cars to schools to the military...