Jack Lessenberry on Issues in Journalism

The media shield bill, which once looked like a sure thing, now is comatose. Even the Democratic-controlled Congress failed to pass it and now, with Republican ascendancy in the new one, the bill doesn't even have a sponsor. What caused the turnaround, and how do you feel about it?

JL: There's always a lot of pressure not to have a shield bill and presidents, like President Obama, come in with the best of intentions, then various lobbyists get to work and now the thing is stymied. I'm afraid, given the composition of Congress and the likely composition of Congress after 2012, it's unlikely to happen under President Obama.

We have a situation, of course, where 49 of the 50 states have shield laws, but once again, we're being stymied in a quest for a federal shield law. Often, presidential candidates think this is a great idea until they actually become president and can envision a situation where they might not want journalists to have that protection.

Now that the Huffington Post is becoming part of the AOL empire, is it still justified in refusing to pay its many contributors of content?

JL: No, it's not justified. Arianna Huffington has made a lot of money, and has now made more selling to AOL. Young journalists are advised to go ahead and do some of this primitive accumulation in Marxist economics, to get some clips that they can show people, but this is not leading to jobs. To some extent, I think it might be the fault of some of these journalists who stay there forever without getting paid. They need a kind of union. If you are not getting paid for work after proving yourself, you shouldn't do it. To some extent, you can say, blame them. As long as Arianna Huffington was getting the milk for free, she felt no need to pay the cow.

"What I have learned in 11 years in the sports business is that the dumbest guys in the room are always the media guys,'' Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban wrote on his blog recently. Cuban probably would be considered a smart guy, as he is a multimillionaire after starting two technology companies. What do you think of what he said?

JL: I think that sometimes media people are very smart about what they are covering, and not very smart about their personal lives and their own personal economic situations. Very few of us are economics majors. If we were, we'd get jobs that paid well. I don't think media people are the dumbest guys in the room. Every journalist has had it happen where they get thrown into unexpectedly covering a story that they don't know a whole lot about. Generalizing, media people tend to be extremely smart, often smarter and more informed than the people they cover. I think they're not always very wise about their own economic situation.

A hot topic in the journalism world these days is whether reporters should be allowed to call someone a liar in a news story if they wish. This sprung from CNN's Anderson Cooper calling former Egyptian president Mubarak a liar for contending that the massive protests against him were foreign influenced. Should reporters get to do name calling or should they just stick to the facts and let the readers make up their own minds?

JL: In general, on reporters calling people names, I think you can disagree without being disagreeable. On the other hand, if it's demonstrably clear that somebody was not telling the truth, it ought to be pointed out whether you call them a "liar" or you use some other formulation. Anderson Cooper is someone who has morphed from being a journalist into being a personality more than anything else. That doesn't mean he doesn't do some good work, but he is now sort of a personality, which is a problem with many broadcast journalists where they become the story, just as it was impossible to imagine Sam Donaldson in an earlier era, going undercover, when Anderson Cooper is somewhere, people flock around him to meet him and get his autograph because he's Anderson Cooper.

Prominent media blogger Alan Mutter recently declared that the "threadbare notion" of objectivity is dead and that in its place, reporters should "forthrightly declare their personal predilections, financial entanglements and political allegiances so the public can evaluate the quality of the information it is getting." Your thoughts? Would this lead to the press being more trusted or less?

JL: My thoughts are that there never was any such thing as objectivity. In a perfectly objective universe, you would write a story saying, "The child was brutally raped, but the rapist had a good time." Or you would write a story that says, "The president was assassinated today, but my goldfish ate his breakfast just fine." What you try to do is be fair, rather than objective. William Safire always said that what he did was opinionated reporting. He came at things from what we might call a "right wing" perspective but he was a reporter. If he came across something about someone from his "own side," that they were a crook or was lying, he would report that.

So I think in some cases there's a case to be made that if a reporter has a strong point of view, it might be more honest if he or she declares that and tries to be fair. Generally the management conventions of American newsrooms won't let you do that, but I think in a lot of cases reporters don't have an opinion. Being an opinionated reporter myself, I do some commentary. I do daily commentary for NPR affiliates in Michigan. I have a television show in Toledo. I write several series of columns myself. And there are things I have opinions on but I also try to keep an open mind.

Currently the state of Michigan, this is March 2011, is struggling with an immense budget deficit. The governor has proposed a budget that does some radical things. I'm interested to see if these things are going to work, but I don't have a strong opinion whether or not this is the right approach and I try just to report everything I can find out about those. I think in general, it does sometimes seem hypocritical if we pretend that we don't have opinions, but then again, if you're a straight news reporter and you're reporting on a murder trial, your job is not to take a stand. Your job is to give people all the facts.

It is practically impossible, unless you have a lot of money and can afford a top lawyer, to successfully sue a paper for libel if you think you've been wronged. Is that good or bad?

JL: It's not at all impossible to sue for libel. It's very hard to sue for libel if you are a public figure or if you are a public person. Papers get sued successfully for libel all the time. The normal way most libel cases happen is like this ... the police arrest some guy named John Smith and they charge him with prostitution. A reporter looks in the city directory and finds that there is a John Smith who lives at 516 Main Street and writes a story saying that John Smith has been charged with prostitution.

In actuality, it's another John Smith who lives somewhere else. Then the one who has been mistakenly identified either files a lawsuit or gets a big fat settlement from the newspaper for defaming his reputation. So, it's not at all impossible to sue for libel when mistakes like that happen. It is, however, almost impossible to sue for libel if you are a public figure.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange faces rape charges in Sweden, has had almost all of his staffers quit, and is depicted in an unflattering new biography as being paranoid and obsessive about his own secrecy while deploring it in others. Has he come and gone as a journalistic influence/media partner in America?

JL: I don't know and I don't think anyone else knows. The WikiLeaks thing has certainly made a major impact. Regardless of whether Julian Assange is a good guy or a bad guy, a rapist, a hero ... we don't know and we don't what yet he may do. So, I think anybody who tries to speculate on whether his day is over or not is making a mistake.

Though grand jury proceedings against Barry Bonds took place eight years ago, they continue to be in the news as he's gone on trial on charges that he lied when he said he never knowingly took performance-enhancing drugs. Looking back at it now, do you think it was justified for the two San Francisco reporters to violate the secrecy of those proceedings with leaked stories about his testimony? Are there any limits?

JL: There are always limits. The question is what the limits are and limits on what? In this case, obviously grand jury testimony is supposed to be secret, but somebody told reporters information that they were able to corroborate about Barry Bonds' drug use. It is also unquestionably true that Major League Baseball engaged in a systematic coverup and didn't take adequate steps to expose the steroid scandal.

I personally am a baseball fan. I know a lot about historic baseball and am very chagrined and angered at what steroids and the tolerance of them has done to the game. But I think that every exception proves the rule that if you get hauled up before a grand jury on some zoning violation charge and somebody leaks information to me, it's much more problematical than information about a pampered, drugged-out superstar who makes more money in a day than the average person does in, perhaps, their lifetime.

Considering all the above questions, do you think there's a sense in America that the press has too much power as it is and it should not be trusted with anymore?

JL: Of course there's a sense in America that the press has too much power. There has generally been that since 1789 in some circles. If we do our jobs correctly, people aren't going to like us. We're the messenger bearing bad news. Now, I'm not going to write a story about you saying Abby Moon (interviewer) is a nice, intelligent lady who is performing a public service here if I were in a room with you and you went berserk and got a butcher knife and stabbed the camera person in their carotid artery. Journalists are telling people, "Hey, the water's bad... the congressman is corrupt... etc..." I think that to some extent, we bring this on ourselves unnecessarily.

I do not know why anyone in the world needs to know one more fact about Lindsay Lohan. To the extent that we are corrupting the airwaves telling people stuff about Lindsay Lohan, we probably deserve anything we get. So, yeah, I think we're occasionally obnoxious, but as everybody has recognized, from the time the founders wrote the First Amendment, if not before... John Peter Zenger in 1735... we are obnoxious, but necessary.

Another great example is Charlie Sheen. I think it is extremely irresponsible for any journalistic institution to put this man, who is clearly mentally unbalanced, and possibly on substances, on display. It reminds me of the medieval practice of bear baiting, or putting insane people on public display, which in a sense is what seems to be going on here. This person clearly is not tethered to reality. They're putting him on shows and bringing on psychiatrists to talk about the fact that he shouldn't be on shows. I think that is sort of unethical.

The New York Times soon will install a paywall on its website news. Do you think it will work financially for them?

JL: Well, it's very interesting in this country. Newspapers started giving everything away for free. It's kind of like in the old days they used to tell nice young girls not to have sex with their boyfriends. Mothers used to say that if he gets the milk for free, he won't marry the cow. That's an old-fashioned sexist formulation, but what happens is people are used to getting things on the Internet for free. The New York Times has tried this before ... the Wall Street Journal and other papers have also tried this before, but the Wall Street Journal is the only one that's really successfully managed to set up a paywall. And when you look at the demographics of their readers, you can see that it's a little bit of a different animal.

So, will the Times be successful at this? I don't know. There are two minds. No. 1, the Times is revenue clearing to go on being the premier journalist institution in this country. No. 2, if they have a paywall, my students aren't going to as easily access it. As we go further down the road, we will become two societies ... one small elite society who is very well informed and very affluent and a much larger society that's poor, desperate and doesn't know anything.

Is there any other current topic concerning journalism you'd like to comment on?

JL: The only thing I would like to mention is ... we're talking about everything is in a spirit right now where we think newspapers are doomed and journalism is in big trouble. What journalists and futurists are very bad at is seeing the future. We know a whole lot about what is going on right now and we tend to project that whatever is going on now is going to go on forever.

In the 1980s, I was a reporter dealing with foreign affairs. I was writing a lot about the Soviet Union. When Gorbachev was the head of the Soviet Union and general secretary of the Communist party in 1985, every Soviet expert in this country told me that there was no chance there would be any substantial change and nobody even thought about the Soviet Union disappearing. Six years later, the Soviet Union went out of business like a bankrupt hardware store. So, the only thing that I'm sure about is that journalism will be different and a lot of the ideas that we have about journalism and the future will be proven totally wrong.

(Mr. Lessenberry has been a member of the journalism faculty at Wayne since 1993. He is also Michigan Radio's senior political analyst and does on-air interviews and commentary on three NPR affiliates every day. He has written for many national publications including Vanity Fair, Esquire, George, the New York Times and Washington Post. He was executive national editor of the Detroit News and a foreign correspondent reporting from more than 40 countries. He currently serves as writing coach and ombudsman for the Toledo Blade. He has an M.A. in journalism and Eastern European studies from the University of Michigan.)