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 Recent commentary from National Journal: Wealth of Nations: There's No Reason Why Deflation Couldn't Happen Again (May 19, 2003) Modern governments have the tools to deal with deflation. The problem is, they require the will to use them. By Clive Crook. Social Studies: Bush Didn't Squander the World's Sympathy. He Spent It. (May 19, 2003) Bush is no sophisticate, but he has the great virtue of knowing a dead policy when he sees one. By Jonathan Rauch. Legal Affairs: America's Credibility Is Taking a Hit in Iraq (May 19, 2003) What if Saddam destroyed most, or all, of his weapons of mass destruction years ago? By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: Seeing Tax Cuts as Stimulating (May 19, 2003) A growing number of Americans say they think that tax cuts would help the economy. By William Schneider. Media: The Call of the Skunk (May 13, 2003) It's time for journalists to get back in touch with their nasty, scandal-loving selves. By William Powers. Social Studies: Bush Didn't Squander the World's Sympathy. He Spent It. (May 13, 2003) Bush is no sophisticate, but he has the great virtue of knowing a dead policy when he sees one. By Jonathan Rauch. Political Pulse: A Delicate Balance in the Middle East (May 13, 2003) If Bush pushes too hard, he could pay a political price. By William Schneider. Legal Affairs: Three Judges, Four Opinions, 1,638 Pages, and One Good Idea (May 13, 2003) The judges' ruling on soft money might curb influence-peddling without harming the two parties. By Stuart Taylor Jr. More from National Journal. |
Media 
The School for ScandalThe Jayson Blair scandal raises a question: Why don't journalists learn from the institutions they cover? by William Powers ..... Introspection is rampant again in the media class, which spent the better part of this week trying to wrap its collective mind around the Jayson Blair scandal. The New York Times published the results of an internal investigation of its own reporter's wrongdoing, and no sooner had that 14,000-word penitential howl hit the street than journalists everywhere were taking it apart and offering critiques, elaborations, and glosses based on their own experiences in the trade. It was the kind of breathless exegesis normally reserved for secret government documents unearthed by some enterprising reporter, but this time the secrets were from within. Inside the media clubhouse, it was widely noted that some of the people who appeared in Blair's stories, and knew he'd made things up, apparently didn't even bother getting in touch with The Times to correct the record, as if brazen dishonesty were all they'd come to expect from us—even the best of us. To regain this lost trust, The Times has its work cut out for it. Last weekend's report was put together quickly and left many layers unplumbed. The paper has yet to answer a lot of questions that are bugging everyone, such as what precisely happened to the internal warning about Blair issued by Jonathan Landman, the paper's metro editor, more than a year ago: "We have to stop Jayson from writing for The Times. Right now." Who read this extraordinary cri de coeur, the likes of which most journalists have never heard even whispered in a newsroom, and what did they do with it? As it digs deeper into its own innards, The Times couldn't do better for a model than "Janet's World," the ombudsman's report on the Janet Cooke fabrication scandal, published in The Washington Post on April 19, 1981. Written by Bill Green, the Post ombudsman at the time, it's a remarkable piece of journalism that reconstructs the Cooke episode not just as a news story, but as a gripping human drama. When I pulled the report this week, I was startled to see it begins with a list of the dramatis personae, along with photos of many of them, including Cooke herself, then-Executive Editor Ben Bradlee, then-Publisher Donald Graham, and then-Editors David Maraniss, Milton Coleman, and Bob Woodward. Even all these years later, it's mortifying for a journalist to see these mug shots in the paper, fellow journalists as the subjects of an ugly scandal just like the ones we glory in covering. In fact, Green's story reads like a first-rate account of a White House scandal, one in which the reporter was given unfettered access to every person and document. In one moment of high drama, Cooke has come under serious suspicion of publishing fiction and Bradlee demands that she speak the various languages she claimed to know on her resume. When he speaks to her in French and she bungles the reply, he says, "You're like Richard Nixon—you're trying to cover up." Later, when he asked Green to do this story and Green agreed, Bradlee made just one request: that it not leave out any of the case's material facts that could possibly come out down the road. Again, you can hear the old Watergate gears cranking in the background, as the journalist who helped bring down a president tries to avoid a cover-up in his own outfit. All of which raises a question: Why don't journalists learn from the institutions they cover? We chase scandal after scandal in the government, the business world, religious organizations, and every other part of society. We know exactly how things go wrong in these institutions, the pattern that scandal tends to follow. There's secret information floating around inside some organization—about a Col. North in the White House, bogus deals at Enron, pedophilia inside the church—and the longer it's trapped in there, the more it festers and rots. There are quiet conversations, glances, shaking heads. Some bold soul writes an honest memo, but it's buried, ignored. By the time the information comes out, it's wreaked havoc, destroyed lives and careers, maybe ruined a noble enterprise. Jayson Blair was the secret information inside The Times. And there were plenty of people at the paper who had covered scandals in the world beyond West 43rd Street and should have recognized this man's trail of shoddy work for what it was, a threat to the whole paper. They should have acted on what they saw, just as they demand that government officials act on the corruption they see around them. "If I were sitting over at the CIA or the FBI right now, I'd be looking at this and saying, 'See, it even happens to those who criticize us. They have the same trouble making what are, in retrospect, obvious connections,' " says Jeffrey Goldberg, a staff writer for The New Yorker who has written about the intelligence agencies and 9/11 (and who formerly wrote for The Times magazine). Though the Blair scandal is much less important than 9/11, Goldberg says, the resonances are clear. "Jonathan Landman is in some ways the Coleen Rowley of The New York Times," he says, referring to the Minneapolis FBI agent who has been a whistle-blower on intelligence failures in the months leading up to 9/11. "Someone inside this organization knew something, sent a memo in language as plain as you could ask, and it had no impact." Introspection is all to the good. But let's not forget to look outward, too, and hold ourselves to the same rigorous standards we routinely apply to others.
What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. More from National Journal. More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. William Powers is media columnist for National Journal. He recently spent three months in Japan as a Japan Society Fellow, studying the role of reading in Japanese life. This column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C. For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com. Copyright © 2003 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. | [an error occurred while processing this directive] | ||
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