Journalists then and now

It seems to be the season for journalism memoirs.

My old friend and former colleague Jon Morgan recently published Newspaper Man, a book covering a long career that culminated in a stellar turn as farming editor of the Dominion Post (a position that no longer exists, despite the paper’s wide rural distribution). Jon’s book initially had a very limited circulation list but I gather there’s a reprint on the way.

Now another old mate, Jim Tucker, former editor of the late, lamented Auckland Star and tutor to hundreds of journalism students, has weighed in with Flair and Loathing on the Front Page, Volume One of an intended three-volume memoir. (Only three, Jim? Surely you can do better than that.) Readers of this blog may have heard Jim interviewed by Kim Hill on her Playing Favourites segment last Saturday.

Both books are self-published and unlikely to be best sellers, but will be of interest to journalists and ex-journos of a certain age, along with the type of people who follow this blog and regret the passing of an era when journalism adhered to values and principles now too often considered a quaint hangover from what's patronisingly labelled "legacy" media.

Tucker and Morgan have both paid their dues, in American parlance. Their books capture the tone and ethos of a time when budding journalists entered the trade (as it was then commonly regarded) straight from school and learned on the job. They were trained to observe principles of fairness, thoroughness, accuracy and balance and if they fell short, were sharply pulled into line by bosses who today would almost certainly be fired for bullying. (Not all such bosses, incidentally, were male. Both Tucker and Morgan mention a legendary Taranaki Herald martinet named June Litman – Tucker in admiring terms, Morgan less so.)

Many became journalists for no better reason than that they were good at English in school, or at least better at English than any other subject (that was me), and thought journalism sounded more interesting than being a school teacher or bank teller, albeit not as well paid. They had no academic pretensions and wouldn’t have dreamed of inserting personal opinions into their work. That was strictly reserved for editorials.

The two books also capture a time when many reporters began their careers on provincial papers and even in branch offices, working in towns such as Hawera and Taumarunui. There was nothing remotely glamorous or exciting about reporting meetings of county councils or catchment boards, but that was what the job typically entailed, and it served the vital purpose of keeping communities informed on matters of local importance. Branch office reporters were expected to provide knowledgeable coverage of sporting fixtures too, since sport – and especially rugby – was a defining aspect of community identity.

No one had heard of Woodward and Bernstein then – and even if they had, no lowly reporter nurtured fantasies about bringing down governments or acting as an agent of political change. The days when aspiring journalists were taught that their mission was to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable" (a popular refrain among politically motivated journalism lecturers in a later era*) were yet to come.

The reminiscences of Tucker and Morgan also recall a time when newspaper newsrooms were, in some important respects, more diverse demographically than now. For one thing, there was a much wider age range. Ambitious young thrusters were counter-balanced by the influence of older, more mature heads. On the first papers I worked for, reporters’ ages ranged from teenage (I started at 17) to 60-plus. And while women were under-represented, it’s a myth that female journalists were confined to the ghetto of the women’s pages. Some occupied key news reporting roles or (as in the case of June Litman) worked on the "top table" or the sub-editors’ desk.

Reporters’ copy was subjected to unsparing critical scrutiny by sub-editors, most of them old hands, who checked for accuracy, clarity, balance and grammatical correctness – a vital form of quality control swept away in the 21st century in the fanciful expectation that reporters could edit themselves. Proof readers, the last line of defence against error, were declared superfluous too. We are now presented every day with abject evidence of how well that experiment turned out. (A small example from my local paper this morning: “edition” instead of “addition” in the first line of a news story. Oh, and "hair and hound" from Saturday's Dominion  Post.)

And here’s another thing. Many of the journalists I worked with during the first decades of my career came from working-class or lower middle-class backgrounds. Many grew up in state houses. They had limited educational qualifications (in some cases, none at all – not even School Certificate) and no academic aspirations. Indeed, they often took pride in journalism being described as a trade rather than a profession. 

It was the tail-end of the era of the self-educated, working-class intellectual, a good few of whom found their way into journalism. University degrees were rare and those who held them were viewed almost with suspicion. When I joined Wellington's Evening Post as a teenager in 1968, there were several dozen journalists in the newsroom and I can think of only one (Geoff Walker, who later became a leader of the anti-Springbok tour movement and a high-profile figure in publishing) who may have had letters after his name.

But from the 1970s onward, journalism training was progressively subjected to academic capture until eventually the traditional career path straight from school was cut off altogether. No one can guess how many potentially good journalists were put off because they didn’t fancy spending a year in the classroom, too often under tutors of poor quality who had little track record in journalism themselves.

If anything, the process known as credentials creep (i.e. the constant cranking up of the required qualifications) has become even more pronounced in recent years as vocationally-oriented one-year diploma courses are supplanted by full-blown degree courses with a more academic focus. Has there been a commensurate improvement in the quality of journalism? You be the judge. On matters of basic general knowledge and even in their command of the English language, many of today's reporters appear bone-ignorant.

By comparison with the past, and contrary to the prevailing fetish for diversity, today’s newsrooms (and I’m not talking only about newspapers) appear strikingly homogeneous, dominated as they are by journalists who are overwhelmingly youngish, university-educated and who come, I suspect, from predominantly middle-class backgrounds. Older journalists who brought balance, maturity and perspective to news coverage have been deliberately and methodically eased out. Old-school scepticism (another former colleague of mine, the late Frank Haden, reckoned journalists should “doubt everything with gusto”) has been replaced by bright-eyed idealism that is conveniently compatible with “progressive” politics.

This is not exclusively a New Zealand phenomenon, as American journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon makes clear in her recent book Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy. Ungar-Sargon, the deputy opinion editor at Newsweek and a Marxist, writes: “The story of 20th century American journalism is essentially the story of a status revolution. Journalism used to be a blue collar trade; it was a working class job that you didn't go to college in order to learn how to do. You picked it up on the job, and it was considered a sort of low status job. And journalists very much saw themselves as being outside the system, fighting for the little guy. But then journalists started to increasingly go to universities and climbed up the status ladder. Essentially today's journalists have become part of the system. They are part of the American elite. Journalism is now produced for and by elites as opposed to a journalism once produced by and for the working class.” (You can hear Ungar-Sargon interviewed by RNZ’s Jesse Mulligan here, in a rare example of the state broadcaster giving air time to someone who is implicitly critical of its own unabashedly elitist culture.)

Not enough has been written about this transformation and its profound impact on how public opinion is shaped. The “woke” takeover of journalism, as Ungar-Sargon characterises it, permeates almost every aspect of news coverage and commentary, from what the media choose to cover (and just as crucially, what they decide to ignore) through to the way the news is presented and the editorial tone in which it’s reported, all of which tends to reinforce prevailing ideological orthodoxy.

But the picture is not entirely bleak. The mainstream media are still capable of presenting us with exemplary journalism that tackles big issues thoroughly, impartially and fairly. Christchurch Press reporter Philip Matthews’ examination last Saturday of the Three Waters project was a case in point. It was all the more impressive because I believe the natural inclination of the journalist concerned (who occasionally pays me the great compliment of sniping at me on Twitter) is to lean sharply to the left.

Such stories happen often enough to keep alive the hope that traditional journalism values are still honoured – at least some of the time – and even that some people in the media, realising how much they have alienated their core audience, may now be trying to engage reverse gear. But whether they happen often enough to reverse declining trust in journalism is another matter.

*The expression originated with a fictional character and was used chiefly for humorous effect, but bizarrely came to be regarded as a serious journalistic maxim.