From Gary Webb to James Risen: The Struggle for the Soul of Journalism
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October 25, 2014 |
In thinking about the cases of Gary Webb and James Risen, two famous investigative reporters aggressively persecuted for their explosive revelations (in very different situations, and with different results), we are drawn into the thorny question of journalism and its so-called professional ethics. How well do the supposed codes of journalism work, and whom do they serve and protect? Is the primary role of journalism as a social institution to discover the truth as best it can and raise the level of public discourse, or to preserve its own power and prestige and privilege? I don’t claim to know the answers with any certainty. If anything, the stories of Webb and Risen suggest that those questions yield different answers in different contexts.
I’ve been a working journalist for more than 25 years, across the demise of print and the rise of the Internet, and I’ve always viewed the idea of journalism as a profession as, at best, a double-edged sword. I mean the word “profession” in the sense that law or medicine or accounting is so defined, each with its own internal codes of conduct administered by various self-governing institutions. All too often, the ideal of professionalism in journalism becomes an excuse for “the View from Nowhere” described by media critic Jay Rosen – a bogus conception of impartiality and “balance,” a refusal of critical thinking and a disinclination to challenge official sources or disrupt accepted narratives.
Amid the chaos of Internet journalism, and the evident fact that many people in the field have no conception of ethics or responsibility, it seems laughably nostalgic to talk about professionalism. But in any case journalism never resembled those listed professions, which was always a strength and a detriment. There is no examination to pass and no credentialing board to face. Graduate programs in journalism have grown more influential, paradoxically or not, even as the trade itself has decayed. But no one would claim they are necessary. I’ve known plenty of journalists who didn’t have college degrees at all; Hunter S. Thompson never finished high school. It’s one of those jobs you learn best by doing, with the right guidance and mentorship. Most of the people who got me interested in the possibilities of journalism in the first place, like Joan Didion and Thompson and Lester Bangs and Robert Christgau and the underappreciated, long-dead San Francisco critic John L. Wasserman, had no professional training, would have refused to join any such association and repeatedly violated the norms and customs of the trade.
On the other hand, maybe journalism does qualify as a profession, in that it displays a sense of tribal identity also found among the doctors and the lawyers. Insiders with the right connections, who conform to established codes, are zealously protected; outsiders perceived as threats to the established order are thrown to the wolves. This is an entirely understandable human reaction, and not always a bad thing. Mainstream journalism has pretty much circled the wagons around Risen, a national-security reporter for the New York Times who was working to uncover the extent of illegal or unconstitutional NSA spying long before anybody had heard of Edward Snowden. His work has sometimes made his own editors uncomfortable – former Times editor Bill Keller repeatedly killed Risen’s NSA story in 2004 and 2005, after a private meeting with President Bush – but in broad terms both the Times and what’s left of the journalism establishment have grasped that the government’s attempt to shut Risen down or send him to prison was a direct assault on the role of the press in a so-called democracy.
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