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It’s not possible to have a functioning democracy without a free press or, in this age of diversity, rather a free media. It’s inevitable, and healthy, that relations between those who exercise power – be it in politics or business or sport or education and the media – be, by and large, of an adversary nature.
To preserve its freedoms, the media must survive commercially. There are rare cases – for example, in Scandinavian countries – where the state subsidises some media without, so it’s said, exercising any influence over content. And in SA we plan State funding for community papers free, hopefully, to criticise Government at will.
However, it’s generally the case that most media in the free world – with the exception of some dinosaurian national broadcasters – is privately owned. Being private property must mean that the owners have a right to influence content. In the case of family ownership, this is common.
Stanley Baldwin dealt with this in his famous 1930 attack on London’s newspapers, when he coined the phrase “Fourth Estate”. “The papers conducted by Lord Rothermere and Lord Beaverbrook are not newspapers in the ordinary acceptance of the term. They are engines of propaganda for the constantly changing policies, desires, personal wishes, personal likes and dislikes of two men.”
Today, for example, Rupert Murdoch is not at all shy to impose his will on his editors in his international empire. Other proprietors, such as Conrad Black, of the Daily Telegraph in London and the Sun Times in Chicago, influence content through their choice of editors, to whom they and their boards then grant discretion.
In other cases – such as the major US chains, where ownership is diffused through the stock markets – their boards and managers influence content through their choice of editors.
There’s a large element of common sense in the choice of appropriate editors. It would make no sense to select a communist as editor of, say, The Wall Street Journal or the London Financial Times. Such appointments would be commercial suicide. For serious newspapers, the key ingredient is credibility – and this is jealously guarded. Recently a New York Times reporter, Jayson Blair, shook the foundations of that great institution by manufacturing articles from his home, shamelessly plagiarising other publications and somehow conning his editors into publishing dozens of such fabrications.
In the ensuing brouhaha, the publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, whose family controls the Times, fired his executive editor, Howell Raines, and the managing editor, Gerald Boyd. Both Boyd and the plagiarising Blair are African Americans, which has injected an unfortunate and unnecessary racist theme into the affair, with opponents of affirmative action making much of the fact that Raines and Boyd were warned repeatedly about Blair’s work.
Raines commented: “Our paper has a commitment to diversify, and by all accounts he appeared to be a promising young minority reporter. I believe in aggressively providing hiring and career opportunities for minorities. Does that mean I personally favoured Jayson? Not consciously. But (did I) as a white man from Alabama, with those convictions, give him one chance too many. . . When I look into my heart for the truth of that, the answer is yes.”
Such are the treacherous currents of aggressive affirmative action. Had Raines been running neurosurgeons or airline pilots he would not have printed his mistakes, he would have buried them.
David Broder, a distinguished Washington Post columnist, lays the fault at the door of arrogance. “The besetting sin of big-time journalism is arrogance – the belief in our own omniscience, that we know so much that we don’t have to listen to criticism. And the Times as an institution leads the league in arrogance.”
It seems the departed executive editor Raines himself is not short of arrogance. One of the reporters who worked on a 7 000-word article on Jayson Blair’s misdeeds told Raines that his staff said of him: “You don’t listen, you intimidate, you play favourites.”
His staff did not like him and did not support him. Media analyst Howard Kurtz commented: “Top executives in a communications company that demands accountability from everyone else seemed to have forgotten how to communicate. Plenty of hard-bitten newspaper editors instil a bit of fear in their subordinates. But at the Times most people didn’t feel part of Raines’s team and were more than willing to turn on him.”
It’s in an editor’s power whether to publish or not. It’s crucial that he or she retains credibility with the publication’s reporters in making these decisions. It will quickly become clear to reporters if articles are altered or not published in order to suit an editor’s agenda.
Thus, just as a newspaper relies on its credibility with readers for its survival, so its editor relies on his or her credibility with the newsroom.
Journalists tend to be insecure creatures, living on their nerves from story to story, worrying about their jobs and, usually, battling to make ends meet financially – both because they’re usually not paid very well and, more frequently, are hopeless at managing their affairs.
But however flawed it may be, and even when a Jayson Blair or others trash its credibility, it remains true that without a free, vigorous and cantankerous media probing, questioning and exposing the seats of power, no society can enjoy the fruits of democracy.
