Against Reporting
Denunciations
Dear Friends,
At
, we are running pieces on “The Best Thing You Read This Year” — including Antonio Di Benedetto’s The Suicides and Tamara Pearson’s The Eyes of the Earth.Best,
Sam
AGAINST REPORTING
More often than I should, I get in these running gun battles about the value of Substack as opposed to traditional media. Usually this is with Becca Rothfeld, but sometimes it’s with
or . The arguments always play out in the same less-than-fully satisfying way. A skirmish breaks out for some reason. Then the other side claims that the average quality of work on Substack is lower than that in traditional magazines. They use the word ‘blogging’ sniffily. I wax poetic about the democratizing force of the internet and say something mean about gatekeepers. Then we argue about why serialized literature doesn’t work on Substack. I say it’s only a matter of time. They say something related to the inimitable smell of old books. Then, eventually, they retreat to their base, which is the value of reporting.So let’s attack the base.
There are a few obvious ways to make this argument. One is that the print media reportorial model disappeared some time ago for reasons that have nothing to do with Substack — and are related to the inherent inefficiency of, in a digital age, collating the day’s reports in a centralized office, sending them to a print shop overnight, and then using boys on bikes to distribute those articles around a metropolitan area the next day. The other is that there is reporting on Substack —
, , etc, have reporting — and there are plenty of publications that use the traditional magazine structure, , , , , for that matter but just don’t think it’s the best use of their resources to pay a 10-year-lease for Manhattan offices. And the third is that it’s a fallacy to imagine the old reportorial structure was a viable business model. Some of the smaller newspapers were sustainable, but almost any newspaper with reach, from William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal to Bezos’ Washington Post or Murdoch’s New York Post was subsidized by the largesse of very wealthy people, who had their reasons for wanting to control public discourse in the way they did.But let’s be more long-winded about this and go back to the birth of journalism. The printing press was developed around 1450. The first newspaper emerged in 1600. And then for the first couple of centuries of modern journalism’s development, it was — to our sensibilities, anyway — a winding road. It didn’t occur to anybody to do an interview until the 1830s, to tag along with soldiers in a war zone until the 1850s, to have a press conference until the 1870s. But our journalistic forefathers weren’t complete ninnies. They did have skills — for instance, in the early days of coffee house culture, when paper was scarce, there was a profession of news tellers who hovered over one’s table and (much like the ad buddies in Maniac) recited the news to you; and since Parliament, with the maximum of British snootiness, refused for some reason to allow note-taking in House sessions, early reporters sat in the benches, memorized the speeches, and then dictated them sometimes word for word in the newspaper. But the basic mode of journalism was ‘the correspondent’ — a loose, jazzy idea with an 18th style and etymology about it. The correspondent might be in some distant locale and then write home whatever he or she saw. The style would of course be subjective, impressionistic, and with a predisposition towards the literary.
It’s possible, really, to trace the emergence of modern journalism to a single article — James Gordon Bennett’s “The Recent Tragedy,” written in 1836. “Yesterday afternoon, about 4 o’clock, the sun broke out for a moment in splendor. I started on a visit to the scene,” wrote Bennett and by the time he reached his destination, a brothel in Greenwich Village, we pass from one epoch of journalism to another. There are three points to notice about “The Recent Tragedy.” One is what happened when Bennett arrived on the scene and was waved inside the house. “He is an editor, he is on public duty,” the cop guarding the perimeter told the protesting crowd. With that, Bennett’s career of crime-sniffing and police beat cultivation paid off — and the reporter became a kind of special breed, not exactly a regular citizen, more a spectre able to pass through various societal barriers. The next point is that Bennett, once inside the house, turned himself into a kind of parallel police force, conducting his own investigation of the crime scene. “Would you like to see the place?” he was asked. “I would,” Bennett replied. And, over the course of the series, Bennet would take his privileged role protecting the public duty, and the trust he had with the police force, and use that to make himself a major nuisance — questioning the police’s theory of the murder and advancing his own hypothesis, with the premise being that the police were too quick to assign guilt for a given crime and were beset by corruption within their own department, and that a free-floating, clearsighted reporter was in better position to obtain justice. “This was the journalist as opener of closed doors, as inquisitor, as detective,” Mitchell Stephens writes in A History of News. And the third point is that Bennet conducted journalism’s first recorded interview, in which he spoke with the brothel’s madame and gave her account of seeing the purported murderer arrive.
So, from this primordial swamp is modern reportage born. Bennett’s was a remarkable series of accomplishments for a single article series, but he was also a deeply unethical writer, close to being a con man — “misanthropic, hyperbolic, self-promoting, apparently shameless,” writes Stephens of him — and he was clearly playing on a degree of public credulity to sell newspapers. His theory of the case, by the way, was cockamamie nonsense — as is so often the case, criminal investigation is better off left to professionals.
The generous reading of Bennett is that an article like “The Recent Tragedy” marked the early days of the form and that journalism acquired a remarkable degree of professionalism by the end of the 19th century, with newspapers organized into bureaus, beats, sections, and so on, with a new detached style of writing coming to the forefront, and with newspapers suddenly big business. The less generous reading of what happened here is that three developments occurred in close succession to change the character of journalism. One was the advent of the telegraph, which just from the nature of the technology, created a clipped, ‘objective’ style that became journalistic SOP. Bennett, in the pre-telegraphic era, opened his account of the murder of a prostitute by writing, “Our city was disgraced by one of the most foul and premeditated murders that ever fell to our lot to record.” New Yorkers, on the other hand, learned of the assassination of their president in 1865 with the considerably more laconic headline, “The President was shot in a theater tonight, and perhaps mortally wounded.” That tendency towards compression and ‘objectivity’ accompanied, more broadly, the scientific sensibility of the late 19th century. “The world has grown tired of preachers and speculation,” Clarence Darrow wrote in 1893. “Today it asks for facts.” And then the moguls who got into the newspaper business, William Randolph Hearst above all, discovered that reportage meshed well with their industrialized tendencies. The ‘reporter’ was a very different figure from the free-range, file-when-it-suits-him ‘correspondent.’ The reporter was more a factotum, working on a tight schedule (in fact with a work ethic that would put many factory workers to shame), and was as detached, as ‘scientific,’ as a lab technician.
There were good reasons for the objective style in journalism. It gave a cloak of protection to reporters in the line of duty. Their ‘neutrality’ meant that they could pass between fractious participants in a particular story without siding with or alienating either one and it allowed them also to evade repercussions if they wrote critically. But the cynical among us might note that it also took away any freedom or creativity in writing, as certainly existed in the correspondent model, and it made reporters just like anybody else working, say, in Hearst’s business empire — just another cog in the factory. The cynical also might note that a newspaper was never exactly a dispassionate keeper of the public trust, that a newspaper always had a ‘line’ (which had a way of overlapping with the political leanings of its business mogul owner), and that a newspaper’s prized ‘objectivity’ was very often just a way of framing a story in order to gently nudge readers to one point of view or another. In their 1988 critique of the media business, Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky noted the following ‘filters’ through which the media business inherently tended to sway towards a more establishment-leaning, status quo-accepting perspective: 1.mogul owners; 2.the demands of advertisers; 3.“the affinity of bureaucratic organizations for one another”; 4.the presence of flaks and experts spinning narratives.
And, throughout the 20th century, the ‘golden age’ of journalism, the record of reportage was less impressive than one might think. In the United States, big business journalism really cut its teeth on the Spanish-American War where, as The New York Evening Post wrote of the jingoistic rivalry between Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, “Nothing so disgraceful as the behavior … of these newspapers this week has ever been known in the history of American journalism” — within a day of the destruction of the Maine, the New York World described it in a headline as the work either of a “bomb or torpedo,” which was based on no evidence whatsoever and turned what was likely a boiler accident into a pretext for a global war. Meanwhile, for reasons of national security, the newspapers allowed themselves to get shut down in any serious coverage during both world wars. Then, the basic premise of professional reporting — that it allowed journalists to ‘work sources’ — was a a two-way street, and the sources, particularly in matters of national security, found that they could work journalists as well. Whenever Frank Wisner, the Deputy Director of Plans in the CIA, wanted to spread the Company line, he liked to shout across his office, “Put something out. The Mighty Wurlitzer.” A Wurlitzer was an organ from the silent movie era and in this case it meant friendly reporters from across the major news outlets.
Reporting was to a great extent hampered by existing jurisprudence. The First Amendment, as we now think of it, really didn’t exist until The New York Times Co v. Sullivan and the Pentagon Papers. Prior to that, the news industry tended to see itself more as being part of a team with the apparatus of power. With the two rulings, journalists to a great extent did slip the leash — they roamed all over Vietnam and essentially undermined the justifications for war, they forced a president to resign (although as Jefferson Morley convincingly demonstrates in Scorpions’ Dance, Watergate really is better understood as a power struggle within the national security hierarchy, and with Nixon’s enemies making clever use of press leaks). But they did so largely by breaking away from the tenets of reportage as they had been established in the 19th century. This was the New Journalism. It was often subjective and impassioned. Writers put themselves back in the story and, instead of pretending to be some fair-and-balanced lab technician, wrote impressionistically about the world as it actually appeared to them. Michael Herr opened his book on Vietnam by describing himself staring at a map on the wall of his apartment. Tom Wolfe wrote of a visit to a car trade show, “There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy Kolored (THPHHH!) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (Rahghhh!) Around The Bend.”
Throughout the 20th century, there was, as Marcus Aurelius nearly put it in Gladiator, “A dream. You could only whisper it. Anything more than a whisper and it would vanish.” And that word was Lincoln Steffens. The idea was that there was a sweet spot that reporting could get to, where a journalist approached some story, came at it with fairness and objectivity, kept friendly relations with all parties, but then kept digging, and finally unearthed some great injustice, so compellingly presented that it would, as if by all itself, engineer wholesale reform. To this day, this is the raison d’être of newspapers. What a newspaper is in the digital era, where information is so widely trafficked, is not exactly how a newspaper is presented in Journalism 101. A newspaper is, basically, a kind of entertainment hub. There are a handful of breaking news stories, which tend to be reported as well by a wide variety of outlets. Then there are the slant pieces — commentary or analysis, giving readers, in a fairly unvarnished way, the ‘line’ of the newspapers. Then there is pure entertainment: nestled in with the stories on Ukraine peace talks and the India/Pakistan conflict in today’s New York Times is also “I Get Bored at the Beach. Where Should I Go This Summer?” and “I Drank Coffee Like [Football Coach] Dan Campbell and Learned a Little About Performance.” And then, like the kind of self-improving present from grandpa that’s wrapped up very, very carefully in the hope that the kids might like it, is the investigative story that some sad reporter took months on and that calls out an abuse in the prison system or medical insurance fraud and that wins an award and gives the newspaper the ability to feel like they are on the side of the angels after all and convinces Bezos to reach for that checkbook.
This is all a bit of an emotional topic for me because, in my life, reporting was the road not traveled. When I started college, that’s what I figured I would do with myself, and then I started working with editors for the college daily, and had that experience that is the bane of all house pets where I felt myself going into the vet’s for what I thought would be a routine checkup and found myself getting neutered instead. And then I had the same experience with professionals in my mid-20s. There was a formula to reporting. You weren’t supposed to sound like yourself, no, no, no, everything had to be written in ledes, nut grafs, and inverted pyramids — these phrases that are barely in English and have no meaning outside of journalism but, if you’re ever in a newsroom, might as well have been carved into granite by Lincoln Steffens himself. And then you couldn’t report on the messy reality that presented itself to you as you did your reporting — you had to have a ‘hook,’ which, say, in some complicated international situation, meant rewiring everything back to accepted geopolitical narratives.
So I ended up not being a reporter. In college, I felt like I preferred, at a formative moment in my development, to not grind my voice down into inverted pyramid mush. And then I had trouble getting myself into the right frame of mind for reported stories — which involved also (as Janet Malcolm neatly documents in The Journalist and the Murderer) turning oneself into a kind of confidence man, earning the trust of vulnerable people and then selling them out for the sake of ‘objectivity’ as soon as one was safely back in one’s office. For a long time, I assumed that all of this was my problem, and then, gradually, I began to think that the fault lay more with how we understand ‘journalism.’ The journalism I found myself gravitating to was more along the lines of people like Ryszard Kapuściński, who really was a ‘correspondent’ in the old-fashioned sense of the term, more of a travel writer than anything, but who was just describing the world in the way he saw it. I started scratching the journalistic itch myself by, while working as a producer, standing behind the camera and madly writing down everything I could remember from the shoot I was on. I knew that the product — the documentary film — wouldn’t bear all that much resemblance to what I saw around me: I knew that, with immaculate professionalism, we would take huge amounts of footage and lived experience and sand all that down to get to a thesis that was exactly what we had come into the project with. But I found myself being much more interested in these accounts that I would write up and secretly stow away somewhere — I would trace what I learned over the course of a shoot, I would describe the different people I met, the accounts would be ‘subjective’ and kind of literary but they would also be much closer to what I felt the ‘truth’ of an experience was than would have been obtainable in some professionally-succinct piece with a lede, a hook, and ‘both-sides’ interview-taking.
As everybody knows, the old reportorial model has broken down. The Onion — as brilliant in media studies as it is in everything else — notes that the most implausible element of Superman is Metropolis’ thriving daily newspaper. The question for me isn’t so much what we can do to keep reporting alive but to ask what of ‘reporting’ is inherently valuable. And, yes, there are things that reporters can do that are rare professional skills and that are in the public service. Ambulance-chasing is always important. Reporters can break through complicated events to get at the facts of a situation that a public — even a public taking cell phone videos of the same situation from all possible angles — might not able to parse out. And reporters can cultivate sources to get at the kind of information that’s not disseminated in press releases. And journalistic institutions are of course valuable in that they can pay for reporters to be in the ‘field,’ maintaining relationships with sources, getting ‘coverage’ on a subject matter, and providing a degree of protection for reporters if subjects should turn on them.
But the question isn’t about the old model v. the new. The old model is already basically gone. The New York Times and a handful of other outlets (The Associated Press and Reuters most prominently) have swallowed up pretty much all the other reporting outlets. The surviving newspapers — including such titans as The Los Angeles Times and Washington Post — are basically charity cases being floated at the whims of mercurial owners. Newspapers, actually, are popping up all over the place — Semafor, The Intercept, Politico, etc. They tend to figure out a ‘beat’ and then to cover that fairly well through a dedicated subscribership. But more interesting, and exciting to me actually, is the rupture that’s happening over the concept of ‘reporting’ itself, which basically takes us back to the fork in the road just before industrialization carried all before it. ‘Journalism’ doesn’t have to mean a boring, detached, clinical, telegraphic, faux-lab-coat-wearing style. Journalism really can just be a curiosity about the world — an interest in talking to different kinds of people, in keeping one’s eyes open, in learning things, in finding creativity within the non-fictional. That’s what the New Journalists were up to — and, like everything ‘new,’ they really were just reaching back to something very old, in this case to the wet and and wild ways of the roving correspondents of the pre-industrialization era. Is that good? Is that bad? I don’t really know. All I know is that we have to live in the world we find ourselves in and to be cognizant of its market forces. We are in an era, actually, of abundant possibilities. It’s up to us whether we make use of them or just bemoan the loss of the actually-not-so-wonderful past.
I expected to hate this, given the provocative headline, but I ended up appreciating your perspective quite a bit. The synthesis of journalism's history is really smooth and entertaining, and I can relate to the dissonance of being a confidence man one minute and, in Malcolm's words, a con man the next. People haven't written about that enough.
I think you've inspired me to write a "What Is Journalism?" essay I've had in my head for a while. There's a lot of big-picture stuff that media critics aren't currently addressing.
Modern democracies were founded at a time when people learned about the world by reading newspapers. I think TV eroded democracy somewhat and social media has brought things to a crisis pretty quickly. It's pretty clear at this point that democracy can't survive if people continue to get their news from social media or news media that behaves like social media.
I think the main lesson from substack is that if you want quality you have to pay for it. When media depends primarily on ad revenue it incentivizes yellow journalism. I think the future of journalism is local, non-profits with subscription fees. An example is The Baltimore Banner, which was founded in 2022 after a failed attempt to make The Baltimore Sun non-profit. The Banner isn't particularly good yet, but it has potential.
I have nothing against subjective New Journalism, it certainly has a place, but most journalism should be pretty boring. It's a way for people to understand the world around them, to have an idea of what their local governments are actually doing, to see the impact new laws are actually having. It is boring compared to New Journalism and the entertainment media that's everywhere nowadays. It doesn't pull you in like flashy national news and hyper-controversial issues. To consume boring journalism you have to cultivate a quiet interest in the world around you, and that world often moves pretty slowly.