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 Support The DrudgeReport; Visit Our Advertisers  [Fri May 16 2003 11:37:34 ET] The author who revealed former President John F. Kennedy's affair with a 19-year-old intern claimed Friday that the media's interest in the liaison underscores an extraordinary change in American culture. "In the 1960s, John Kennedy was not going to be found out," author Robert Dallek said Friday on ABC's GOOD MORNING AMERICA. "Lots of journalists, reporters, knew about the womanizing, and if they didn't they had strong suspicions, but they weren't going to publish it in their newspapers. It just was not part of the culture of the times," Dallek said. "Now, of course, it's so different." But are things really that different? Or are Mr. Dallek and the rest of the mainpress preachers erasing the nation's dynamic history for their intellectual purposes? Sleaze Journalism? It's an Old Story By Adam Goodheart February 20, 1998, NY TIMES The American press is once again at risk grave risk! -- of abandoning its proud tradition of sobriety, fairness and impartiality. Or so say most of the people who are paid to fill air time and column inches with that sort of pronouncement. What seems to be the problem is something referred to as "the 24-hour news cycle" or "the feeding frenzy" or, more simply, "Matt Drudge." Reporters and editors, we're told, care less about being right than about being first, scandalmongers spread rumors and falsehoods, any crackpot with a strong opinion and a little money can make himself heard, and no one in the press exhibits the slightest respect for the dignity of high public office. Thanks to the Internet, round-the-clock television news and other new media, such wild anarchy may represent the future of American journalism, the pundits warn. Their prediction could well come true. But if it does, it will represent not a break from the traditions of American journalism, but a return to them. For most of our history, Americans didn't get their news from the David Brinkleys and the Walter Lippmanns. They got it from the Matt Drudges. When Alexis de Tocqueville toured the United States in 1831 and 1832, he had high praise for the role of newspapers in sustaining democratic government. "We should underrate their importance if we thought they just guaranteed liberty," he wrote. "They maintain civilization." What sort of press was it that impressed Tocqueville so favorably? It was the press of the Jacksonian era, a time when politicians' sex lives (real or fictitious) were regularly exposed by the partisan opposition, when one newspaper assured its readers that the President's mother "was a common prostitute, brought to this country by the British soldiers," and when the President, like several of his predecessors, responded by bribing editors to support him. Today's commentators, many of them products of institutions like the Harvard Crimson and the Columbia School of Journalism, look down their noses at Mr. Drudge, a former grocery-store clerk without a college degree who peddles gossip on the Internet. But Mr. Drudge actually belongs to a venerable tradition. Joseph Pulitzer was a penniless immigrant; Horace Greeley dropped out of school at 15 to work in a print shop. Like Web pages now, newspapers were cheap to set up in the 19th century. And objectivity was almost unheard of. Scandal sheets with names like Truth's Advocate and Monthly Anti-Jackson Expositor sprang up in moments of political crisis, only to vanish, as evanescent as electrons, once they had outlived their usefulness. The 24-hour news cycle -- which Hillary Rodham Clinton has blamed for the brush-fire spread of gossip -- also has a history that long antedates the Internet and Cable News Network. Until the 1920's, each major city often had more than a dozen fiercely competitive morning and evening newspapers. A paper like The Philadelphia Evening City Item appeared in as many as 12 editions each day. Journalism didn't truly become a respectable profession until after World War II, when political journalism came to be dominated by a few big newspapers, networks and news services. These outlets cultivated an impartiality that, in a market with few rivals, makes good sales sense. They also cultivated the myth that the American press had always (with a few deplorable exceptions, of course) been a model of decorum. But it wasn't this sort of press that the framers of the Bill of Rights set out to protect. It was, rather, a press that called Washington an incompetent, Adams a tyrant and Jefferson a fornicator. And it was that rambunctious sort of press that, in contrast to the more genteel European periodicals of the day, came to be seen as proof of America's republican vitality. When Charles Dickens's fictional hero Martin Chuzzlewit stepped off the steamer from England in the 1840's, the first sight he saw at quayside was a motley crowd of newsboys: "Here's this morning's New York Sewer!" cried one. "Here's this morning's New York Stabber! Here's the New York Family Spy! Here's the New York Private Listener! Here's the New York Peeper! Here's the New York Plunderer! Here's the New York Keyhole Reporter! Here's the New York Rowdy Journal!" The Rowdy Journal's star correspondent turns out to be a scruffy character called, in the best Dickensian fashion, Mr. Jefferson Brick. (One imagines Dickens could also have made good use of "Matt Drudge.") It was the perfect name for a reporter, because in Dickens's day, the news wasn't delivered in a deferential whisper -- it arrived like a rude democratic missile crashing through a windowpane. For better or for worse, we now seem to be returning to the brickbat days of journalism. It will all be quite Dickensian, to be sure -- but perhaps a bit Tocquevillean as well. |
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