The Countryman: Down the primrose path

“New journalism” of the ’70s left us a comic-page icon and, I dare say, conflicted news media. New journalists injected themselves into their stories and flowered up the writing. Those were the first steps down to the low esteem in which news outlets are held today.

Those baby steps morphed into grown-up steps. Wikipedia says of new journalism: “Literary techniques (were) used extensively and traditional values of journalistic objectivity and evenhandedness (were) rejected.”

New journalism’s poster boys were Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. Wolfe set the standard in The Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test, a book on a psychedelic trip (pun intended) in the ’60s. Garry Trudeau immortalized Thompson as Uncle Duke in Doonesbury.

Wolfe may have been the more serious innovator. Those of us committing journalism in the ’70s spent many hours in barrooms debating how far down the primrose path to follow those guys. Truth is, we would have spent hours in the barrooms anyhow, but Wolfe and Thompson gave us a rationale to try out when we got home.

The new questions. Do reporters participate, like anthropologists, in the activities we cover by, say, taking the microphone at a meeting or helping a Habitat for Humanity crew drive nails? Do we tell readers how we feel about how people in the story behaved? Do we dress up our copy to appeal to readers who want more sizzle with their steak?

When I began at The Kansas City Star in 1966 as a reporter in the Independence (Mo.) bureau, our orders from downtown were clear: You are NOT part of the story. Nobody buys The Star — it sold 610,000 copies a day — to learn what you feel about anything.

But the new guys challenged that objectivity. Their view was that we should stop pretending we can be neutral, or objective, to state our point of view but also to be clear that it was just that, a point of view. In news stories.

The Star told us to change nothing about our neutrality. Journalism took 200 years to find objectivity — Tom Paine was a journalist, but hardly neutral — which finally only came in 1908 with the founding of the first journalism school (University of Missouri) and the standardizing of standards.

This debate boils down to whether reporters should cover the same old things (meetings, press conferences, cops, fires) in the same old ways of straight reporting or in the new ways of Wolfe and Thompson by telling readers how we feel about, say, that house fire.

Another debate went on at the time (at least in newspapers, where we had time to debate because we didn’t spend much time caring for our hair as did TV reporters). That debate was whether we should cover more things (household safety, snow driving tips, etc.) and, if so, whether to do it objectively or to do it while participating and sharing our opinion.

For the record, I came down on the side of covering more things but using the tried and true techniques of objectivity and non-involvement. My view didn’t carry the day.

When reporters enter their stories, they sit atop a slippery slope. In an editor’s chair during most of my 20 years in the newsroom, my job as enforcer was to keep them off that slope. Again, I didn’t always carry the day.

A cop in Independence was murdered by a lowlife prison escaper. My colleague, Bob Phillips, had relied on Lt. David Kraxner for background info, news tips and sharing beers. When Bob wrote that Kraxner had been “a husband, a father, a hero and a friend,” the black pencil came out. No one cares whether the cop was the reporter’s buddy.

Bob accepted the copy desk’s judgment, but sadly. The desk was right. If Bob wanted to write a remembrance of his pal, he should write an op-ed piece, labeled opinion.

You needn’t listen long to radio or TV news or read many newspaper stories to find reporters in the stories. If a meeting is closed, reporters all too often write, “The meeting was closed to press and public.” Or, worse, “The meeting was closed to the press.”

If a meeting is closed to the public, it is closed to the press. Writing “press and public” gives the press a separate status. It may suggest to readers that the press feels its status is above the public’s. It puts the press into the story. As The Star’s stylebook said, “Don’t.”

The Star’s stylebook also warned about adjectives. In a word, our editors told us, again, “Don’t.” Adjectives all too often inject bias into writing. We think we are adding to the reader’s information but often we scatter information when we sprinkle it with adjectives.

Of course, you best describe a blue sky by calling it a blue sky. Call it a “Carolina blue sky,” though, and you have irritated those of your readers who favor North Carolina State. Or Duke. Or who don’t know what Carolina blue is. Etc.

If you describe the Town of York as a “small town,” your adjective injects a bias. Small to whom? Compared to New Sharon, York doesn’t seem small. It has 12,000 residents, we have 1,400. In New Sharon, we may think the writer doesn’t know what a small town is. “The guy who wrote that, he must be from Portland.” If the population of York is important, just state the population figure. Let the reader decide what is a “small” town.

Complicating these changes in writing is that readers, who may be asking more today from their news reports, bring less to their end of the bargain. That may be the fault of the internet, which wants us to believe we can know everything about anything in a few seconds. Or it could be the fault of an education system that no longer teaches students to make distinctions, as between what is supposed to be news and what is supposed to be opinion. Most likely, it is the fault of both and probably of many others, as well.

So, readers blame the messenger. At least, they aren’t yet ready to shoot the messenger.

Somewhere along the way, readers forget to check which page they are on. The opinion pages usually say something cryptic at the top of the page, like “Opinion.” But if you read the comments sections you’ll find readers who clearly don’t get it that a writer is expressing an opinion, as I’m doing here, or is analyzing an issue, as I’m also trying to do.

Comments in the Bangor Daily News are particularly vicious and vacuous. But even in the New York Times and Washington Post, comment writers deny that David Brooks or Michael Gerson has a right to an opinion. The Lewiston Sun Journal has gone a long way toward eliminating vile comments with a simple step. You must use your real name when commenting. What a concept.

The news media are gazing deep into their belly buttons to find what sent their status south. Most of what they do is accurate and useful. But they err when their egos lead them to believe the public gives a damn about what they think. I believe it still does not.

Bob Neal does give a damn about what you think, but then, this is an opinion piece.