HISTORY
DEPT.
The New York Times Used to Be a Model of Diverse
Opinion. What Happened?
Fifty years ago, like today, newsrooms were divided
about what "objectivity" means. Here’s how a détente was reached.
The New
York Times
One reason
quality journalism survived after the 1960s is that institutions like the New
York Times bent so as not to break.
By DAVID
GREENBERG
06/14/2020
06:57 AM EDT
Updated:
06/14/2020 08:42 AM EDT
David
Greenberg, a professor of history and journalism and media studies at Rutgers,
is a contributing editor at Politico Magazine. He is the author of several
works of political history including, most recently, Republic of Spin: An
Inside History of the American Presidency.
Heads are
rolling in America’s newsrooms. The editors of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Bon
Appetit and, most controversially, the New York Times Opinion section were
recently ousted—the latter amid a melee over an op-ed by Republican Senator Tom
Cotton calling for the U.S. army to put down violence in America’s streets.
These harsh reprisals occurred against the backdrop of protests against police
brutality toward African Americans and entrenched racism generally—protests
whose tremors are being felt across America, including in journalism itself.
One
resulting debate is whether pursuing the goals of racial justice in the
newsroom requires overhauling journalistic values. The Times’ Ben Smith reports
on clashes between Washington Post Editor Marty Baron and a star reporter
Wesley Lowery over the reporter’s provocative Twitter commentary. Radio host
Tanzina Vega of “The Takeaway” contends that “objectivity”— a lodestar of
mainstream reporting—“reinforces a white point of view that has always
dominated the industry.” Bari Weiss of the Times notes the generational divide,
as “over-forty liberals” have defended the newspaper’s customary role and
younger “wokes” think hearing both sides of some debates can legitimize
dangerous ideas. Times reporter Farah Stockman pointed out that James Bennet’s
commitment to opening up the Op-Ed page was of a piece with his willingness to
take editorial risks when he edited the Atlantic: “I will always remember him
as the editor who gave Ta-Nehisi Coates the space to write the groundbreaking
Case for Reparations when few would entertain the idea. That's the James Bennet
I know.” Damon Linker of the Week suggests that the liberal idea of a
“marketplace of ideas” is dead or dying.
All might
be surprised to know how uncannily these debates echo those of 50 years ago,
during a period of equal or greater turmoil. In 1969, the Wall Street Journal
reported on a 21-year-old Raleigh News and Observer reporter, Kerry Gruson, who
declared objectivity a “myth” and insisted on wearing a black armband while
reporting on the “Moratorium,” a nationwide day of protest against the Vietnam
War. Five hundred miles to the north, her father, Sydney Gruson, a muckety-muck
at the New York Times, forbade some 300 of his employees from using the paper’s
auditorium for an antiwar teach-in, declaring, “Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I
feel strongly about the purity of the news columns.” (The Journal piece is
cited in the scholar Michael Schudson’s classic history of objectivity in
journalism, Discovering the News.)
Similar
clashes in this period took place at other publications. They revolved around
civil rights, gender equality and diversity in the newsroom. All generally
pitted older, stodgy traditionalists (mostly white and male) against more
diverse younger journalists seeking to test the boundaries of how much
viewpoint and even activism they could get into print.
In our
dismal times, it may be encouraging to note that a détente, of sorts, was
reached—suggesting there may be a satisfactory way forward as newspapers face a
similar crisis today.
One reason
quality journalism survived after the 1960s is that institutions like the New
York Times bent so as not to break. Under pressure to make room for more
subjectivity and analysis, they innovated, permitting in their publications a
greater range of topics and writers, more personal voice, more political
opinion and more in-depth exposés—but each in its proper place. These
developments allowed journalism to become more interesting, useful and
appealing to audiences without sacrificing its bedrock principles.
The sheer
number of experiments in news writing that emerged in the late ’60s and early
’70s would surprise anyone who thinks of our internet age as unprecedentedly
revolutionary. There were the virtuosic riffs of the “New Journalism,” which
tossed out the reporter’s well-thumbed rulebook in favor of brash subjectivity
and chatty or stylized language. A new vogue appeared for investigative
journalism, as newspapers like Newsday and the Washington Post built special
teams to probe stories that required multiple reporters and months of work.
(CBS’ “60 Minutes” debuted in 1968.) And while mainstream newspapers mostly
shied away from what was called “advocacy journalism”—journalism openly
championing a cause—they were challenged by publications that felt freer to
brandish a political viewpoint, like the new left magazine Ramparts, which
reported on the CIA’s funding of a national student organization, or the New
York Review of Books, which ran Seymour Hersh’s account of the My Lai massacre.
The era
also witnessed an explosion of press criticism and in-house ombudsmen, as
editors realized that walking readers through journalists’ professional and
ethical dilemmas made more sense than pretending those dilemmas didn’t exist.
One of the period’s most influential new magazines was the journalism review
(MORE), which, as Kevin M. Lerner recounts in his recent history Provoking the
Press, grew out of the conviction of Times reporter J. Anthony Lukas and a
self-styled “cabal” at the paper that its “emphasis on objectivity kept it from
accurately reflecting the state of the world”—including with respect to groups
like the Black Panthers.
Some of the
efforts to bend without breaking produced lasting contributions. One brainchild
of these years was the Washington Post’s Style section. Ben Bradlee, one of the
greats in journalism history, took the paper’s old “women’s section”—that’s
what they were called—devoted to shopping, homemaking and the social scene, and
reinvented it. He found young writers who wrote with flair, edge and humor,
like those who were pioneering the new journalism in Esquire and New York
magazine. A half-century later, the Style section has perhaps lost some of its
verve and originality, but is still remembered as a smashing success.
The Times
made changes too. It introduced more “news analysis” pieces to allow reporters
to interpret events instead of just dryly describing them—a label it debuted in
the late 1950s but began to dole out more generously. (Then, as now, “analysis”
was meant to help readers understand the issues, not to plump for personal or
political preferences, which fell under “opinion.”) As important, in 1970 the
paper rolled out its Op-Ed page. Though other newspapers had previously
included—facing their editorial pages—forums for outside contributors, the
Times’ choice to do so marked a grand step in opening up the hoary institution.
The idea was to air a broad diversity of voices—feminists, leftists,
conservatives, humorists, novelists, artists. Even back then, the idea of
including a Tom Cotton-like figure for his views on military force wasn’t
considered beyond the pale. As journalism historian Michael Socolow has
recounted, the page’s editor, Herbert Mitgang, early on solicited a piece from
Curtis LeMay, the right-wing Air Force general (and Buck Turgidson inspiration)
who was notorious for having talked loosely of bombing North Vietnam “back to
the Stone Age.” Mitgang wanted LeMay “to comment on the role of the Air Force
in Vietnam and whether it should be doing more, less, or something different to
expedite the war,” though no contribution from LeMay ever appears to have run.
It short order, Op-Ed became an indispensable part of readers’ daily diets and
a reliable generator of buzz.
Most of the
editors who led the Times in these and succeeding decades believed, like their
colleague Sydney Gruson, in keeping the news columns free from reporters’
personal politics. “Take out the goddamn editorializing,” A.M. Rosenthal would
bellow. And while the strait-laced tone of the news pages in time loosened up
as well, allowing for a bit more personal voice, individual style and even
evaluative language, the Op-Ed page and other new features provided not just a
symposium to chew over policy ideas but also a safety valve for social
tension—satisfying readers’ and writers’ hunger for more viewpoint-based
commentary.
The new
regime wasn’t wholly satisfactory. Female and minority journalists continued to
face slights and discrimination at many news institutions, sometimes resulting
in lawsuits. As Matthew Pressman notes in On Press, his study of how mainstream
journalism changed from 1960 to 1980, Grace Lichtenstein of the New York Times,
a feminist who strove to reconcile her political views with the rules of
objective reporting, struggled against editors like Rosenthal, who thought
advocacy crept into her writing. Her bosses forbade her from covering the historic
1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston on the grounds she’d be biased—a
situation echoed recently when Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editors kept two black
staffers, Alexis Johnson and Michael Santiago, from covering the George Floyd
protests. Still, over time, newsrooms have—slowly—diversified.
Many people
also continued to question the basic rules of journalistic engagement. With the
rise of the internet, early 21st-century bloggers revived the old but
sometimes-valid critique that editors confused objectivity with neutrality or,
worse, “balance”—pointing out the absurdity of giving equal weight (in the most
common example) to scientists inveighing against global warming and
business-friendly politicians dismissing its threat. Still, even as news professionals
and their audiences renegotiated their understandings of the journalist’s role,
journalists weren’t regularly losing their jobs over politically charged
editorial decisions. (If anything, Pressman notes, those most likely to suffer
then were those like the Los Angeles Times’ Ed Guthman, who was deemed too
“aggressive and assertive” in rewriting the journalistic rules.) Thus, in the
past 50 years, while questions of objectivity and the proper boundaries of
debate have clearly persisted, hashing them out has tended to resemble, most of
the time, a university seminar more than a barroom brawl.
Now brawls
are breaking out again. But if 2020 thus resembles 1970 in the challenges that
media outlets face—dealing with younger employees’ activist bent and their
suspicion of time-honored journalistic values—it also differs in a key respect.
The advent of investigative journalism and new journalism, the creation of the
Post’s Style section and the debut of the Times’ Op-Ed page, all sought to open
up mainstream journalism to new and different voices. Today, in contrast, even
as we retreat into bubbles of the like-minded, and even as many complaints
center on insufficient diversity in our journalism institutions, the response
to controversy is often to constrict the range of permissible opinion including
by punishing those who transgress ever-stricter political orthodoxies.
Replacing editors for a bad editorial call, even if there were earlier points
of controversy in their tenures, will diminish the likelihood that leaders will
take the editorial risks of the sort that allowed American journalism, in the crucible
of the late 1960s and early ’70s, to stay vital and relevant.
That
doesn’t mean that journalism must stand pat with the innovations of the 1970s.
The effort to bring more racial and gender equality to news outlets clearly
needs a new push and more aggressive measures. If reporters are itching to
express their opinions, moreover, newspapers and magazines might now consider
hiring a few well-chosen journalists who are granted the freedom to mix it up
in their own voice on Twitter, much as those institutions survived the advent a
decade ago of blogging and data-crunching by hiring and acclimating bloggers
and quants into the mainstream-media ethos. Doing so would also make it easier
for papers concerned about their imperiled reputation for nonpartisanship to
ensure that straight-news reporters never send out a sentence on social media
that wouldn’t fit comfortably and unnoticeably into a just-the-facts
print-edition news story.
The reality
is that advocacy and objectivity, which have both animated American journalism
for ages, will always be in some tension. Men and women in every era have gone
into journalism to make a difference in the world—to expose corruption, hold
power to account, tell stories of the ignored or oppressed, shock the public
into reforming business or government, or use the power of the press to right
wrongs. But American newspapers and news networks have also since the early
20th century consistently prided themselves on truth and accuracy—striving as
much as possible to prevent individual biases and prejudices from slanting the
news coverage. Like poets who fashion beauty and meaning within the confines of
a strict meter and rhyme scheme, the best journalists find a way to call
attention to urgent social or political causes even as they preserve a
reputation for fairness and open-mindedness.
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