By Matthew Pressman (Harvard University Press, November 2018)
“We are living in a time of revolution,” Los Angeles Times publisher Otis Chandler told a conference of his company’s executives in May 1969. “You can go right down the list,” he said: race, student unrest, riots, crime, pollution, wars, poverty, corruption. “It is a very difficult time to be in this business of reporting news, because people do not tend to agree with what you are saying to them. They don’t want to hear the bad news.”[1]
But it was not simply the tumultuous events of the day that made reporting so difficult; changes in journalists’ practices and beliefs created a host of challenges that the press had not faced in previous generations. The first set of changes predated the “revolution” that Otis Chandler mentioned. During the early to mid-1960s, interpretive reporting became a central component of news coverage, transforming the reporter from stenographer to analyst. News articles would increasingly include the reporter’s judgments about controversial issues, in addition to quotes and background information.[2] The second set of changes resulted from the revolutionary climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Even those journalists who remained wary of the era’s radical movements recognized some truth in their critiques: the injustice of the Vietnam War, the systemic nature of racism and poverty, the self-interest and sometimes corruption of America’s corporate and political class. These realizations led to a more skeptical, adversarial approach to news coverage.
Moreover, many journalists were swept up in the movements to remake American society, and their passion helped pull the entire profession to the left. News professionals following the precepts of objectivity tend to seek out a centrist position.[3] But in a newsroom where the main ideological division was between Cold War liberals and adherents of the New Left, the center could appear significantly to the left of what the country at large would consider the middle of the road. Journalists understood, of course, that the newsroom was not a microcosm of the nation, but even if they tried to correct for their own and their colleagues’ political leanings, the views of the Silent Majority rarely merited the same respect as the views of the left. For one thing, leftist views seemed more newsworthy: calls for reshaping American society from colorful provocateurs made for better copy than calls for law and order or lower taxes from local chambers of commerce. (This would begin to change in the late 1970s, as the New Right adopted more effective media tactics.) Plus, newspapers worried greatly about failing to attract young readers, and because they believed the educated youth to be overwhelmingly left-wing, they wished to treat such ideas respectfully.
Vice President Spiro Agnew, in his speeches denouncing the news media in 1969 and 1970, suggested that journalists had adopted the antiestablishment attitude of the era. He had a point. They were more likely than in previous decades to challenge the White House, to write critically about powerful institutions, and to publicize the views of dissenters. But to label this attitudinal shift “liberal bias,” as Agnew did and as many others have done, oversimplifies the issue.
[1] Transcript of Los Angeles Times Executive Conference: Editorial Excellence, May 17, 1969, Los Angeles Times Records, box 85, folder 5, The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.
[2] See Chapter 1 for details about the rise of interpretive reporting.
[3] As Herbert Gans has argued, “moderatism” is a core journalistic value: Herbert Gans, Deciding What’s News (1979; repr., New York: Vintage Books edition, 1980), 51-52. See also Chapter 3 of this book.
Matthew Pressman is an assistant professor of journalism at Seton Hall University and holds a Ph.D. in History from Boston University. Prior to his academic career, he was an assistant editor and online columnist at Vanity Fair. To purchase his book through Amazon, click here.
