An Interview with James Fallows

I think they're changing the culture in which journalists do their work. It's important to remember that journalism is not a formal profession. There are no official standards for it. That's good because this allows journalism to be flexible and responsive; it's good because styles can change. It's bad because bad habits can set in. There's been a style of journalism in the last ten or fifteen years that has become destructive--a professional and economic culture of opinionizing, attitude, exaggeration, and polarization, which has been good for journalists but bad for journalism and the country. What journalists need to do to get most noticed and make the most money is bad for the profession. I make a comparison in the book with the world of sports. You could argue that Michael Jordan makes too much money, or that Cal Ripken or Deion Sanders makes too much money, but what they make too much money for is a logical extension of what they should be doing. The way you make a lot of money in journalism is to do things you shouldn't be doing.

Is the public to blame for any of this shift in the media?

I think that if people didn't watch the crudest kinds of talk shows there would be less of a market for them. But some of the habits that become most pernicious in journalism aren't really supported by a public market. For example, in Breaking the News I talk a lot about the way the game of politics has stamped out the substance of politics and political reporting. For example, in the last two or three weeks there have been endless reports about whether Gingrich, Clinton, or Dole has won the budget battle. There have been very few reports about what's actually at stake for the public. But there's almost no evidence that win-lose reporting is driven by a public demand. There's no indication that people want to hear more about the game of politics. Let me give one other illustration. It was true in the last year that O.J.-mania seized the nation and almost every news outlet felt they had to do something O.J.-related to stay in business. But it becomes a matter of degree. The network news broadcaster who did the least O.J. reporting--ABC--had the strongest ratings for the year.

Does public journalism have a chance?

It has already succeeded in a lot of political papers. This is a debate that would have seemed peculiar ten or fifteen years ago. Now we have a religious war among the public journalists, the journalism advocates, and some of the bigshot newspaper editors about subjects where, in the end, they agree. Or they should agree. When Len Downey from The Washington Post and people from the The New York Times look at the projects that have been done in the name of public journalism in North Carolina or Ohio, they think, "Oh, that's just good journalism." They almost never complain about the projects themselves. What they complain about is the label "public journalism." So I think the way that public journalism will ultimately win the battle is when people stop using that label for it and say instead, "Okay, what is good journalism?"

Do you think that other journalists are going to use this book as cover for their own condemnations of the media?

I think so. The main reason that I decided to write the book was that the situation in my business resembled so powerfully what I remembered seeing in a different institution fifteen years ago--the military after the Vietnam war. It was a professional culture that was clearly in trouble. The people who had gone into the military were on the whole high-minded; they could have made more money other places, but they liked the military way of life. After being in there ten or fifteen years, they were embarrassed about a lot, and while they're sensitive about being criticized from outside, they themselves were very critical about what was happening. The same thing is true in mainstream journalism now. People for the most part didn't go into it just to be on TV, or just to become famous, or just to make as much money as they could--because that's not the best way to do those things. As time has gone on they have become embarrassed by that shift in attitude and so my guess is that people whom I don't criticize by name in this book will agree with it. The other ones may not.

What kind of reviews do you expect?

I would expect some divided response. I know of some reviews that will be coming out that are very positive. I know of some that will be hostile. It's going to be interesting to me to see how the hostile ones are couched. If people try to say, "Hey, everything's great with the press," that's going to be a tough sell. So I think the hostile reviews are either going to have to say, "This guy Fallows is a creep," or they'll have to say, "Public journalism is a crock." I think those are the two prongs that a hostile review could take.

Are you in any danger of any doors closing for you as a journalist?

I don't think so, but I may have put a low ceiling on my career as a TV pundit.

Is there a model of good reporting, of good coverage, right now?

There's a reason why I so much enjoy working for The Atlantic. It's because I think that what Bill Whitworth wants month in and month out is part of what journalism really should be. Obviously, a monthly magazine's headlines are different from others, and so the situation is different from that of a newspaper, but I think that Bill has been consistently interested in the meat of the issue--Why does this really matter? He gets to the point and gives our readers something that's useful. I think this is a model. I mentioned a couple of models in the book. I think that The Wall Street Journal news staff, as distinguished from its editorial staff, is interesting. In my opinion, the editorial staff is made up of ideological pamphleteers; they are just sort of hammering home their view of the world each day. What's interesting about The Wall Street Journal's news staff is that they whittle down their obligation to cover the breaking news and say, "Okay, we're going to give a cursory nod to the breaking news, but we're going to really stand on our investigative talent, on a more creative approach, and on finding things that we think are important--anything from how the telecommunications industry is changing to whether Indonesian refugees are doing this or that in California." They're not being driven by the breaking news, though they acknowledge it. I think that National Public Radio also does a valuable job of that. I have a very peripheral involvement with them. I do commentaries for them; I have no connection whatsoever with their news staff. I think that The New York Times, while I pick a lot of fights with them in this book, has very impressive overall coverage of the world. And I think that this brings up a really crucial point: most people who are journalists are both intelligent and honest. On an average day you can find that most stories in the newspaper or on broadcast news are reasonable stories; they're valuable to somebody. It becomes a question of proportion and overall emphasis and tone. It's not a matter of rewriting every story that's in the paper. But if ten or fifteen percent of the stories were not about the latest fight between Gingrich and Clinton, and instead were about how this affects your life and my life tomorrow--that's the kind of shift in tone I'm talking about.

Interview by Marty Hergert