As Wednesday Journal celebrated its 45th anniversary and the power of journalism with a special Lake Theatre showing of “All the President’s Men,” we asked Charlie Meyerson — Growing Community Media Board member, long-ago Journal columnist and now publisher of the free daily email news briefing Chicago Public Square — to set the stage with a few remarks on the state of journalism now and then:
NBC News has a new slogan: “Facts. Clarity. Calm.”
I have no beef with facts or clarity. But at a time when reporters are getting tear-gassed, elected officials are getting arrested simply for engaging in political protest and people are being snatched at random off our streets, I don’t have much use for “calm” reporting.
In the summer of 1974, when the book All the President’s Men was published, I’d just declared a change in my major at the University of Illinois, from chemistry to journalism. (The chemistry thing was a sham; I had a chemistry scholarship, but I’d planned on journalism as soon as I could switch — which, back then and there, you couldn’t do until you qualified as a junior.)
And although my career path had been set long before that — both my parents were newspaper folk, as were Clark Kent, Peter Parker, and Mike Royko, and I’d been publishing my own newspapers since the age of 7 (with crayon) — the reporting detailed in All the President’s Men made me more certain than ever that that’s what I wanted to do with my life.
And I wasn’t alone, of course. Remember that the Watergate scandal documented in that book led to Richard Nixon’s resignation just two months after its publication. That energized a generation of young people who saw the news biz as a way to make a difference.
And for decades that followed, it was just that. Courageous publishers like the Post’s Katherine Graham and editors like Ben Bradlee spoke truth to power, and truth often, although not always, came out on top.
But that tide’s turned. Mainstream media — which had gotten fat on easy profits in the years before the internet — got caught flat-footed by digital competition and found themselves headed for a financial cliff. In many cases, they handed the wheel to vampiric hedge funds and billionaire dilettantes who let staffs shrink and principles wither.
And as Donald Trump and the Republican Party — enabled by reactionary organizations like Fox (I refuse to associate the word “News” with it) — have attacked journalism with rhetoric like the kind spewed by Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew, traditional news media have shown sadly little of the mettle detailed in All the President’s Men. Trump’s outrageous, unhinged statements have time and again been “sanewashed” at plutocrat- and corporate-owned media — at least some of them paralyzed by the administration’s financial and regulatory threats.
So, no: I can’t celebrate “calm” journalism — or, for that matter, “objective” journalism. As then-Slate columnist Will Oremus wrote early in Trump’s first administration: The president “exploited traditional media outlets’ intense desire to be perceived as … objective, and thus to be respected by conservatives and liberals alike — a business imperative … transmuted into an ethical injunction.”
To put it more plainly: A good reporter becomes an expert in their subject matter. And experts develop opinions worth knowing. Reporters who don’t share their opinions — of who’s a truth-teller, who’s a liar, who’s smart and who’s not — are leaving their audience in the dark. If they know someone’s a crook and they don’t tell us clearly — if they don’t shout it from the rooftops and Tiktoks; if they stay, you know, calm — they’re letting us down. Especially now.
So let’s celebrate the journalists who brought us All the President’s Men, yes — along with all the reporters, editors, publishers and broadcasters who know when not to stay calm.
