The Idiot Culture

8/4/2019 The Idiot Culture

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Reflections of post-WafteriEate journalism.

T H E IDIOT CULTUREBy Carl BernsteinI t is now nearly a generation since the drama thatbegan with the Watergate break-in a nd en ded withthe resignation of Richard Nixon, a fuU twenty yearsin which the American press has been engaged in astrange frenzy of self-congratulation and defensivenessabout its performance in that afiair and afterward. Theself


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endo without ever addressing tUe specifics of our stories."The sources of The Washington Po.v/are a fou ntain of mis-information," the Wbite House responded wben wereported tbat the president's closest aides controlled tbesecret funds tbat had paid for the break-in and a perva-sive cover-up (not to mention John Mitchell's inspiredwords to m e: "If you prin t that, Katie Graham 's gonn a gether titcaug btin a big fat wrin ge r.. .") .Rather than disappearing after W atergate, the Nixon-ian tecbn ique of making the press tbe issue reach ed newheights of cleverness and cynicism during tbe Reaganadministration, and it flourishes today. Hence Reagan'srevealing statementabout the sad andsorry events that rav-aged bis presidency inthe Iran-contra affair:"What is driving me u pthe wall is that thiswasn't a failure untilthe press got a tip fromthat rag In Beirut andbegan to play it up.This whole thing boilsdown to a great irre-sponsibility on thepart of the press."

And now in GeorgeBush we have still an-other president ob-sessed with leaks andsecrecy, a presidentwho could not under-stand why the pressconsidered it newswhen his men set up afaked drug bust inLafayette Square acrossfrom the Wliite House,"Whose side are youon?" he asked. It was atruly Nixonian ques-tion. This contem pt fortbe press, passed on tobundreds of officialswho hold public officetodayincluding Bush, may be the most important andlasting legacy of the Nixon adm inistration .In retrospect, tbe Nixon administration's extraordi-nary campaign to und erm ine the credibility of the presssucceeded to a remarkable extent, despite all the post-Watergate posturing in our profession. It succeeded inlarge part because of our own obvious shortcomings.The hard and simple fact is that our reporting has notbeen good enough. Itwas not good eno ugb in the Nixonyears, it got worse in the Reagan years, and it isno betternow. We are arrogant. We have failed to open up ourown institutions in the media to the same kind ofscrutiny that we dem and of other powerful institutionsin tbe society. Wt are n o m ore forthco ming or gracious

ROSS P K K O T . E ' R t S l D r . N T l A l . (.: A N I) I D A IF .

in acknowledging error or misjudgment than the congressional miscreants and bureaucratic felons we spendso mucb time scrutinizing.The greatest felony in the news business today (aWoodward recently observed ) is to be beh ind, or to misa major story; or more precisely, to seem behind, or tseem in danger of missing, a major story. So speed anquantity substitute for thoroughness and quality, foaccuracy and context. The p ressure to com pete, the feathat somebody else will make the splash first, creates afrenzied env ironm ent in which a blizzard of info rmatiois presented and serious questions may not be raisedand even in those fortunate instances inwhich such questionare raised (as hapened after some otbe egregious storieabout the Clintonfamily), no one hdone the weeks andmo nths of work to sor

it aU out and to answethem properly.Reporting is nostenography. It is thbest obtainable version ofthe truth. Threally significantrends in journalismbave not been towarda commitment to thbest and the moscomplex obtainablversion of the trutbnot toward building anew journ alism baseon serious, tboughtfureporting. Those arecertainly not the prorities tbat ju m p ouat the reader or tbviewer from Page Oneor "Page Six" of mosof our newspapersand no t what a viewegets when he turns on tbe 11 o'clock local news or, tooften, even network news productions."All right, was it really the best sex you ever had?Tho se were the words of Diane Sawyer, in an interview oMaria Maples on "Prime T ime Live," a broad cast of ABCNews (where "more Americans get their news from . .tban any otbe r source"), Those words marked a new low(out of whicb Sawyer herself has b een busily climbing )For mo re than fifteen years we have been moving awafrom real journ alism toward the creation of a sleazoidinfo-tainment c ulture in which the lines between Op raand Phil and Geraldo and Diane and even Ted, betweenth e New York Post an d Newsday, are too often indiguishable. In this new culture of ournalistic dtiUation, w

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r rea ders an d o ur viewers that th e trivial is signif-real news. We do not serve our rea ders an d viewers,pander to them. And we condescend to them, givingwhat we think they want and wbat we calculate will

dly, seem to justify our condescen sion, and to kindle at. Still, it is the role of journ alists to challengeWe are in the process of creating, in sum, whatbe called tbe idiot culture . Not an idiot sub-which every society has bubbling beneath the

we witnessed

York Daily NewsNew York PostThe New YorkTimes, The Washingtontbe network newsons, and the seri-beat. Even Thehas

tbe front p age as ag poUs as if tbey wereI do not mean to attack popular culture. Good jour-

is popular culture, but popular culture that

ns of thou gh t or feeling th at requ ire n o work of thoseme them, then decent popular journalism isis happening today, unfortunately, is thatt form of pop ular culture lack of informa tion,on, disinformation, an d a contem pt for theToday ordinary Americans are being stuffed withDon ahue-G eraldo-O prah freak shows (cross-

GERALDO RIVERA, TELEV ISI O N J O U RN ALIST

dressing in the marketplace; skinheads at your cornerluncheonette; pop psychologists rhapsodizing over tbeairways abou t the min ds of serial killers and sex offend-ers); by the Maury Povich news; by "Hard Copy"; byHoward Stern; by local newscasts that do special seg-ments devoted to hyping hype. Last month, in sup-posedly sophisticated New York, the country's biggestmedia market, there ran a craven five-part series on the11 o'clock news called "Where Do They G et Those Peo-ple . . . ? ," a special report on where Geraldo and Opr aband D onah ue get their freaks (the prom o for the seriesfeatured Donahue interviewing a diapered man with apacifier in his m ou th) .The point is notonly that this is trashjournalism. Tbatmucb is obvious. It isalso essential to notethat this was on an NBC-owned and -operatedstation. And who dis-tributes Geraldo? TheTribune Gompany ofChicago. Who ownsthe stations on whichthese cross-dressersand transsexuals andskinheads and lawyersfor serial kiUers get tostrut their stuff? Tbenetworks, the Wash-ington Post Company,dozens of major news-papers that also owntelevision stations,Times-Mirror and theNew York Times Com-pany, among others.And last month IvanaTrump, perhaps thesingle greatest cre-ation of the idiot cul-ture, a tabloid artifactif ever there was one,appeared on the coverof Vanity Fair. On thecover, that is, of Conde N ast's flagship magaz ine, the sameConde Nast/Newhouse/Random House whose execu-tives will yield to nobody in their solemnity about theirprofession, wbo will tell you long into the night how seri-ously in touch with American culture they are, how seri-ous they are about the trut h.

Look, to o, at what is on The New York Times best-sellelist these days. Double Cross: The Explosive Inside Story oftheMobster Who Controlled America by Sam and Chuck Gian-cana, W arner Books, $22.95. (Do n't forget th at $22.95.)This book is a fantasy pretty m uch from cover to cover. Itis riddled with inventions and lies, with conspiracies tha tnever happened, with misinformation and disinforma-continued on page 28JUNE a, 1992 THE NEW REPUBLIC 25


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tion, aU designed to line somebody's pockets and satisfythe twisted egos of some fame-hungry relatives of a mob-ster. But this book h as been published by Warner Books,part of Time W arner, a cong lomerate I 've been associatedwith for a long time. (-4// the President's Men is a WarnerBros, movie, the paperback oi All the President's Men wasalso published by Warner Books, and I've just finishedtwo years as a corresp ond ent and contributo r at Time.)Surely the pub lisher of Time has no business publishing abook,that its executives and its editors know is a historicalhoax , with no redee min g value except financial.By now the defenders of the institutions that I amattacking will have cried the First Am endm ent. But this isnot about the First Amendment, or about free expres-sion. In a free country, we are free for trash, too . But thefact that trash will always find an outlet does not meanthat we shou ld always furnish it with an ou tiet. And thegreat information conglomerates of this coun try are nowin the trash business. We aU know pornograp hy when wesee it, and of course it has a right to exist. But we do notall have to be porn publishers; and there is hardly amajor med ia company in America that has no t dipped itstoe into the social and political equivalent of the pornbusiness in the last fifteen years.Many, indeed, are now waist-deep in the big muddy.Take Donahue. Eighteen years ago Woodward and Iwent to Ohio on o ur book tou r because we were told thatthe re was a guy doing a syndicated talk show there whowas the most substantive interview in the business. Andhe was. Donah ue had read o ur book. He had charts, heknew the evidence, be conducted a serious discussionabout the impUcations of Watergate for the country andfor the media. Last month, however, Donahue put BillClinton on his showand for half an hou r engag ed in amud wrestiing contest that was even too much for thestudio audience. Donah ue was amon g those interviewedfor that WNBC special report abou t "Where Do They GetThose People . . . ? , " and on that report he uttered adamning extenuation to the effect that as Oprah and theothers get farther o ut the re, he too has to do it.

Yes, we have always had a sensation al, po pula r, yellowtabloid press; and we bave always had gossip columns,even powerful ones like Hedda Hopper's and WalterWinchell's. But never before have we had anything liketoday's situation in which supposedly serious peopleImean the so-called intellectual and social elites of thiscountryUve and die by (and actually believe!) thesecolumns an d these shows and millions mo re rely upo nthem for their primary source of information. Liz Smith,Newsday's gossip colum nist an d th e best of a bad lot, hasadmitted blithely on more than a few occasions that shedoe sn' t try very hard to check th e accuracy of many of heritems, or even give the subjects of her co ltimn th e oppo r-tunity to com men t on what is being said abou t them .For the eight years of the Reagan presidency, thepress failed to comprehend that Reagan was a realleaderhowever asleep at the switch he might haveseemed, however shallow his intellect. No leader sinceFDR so chan ged the A merican landscape or saw hisvision of the country ajid the world so thoroughly

implanted. But in the Reagan years we in the prerarely went outside Washington to look at the relatioship between policy and legislation and judiciappointments to see how the administration's policiwere affecting the peoplethe children and the aduland the institutions of America: in education, in thworkplace, in the courts, in the black community, in thfamily paycheck. In our ridicule of Reagan's rhetorabout tiie "evil empire," we failed to make the connetion between Reagan's poUcies and the willingness Gorbachev to loosen the vise of comm unism. Now threcord is slowly becoming known. We have, in facmissed most of the great stories of our gene ration , froIran-contra to the savings and loan debacle.The failures of the press have contributed immenseto the emergence of a talk-show nation, in which publdiscourse is reduced to ranting and raving and posturinWe now have a mainstream press whose news agenda increasingly infiuenced by this neth erwo rld. O n the dthat Nelson Mandela retu rne d to Soweto and the aUiesWorld War II agreed to the unification of Germany, thfront pages of many "responsible" newspapers wedevoted to the divorce of Donald and Ivana Tru mp .Now the apotheosis of this talk-show cultu re is befous. I refer to Ross Perot, a candidate created and sutained by television, launched on "Larry King Livewhose willingness to bluster and to pose is far less in tuwith the workings of liberal democracy than with thsumo-pundits of 'The McLaughlin Group," a candidawhose only substantive proposal is to replace representtive democracy w ith a live TV talk show for the ent ination. And this candidate, who has dismissivedeflected all media scrutiny with shameless assertions his own ignoranc e, now leads both parties' candidates the polls in several major states.Today the m ost com pelling news story in the world the condition of America. Our political system is in dee p crisis; we are witnessing a breakdown oft he comiand the comm unity that has in the past allowed Americademocracy to bu ild and to progress. Surely the advent the talk-show nation is a part of this breakdown. Somgood journalism is stiU being done today, to be sure, buis the exception and not the rule. Good journaUsmrequ ires a degree of courage in today's climate, a qualinow in scarce supply in our mass media. Many curreassumptions in Americaabout race, about econom icabout the fate of our citiesneed to be challenged, anwe might start with the media. For, next to race , the stoof the contemporary American media is the gre at uncoered story in America today. We need to start asking thsame fundamental questions about the press that we dofthe other powerful institutions in this societyabowho is served, abou t standards, abo ut self-interest and ieclipse ofthe public interest and the interest of truth . Fthe reality is that the med ia are probably the most poweful of all our institutions today; and they are squanderintheir power and ignoring their obligation. Theyomore precisely, wehave abdicated our responsibilitand the con sequence of our abdication is the spectacland the triumph, ofth e idiot culture.

2 8 T H E NEW REPUBLIC JUNES, 1992


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The Idiot Culture

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