Grandpa Ray! Tell us a story about when you were growing up!
When I was a young man in Journalism school (or "J-school" as it was called), there were two "rock stars'' that influenced me and most of my classmates: Geraldo Rivera, and the two reporters that brought down the Nixon government collectively known as "Woodstein," actually Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
Why we admired Woodward and Bernstein was obvious. Two reporters who stumbled upon Watergate, the event that brought about the conviction of so many White House staffers and presidential advisers and ultimately led to the resignation of the President, Richard Nixon.
That seemed to be the ultimate example of the power of the "Fourth Estate," the unofficial fourth wing of the United States' governmental system of checks and balances. A free media is there to be a watch dog on public officials, and no one emerged as more of a watch dog than the Washington Post in the early 1970s.
As for Geraldo - one of the first pop culture stars to be known simply by one name - he was a passionate "journalist" who crossed the line that we were taught was sacrosanct of impartial observer to involved, impassioned story-teller. In class we often made fun of the way Geraldo so obviously took sides in his reporting, but we loved the fact that he didn't sit behind a desk and tell the story, or do his reporting from a nearby media center, but rather put on his fatigues and walked into the middle of whatever story he was "doing." (He "did" stories, rather than 'report' them).
Yes, it was sensational. But it was exciting, too. I always wanted to be a war correspondent along the lines of Ernie Pyle or Michael Herr (an embedded journalist who covered the Vietnam war and wrote a fascinating book called "Dispatches"). Both of those men - and many others like them, but those two were among the most famous - lived with, ate with, slept with, marched with the soldiers they covered, telling the soldiers' story from the front line. Indeed, after Pyle made the European theatre so real for Americans in the way he covered that part of World War II, he turned his attention to the fighting that was still going on in the Pacific (after the surrender of Germany) and was killed in action.
So Woodward and Bernstein and Geraldo became the rock stars of journalism, opening up to many of my generation the idea that not only could we report on the most powerful and famous people in the world, but we could actually join the most powerful and famous people in the world.
This was not new, by any means. People who talk about media as being objective don't know their history. The media in this country has rarely been truly objective. Go back in history and see the way the media attacked even George Washington; how the media abused Andrew Jackson; the influence of editor Horace "Go West Young Man" Greeley in making the New York Tribune the mouth-piece of first the Whig party and then the new Republican Party; and so on.
So what we're seeing now with the proliferation of cable news networks and talk radio shows that barely try to hide their political agendas is not new.
However, this idea of journalists becoming rock stars really took off with Geraldo and the two-headed monster often referred to as "Woodstein" - particularly when Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman played them in the movie "All the President's Men."
Even as I was part of the media for so many years and believed in it and defended it, I worried about it the profession. "Watergate" and Woodward-Bernstein created a position known in every media room as "investigative reporter,'' which too often became little more than a professional bounty hunter in pursuit of the great evil doers of society. The problem with that was/is that there is often not enough evil to go around, so to justify having that position, investigative reporters had to make everything they report sound as if it were going to be the next Watergate.
And too often, reporters moved from the ununofficial "fourth estate'' relationship to the government into something akin to the Secret Police.Unlike real police, however, reporters are not bogged down by due process or legal procedure, and they have the power to indict, prosecute, and convict anyone as long as the story sells papers or generates improved ratings.
I have been part of "investigative teams" that were assigned to look into a story, only to realize there really wasn't a story there after all. But because the paper had invested so many resources (manpower, time, money) into the investigation, we pretty much had to justify ourselves by coming up with something, anything. So we did.
One of my favorite stories occurred during the early days of the internet. I was in sports, and often we'd get these rumors on the internet that went viral. It seemed like everyone was repeating it. I had an editor who told me I needed to write a story about this rumor. I said I had looked into this particular rumor and it was not true. The editor then said I should write a story saying the rumor wasn't true. I laughed and said, "This is great. You want me to write a story about things that aren't true? I can do that all day, every day. I can fill the paper writing about stories that aren't true!"
At that time, to this editor's credit, he realized what I was saying and left the idea alone. But I dare say that these days, that same editor is forced to have his reporters address wide-spread rumors in print or on air because "that's what people are talking about."
Add to that the fact that reporters know they can make their reputation by being the one people talk about, that they can not only report news, but make news, and that makes them famous - mini "Geraldos'' and "Woodsteins."
Which has been and remains the goal of so many J-school graduates since the 1970s.
And just like you have to be wary of politicians who become addicted to power, so do you have to be wary of reporters who seek that kind of power. Because power and recognition is addictive; it makes crack look like caffeine in comparison.
At the same time, I still believe in the necessity of a free and unfettered media. I'd rather have the current system of agenda-led media than a state-controlled media (and yes, I realize some would argue that some of the media appears to have become state-controlled). Because somewhere in the middle of the extremes lies the truth, and "we the people" have a responsibility to educate ourselves - often by reading through the extremes - to decide for ourselves what is true, or at least what we believe to be true.
And, yes, I'd jump at the chance to be something like a war correspondent again, to put myself in the middle of the biggest story to be as close to a neutral observer as I could be. There is nothing, for me, like the rush of confirming and breaking a story and racing to meet deadline, of being the one "in the know."
Because knowledge remains power.
But we all know what power does ....
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