There is no democracy without journalism.
Our citizens depend on independent, reliable information to make decisions in their lives and in the life of the nation. The quality of our democracy is bound to the quality of our journalism. Like other freedoms, quality journalism must be defended, renewed and fought for by every generation, by your generation. What is the greatest threat to democracy? Is it war? Terrorism? Recession? I believe the fastest way to destroy democracy is to poison the information. In my view, there are four threats poisoning our democracy today:
Biased media on the Left and the Right that treat their work not as a responsibility but as a business model.
Aggregators who recycle stories without checking the facts.
Hostile nations and political operatives.
Charlatans who peddle outrage to compel clicks on advertising algorithms.
Let me take a moment to explain this threat and how journalism can be our national shield. Not long ago, the dividing line in media lay between New Media (Facebook/Twitter) and Legacy Media (CBS News/New York Times). That distinction is no longer meaningful. Today, all media are available on all platforms. The dividing line that matters now is the one between journalism and junk. The 2016 presidential campaign was the first in our history in which citizens were awash in false stories masquerading as news. Much of this was a disinformation campaign engineered by domestic political partisans and by Russia. Their weapons targeting democracy were fashioned from an internet idiosyncrasy—stories that provoke outrage are less likely to be true, but more likely to be clicked. Algorithms at Facebook, Google and others prioritize content based on the number of likes, shares and comments. So, the algorithms themselves are unconsciously biased in favor of outrage. You may be thinking lies have outpaced truth for hundreds of years. You’re right. In 1710, Jonathan Swift wrote in the Examiner, “Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it...”1 But what has never existed before is the internet. Today we live in an unprecedented age in which falsehoods fly at the speed of light and multiply exponentially to fill devices we carry 24/7.
After the election, I wanted to understand the hidden machinery of the information age. There was no one better to investigate this than 60 Minutes producer Guy Campanile. Guy had been my “right hand” as a senior producer on the CBS Evening News. He is a careful, no-nonsense newsman. Guy’s Italian surname translates “bell tower.” His work always has the clarity and resonance his name implies. Somehow, Guy convinced several people to explain to us how they scammed the voters. Among them was Jestin Coler, who created two fake news sites, National Report and the Denver Guardian. Coler told me “outrage” is the key to all fake news. During the election, he used a keyboard to push people’s buttons on issues including abortion, immigration and Obamacare. He told me, “We did a piece on Radio Frequency Identification chips being mandated through the Obamacare exchange.”
“And what are those?” I asked.
“Essentially a tracking device. So, as part of signing up for Obamacare, you had to be implanted, essentially, with this tracking device.”
That false story was read 1.6 million times. Another fake story he wrote was about an FBI agent investigating Hillary Clinton’s email server, who was murdered in his own home. It was completely false, there had been no murder, no FBI agent. Another Coler creation involved a Texas town quarantined by the military because of an outbreak of Ebola. There was no Ebola, no military quarantine, but the story got eight million views. At the time, that was only slightly more viewers than one edition of the CBS Evening News. Coler told me that, for him, “It’s kind of an addiction, right? You see something really take off and then you’re kinda lookin’ for that next high.” His highs were profitable, with each click he made money on ads. He told me he was making $10,000 a month.
“Facebook was key to what we did,” Coler said.
“How?” I asked.
“Well, we would basically join whatever group it is that you’re trying to target on Facebook. Once they took the bait, so to speak, they would spread this stuff around.”
“Some people watching this interview are thinking that you’re an evil guy,” I suggested.
“I get that a lot,” Coler said. “And that’s fair. You know, I can take criticism. There have been stories that we’ve published that I do regret. Overall, I think the larger body of work of National Report and the contributors that I have is something I’m still very proud of.”
“What did you discover about the audience?” I wondered.
“You know, people, in general, are quick to believe anything—well, not anything—but, well, yeah, basically anything that’s put in front of them in a format that is ‘news-ish.’”
How can people be so gullible? In The Knowledge Illusion, scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach argue knowledge is collective, not individual. Here’s what they mean. You know too much candy can lead to obesity and diabetes. How do you know that? Is it because you’ve spent a lifetime in diabetes research? Probably not. You know because someone told you. You are probably an expert in the thing that you do—nuclear engineering, welding, cotton farming—but for most everything else in a complex world, you rely on what you read and hear. You have to accept the responsibility to carefully choose an information diet that will nourish your mind.
False Russian content, intended to influence the election, was seen by an estimated 126 million Facebook users according to Facebook’s testimony to Congress.2 Google’s YouTube told Congress that more than 1,000 Russian-produced videos were uploaded, masquerading as American political debate.3 These are not significant numbers in the world of the World Wide Web, but they don’t have to be. Remember, the presidency was won in 2016 by a total of about 77,000 votes in the states that put Donald Trump over the top in the Electoral College. The number of people reached on Facebook by the Russian disinformation campaign is equal to 92 percent of all those who voted in 2016.4
Twitter reported to Congress that it discovered 36,746 fake, automated users known as “bots” infesting the election.5 These bots sent 1.4 million election-oriented tweets concocted by the Russians. Bots are a little terrifying when you understand how insidiously efficient they are. Guy Campanile and I decided to try spreading an innocuous message with bots to see how far we could go. We had help from Jim Vidmar, a Nevada based internet consultant who specializes in getting new products noticed online. Vidmar was a slender man, forty-something, with a close-trimmed beard that began just below the rim of his black baseball cap. Given the scorching Nevada sun, his pale skin suggested to me he was spending far too much time at the keyboard. Vidmar’s home was short on furniture but packed with servers and flat screens. With Vidmar’s help, we purchased five thousand bots from a vendor in Russia. Most anyone can do this. Our five thousand bots cost only a few hundred bucks. The bots were programmed to automatically create false user profiles for themselves. Ours stole head shot photos, randomly, from the internet and automatically wrote little autobiographies for themselves. Because of the way our bots were programmed, most of them were soccer moms. All of this took half an hour or so. Now we had five thousand Twitter accounts masquerading as real people. On my actual Twitter account, I tweeted, “What happens when 60 Minutes investigates fake news?” Normally, I would expect a few dozen retweets from real people over a period of hours. But Vidmar set our bots loose with instructions to retweet anything I tweeted. He punched the Return key. “There you go,” Vidmar said. “Now you’ve got 3,200 retweets right there. Now, it’s 4,400.” The numbers raced higher and, within one minute, the reach of my tweet was 9,000 percent higher than normal. I pushed our experiment one step further. This was March, so the NCAA basketball tournament was in full dribble. I wondered what would happen if I simply added the hashtag “#Marchmadness” to my tweet—a tweet that had nothing to do with basketball. It was a slam dunk. My bots instantly pushed my tweet to the top ten posts of the tournament. You can think of bots as the booster stage of a rocket. They get the message off the ground, the second and third stages are actual users. “Real people start seeing it,” Vidmar explained. “They start retweeting it and responding.”
Now, imagine what well-funded frauds, including nation-states, can do with millions of bots. The artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms of Facebook, Google and others prioritize content by the number of likes, regardless of whether they’re human or automated. I believe this is more fairly described as “artificial stupidity” (AS). If Facebook and Google inserted reporters, editors and fact-checkers into this loop, the false stories would never take off. Internet search engines make billions of dollars in the information distribution business without taking adequate responsibility for what they distribute. After the election, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, defended his social media site by saying, “Determining the truth is complicated.” Well, yes. Yes, it is. Determining the truth is so complicated that people go to universities to learn how to do it. Some get master’s degrees in the subject or PhDs. These are called journalism degrees and the people who care deeply about seeking truth for democracy are called journalists.
What responsibility do search engines have to the public? Are they simply utilities, conduits for anything and everything, or do they have a responsibility to use human intelligence to stop the false reporting that poisons our democracy? Facebook calls part of its site its “Newsfeed.” It is reckless to claim to be in the news business while disregarding the values and principles of journalism.
To their credit, Facebook and Google have begun experimenting with filters and human intervention to screen malicious content. Both companies have become more vigilant since 2016. But so much more can and must be done to protect our country. The titans of Silicon Valley are the great innovators of our age. Shouldn’t they be able to handle something “complicated”?
Another problem with the notion of “new versus old media” is that it suggests the rules of content have changed. The turn of the twenty-first century brought us a revolution in distribution. But the rules of content never change. With every story, the journalist asks: “Is it right? Is it fair? Is it honest?” Have I double-checked the facts with a skeptical mind? Have I balanced the variety of views? Have I written impartially, without placing my thumb on the scale of opinion? Journalism has much in common with the scientific method. In reporting, we don’t care what the results are as long as they are true. The principles of honest content have not changed in hundreds of years. Whether you are writing on a stone tablet or a glass tablet, the audience must have accurate, evenhanded reporting.
Hard to imagine, but there was a time when there were three commercial television channels in America. Back in 1972, a major poll found CBS Evening News managing editor, Walter Cronkite, was “The Most Trusted Man in America.”6 By the time I took over as managing editor of the Evening News, in 2011, the universe had changed. Vietnam, Watergate, the Clinton impeachment, the 2003 war in Iraq and the Great Recession made us a much more skeptical people. By and large, that’s good. But in this evolution, journalism itself has become suspect and we journalists have to own up to our failures that contribute to the corrosive cynicism about the news media.
Our credibility is damaged when reporters reach for fame rather than public service. It has become common for reporters to appear in movies and fictional dramas. One night, the reporter is relaying election results on a news program, the next night, you encounter him in a movie reporting an invasion of aliens from space. This desire for personal fame is the same instinct that leads some reporters to embellish their reporting or embellish their role in their reporting. To them, it is more important to be celebrated than believed. Reporters who grasp for fame have forgotten that journalism has nothing to do with being popular. If you report the facts with courage and without bias, you’re more likely to be unpopular. It has been argued to me that no viewer would misunderstand the role of the reporter on election night and his or her fictional account of an alien invasion. I agree. That is not the point. The problem comes when the audience becomes skeptical of the reporter’s motives. Is he in this to inform, or is he in this to be famous? If the reporter is in this to be famous, what is he or she willing to compromise to become a celebrity?
A few years ago, my friend, the immensely talented comedian Stephen Colbert, asked me for permission to stage a gag for The Colbert Report on the set of the CBS Evening News. I had to decline because the Evening News must be, always, a place for reliable reality, not satire. I assumed Stephen thought I was being a pretentious snob. I was surprised months later, when he told the story to an audience and, in all seriousness, said, “Thank God something is sacred.”
When reporters make every story, essentially, about themselves, we squander the public trust. We undermine the indispensable role of journalism in democracy. This is no small thing. Cynicism, as distinct from healthy skepticism, allowed President Trump to describe the media as “a great danger to our country.” When I offered frank coverage of the president’s demonstrable falsehoods on the CBS Evening News, Mr. Trump attacked CBS News as an “enemy of the American people.” Days later, at the White House, I suggested to Mr. Trump that his “enemy of the American people” language could lead some deranged soul to commit violence at a newspaper, website or television station. I asked him to consider the consequences. He thought for a moment and said, “I don’t worry about that.”
Late in 2018, I couldn’t help but wonder whether Mr. Trump’s hostile rhetoric in some way encouraged Saudi Arabia to order the torture, murder and dismemberment of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Many world leaders look to the president of the United States to set the norms and the limits of behavior. At the least, Saudi Arabia could have calculated it wouldn’t have to fear Mr. Trump’s reaction to a government murder of a reporter. They turned out to be right about that.
Mr. Trump’s irresponsible rhetoric continues to inspire. Two weeks after the butchering of Khashoggi was uncovered, a fanatic mailed pipe bombs to a dozen people he considered to be enemies of the president. I was on the bomber’s target list. An FBI special agent called to tell me the bomber had a file on me in his computer, which included my home address. The FBI arrested the man before he could mail a bomb to my family.
During America’s midterm elections in 2018, Mr. Trump endorsed a candidate for the US House of Representatives who had pleaded guilty to body-slamming and punching a journalist. Mr. Trump called the candidate, “My kind of guy.”
Now, let me tell you about my kind of guy.
Hadi Abdullah was a resident of Aleppo when Syria’s largest city was under siege by the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad. Assad was committing every kind of war crime to retake the city from rebels who rose up against his family dynasty in 2011. The Syrian Air Force bombed hospitals and schools. Syrian artillery hammered apartment buildings into rubble. Civilians were dying by the thousands. Few news media could get past the dictatorship’s cordon around Aleppo. Hadi had not been a reporter but he became one. With a small camera and a friend to shoot the pictures, he chronicled the catastrophe and posted his reports on YouTube. The dictatorship noticed. One night, when Hadi was returning to his apartment, a bomb connected to his front door detonated. His cameraman was killed. Hadi was rescued by a White Helmets civil defense team, but as they prepared to rush him to a makeshift hospital, they were forced to leave his legs behind. Both had been crushed. I met Hadi, twelve surgeries later, for a 60 Minutes interview. What was most remarkable about Hadi’s story was not his initial sacrifice. After months of recovery in Turkey, he went back to Aleppo, in a wheelchair, to continue his reporting. That is a reporter. With no regard for himself, Hadi Abdullah risked his life to give voice to the voiceless of Aleppo—a people suffering the most grotesque atrocities of the twenty-first century. Hadi isn’t likely to be an actor in a movie nor push his wheelchair down a red carpet. He is the purest form of journalist and he is not alone. There are many like Hadi Abdullah who shine their light on the dispossessed, taking care to stay out of the light themselves.
Among the worst self-inflicted wounds in journalism is the headlong rush to be first with a story. Ironically, this has no value whatsoever to the audience. It is a narcissistic game we play in our control rooms as we keep score among the video monitors carrying the coverage of our competitors. Our audience would prefer we be right rather than first.
In 1993, I was reporting live from the site of the World Trade Center bombing in Lower Manhattan. Days had passed since the truck bomb attack. I was preparing for that night’s broadcast when a producer in the control room crackled into my earpiece, “Stand by! We’re going on the air with a Special Report! They’ve just found a survivor. Here we come!” One of our competitors was reporting a rescue. Now, finding a survivor in the wreckage days after the bombing would be big news. You would also expect a good deal of commotion at the scene. As I looked around, I saw cops milling about and firefighters passing the time. “Hold on,” I told the control room. “Don’t put me on the air, let me check this out.” I walked over to the police command post. “You guys hear anything about a survivor rescue tonight?” I asked. The sergeant had his feet on his desk and a Styrofoam cup of thin, cold coffee. He said, “Nope,” but his expression was, Seriously, buddy? Do youse think I’d be sittin’ here drinkin’ coffee? I went back to my microphone and told the control room what I learned. “No! No!” the producer yelled, watching our competitor. “They found him. Stand by, we’re coming to you!”
“Wait!” I told her. “I’ll check again.” This time I found an FDNY officer under a white helmet. He confirmed no one had been found since the day of the bombing. Like the cop, his admonishing expression said, Look around, pal. Does it look like we just rescued a guy? I told the control room, “I’ve got this confirmed two ways. No rescue.” But by this time, the story on the competing broadcast was only getting better. The control room producer said, “The victim is in an ambulance headed to Roosevelt Hospital right now. Stand by! Here we come.”
“I’m not reporting this!” I told her in a chargeable act of insubordination. “Don’t put me on the air because I will NOT report this.” The producer had no choice but to watch additional channels pick up the breathtaking details of the miracle rescue. The competition was killing her. She was livid and I couldn’t be sure I would have a job after I got back to the studio. If other reporters had better sources than mine, so be it. I may be getting my ass kicked, but I was not going to report other people’s reporting that I could not confirm.
As it turned out, a man reported missing in the blast had been found that night. He had been found in a bar on the Lower East Side. The man had been reported missing after the bombing, but in fact, he hadn’t been at the World Trade Center at all. He was unaware that he was “missing.” Someone, somewhere, maybe a police radio dispatcher, maybe a green reporter, assumed that if a missing person had been found, he must have been found in the wreckage. The story of the ambulance was a misunderstanding based on a falsehood. The pressure to be first with the story took it from there.
In 2013, a similar emergency called the CBS newsroom to battle stations. The hunt was on for the Boston Marathon terrorists. It was midafternoon, my team and I were in the Evening News office going over the lineup for our broadcast. A major cable channel flashed on the air to report the bombers had been arrested. We fired up the lights illuminating the Evening News set in Studio 47. I climbed into my chair in anticipation of confirming the story. As my soundman pinned a microphone to my lapel, a major wire service ran a bulletin with the same story citing its own anonymous sources. I had imposed a rule at the CBS Evening News when I was managing editor: breaking news required two independent sources and extraordinary news absolutely demanded them. Other news media were not sources. We did not report the reporting of others without independent confirmation of our own. We stayed off the air. Within a minute or so, I got a call on the set from our veteran Justice Department correspondent. “Yes,” he told me. “A highly placed federal source confirms the arrests.”
“That’s great!” I said. “Now, get us another source.” Waiting on the set, I watched one news organization after another flash on with the story. Now cable channels were reporting the suspects were on the way to the Moakley Federal Courthouse in Boston. That reporting gave me more reason to pause. The courthouse would not be an early stop after an arrest. The suspects would be booked and processed at the jail and the FBI would try to interview them. I knew, by law, the government had up to seventy-two hours to present the suspects before a magistrate for a preliminary hearing. I figured in a case like this, the feds would take all the time they had coming. Mentally, I pressed the brakes harder. On monitors in my studio, I watched live shots from helicopters flash onto our competitor’s broadcasts. A massive crowd was gathering outside the courthouse. The pressure was building in my newsroom to go on the air with a Special Report. I was beginning to look obstinate. I could hear the restrained frustration of the executive producer of special events as he spoke into my earpiece. Still, he did not suggest we go on the air; he knew my rule. Under the anchor desk, my heels were dug in.
The more we tried to confirm the story, the more we couldn’t. Reliable contacts, one after another, told us that all they knew was what they were seeing on TV. We never reported the arrests that we could not confirm. We did not go on the air until the FBI arranged a hasty news conference. The FBI’s special agent in charge, clearly agitated and angry, scolded reporters. There had been no arrests. He went on to say the false reporting of arrests had disrupted the biggest manhunt in Boston history. I don’t know how that rumor got started or how it mutated into reportable “fact.” But the immense pressure to “be first!” seriously damaged many reputations. I have a maxim that I often repeat around the newsroom: “If we’re first, no one will remember. If we’re wrong, no one will ever forget.”
Now, a few words on writing.
There is no such thing as good writing; there is only good rewriting. Reflection is the greatest gift writers can give themselves. Write your first draft then put it away—for an hour, a day or overnight. I guarantee when you come back to it, you will see problems you didn’t expect and opportunities you hadn’t imagined. Of course, in journalism, all depends on the deadline. At 60 Minutes, we rewrite our scripts until they’re perfect. At the CBS Evening News, we rewrite them until 6:30 p.m. Even on a tight deadline, it is often possible to write, reflect and write again. Don’t stop rewriting until your deadline makes you stop.
Reporting and writing are first and foremost about “seeing.” You can’t write about what you did not see and most of us are terrible at “seeing.” Here are a couple of exercises to practice. In your home, find twenty things you’ve never seen before. I promise you there are two thousand. Also, a few times a day, stop and ask yourself, “If I had to write about this place, or this person, or this moment, what are the unnoticed details that would bring my story to life?” For example, imagine trying to get a sense of the voters before the 2016 election as we did in our story “Ask Ohio” for 60 Minutes. When you’re in the coffee shop interviewing out-of-work steelworkers, turn the coffee cup upside down. “Made in China,” ironic. In the greasy spoon restaurant in Lorain, Ohio, notice the shops on either side of the café are boarded up. Notice the Virgin Mary standing on the shelf above the Coco Puffs. Notice the sign that reads Pull Up Your Pants! With just these observations, the reader gets a pretty good idea of what kind of place this is, who works there and who eats there. John Steinbeck called this “layering detail upon detail.” The author and journalism professor John McPhee tells his students at Princeton, “A thousand details make one impression.” In the minutia, you will find richness, texture and truth. Think about it this way: if you don’t see more than I do, why do I need your journalism?
“Seeing” is also about working equally hard to see both sides (or the many sides) of a story. You will be surprised how often a story isn’t what it seems. In my experience, stories are rarely what they seem. I’ll give you a brief example. A snowstorm engulfed a major airport. Hundreds of flights were cancelled. A local TV station received a complaint from a family who said their elderly, wheelchair-bound mother languished many hours in the terminal after she was abandoned by the airline. This narrative of outrage—elderly woman stranded by profit-pinching airline—was repeated by news organizations across the country. The airline told the station that it would investigate. But the station ran the story without the benefit of hearing the results of that investigation. Two days later, the airline had security camera video that revealed the woman had been taken by an attendant to a wheelchair waiting area in the airport. Her family picked her up forty-five minutes later. Why did the family tell the story of abandonment? Believe me, people do strange, inexplicable things. Let that be the first thing you understand as a reporter. The only way to protect yourself, the only way to protect your viewers and readers, is to dig into every side. Don’t publish until you know the whole story. Relying on one point of view is dangerous, unethical and foolish. Hold the story until you know what you’re talking about.
Now, the Great Divide. In journalism, there is breaking news copy and there is feature copy. Respect the Great Divide. If you are covering the five-alarm fire or the summit meeting between heads of state, write the news straight and unembellished. What happened? “Who, What, When, Where, Why and How” remains the trite and true method of telling a complete news story. There is art in crisp copy composed of simple declarative sentences. And please, make them sentences. In recent years a bizarre fashion has arisen, even in network news, to drop verbs. You end up with nonsense such as “President Trump, surprised by the House vote, and angry at the outcome,” or “Scientists, giddy over the result of their experiment.” The deletion of the “to be” verb—was in the first example and were in the second—is not a new style. It is illiterate. If you do not respect language, you are not a writer. If you are not a writer, you are not a reporter. The word verb is Latin for word.7 They important.
On the other side of the Great Divide lies feature writing, which is often what we do at 60 Minutes. I turn to two bits of priceless advice from Don Hewitt, the creator of the most successful prime-time television program in history.
First, “Find people who can tell the story better than we can.”
In journalism, insightful, poetic quotes are the spice in your copy. In video journalism, they are the difference between success and failure. Everyone has a story, but in my experience, only about 5 percent can tell his or her story well. Those are the people you want to interview. For our story “Hard Times Generation” about homeless children living in cars, 60 Minutes producer Nicole Young made her way through shelter after shelter, soup kitchen after soup kitchen, talking to fifty people to find the five we would interview. There are natural poets in our world, gifted storytellers. They are rare, but you can find them. Interviews are your oil paints. How much vibrancy and color do you want to work with? I, again, acknowledge the guillotine of the deadline. If you’re covering the five-alarm fire and your story goes up in fifteen minutes, you’re going to grab anyone who happens by. But if your deadline allows, remember: great characters can save a weak story, poor characters will kill a great story. “Find people who can tell the story better than we can.”
Don’s second piece of advice was simply, “Tell me a story.”
For the journalist, this directive is a powerful concept camouflaged in simplicity. If you went into Don’s corner office and said, “Don! We need to do a story on the war in Sudan,” Don would look up from the copy he was editing and say, “That’s an issue. Tell me a story.” An example is our 2008 60 Minutes story on the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan. We called it “Searching for Jacob.” Jacob was a boy in a village that had been burned down by Sudanese military forces because Jacob’s people were the “wrong” ethnic group. One of Jacob’s charred notebooks from school was in a genocide exhibit in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. We decided to try to find Jacob in the desert refugee camps bordering Darfur. We enlisted the help of an expert in the region, John Prendergast, a former National Security Council official and the founder of the “Enough Project.” Prendergast, photographer Ian Robbie, and I slipped into Darfur with the help of a militia fighting the Sudanese government. After several hours driving overland, we found Jacob’s village. Sudanese government forces and their allies left only ashes. The round thatched huts that once sheltered hundreds of families were leveled. Everyone in the village was either dead—or had fled. We camped in the desert overnight. The next morning, on the way back into neighboring Chad, the militia leader roasted a camel to celebrate our safe return. We chewed the gamey, charred dromedary with gratitude, but no one on my team felt much like celebrating after surveying the landscape of a people marked for annihilation. Ultimately, after searching the records of the United Nations refugee relief agency, we found Jacob in Chad’s Sahel Desert. He was amazed and delighted to see his notebook again. “Where did you get it?” he asked. We explained it had been part of an exhibit in a Washington museum. Jacob, who was about fifteen years old, asked if we would do him a favor. Would we take the notebook back to Washington so America could understand the atrocities devastating his people? We were glad to oblige.
Our story was about one boy, but through his struggle we were able to explain all the “issues” driving the conflict. The director Steven Spielberg makes cinematic art from this storytelling principle. He didn’t shoot a movie called D-Day. He made a movie called Saving Private Ryan. He didn’t make a film called The Holocaust. He made a film called Schindler’s List. In telling “small” stories, we illuminate titanic events.
“Tell me a story” can lead to a dramatically unique approach to breaking news. In 1963, in the days after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, every important journalist in the world had picked up his bags at National Airport and headed east, across Arlington Memorial Bridge, into Washington, DC. Jimmy Breslin, a thirty-three-year-old reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, turned west, against the prevailing traffic, to Arlington National Cemetery. There, he found Clifton Pollard, a man gnawing the earth with a backhoe. Breslin wrote:
Pollard is 42. He is a slim man with a mustache who was born in Pittsburgh and served as a private in the 352nd Engineers Battalion in Burma in World War II. He is an equipment operator, grade 10, which means he gets $3.01 an hour. One of the last to serve John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who was the 35th president of this country, was a working man who earns $3.01 an hour and said it was an honor to dig the grave.8
Find Breslin’s article in its entirety. Infer the questions Breslin must have asked to tell the story of Pollard’s day. Detail, layered upon detail. Seeing what others don’t see.
To write well, study writers. I would guide you to Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and to Coming into the Country by John McPhee. McPhee is among the best who craft nonfiction in literary style. Lucky for all of us, McPhee wrote his first book about writing in 2017. It’s called Draft No. 4. I’d say he’s lucky to get it in only four drafts, but McPhee is a vastly better writer than I am. Read for the rhythm in sentence structure in McPhee and Steinbeck. For example, in The Grapes, Steinbeck’s line “And her joy was nearly like sorrow” describes Ma’s reaction when her son, Tom, returns from prison.9 Now, make an innocuous change in the line. Notice how “And her joy was like sorrow” falls flat. The loss of the two syllables supplied by “nearly” are indispensable to the cadence. This is what Mark Twain meant when he wrote, “The difference between almost the right word and the right word is really a large matter—’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.”10 Steinbeck wrote The Grapes longhand, on a legal pad. His rhythm was timed to a washing machine he kept running in the background like a metronome. If you despair (and you will) that you were not cut out for writing, read the journal Steinbeck kept while he was writing The Grapes. This daily diary was published as Working Days. The journal exposes his self-doubt, the anxiety in his inability to realize the work he dreamed of. The Grapes, of course, won the Pulitzer Prize and helped Steinbeck win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
If you think you are writing well, you’re not trying hard enough. If you think you are writing badly, you have probably found the right path. Never give up. Journalism shares at least one attribute of poetry. Both the journalist and the poet are working to convey maximum meaning with minimum words. It’s helpful and a pleasure to read the poets. Hear their song. Feel the cadence. See how words convey meaning beyond their definitions. May I suggest Whitman, Sandburg and Yeats? That’s a start.
If you are a young journalist or student of journalism, I want you to know we need you. Your country needs you. But we need you to be good. Journalism is hard work with tough hours and far too much time away from family. The hard work comes in digging for truth, verifying facts with original sources and writing clearly and concisely on deadline. It is not for the faint of heart and not for those who just want to be famous. But, if you have fire in the belly for it, I cannot imagine a more fascinating, rewarding career. Journalism is the world’s greatest continuing education program. It is also one of those professions where values and ethics matter every day. Journalism is a vocation in which you can pursue justice and practice art.
If you are just coming out of college, or you are early in your career, I urge you to refuse to be defeated when looking for a job. The only people who don’t find work in journalism are those who quit. It is hard to get started. The rejections are going to come at you thirty to one. But remember my experience. It took four years of intense work to get CBS to hire me. I kept coming after they told me to stop. If journalism is the song in your heart and others can’t hear it, they are wrong, not you. You keep going, keep growing. Never give in. Sing the song in your heart.
Your country needs you.
I wrote earlier that there is no democracy without journalism. But there was a brief, dark moment in American history when Congress imposed government control over both Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press. The Sedition Act of 1798—promoted by Alexander Hamilton no less—was among the great blunders of the US Congress. The Act read in part:
If any person shall write, print, utter or publish...any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either House of the Congress of the United States, or the President of the United States, with intent to defame the said government, or to bring them into contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them...the hatred of the good people of the United States...then such person, being thereof convicted before any court of the United States having jurisdiction thereof, shall be punished by a fine not exceeding two thousand dollars, and by imprisonment not exceeding two years.11
Congress made it a crime for anyone to “utter” criticism of the House, Senate or the president. Not to put too fine a point on this, but consider, adjusted for inflation, $2,000 in 1798 equals more than $38,000 in 2019 and would have bankrupted a newspaper of those days. This repudiation of the First Amendment was passed by Congress and signed into law by President John Adams. There were numerous prosecutions of citizens; many went to jail. The Sedition Act was exactly the tyranny James Madison was determined to prevent when he wrote the First Amendment in our Bill of Rights:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.12
To see how Madison really felt about Freedom of the Press, look at how he described it in his original draft of the First Amendment:
The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable.13
The Sedition Act outraged Madison and Thomas Jefferson. Have a look at Madison’s rebuttal in his “Report on the Virginia Resolutions,” from 1800. Madison writes that Congress has assumed a power over a free press that is...
...expressly and positively forbidden by one of the [constitutional] amendments thereto: a power, which more than any other, ought to produce universal alarm; because it is leveled against that right of freely examining public characters and measures, and of free communication among the people thereon, which has ever been justly deemed the only effectual guardian of every other right.14
The Sedition Act figured in Adams’s defeat by Jefferson in the next election. It expired, in 1801, on the last day of the Adams administration.
What Madison meant by “press” was every American and his or her right to say what they want to say, write what they want to write, read what they want to read. Don’t be misled. Any constraint on “the press” applies to every citizen’s voice. “Enemy of the American people,” in President Trump’s phrase? We are the American people. Journalists bring vitality to the national conversation. We bridge differences, serve public safety, expose corruption, constrain power and give voice to the voiceless. As Madison might say today, Freedom of the Press is the right that guarantees all the others.
The stakes are high.
Become a journalist. We’d be proud to have you.