Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [359]
A study conducted by a group of prominent journalists, looking back on this train wreck, concluded that the media repeatedly “got ahead of the facts in its basic reporting.”
For veteran journalists who had grown up in an era when accuracy was paramount and facts had to be scrupulously double-checked before stories went to print, the new world ushered in by the Clinton-Starr reporting frenzy was unlike anything in history. Walter Cronkite, the retired anchor of CBS Evening News who had spent six decades in the business, felt that many rules of professionalism were being tossed out overnight as journalists scrambled to cover the Clinton scandal. Cronkite had grown up in Missouri and Texas, working his way up from copy boy to reporter to radio sports announcer to war correspondent for the United Press syndicate during World War II. As anchor for CBS Evening News, he had covered the U.S. space program, President Kennedy’s assassination, the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, and news around the world. His rock-solid reporting had earned him the title “the most trusted man in America.”
The dapper, mustachioed Cronkite—by this time doing work as a commentator and film producer—watched the Clinton saga unfold with bedevilment. He did not dispute that the Lewinsky story was fair game for coverage. “This is the president of the United States involved,” Cronkite acknowledged. “And therefore, the people are entitled to know peccadilloes that might have influenced the course of affairs” since these might be relevant as to “whether the president was trustworthy or not in other matters.”
Yet, as he followed the Clinton-Starr media frenzy from his summer home on Martha’s Vineyard, Cronkite detected something he had never seen in journalism before. “Far too much material was being leaked from the grand jury,” he said, “which kept the story, of course, very much alive.” The introduction of Internet news sources, fax machines, e-mails, and round-the-clock cable coverage had oversaturated the market. Moreover, the rush by journalists to post stories led to sloppy reporting. “Simply the volume of material being put out by the cable news, twenty-four-hour news organizations, and the Internet helped feed the frenzy,” Cronkite explained.
Back when Cronkite had cut his teeth in the business, under mentors like the legendary editor Gordon Kent Shearer and the famed broadcaster Edward R. Murrow, there was a journalistic credo: “Get it first, but get it right.” Now, a free-for-all in media coverage had been unleashed, composed of hundreds of cable news programs that required constant feeding and Internet gossip columnists like Matt Drudge, who trolled day and night looking for rumors and news tips that could be dumped onto the World Wide Web in raw, uncut form. The obsession with publishing stories “first” had led to the disembowelment of once-sacred journalistic tenets, in Cronkite’s view.
This was particularly ironic, he said, because the need to be first had become dramatically less important with the advent of new technology. “The rush to print was essential in the days when street sales were critical to the circulation of newspapers,” explained the veteran journalist. Cronkite began his career in the 1930s when television was non existent and newspaper boys still hawked papers on street corners. “And you could sell thousands of extra papers if your boys were on the street first with that big headline. So the rush to print was important.” By the end of the twentieth century, street sales were largely irrelevant in most locations in America. Yet journalists and broadcasters were