I remember when someone told me--I think it was my grandmother, either she or my fourth-grade Phys Ed teacher--that, if you read it in the papers, it's true. 

Well, no matter who said it, it must have had an effect on me, because sandwiched somewhere between wanting to make a living writing Beat poetry and wanting to make a living writing novels, I decided to become a reporter.

That was years ago, of course, and during the four decades or so that I struggled to make ends meet, I managed to write for most of the English newspapers in the world, as well as a few that transcribed my words into gibberish.  Throughout the hundreds of thousands of times my stories saw publication, I was never once admonished for having misquoted an interviewee, never chastised for having gotten the facts wrong, and never chided for having slanted a story.  I take no particular pride in these feats but simply call them up as rule of measure for the standard requirements for a reporter of the day.

Sadly, I see little of those requirements at work in today's press.  Today, the press has fallen on sad times, has fallen farther from the grace of accurate and unbiased reporting than ever before in this poor writer's memory.  Unfortunately for the once revered Fourth Estate, its slide into the halls of mediocrity--and worse--has not gone unnoticed.  The public, which once marveled at the integrity within the newsroom and rooted for its adherents, today sees a different press entirely.  And what a press it is.

Back in the halcyon days of accurate reporting, the mere mention of the Fourth Estate brought with it images of the squirrely but principled men (and the occasional woman) in The Front Page or the maniacally dedicated political watchdogs in All the President's Men.  It elicited images of Ed Asner in the Lou Grant Show, playing the hard-nosed but always fair city editor of the fictitious Los Angeles Tribune, a role in which Asner played Lou Grant.  It was the only dramatic series ever spun off from a situation comedy, the Mary Tyler Moore show, where Grant also played a newsman.

We respected depictions of reporters back then because they were based upon reality.  Those were the days when Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, when Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, when Mike Royko and Jimmy Breslin, Daniel Schorr and Mike Wallace and countless others dug up their own stories, double-checked the facts, wrote them up, and presented them to a grateful public anxious to learn the truth.  They truly were members of the Fourth Estate, that mythical but very real fourth branch of government whose goal was to ferret out evil and wrong-doing, by anyone, anywhere, and present it openly, accurately, and without bias or prejudice.  Today, "Fourth Estate" is more synonymous with "Fourth Violin," so deeply into oblivion has our once-illustrious press sunk in the eyes of the public.

Even more sadly, the press has no one to blame but itself.  When newsmen such as Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite use their privileged positions to espouse their personal political beliefs, how can anyone believe they are unbiased in their reporting?  When reporters routinely hit the publicity trail, hawking everything from nose spray to their own books, how can anyone conclude that they're still capable of delivering the news without personal bias? 

The two cardinal sins of journalism have remained the same since the dawn of enlightened reporting.  One is failing to get the facts straight.  The other is failing to present them without bias.  Yet, today, a quick glance at nearly any newspaper in the country shows a paper bloated with bias--in its headlines, its blurbs, its captions, and certainly in its stories. 

Television news is even worse because it is such a fluid medium.  When an electronic journalist or an anchorman slurs over a word or raises an eyebrow at a certain point in a story or even pauses too long between syllables, the story becomes slanted, and we are forced to question whether or not it actually happened.  That's a luxury that print media journalists do not enjoy.  Electronic media flies on the wind; print media is cemented to the ground forever.  Only by rerunning a television or radio newscast can we be sure that what we thought we heard or saw was, in fact, actual.

Of course, the press is little different from most of society in America today.  We live in the most litigious times in history.  When the phrase "The buck stops here" is a mere prelude to "...as soon as I can figure out how to screw somebody out of it," it's painfully obvious that everyone is looking out for himself, at any cost.  Burn yourself by spilling hot coffee on your way out of a fast-food restaurant?  Step out onto the street without looking and get hit by a bus?  Trip over a concrete curb in the supermarket parking lot?  Not to worry.  Pain is short-lived; staggering financial windfalls go on forever.

We live in a world where nothing is sacred, where immorality and moral decay run rampant, and where those who embrace them are rewarded for their acuity.  Why should we expect more from the press than we do from our own clergymen?  Why should we expect journalists to have more honesty and integrity when our own politicians are muckraking scandal-mongers?  Why should a journeyman reporter starting out at a small-town paper, earning $18,500 a year, believe that the press is sacred, that the duty of a journalist is inviolable, and that the responsibility he has to society for fair and accurate reporting is all-encompassing?   

When Stephen Glass, a New Republic writer, admitted last year in an interview on 60 Minutes that he had done wrong, he seemed happy about it.  "I lied to the people who were my co-workers and cared about me," he said.  "I lied to my family.  I lied to my editors.  I lied to all of the readers, and I lied to the people I was writing about."

Glass routinely made up stories, such as a teenage computer hacker who attended hackers' conferences.  To juice up a profile of lawyer Vernon Jordan, he falsely alleged that Jordan behaved lecherously with young women.  Later, he went on television to hawk a novel about a lying newsman, cashing in on his own lack of scruples one more time.

Earlier this year, New York Times reporter Jayson Blair committed routine acts of journalistic fraud that finally came to light only after the San Antonio Express-News alerted the Times to the fact that Blair had appropriated its story about the family of a man missing in Iraq.  He also fabricated stories about Jessica Lynch--the U.S. soldier who had been captured by the Iraqis and rescued by American special forces.

One of the most upsetting aspects of the Blair debacle is that few subjects close to his bogus stories, including Jessica Lynch's own family, bothered to complain about them to The Times, implying that the public accepts the fact that lying reporters are the norm rather than the exception. 

Meanwhile, Blair, who himself turned his history of moral repugnancy into a publishing windfall, remains totally unrepentant.  Perhaps, to him, the end does justify the means. 

Watergate tattletale Carl Bernstein, when asked how journalism has changed since he broke the story that led to Richard Nixon's resignation as president, said, "The standard for journalism used to be, `What's the best obtainable version of the truth?' Now we're living in a celebrity culture that no longer values truth more than hype.  You have to go back to what was great about the movie All the President's Men.  It was not about the characters of Bob [Woodward] and me.  There's not a woman in our lives in it; it's not about us at all.  It's about the process of good journalism: methodical, empirical, not very glamorous, hard-slogging reporting.  Now journalism is as infected by the celebrity culture as every other institution."

Of course, not all subverted journalists have come from this generation of Gen-Xers-Gone-Sour.  I recall a New Yorker magazine writer by the name of Janet Malcolm who, in 1981, attributed her own words as coming from an interview subject, psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson.  When Masson went public with it, she brushed off the resulting criticism, saying, "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice knows that what he does is morally indefensible.  He is a kind of confidence man...."

Obviously, at least, Ms. Malcolm was in touch with her inner self.

The difference between lack of journalistic ethics in 1981, when Malcolm betrayed her profession, and 2004, when Blair did, is that two decades ago, the press community was shocked.  Today, nobody thinks twice about it, unless perhaps the perpetrator, who is sorry to have gotten caught.  Yet, in a time in history when personal integrity is low, personal principles are AWOL, and morality is something rappers make fun of in poorly rhyming ditties, there is no greater need for the Fourth Estate to review its reason for existence and come to terms with the power that journalists wield.

As Daniel Schorr said, "As full disclosure, if that is needed, let me acknowledge a [personal] bias against journalists and media organizations that practice to deceive. After some 60 years in journalism, I've come to regard the reporter as one of the last guardians of reality in an age of 'virtual reality,' 'infotainment,' and contrivance."

In a Democratic society, the press, whether it likes it or not, is charged with a duty to remain faithful to the principles of fair and accurate reporting.  The Fourth Estate is and must always be the last bastion between truth and lie, accuracy and distortion, liberty and demagoguery.  We are, whether we like it or not, the reflections of a nation, the mirror into which the rest of society gazes to see just how it looks.

Unfortunately, the bastion is sagging, and the mirror is cracked.

And I ... am D. J. Herda.

D. J. Herda is President of the American Society of Authors and Writers (http://amsaw.org), an organization made up of authors, writers, editors, publishers, agents, directors, producers, and other media professionals who rely upon the printed word in the creation of quality literature and entertainment.  He is a member of the Author's Guild and a former member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors and the National Press Club.  He has published more than 80 books and several hundred thousand articles, short stories, columns, interviews, plays, and scripts.
 

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