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Friday, May 24, 2002
Stop the Presses
"Every journalist ... knows that what he does is morally indefensible." -- Janet Malcolm
Whenever a reporter calls to speak with me, I try to keep in mind the wisdom once dispensed by that great American philosopher Charles Barkley. Besieged by questions about a rumored relationship with Madonna, supposedly verified as a fact by various newspapers and magazines, Barkley said simply, "The one thing you have to know about reporters is that they're not your friends."
Now, taken in a certain sense, this is not a criticism but a recognition of the job reporters are pledged to do. They are pledged to report the truth about matters of interest to the public. They are not pledged to be nice to you, or to take your side in a controversy, or to rehearse every little nuance of your argument. But Barkley intends something harsher and darker: Reporters are not only not your friends, they are your enemies, for they like nothing better than to catch you up, embarrass you, and make you out to be either a fool or a knave.
To be sure, they are also after the truth, but in the context of any story there are many truths one might focus on, and the truths reporters favor are always those that have the potential of making someone look bad. Just the other day, a friend told me about a story concerning a bankruptcy that had left a bunch of would-be homeowners in the lurch with the houses they had contracted for unbuilt and the down payments drawn from their life savings gone with the wind. My friend, who had a professional connection with the situation, was interviewed by a reporter who asked him if he suspected fraud. He said, no. Later, in a happy turn of events, a bank took over the project and guaranteed the completion of construction at no additional cost to those whose dreams had apparently gone down the drain. Excited, my friend called the reporter back to tell her the good news, certain that she would want to relay it to her readers. She asked, Did you find any fraud? No dirty linen, no story, and certainly no interest in a story that had turned out well.
In short, reporters will be sniffing around you only if they think that something smells, and if a first pass reveals nothing untoward, they'll keep digging until some juicy bit of dirt is uncovered. This wouldn't be so bad if they themselves were truthful about their motives and intentions, but in fact they come at you in the guise of the friends Barkley warns you they are not. This is easy to do when your marks are academics, for academics are suckers for anyone who says the magic words: "Tell me about your work."
This is just what David Brooks, then with The Wall Street Journal, said to several of my colleagues in the Duke English department. They obligingly poured out their little hearts to him, rehearsing in great detail their contributions to the brave new world of advanced literary studies. In February 1988, they were rewarded with a classic hatchet-job headlined "From Western Lit to Westerns As Lit," a nice piece of muckraking that was soon picked up by Bill Bennett, at the time U.S. secretary of education, and recirculated in a number of right-wing journals then fighting the good fight of the culture wars.
My colleagues were naïve enough to feel betrayed, and I was naïve enough to call Brooks up and invite him to the campus, sure that as soon as he saw how sincere and dedicated we were he would write another, kinder story. He politely declined, and probably laughed when he recounted the tale to his friends at the Heritage Foundation. We found out what the game was a little later when another writer from a major newspaper did in fact visit the campus and told the provost who spoke with her that he needn't provide her with a whole lot of information since she already knew what she was going to write.
Not all reporters come at you with an ideological agenda. In some cases the agenda is more personal. This is certainly true of those higher-education beat reporters who either washed out of graduate school, or got the Ph.D. but never got a job, or got a job but it didn't work out. Like Milton, who always felt that he had been "church-outed by the Prelates," these would-be or failed academics spend much of their lives trying to prove that they were too good for the institution that could not find a place for them. They love to write stories showing the foolishness that has taken over the academy since they were excluded from it. They love to paint a picture of education having gone astray, of overpriced professors worshiping false foreign (usually French) gods, of students betrayed when their teachers forsake the "basics" in favor of texts that are studied only because they were written by someone who has been oppressed. And they love to write that story again and again, living out a compulsion for repetition that has its source in a trauma they cannot leave behind.
Of course there are many higher-education reporters who have neither a political ax to grind nor a personal score to settle, but still beat up on you nevertheless. What's their problem? Their problem is the profession they practice, a profession that pays lip service to accuracy and in-depth reporting but more often than not performs ignorance and superficiality. A university is a complex entity that does not yield up its mysteries to casual observation. Yet nothing is more common for a dean than to spend hours answering questions posed by someone who hasn't the slightest idea of how a university works and who seems to regard that lack of knowledge as a point of pride and even a professional qualification.
Typically reporters understand nothing of the tenure and promotion process, but they are certain it is unfair and operates at the expense of students. They understand even less of the budget, but they are certain that money is being squandered or misspent on nonessential frills. They have no acquaintance at all with the latest theories in any field, but they know they are faddish and a waste of taxpayers' money. They have no sense at all of what it takes to prepare and teach a course, but they are confident that they could teach at least six in any semester.
Of course you know better, and you are more than willing to explain everything for as long as it takes -- that, after all, is what you do for a living -- but no matter how many notes they take and how many times they nod, when the story appears it will be the same one written two years ago by the last smiler-with-the knife who sat down and said, "Tell me about your work."
What to do? I always turn for advice to a book that came my way when I was deciding whether to become a dean, Frederic Ness's An Uncertain Glory: Letters Of Cautious But Sound Advice To Stanley, A Dean-In-Waiting, From C.F. Coltswood, A President-At-Large (Jossey-Bass, 1971). (No, I'm not making this up.) Ness, through Coltswood, tells Stanley that if he is lucky, the media will ignore him, but that is unlikely, "now that education is not only our national religion, but our principal spectator sport." The best thing then, according to Ness/Coltswood, is to put a buffer between you and the press and hope that you never get cornered alone:
"... get a good PR man and let him handle the whole affair. Never speak directly to a reporter unless he has been cleared through the PR man or unless the latter is present. Never seek personally to correct a misquotation, and never answer any challenge."
Good advice, but as Ness/Coltswood goes on to say, you can follow it and still not be safe because "there will be times when you will be caught napping or off guard," and then you'd better "pray that your reporter had a good night's sleep," for if he or she has not, "you may not have one either."
But of course the real problem with the advice to Stanley is that Stanley may not want to take it, because underneath it all what he really wants is to be understood and admired and celebrated, and so he always thinks that if he can talk to the reporter for just one more hour (a recipe for certain disaster) the virtue and wisdom of what he is trying to do will become so dazzlingly clear that no one could fail to be persuaded of it.
At one point in his great Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton remarks on the fact that even though men experience only madness, disappointment, and chaos in this life, they nevertheless keep on going. He asks why, and answers that it is so with men that no matter how many bad herrings they have eaten they continue to hope that the very next barrel will yield up better herring. I guess I'll keep opening that next barrel, even against the odds.
Stanley Fish, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, writes a monthly column for the Career Network on campus politics and academic careers. His most recent book is How Milton Works (Harvard University Press, 2001).
Copyright © 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
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