Kevin M. Lerner
Volu
me 35, No.
Summer 2018
Kevin Lerner is the author of “The Accidental Press Critic: Newsroom Ethnography and Resistance to Self-Criticism and Management Change at the New York Times in 1974.” In an interview with Editorial Assistant Virginia Harrison, he discusses his research for the article and the practice of press self-criticism.
Why is newsroom ethnography a particularly effective way to understand and critique the press?
One of the things that I have found most interesting about scholarship of journalism has been that in the academy, journalism is a topic, and not a discipline. My dissertation adviser was trained as a historian. Two other members of my committee were trained in more social science–leaning programs. Journalism scholars can be found in English or cultural studies departments and commonly in schools of journalism, where the focus is primarily on training professionals in the practice of journalism itself. So while there is a field of Journalism Studies, there is not one widely accepted approach for how to study that practice.
For many years, the techniques of sociology seemed to dominate, largely because of the perceived influence of mass media on broad swaths of the public. There was a surge in newsroom ethnography in the 1970s though, producing still-useful work such as Gaye Tuchman’s Making News, Herbert Gans’s Deciding What’s News, and Mark Fishman’s Manufacturing the News. More recently, works including Nikki Usher’s Making News at the New York Times, and Chris Anderson’s Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age have revived this tradition. My friend Joy Jenkins has begun to extend this work to the ethnography of magazine offices as well.
The real benefit of such studies is that they provide insight into how journalism works as a cultural practice, and how the news report itself is constructed by the unique cultures of these newsrooms. As anyone who has worked for more than one journalistic organization can tell you, these newsrooms share particular beliefs and norms about how news work functions and its role in society—but they can also be vastly different from one another. With ethnography, a scholar can become a disinterested observer of these newsroom cultures, explicating how a group of working journalists exchanges ideas to produce the news—which is not somehow a purely objective report on reality, but a constructed product that reflects myriad decisions by multiple people working in concert.
Ethnography allows us a window into this process, and a different view of the news than one can get from surveys of news consumers or scholarship that looks at the news report as a text. The method appeals to me both as a former journalist and as a historian. There are similarities to journalism in that you are reporting on what you observe, and often conducting interviews with your participants. There are similarities to historical work in that you are seeing things on a micro level, the specific decisions and actions that led to specific outcomes. Only instead of reconstructing those decisions through documentary evidence, the ethnographer is observing the processes first hand.
What is the legacy of Chris Argyris’ work in the practice of journalism?
Until now, Chris Argyris has not had much of a legacy in the practice or the study of journalism, though with this study, I am attempting to bring his work into the conversation in a larger way. Michael Socolow has used Argyris’s book Behind the Front Page to tell the story of the creation of The New York Times Op-Ed page, which Argyris coincidentally documented in the book. But otherwise, his work has largely been ignored. This has likely been because Behind the Front Page attempted to disguise the fact that it was really a study of the Times. Argyris agreed to mask the paper’s identity and that of the editors and managers he observed and interviewed to write it as a condition of getting the extraordinary access to the newspaper that he did.
Argyris had almost completely unrestricted access to executives, editorial staff, and even most meetings during the time that he studied the paper, but the resulting book never explicitly names the Times, or any of the people he writes about. This makes the book frustratingly difficult to read, since you have to deal with remembering who “Mr. R” is, vs. “Mr. Q.” One executive was so paranoid that he asked Argyris to use one letter to identify him in the first half of the book, and a different letter in the second half.
But Behind the Front Page should have a stronger legacy. Once it has been “decoded,” it provides perhaps the most explicit, clinical view of the managerial and even cultural wars that were raging inside The New York Times in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as Ivy League-educated young reporters who had known members of Students for a Democratic Society in college butted heads with editors who had gone to, say, City College, and adhered to an earlier model of journalistic objectivity and decorum that these younger reporters were beginning to see as antiquated.
The former Times reporter turned magazine New Journalist Gay Talese had told some of this story in a journalistic way in his book The Kingdom and the Power, but Argyris did it with scholarly rigor and footnotes. As the title of my paper suggests, Argyris stumbled into the role of press critic by writing this book, which he intended as a study of management practices, and by doing so, he exposed that while newspapers made it their duty to criticize all of the other institutions of a representative democracy, they were not very good at letting themselves be criticized, or in criticizing themselves.
How have newspapers incorporated the concept of self-critique, if at all? What do you think would be the impact if they did?
Around the time that Chris Argyris was studying The New York Times, newspapers were experimenting with the idea of bringing on ombudsmen, in-house staff members whose job was to mediate between the papers and readers. The Louisville Courier-Journal seems to be the first paper to do so, and The Washington Post followed them in the 1970s. Some of these have been quite successful, but The New York Times was resistant to the idea of having any kind of public-facing self-criticism until after the Jayson Blair incident, when a reporter was discovered to have fabricated or plagiarized parts of at least a half dozen stories. This prompted the Times to launch its Public Editor position in 2003, setting up a position where a journalist from outside the paper would be hired on a fixed-term contract and given a regular column and space on the paper’s website to write about whatever he or she wanted to, with editing only for style. The writers who held this role had varying degrees of success, with Margaret Sullivan widely deemed to be the best at the role. In 2017 however, the Times fired its last Public Editor, Liz Spayd, and ended the role, instead relying on something it called the Reader Center to handle complaints. When the Times ran a profile of a white supremacist later that year however, critics lamented the loss of the Public Editor. The Post also ended its ombudsman position in 2013, citing budgetary concerns, but keeps two press critics on staff—one of whom is Margaret Sullivan.
So newspapers (and other news organizations) have not been particularly good at establishing institutions of public-facing self-criticism, perhaps because they worry that an ongoing conversation about things they could have done better might lower their credibility (though it could easily be argued that institutions that criticize themselves have a higher level of credibility). In the last four decades however, there are some external signs that these news organizations are at least having internal discussions about how they practice their journalism.
The Times has changed dramatically in the kind of news report that it presents, and has invested quite a bit of money in experimenting with new forms of news gathering and delivery, adapting to technological changes brought about by the internet, social media, and podcasting. And there are signs that the paper is open to having greater transparency in revealing its processes. But without more scholarship of the kind that Argyris (and more recently, Usher) have done, it’s impossible to know whether this is a turn toward institutional self-criticism, or, more likely, changes necessitated by technological change and the erosion of the traditional newspaper business model.
If news organizations did examine themselves (and each other) with the level of scrutiny they give to the other institutions of democracy, the effects would only be to the good. As the scholar James W. Carey pointed out in an essay that came out the same year as Argyris’s book, critics in the popular press spend far more time thinking about and more words writing about films and music and literature than they do thinking about journalism as a genre—and yet we consume as much journalism as we do literature, and probably far more. A systematic practice of criticism, both internal and external to news organizations, will help to keep them healthy. Much more of this has occurred since the 2016 election than it did immediately previous to that event, it should be noted. It was hard for the American press as an institution to ignore the fact that it had misread the mood of the country, and this led to much soul searching. But Carey and I would both argue that this kind of criticism must be systematic, ongoing, and self-perpetuating, and not reliant on a political moment of reckoning or on facing the prospect of immediate economic collapse.
How can Wyatt’s discursive model of press criticism help news outlets today address attacks on media credibility and the rise of fake news?
Wyatt’s discursive model of press criticism is really more about understanding how press criticism works as a discourse, an ongoing conversation among an interested public, rather than being a tool that the news organizations themselves would use. But for a good, self-aware newsroom, an understanding of how criticism affects an organization would be essential for establishing the practices of openness and dialogue that can help to increase trust in that organization. Wyatt’s model envisions three tiers of criticism: on the outside, an interested public who care about the quality of news that a given news organization or the press ecosystem more generally. In the middle, Wyatt proposes a layer of professional critics who have knowledge of the interested public’s needs and desires on one hand, and the processes of news work on the other, so that they can effectively communicate with both of the other layers. And in the middle of her model, Wyatt places the news organizations themselves, engaging in internal discussions about policy or coverage.
News organizations need to be aware that they are participating in that ecosystem for any of the other layers to have an effect on performance. So self-awareness is key. In the face of attacks calling them “fake news,” these newsrooms should respond with complete transparency of their process, accepting reasonable suggestions for alteration of their practices, and calmly explaining why other proposals won’t work for them. And in a best case scenario, they will engage in real self-reflection. It’s not a perfect process by any means; it’s a human process. But by acknowledging their own role as collections of human beings making human decisions—and not acting as if they are infallible, omniscient institutions—they should gain back some measure of trust from a reasonable public.
What are some additional resources for people who want to learn more about Behind the Front Page and the history of the New York Times?
I originally came across the Argyris story while working on my dissertation, and now my first book, which is a history of the 1970s journalism review (MORE). Copies of (MORE) are difficult to find, partially because its name was clearly thought up before anyone was concerned about looking it up in a database. In the November 1974 issue, a New York University journalism professor named David Rubin (now Dean Emeritus of the Newhouse School at Syracuse University) “decoded” a section of the book and published excerpts from the book, as well as an accompanying article. The book itself is also available in academic libraries, and can be found in online used book stores.
Gay Talese’s The Kingdom and the Power is still entertaining to read, but it’s frustrating for scholars because it has no citations and very few attributions. Susan Tifft and Alex Jones’s The Trust is a good one-volume history of the Times, and there are several memoirs by “Timesmen” (as they were called) of that era. Max Frankel and Harrison Salisbury come to mind. And while it is specific to the publication of the Pentagon Papers (which Argyris decidedly did not have access to), former New York Times attorney James Goodale’s Fighting for the Press gives a good portrait of the role that the Times saw itself as fulfilling in that era.