A few weeks ago, I listened to one of Vladimir Putin’s advisers complaining that many of his country’s journalists “were far from being of very high quality”. He added, in an aside meant to flatter his western listeners, that “your journalists are probably more honest than ours”. His comments struck me as a clear attack on the very idea of a free press. But to my astonishment, a couple of the billionaire American businessmen in attendance murmured sympathetically that, in fact, many western journalists were little better than the low- quality Russian variety.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, Barbara Amiel, recently caught in an elevator with a couple of reporters in the Chicago courthouse where her husband Conrad Black is on trial, snarlingly described them as “vermin”.
Part of the problem, as a Wall Street banker admitted to me, is that many people aren’t satisfied with the “fair” coverage that is our ostensible collective goal. What he actually wanted, he had the candor to confess, is “good” coverage – which is quite a different thing. It is also often true that, as my high school English teacher informed us when teaching Macbeth: “Evil always fascinates, but goodness rarely entertains.” In the late 1990s, Mikhail Berger, a Russian editor and friend who was struggling with that decade’s challenge of finding a space to operate between the oligarchs and the state, made a similar point. Newspapers, he told me, were essentially “factories of dirt”.
He meant it in a good way. Indeed, many of the precious moments when journalism rises from being a job and a service to being a calling and a civic good involve this risky kind of reporting. Consider, for example, one of my heroes, Natalia Dmytruk, the sign language interpreter who broke state censorship of the main TV channels in Ukraine when she abruptly deviated from the official script and, in sign language, said that everything the government was saying about the Orange Revolution was a lie. That kind of journalism takes great courage: had events turned out differently, she risked not just her job, but her life. She had one luxury though – the ethics of her action were clear.
In free societies, things aren’t always so black and white. The privacy debate in Britain, made more salient by the tragic fall of Lord Browne, is one example. Another is the rise of hard-hitting celebrity journalism in the US. As a display of the reporter’s craft, it is clearly superior to the sycophantic coverage it is outselling on the news-stand. But does it provide the social benefits associated with a free press?
The waters have been further muddied by rising income inequality. In post-Watergate America, reporters came to occupy a privileged place in society. Even as we prided ourselves on our mission of afflicting the comfortable, we were offered a seat at their table. David Brooks described this social position as one of status-income disequilibrium. Reporters earned less than many of their professional subjects and peers, but they enjoyed a higher profile and prestige.
Recently though, with the soaring rewards going to the best and brightest in the financial services, the disparity has increased. As columnist Daniel Gross pointed out on Slate, “the economics of the business” have made journalists downwardly mobile. Gross didn’t want sympathy: “We New York-area journalists shouldn’t ask for pity and we don’t deserve it.” He did contend, however, that reporters’ changing status might affect their work, pointing in particular to the “nose-pressed-to-the-glass quality” of much of the coverage of the super-rewards of the new economic order. This shift hasn’t escaped the plutocrats themselves: fund manager Larry Fink recently told the FT that part of the reason executive pay is under fire is that “a lot of people in the media make a lot less money”.
Reporters aren’t the only educated Americans fretting that they may slip down the social totem pole. Princeton economist Alan Blinder has identified some of the professions we once thought were guarantees of the good life – including mathematics, financial analysis, even economics – as potentially “offshorable”. As he pointed out in an interview with the Wall Street Journal: “This is something factory workers have understood for a generation … it’s now coming down on the heads of highly educated, politically vocal people and they’re not going to take it.”
It is a truism that an economic slowdown becomes a recession only when someone a reporter knows gets laid off. In this moment of unprecedented prosperity, the dynamics are more subtle. In a further twist, many of the barons of our new gilded age have taken a fancy to newspapers. Hank Greenberg, Jack Welch, David Geffen, Ron Burkle and Eli Broad have all said they would like to own one. Sam Zell already does. And Rupert Murdoch this week made a “big, generous” bid to extend his reach into one of American journalism’s holiest of holies, the Wall Street Journal.
Particularly when you work in an undervalued sector, there is something flattering about being wooed by a billionaire. Let’s just hope that the growing class divide between journalists and these new moguls doesn’t end in the sort of antipathy the wife of an earlier businessman-turned-media-magnate expressed so clearly in that Chicago courthouse.
Chrystia Freeland is the FT’s US managing editor
chrystia.freeland@ft.com
