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Laurie Garrett
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After over 15 years of distinguished reporting at Newsday, Laurie Garrett recently resigned and sent an impassioned email to her colleagues explaining her decision. In the email, Garrett despairs over both the increasing corporatization of American newsrooms and the scandal over inflated circulation numbers that has laid Newsday low. Garrett, a science and health writer who’s been awarded a Pulitzer Prize, two George W. Polk awards, and a Peabody award for outstanding broadcast journalism, is currently a Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations. Garrett began her career at KPFA, a local radio station in California, and then moved on to become a science correspondent at National Public Radio, before joining Newsday in 1988.
Thomas Lang: Do you see corporate consolidation of the media as the greatest threat to the press?
Laurie Garrett: Yes, I do. I think that it’s very hard to come up with a model for making enormous profits based on high quality news [reporting and] in-depth coverage — including coverage of boring issues.
TL: You just mentioned process, and you talk a lot about process in your email. And you talk about the newsroom and the corporate ownership. Do you think the product of journalism is any different than it was 30 years ago?
LG: Oh, definitely. Incredibly different. I knew how different it was when I was sent to cover the Persian Gulf War. The war was just ending, and I was coming out of the region and I was in Vienna, because that’s where my R&R was. One of the guys working in the hotel said, “Hey, you know what, OPEC is meeting here secretly.” And I looked around and I saw slightly hidden military personal with sub-machine guns on the rooftop and all that. I thought “Wow, OK, I’ve got to find these guys. This is huge. They are probably resetting all the pricing standards on oil in the world.” So I went hunting and hunting and couldn’t find them. We knew they were in the hotel somewhere but couldn’t find them. Then I said, “Wait a minute, do you have a room with a huge projector television?” They said, “Yeah, but its closed, it’s the bar.” I said, ” No it’s not closed, lets go.” And sure enough there was OPEC, watching CNN.
Before then we had never had a war with 24-hour news coverage. We had never had live, in-your-face, there go the bombs, the bullets, and here come the SCUDs. We had never seen a war like that before.
Fundamentally, everything changed [at] that moment. That was the second that I knew CNN was no longer going to be about really embarrassing products being advertised by Barbie dolls and Ken dolls in some funny little studio in the middle of Atlanta.
TL: What kind of impact do you think the 24-hour cycle has had on the news?
LG: I think that 24 hours was the first one. Then the next one has been the Internet. Forget 24 hours. Now it’s microseconds. You go to a Web site and watch it change right before your eyes. And the other thing that I think has changed is that index of skepticism on the part of the reader is different. It’s amazing how many people will simply accept that everything on the Internet is probably true.
TL: The reader is something I wanted to ask you about. If corporate takeovers result in the tailoring of a paper so it contains content that people want, aren’t they doing their job? Or is it the journalist’s job to get the reader back on track?
LG: Do you really think that in 1967 Americans were so fundamentally different as human beings that they wanted Walter Cronkite and the “CBS Evening News,” and they wanted Life magazine and all those amazing photographs? And they wanted their family-owned daily newspaper that was published by somebody they might even know? And today they are fundamentally different homo sapiens that only want stuff that gets shouted at them, that has gory, graphic, violent details? [That they want programming] that tells you the inner lives of people whose only claim to fame is a reality TV show? Do you really think that fundamentally there was something different in 1967 that made it so that people who were watching Cronkite had a different hunger for valid information than people today? I don’t. I just think that everybody is playing to the lowest common denominator. I think everybody is playing to catchy headlines.
How old are you?
TL: Twenty-four.
LG: See, I took a wild guess. All of this is driven by what certain executives in boardrooms think people in your age group want. How insulting is that? They have decided that your generation is a bunch of goddam idiots. That all you want is stuff you can completely absorb in 30 seconds, max. That you have no attention span, that you much more interested in form than content. That you are multi-tasking right and left so that you are never absorbing information from one source at a time, you’re always focusing your brain on your iPod and TV at the same time, and so forth.
Do you accept that description of your generation?
TL: I don’t, personally.
LG: I think it is as crass as the decision … I was more upset about the Super Bowl last year than Janet showing her breast. It was everything that led up to before she showed her breast. [There was] a performer, a rap singer, who spent the whole time holding his crotch and spent the whole time bumping and grinding at the camera. We’ve just descended into a commodity fetishism that makes information a commodity in the extreme. Sometimes I really can’t tell where the TV show I’m watching stops and the commercial begins.
TL: You wrote that the decline of journalism has had a negative effect on the “American psyche.” And you just said that people in 1967 wanted one thing and people today accept another thing as news. What do you think started the decline or transformation?
LG: I don’t think it was one thing. I think it’s been a long, cumulative erosion. For sure, there has been a fundamental difference in a whole range of product lines, not just news as a product, but your pharmaceuticals, your clothing, your cars, everything as we’ve shifted from family-owned businesses, including huge Fortune 500 family-owned businesses, to corporate monopolies that control huge ranges of different kind of companies that are characterized by having a whole lot in common with each other. The huge book that is about to hit the newsstands is Disney Wars. I’ve just been scanning through it, and it’s clear that as Michael Eisner wanted to devour more and more and more of a range of different kinds of companies, the overall fundamental core mission of Disney and the identity of the Disney brand began to dilute. It became less and less about the vision the Disney family had about what this company would be about. It became more about a kind of vague all-over-the place vision, or lack thereof, that Michael Eisner had.
And I think that when a company [whose] core mission is the generation of electricity and utilities and the manufacture of electronics takes over NBC News, then it’s a different newscast. When Disney takes over ABC News, it’s a different newscast. When people at ABC News get rewarded for excellence with little pins with Mickey Mouse on it, then it’s a different newscast. And that’s not a joke. It’s true.
TL: Because of that, do you think that journalism is failing in its basic mission to inform people?
LG: Yeah. It could be argued that we are in a transitional time. I’ve heard some people make the parallel to the all-print and telegraph era and the rise of radio. I’ve been told that when radio first appeared and there was radio news, there were many people who thought it was an abomination — how could people absorb information when they just kind of heard it go past them sounding like so much gossip, and blah, blah, blah? Certainly, today no one would say that about NPR or BBC News. So maybe it could be argued that we are some kind of transition into something that will make the Internet a more sophisticated enterprise, [how] the whole notion of how one acquires and uses information changed and that it will somehow be better. I don’t see the evidence that we are moving to something better. But I could be wrong. I’m willing to concede that this could be a transitional time.
What I can say is that I have been overseas in repressive countries and repressive societies and seen the tremendous positive impact CNN, BBC World News and the Internet have had on those societies, how much more difficult it is for leaders to lie to their people. That is fabulous. And I would never advocate rolling back the clock on any of that.
TL: In your email to your Newsday colleagues you discuss the problem that the “blue collar” journalists of old have been fully replaced by white collars in America’s newsrooms, where “everybody has college degrees.” What exactly is wrong with that?
LG: On the one hand, the really good thing is now we have people working in newsrooms who know how to crunch statistical data, who are very good at doing database searching, who understand principles of economics. They have some language skills. All of that is great. Believe me, as somebody who has graduate degrees, I’m not opposed to college education.
But what we’ve completely lost from most newsrooms is that street smart ability to walk right up to a cop, as a cop beat reporter, and talk like someone from the same background. Someone who perhaps has a brother or a sister who is a cop. Someone who can work with steel workers and not be condescending about it. We just don’t have a whole lot of those people.
First of all, almost everybody has dropped labor as a beat. We’ve dropped the whole notion of unions as something that deserves close coverage from the media entirely. … A colleague of mine that used to be at Newsday and is now at Time magazine described this by saying that she had grown up in a working-class Irish-American family in Brooklyn. All of her brothers and sisters were either cops or firefighters or nurses. And she was the one that they all thought was an oddball because she was a writer. She said there came a day in the newsroom when a little light bulb went off in her head and she suddenly understood why fundamentally she was always disagreeing with other reporters and editors and had a different instinct about where to go with a specific story. And it was because one of them said in the newsroom, “How could anybody be a working stiff and a Republican?” And she realized that she had certainly grown up around working-stiff Republicans and here was a newsroom full of people who absolutely couldn’t comprehend how any one individual could put those two ways of thinking together. Which meant that, of course, they couldn’t understand who elected George Bush. They couldn’t understand how the Republican Party fundamentally transformed itself. And it was part-and-parcel of not having grown up among people who were hard-working stiffs but might have ideas and ways of looking at the world that you disagreed with.
The other thing is, how in the world could Jayson Blair have gotten away with so much of the crap he got away with if he’d been working at a newspaper full of working stiffs? They would have spotted the stereotypes in those stories a mile away. When he starts talking about the family in [West Virginia] where Jessica Lynch [was from] it read right out of Li’l Abner like, “Across the holler where the opossum are running.” I just don’t think that people who come from working-stiff families and backgrounds would have read that and thought that that rang true.
I don’t want you to misunderstand. I don’t come from that class background myself. I grew up in a nice comfortable middle class family. My parents were college-educated. I was college-educated. All my siblings were college-educated. What I am saying is that having none of that — having a newsroom that has completely shifted to one of these smart-ass things — I think one of the reasons that Clinton had a very hard time as President of the United States was that he was about the same age and with a similar educational background as the White House press corps. And they all thought they were smarter than him. They behaved, in terms of decorum in the White House press [room], in ways that no one ever would have dreamed of behaving for Eisenhower or Kennedy or even LBJ. It was a weird situation. I remember being there — I was occasionally on stories where I would be part of the White House press briefings — and I remember being down there in the basement and thinking that I was kind of shocked that everyone talked as if they could be the leader of the free world — second-guessing every decision made by the White House in a way that I often didn’t hear people saying about Giuliani in the City Hall press office in New York.
TL: If your were the top dog at Newsday, under pressure from Tribune Co. [to cut costs and grow revenue], how would you handle it? What would you cut back on? What would you move the paper towards? What suggestions do you have?
LG: The thing is that they have already cut so much. They’ve cut it to the bone. There is bone marrow showing. There is not much you could cut.
TL: All right then, how would you handle it?
LG: The first problem that I think current leadership is very well aware of is morale. You’ve just taken a very talented group of human beings and devalued them. They were first devalued by prior leadership that lied and cheated and committed illegal acts that degraded the whole enterprise by lying about circulation. So institutionally, everybody has to go down because of these jerks. That’s the first step.
Then the new leadership comes in and they were forced to lay off still further people or [force] buyouts. They had layoffs in other sectors of the building that were not nice sweet buyouts, but armed guards marching in and saying you have five minutes to get out. … For a year, I worked in a computer graveyard where there were three or four of us on the entire floor surrounded by the detritus of our [former] colleagues. They still had family photos on their desks and dust-covered computers and files. It was so depressing.
Institutionally and individually, everybody at Newsday has been in a state of shell shock for a long time. So step one is to try to revitalize the core mission to get people to believe that there is actually a sense of value for their work and their talent and their skill set as individuals and as a group. I don’t think that you can begin to go any further and really come up with a vision of how to bring back real journalism if you can’t first conquer that morale problem. It’s very serious.
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