THESE BOOKS are fairly accurate accounts of what they describe, but they constitute a thousand pages of overblown prose about people who don’t deserve the attention, and institutions that are very fallible sacred cows. The Times and Post titles are essentially snapshots of a moment in the lives of those properties, where the Journal book at least describes a takeover, albeit a friendly one. But they are exercises in journalistic narcissism, to the point that the mundane is exalted, the twitches and ticks of the media leadership are thought implicitly to be newsworthy and interesting, and the whole function is implied to be in safe hands and running smoothly, serving the nation and the world conscientiously. None of that is true.

The media are threatened not only by technological changes but also by the public’s disillusionment with them as a reliable source of news. In fact, it does go back to Kay Graham and the Watergate affair, because it was those decades ago that the press began to celebrate itself while slowly losing the faith of its readership until there was little left but angry partisan personalities squawking from rooftops. The Washington Post book’s blind and mute acceptance of the Watergate myth makes the deficiencies of the media’s own self-image abundantly clear. The media’s treatment of Vietnam and Watergate was irresponsible—because a war was needlessly lost and a president unjustly chased from office—no matter, the media so riotously continues to celebrate these events as its finest modern hours.

The Washington Post and New York Times, in particular, enjoyed a reverent trust that is such an important part of the Talese and Kindred books. Their influence, as opposed to their efficacy as a source of ordinary information and advertising, suffered an almost-mortal wound in public esteem, as did almost all those that urged the desertion of South Vietnam and led the lynch mob against Richard Nixon, published the Pentagon Papers, and then, after the destruction of the Nixon presidency and the defeat of the United States in Vietnam, showered themselves with awards and claimed credit for the salvation of constitutional democracy.

The mythmaking only ended with the Nixon character assassination (in which, it must be said, he effectively and inexplicably participated himself by his mismanagement of the problem). That was preceded by a whitewashing of John F. Kennedy, naturally assisted by the horrible nature of his death and the great dignity with which his wife and family bore the tragedy.

The happy and unthinking foot soldiers of the lore, such as David Kindred, repeat like boot-camp marchers the mantra of the Washington Post’s triumph in destroying one of the most successful presidencies in the country’s history (with such domestic achievements as the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency, the end of school segregation and avoidance of interdistrict school busing, the cessation of the draft and the decline of the crime rate, and the famous foreign-policy successes of China, arms control, Vietnam, détente and the Middle East).

The quality of news reporting has deteriorated steadily for decades. Walter Lippmann really was an icon for whose opinion people waited before deciding how to vote. Scores of millions watched Walter Cronkite administer his friendly moustache (a little like Vichy Chief of State Marshal Pétain’s for the French, though his was white), with his country-doctor bedside manner of imparting the news, and appreciated the crisp authority with which fellow newscasters Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, Howard K. Smith, Frank Reynolds and E. P. Morgan acquitted the same task. Now we have pretty female and male talking heads describing freakish but supposedly heartwarming human-interest divertissements and earnestly giving family medical alerts. At the height of the controversy over the proposed downtown mosque in Manhattan, the admirable Diane Sawyer opened with an item about an assault on a Muslim New York taxi driver. This isn’t national news at all, and the function of telling the real news has been largely wrenched from the hands that formerly held it.

A large part of the country does not trust the industry now, and the news-delivering credibility of the old media has sharply declined, whether the Kool-Aid-drinking devotees of Washingtonpost.com see it or not.

The news media can regain credibility if they cease to make exaggerated claims of virtue and increasingly focus on quality and fairness of reporting. The tabloidization of network newscasts and the intrusion into comment of strident vulgarizers and ideologues will diminish if the national media moderate their relentless elitist liberalism. Their from-on-high perch, a poor condition in and of itself, creates a reaction that divides the market and popular opinion along stark ideological lines, shrinking the traditional center. It coarsens and envenoms public discussion, and it will not cease until the public sickens of it and cultural warriors rediscover the virtues of civility. The New York Times and the Washington Post should mend their ways, not least their endless claims to the status of national redeemers. But they are not traitors and should not be branded as un-American by their accusers.

As print media evolve into a twenty-four-hour product, edited to suit the preferences of individual subscribers, those who play it down the center, where the majority of Americans always are, and behave professionally, will prevail. Costs will be transferred to the subscriber and reduced to an Internet signal as readers print out their own individualized newspapers on more sophisticated home printers than we have now. Exclusive draws among writers, joined by editing and rewrite teams, will build out under the familiar and respected trademarks of great broadsheets. Somewhere along these lines lies the future.

The romantic nostalgia and hushed reverence of the authors reviewed above will become steadily less relevant to what will be a fierce struggle for survival, though all three of those great titles should be among the living, especially the Wall Street Journal if a man of the seventy-nine-year-old Murdoch’s cunning and determination can hang on usefully for another decade.

 

Conrad Black is a writer and former newspaper publisher whose most recent book is Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full (PublicAffairs, 2007). He is publisher emeritus of The National Interest.

Image: Essay Types: Book Review