We journalists must be puzzling creatures to the rest of the world. We adore “The Front Page” and “Scoop,” which present us as lazy, unprincipled, and hopelessly in thrall to bogus information. Hildy Johnson befriends a murder suspect who’s escaped from jail and hides him inside a rolltop desk in the newsroom, so that nobody else can get an interview with him—great! William Boot gets an exclusive on a coup in the nation of Ishmaelia because the rest of the press pack has left town on some reportorial fools’ errand, and Boot was so hapless that he couldn’t manage to join them—love it!
But, if journalists enjoy being raffish and self-mocking, what explains our equally powerful inclination (especially in the United States) to bang on portentously about the Founders, the First Amendment, the Fourth Estate, and the people’s right to know? Are journalists lovable rogues or human-rights crusaders? Or people who have granted themselves the right to switch between these two identities on a whim?
One can sense the Murdoch press, now minus one large-circulation outlet but otherwise going strong, descending into self-pity about the phone-hacking scandal, even as its public statements are alternately contrite and defiant. News Corporation belongs to a region of the press that likes to think of itself as sitting comfortably and unpretentiously within the “Front Page”/“Scoop” tradition, in closer touch with public tastes than with establishment ones, and resistant to the self-regard that defines the broadsheet culture. There’s a palpable suspicion, within the corporation, that the outrage over the scandal is a cover for ideological enmity and commercial rivalry.
Is there anything to this not quite openly made argument? The answer is related to two issues that correspond to the two halves of the journalistic soul, the scamp and the saint. The first is whether the phone-hacking scandal represents a notably egregious type of press misbehavior, rather than the usual naughtiness. The second is whether violating ordinary boundaries of decent behavior in search of big stories actually has a redemptive public-interest aspect.
The first question is easy: yes! The phone-hacking case that set off the scandal took place within a newsroom culture (and possibly a company culture) in which technologically abetted intrusions on people’s privacy had become about as commonplace as a reporter’s notebook. It’s also—sorry to sound prissy—not O.K. to bribe police and other public officials to serve as unofficial collaborators. Equally repellent is the Mafia-like ecosystem supporting News of the World-style journalism, in which even the highest politicians feel that they will suffer grave personal consequences if they fail to feed the hungry monster. The charm of the journalists in “The Front Page,” it’s worth remembering, had to do with their functioning, for all their gruff cynicism, as a force for good in society—exposing bribery, not engaging in it, and helping to exonerate the falsely accused, not sullying the innocent.
But then things get more complicated. Reporters have a powerful need, as unstoppable as the survival instinct, to make public things that aren’t. Almost every interview contains at least a few nosy questions. Every office encounter includes a furtive glance at the papers left out on a desk. The exchange of anonymity in return for non-public information is a core transaction: it isn’t financial bribery, but it’s definitely a trade of items of value, especially when the leak is to the tactical advantage of the leaker. When journalists don’t relentlessly push for disclosure, they’re condemned as poodles of the powerful, but the process of pushing, in its daily reality, resembles any other functioning marketplace—not so exalted as after-dinner speeches make it sound.
It’s hard to argue that the press (which is, in the Internet age, an increasingly difficult entity to define) has a perpetual trump card when it comes to deciding what deserves to be made public. Certainly, the phone-hacking scandal demonstrates the absurdity of such absolutism. Information pluralism is better viewed as akin to political pluralism: just as it’s healthy in the aggregate for squabbling politicians to duke it out unprettily in Congress, it’s good for society to have the press and other entities, especially government, battle over how much should be public. The press’s case for itself is always stronger when applied to matters of public importance. WikiLeaks (which the columnist Bret Stephens, of the Wall Street Journal, recently had trouble distinguishing from the phone-hacking scandal) generated significant information about how our political, diplomatic, and military institutions function, in ways that can lead to an enriched democracy. Milly Dowler’s voice-mail messages did not.
So subject matter is key in judging the press’s boundary-violating behavior. What about technique, though? The phone-hacking scandal, as the name implies, is primarily about how the information was obtained, and only secondarily about the nature of that information. Is it never acceptable to intercept personal phone calls, even in cases of clear public importance?
Here the press—at least, the more established American corner of it—has a standard that works as a daily guide to behavior, even when it seems to defy logic. A congeries of information-gathering techniques, including breaking and entering, stealing, and phone-hacking, are unpardonable and can never be undertaken directly by news organizations, but if others give news organizations the fruits of such labors it’s fine to publish them. Bradley Manning is a traitor, but Nick Davies, of the Guardian (who received Manning’s “war logs” from WikiLeaks), is a patriot, and Julian Assange occupies some nebulous in-between zone. Prosecutors who use search warrants to pry into politicians’ personal lives and then leak their findings before filing any charges are sleazy. Journalists who publish transcripts of Eliot Spitzer’s text messages to a prostitution service are models of professionalism. Ritual sanctification is assumed to take place at the moment when questionably obtained information passes into the hands of a reporter.
This is a little facile. The phone-hacking affair ought to inspire more than glee over seeing Rupert Murdoch and his entourage of lieutenants and relatives get in trouble; the questions it raises aren’t limited to tabloid journalists. The case ought to reawaken everyone’s awareness that personal privacy shouldn’t be defenseless against the intrusions of powerful institutions. Journalists are indispensably well positioned to expose abuses of power, but a press pass is not a moral unlimited-ride card. If the scandal caused journalists to reflect upon their own power, and their capacity to abuse that power, it would be a good thing. ♦
