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 veryone
knows that the New York Timess' motto is, "all the news that's
fit to print." But have you ever heard of the Washington Post's
principles? The fundamental principles by which the Washington
Post is committed to abide were enunciated in 1933 by Eugene
Meyer, the Post's owner (and father of Katharine Graham,
the esteemed publisher of the Post who died this past Tuesday).
The Washington Post's first principle is that the mission
of a newspaper is to tell the truth as nearly as it can be ascertained.
The Post's second principle is that it will tell ALL the
truth, so far as it can learn it, concerning the affairs of America
and the world (emphasis in the original). The Post's final
principle holds that the paper shall not be the ally of any special
interest. (There are a couple of other principles in between.)
In 1977, on the Post's centennial, Katharine Graham herself
reaffirmed the timeless nature of her father's principles, and described
the paper as an independent, nonpartisan voice whose mission was
"to provide a common base of information" to the nation.
Has the Washington Post successfully stood by these principles?
I'm skeptical. Consider the paper's treatment of the announcement
on July 12 that a coalition called "The Alliance for Marriage" was
sponsoring a drive to pass a "Federal Marriage Amendment," an amendment
to the United States Constitution defining marriage as a union of
a man and a woman. The failure of the Washington Post and
several other major news outlets to cover that announcement struck
me as a classic case of liberal media bias. But rather than simply
write a story to that effect, I decided to contact the Washington
Post, the New York Times, ABC World News, and the Boston
Globe and ask them to respond to the claim that their failure
to cover the drive for a Federal Marriage Amendment reflected a
liberal bias.
The importance of a Federal Marriage Amendment was reflected in
the wide press coverage that the announcement of the drive provoked.
The story was covered by the Associated Press, United Press International,
two of the three major television networks, CNN, FOX News, every
national radio network, including NPR, the Los Angeles Times,
the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Times,
and local stations in 106 television markets across the country.
And of course, the FMA is the cover story of the current issue of
National Review.
So why, one wonders, was there no coverage of the drive for a Federal
Marriage Amendment in such important organs as the Washington
Post, the New York Times, ABC World News, and the Boston
Globe? Here's what happened when I went directly to these news
outlets and asked them whether their failure to cover FMA betrayed
a liberal bias.
Michael Getler, the Washington Post's ombudsman, responded
promptly to my inquiry. Getler told me that he had checked with
the Post's "National Desk" and "they had not heard of this
press conference, they don't cover every press conference that takes
place in Washington. They say they are not aware of any member of
Congress sponsoring such an amendment but they are going to look
into the subject."
The claim that the Washington Post had not heard of the press
conference announcing Federal Marriage Amendment is scarcely credible.
Both wire services (AP and UPI) carried extensive reports on the
announcement well before the press conference itself. Either this
assertion of ignorance is flatly untrue, or it is an admission of
gross incompetence. Is it conceivable that the Washington Post's
National Desk does not read the wire services? The rest of the Post's
statement disparages the importance of the drive for an FMA because
no congressional sponsors have yet been announced. This didn't seem
to stop well over a hundred other news outlets from covering the
story. The important thing is that a movement has been formed. That
is precisely what will bring congressional sponsors in its train.
The Post's stand on FMA seems to be, "We didn't know about
it, and it's not important anyway." That's especially interesting
in light of the fact that the Post ran no less than five
lengthy investigative stories on the flap over the administration's
consultations with the Salvation Army over the issue of homosexuality.
Somehow it was necessary to print five major stories within a four-day
period on the Salvation Army "scandal," while the announcement of
a drive for a Federal Marriage Amendment during exactly the same
period entirely escaped the attention of the Post (even as
it was being reported by nearly every other news outlet in the country).
It begins to look as though there's some reason to doubt the Post's
adherence to its pledge to tell ALL the truth and to avoid alliances
with any particular special interest.
Neither Jack Thomas, the Boston Globe's ombudsman, nor Kenneth
Cooper, the editor at the Globe's National Desk, responded
to my initial e-mail inquiries about their coverage of FMA. I did
manage to reach Kenneth Cooper by phone, however. Cooper first accused
me of being presumptuous in assuming that liberal bias had been
at work in the Globe's failure to cover the story. I told
him that I had contacted him precisely so he could show why that
interpretation was mistaken. Cooper then chastised me for acting
as though this were merely a personal inquiry while not revealing
that I was in fact working on a story about his paper's coverage.
I reminded him that my initial e-mail had revealed in the very first
line that I was working on a story for NRO.
After reminding me that he had no obligation to explain the truth
to me (with which I agreed), Cooper told me that the real reason
the Globe hadn't covered the announcement of the drive for
a Federal Marriage Amendment was that the person who writes about
such issues was out of town. "We did consider it [i.e. running a
story on FMA], but we were short staffed." I then asked Mr. Cooper
why he didn't simply run one of the wire-service stories on FMA.
At that point Cooper said that he himself had been on vacation at
the time, and that one of his assistants had made the decision.
I asked him for the name of the assistant who was running the Globe's
National Desk at the time. At that point Mr. Cooper told me that
he had said enough and didn't wish to discuss the internal affairs
of the Globe any more than he already had.
Cooper's story is unconvincing. Even setting aside my inability
to speak with the people who were covering for Cooper during his
vacation, it's hard to understand why, if the Globe really
considered running the story but couldn't because they were short
staffed, they did not simply go with a wire-service report.
And the FMA story is of particular interest in Massachusetts. That's
because a very important court case has been filed in Massachusetts,
the very point of which is to ask the state's Supreme Judicial Court
to mandate same-sex marriage. And with Massachusetts's liberal high
court, there is an excellent chance that this will be the first
state to legalize gay marriage, thus moving the case to the United
States Supreme Court and sending the battle over the Federal Marriage
Amendment into high gear. If there's one state where the announcement
of FMA is of unarguable local relevance, it's Massachusetts.
Like the Washington Post, the Globe has an interesting
track record on this topic. In 1997, John Leo wrote a column condemning
Jack Thomas, the Globe's ombudsman, for censuring conservative
columnist Jeff Jacoby. Jacoby's perfectly moderate and reasoned
defense of the right of a Christian student's association at Harvard
Law School to freely publicize and articulate its views on homosexuality
was condemned by Thomas as "a high price to pay for freedom of the
press." In fact staffers at the Globe have made repeated
attempts to censor Jacoby's writings on homosexuality. Interestingly,
Jack Thomas is the only official ombudsmen/spokesmen at the four
major news outlets I contacted who never got back to me. (The reporters
I contacted were more hesitant to get in touch.) Perhaps Thomas
was out on vacation, but a phone operator at the Globe claimed
to have seen him in the office on the day I sent in my e-mail inquiry.
A spokesman for ABC World News, Jeffrey Schneider, explained that
ABC had not covered the story because the Federal Marriage Amendment
announcement had been reported early by CBS news, and was widely
reported elsewhere as well. Millions of people watch a favorite
network news show and no other. Keeping a story from those millions
because a competitor got it first only makes sense if the story
isn't all that interesting or important to begin with. Isn't a major
new move in the controversial battle over gay marriage worth a mention
to ABC's audience, even if another network got to it first? And
isn't it interesting that the Post claims not to have known
about the news conference, while ABC claims that it passed up coverage
because, even before the day of the conference, the planned announcement
had been widely reported? This only makes sense if ABC was the sole
news source for the people at the Post's National Desk.
The response from the New York Times was the smoothest of
all. Times National Desk editor, Katie Roberts, did not respond
to my e-mail. But after accusing me of asking a one-sided question
(i.e. asking if the Times hadn't shown liberal bias in ignoring
FMA), Catherine Mathis, Vice President of Corporate Communications
at the Times, said the following:
The
calling of a news conference may or may not signify an important
new chapter; events will tell us that. Innumerable news conferences
are held every day in Washington, and if we tried to cover all of
them, we would be able to cover nothing else and would need a much
larger staff than we have.
Our coverage of all sides on the issue of same-sex marriage has
been thorough and will remain thorough, as well as impartial.
It takes many steps and much time for a constitutional amendment
to gain ground. At some appropriate point, if the political momentum
seems to be building, we will report on the matter.
I thanked Mathis, and told her that my question had intentionally
revealed to her my suspicions about liberal bias, precisely so as
to give the Times a fair chance to rebut them.
But what are we to make of the claim that FMA doesn't yet have enough
political momentum behind it for its announcement to merit coverage?
I put that question to Anuj Gupta, the author of a lengthy and balanced
piece on the drive for a Federal Marriage Amendment in the Los
Angeles Times, and to Adrianne Goodman, the editor at the L.A.
Times Washington office who assigned the story to Gupta.
For Gupta, what made the announcement of the FMA particularly newsworthy
was the fact that the Alliance for Marriage had been able to assemble
a such a religiously and racially diverse coalition to back the
amendment. Gupta's editor, Goodman, said that what made the FMA
announcement newsworthy was that, after her paper had covered so
many stories about proponents of gay marriage, here was an opportunity
to cover an important effort by the other side in the dispute.
I couldn't agree more. But keeping the New York Times's claims
in mind, I asked Goodman what she would say to the argument that
the amendment's prospects seem dim to some. Why not wait till the
movement gains some real political momentum before covering it?
Goodman said that if that were the criterion, nothing much would
ever get covered. It's difficult to tell a movement's real prospects
at the start, she said. The key point, she noted, was this was an
important issue, and one of real interest to her readers. Kudos
to Goodman, Gupta, and the Los Angeles Times for its good
faith effort at a balanced treatment of this controversial issue.
The vision of Katharine Graham and her father was of a paper that
could provide "a common base" of accurate and non-partisan information
to the public. Magazines of opinion (like The Nation or National
Review) are as vital to a democracy as papers of record, but
without a trusted mainstream media to provide the common base of
information about which everyone else can argue, it's impossible
for a nation to maintain any unity underneath all the difference.
The issue of homosexuality — and same-sex marriage in particular
— is a critical test-case for the media. The nation is sharply
divided on this issue, and will be for years. If the mainstream
press cannot fairly cover both sides of the gay marriage debate,
then it simply can no longer do its job. We are moving surely, and
not very slowly, from a mainstream media surrounded by magazines
of opinion on the right and left to a simple left media/right media
system. That will be as dangerous for democracy as for the principles
enunciated seventy years ago by Eugene Meyer, of the Washington
Post.
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