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On Journalistic Credibility
Jules Witcover

We Americans are doing a lot of finger wagging at the scandal unfolding in Britain around Rupert Murdoch's newspapers. Minions of the media mogul there are accused of phone and computer hacking into the lives of seemingly everyone from high government officials to the families of war victims. Added to that are allegations of bribing police at the hallowed Scotland Yard.

All this American carping is aimed at a naturalized American citizen from Australia whose publications and television properties on this side of the pond also are subject to wide criticism and accusations of yellow journalism.

Not excluded is Murdoch's most distinguished newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, which he bought from tired and money-hungry owners in 2007 amid solemn pledges that he would preserve the independence and integrity of the American bible of business. Some of the former owners have recently said they now regret selling the paper to him.

Even the Journal has lately come under some scrutiny for sliding standards, a diminished commitment to investigative journalism, and the departure of some of its more heralded reporters and writers. But so far, the widespread hacking that led Murdoch to shut down his hugely profitable News of the World weekly newspaper in Britain has not been detected in Murdoch publications here.

Another virus, however, has been increasingly attacking American journalism and its expanding universe of news-gatherers and rumormongers spawned by the computer age, television and particularly the Internet. Reputations have been shattered and privacy obliterated here not so much by hacking as by an anything-goes mentality that sanctions getting the story by whatever means, fair or foul.

While Murdoch's successful Fox News television channel styles itself "fair and balanced," its top-heavy use of conservative commentators and analysts has generated much ridicule, but also a loyal following.

A major contributor to the credibility gap has been the combination of intensified personal ambition among those who pursue information about public figures and the technological enablers of the wired world. The problem may have come well before the computer age with the advent of "gotcha" journalism -- catching a politician or other public figure in some sort or other of wrongdoing, and gaining fame and fortune by bringing the target down.

This exploitative side of journalism has certainly always been within the American brand. In the earlier years of the last century, New York gossip columnist Walter Winchell made a career of it. Later, Drew Pearson in Washington and then his protege and successor Jack Anderson did the same as scourges of the political high and mighty.

Arguably the greatest political story in American annals, the Watergate scandal that toppled a president in 1974, made the Washington Post team of Woodward and Bernstein the inspiration of a generation of young reporters in journalism. Unlike these two, who broke the story and pursued it to its dramatic end with relentless old-fashioned shoe leather, some of the newcomers cut corners in quest of the holy grail of fame or lucrative celebrity television careers.

The result often has been a much more adversarial relationship between politicians and reporters, who have suffered from diminished access to the public figures whose influential roles they seek to discover, examine and comment upon in print or on the air. With less access, and the erosion of longstanding standards of journalistic fairness and ethics, rumor and biased opinion too often now enter the mainstream of reporting and analysis.

Reporters getting too close or too chummy with the public figures they cover has always posed a peril to honest newsgathering and expressing of opinion. Also, it has not been unknown here, particularly in gossip or celebrity reporting, for sources to be paid in cash or certainly in favored treatment in what is written or aired.

The presence of self-appointed or hired bloggers published by old mainstays of American journalism like the Post and the New York Times have seen greater leeway in purveying what we used to call scuttlebutt in the Navy. What is being revealed now about the Murdoch empire in Britain is a cautionary note to the American news media about guarding their own credibility in the journalistic era of anything goes.

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