John O’Sullivan is one of the grand old men of literature-posing-as-journalism. Plus, if you want to start a newspaper from scratch, a big, national newspaper, like say, Canada’s putatively conservative National Post, you call John. He has worked everywhere of note.
John O’Sullivan is editor-at-large of National Review, editor of Australia’s Quadrant, founding editor of The Pipeline, and President of the Danube Institute. He has served in the past as associate editor of the London Times, editorial and op-ed editor for Canada’s National Post, and special adviser to Margaret Thatcher. He is the author of The President, the Pope and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World
I am running short – 1-3 minute reads – excerpts from a new book, Against the Corporate Media, 42 Ways the Media Hates You – a book of essays to which I contributed, along with forty-one others on just what happened. It will be published on September 10th. My purpose is that you come away from this somewhat enlightened as to what the hell happened, and how a once respectable profession became seedy and dishonest. The book provides a clear direction towards root and branch reform. And perhaps you will buy the book.
Through the Revolving Door – How the Fourth Estate Vanished
An excerpt from Against the Corporate Media, coming Sept. 10 from Bombardier Books. “Through the Revolving Door: How the Fourth Estate Vanished,” by John O’Sullivan:
For most of my lifetime the balance of temperaments in newsrooms, both in America and the U.K., has been weighted—this is plainly not a scientific judgment—strongly toward the bohemian, rebellious, and creative, and away from the respectable, conformist, and administrative on something like 70 lines to 30 lines. That division strikes me today as a pretty good corporate personality mix if you want to produce a lively, controversial, and unpredictable newspaper, magazine, television, or internet current affairs program. It didn’t track too well with partisan political divides between liberals and conservatives—which was a good thing because it meant that the common journalistic mission could and sometimes did override politics and ideology. Most newsrooms had a liberal majority but relaxed ideological attitudes. Bohemian Tories were more popular than liberal ideologues, for instance, and the most significant question you could ask about any newsroom was “Does it have an esprit de corps?”
That had less to do with the administrative virtues—important though getting expenses paid on time is to basic morale—than with bold and courageous editorial leadership shown by people as different as Arnaud de Borchgrave in The Washington Times, Roger Wood on the New York Post, Andrew Neil on the London Sunday Times, and Colin Welch as deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph. All of them had the necessary buccaneering self-confidence to drive their papers to excel in challenging not only governments but also all the respectable people, institutions, opinions, and causes mired in groupthink and self-congratulation—whom the Brits summarize ironically as “the Great and the Good”—who exercise enormous social and cultural power but too often get a pass when criticisms are being handed out.
Though we didn’t all realize it at the time, the era from the early 1980s to the start of the century was a golden age of journalism financially, technically, and creatively. And that produced freer countries and better governments. Those active in the press of those days drew a high card in the lottery of life.
You really can’t hate them enough.
So, what went wrong? Many things, as we’ll see, but one unnoticed cause was that even in those glory days, journalism wasn’t a particularly good launching pad for a career in high society (in which, incidentally, there are many mansions, not only on Park Avenue but also in Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Washington, Los Angeles, and London). That didn’t sit well with the growing number of lawyerly minded and socially ambitious journalists who were entering the trade not as copy boys but as former editors of Ivy League papers on special entry programs. They wanted more, better, and earlier avenues to the top than were offered by the relatively few senior positions in major media corporations.
That was hard to fashion directly but what they found was a sidedoor—a revolving door in fact between government and the media and vice versa. Opening it allowed reporters, editors, and columnists to leave the media to serve in government, and politicians to exchange jobs on Capitol Hill for jobs in the newsroom, and a few especially ambidextrous people to go back and forth through it several times as their talents permitted, or the voters insisted.
Opening that door was an important moment in the decline of American journalism, after which the door’s locks were permanently removed and the traffic through it increased exponentially. And it happened publicly at a 1988 dinner at the Washington Press Club in honor of David Broder, The Washington Post’s political correspondent, who was well-regarded by all as a good man and a scrupulous reporter but neither a revolutionary nor a reactionary.
Broder seems to have surprised his audience by the force of his criticism of those who went in both directions through the door as “androgynous insiders”—politicians one day, journalists the next, and on the third “slipping into a phone booth from which they emerged in their original guise.” He argued that the press should make it clear that the job of journalists was to criticize and check government, not to become interchangeable members of an insiders’ clique in Washington. If journalists were to lose their distinctive role as independent critics of government, he said, “it will not be long before we lose our freedom.”
These were fighting words to those of his fellow journalists who had gone between press and government and back, and they hit back. William Safire, Carl Rowan, Chris Matthews, and Pat Buchanan all wrote columns defending themselves, Pat Buchanan calling Broder “a sermonizing, sanctimonious prig.” And it stimulated debate about the propriety of “line-crossing” on the op-ed pages and professional press journals. The debate died down after a while, but it never really stopped altogether…
John O’Sullivan is editor-at-large of National Review, editor of Australia’s Quadrant, founding editor of The Pipeline, and President of the Danube Institute. He has served in the past as associate editor of the London Times, editorial and op-ed editor for Canada’s National Post, and special adviser to Margaret Thatcher. He is the author of The President, the Pope and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World.
It is arguable we have never had a completely free media, but today, independent media is pretty much there. Readers are exercising their choice and subscribing to the writers they trust. If you are inclined, you can buy a inexpensive annual subscription to Absurdistan below. And you can continue to Absurdistan’s reporting fund here. PayPal.Me/ElizabethJNickson. I will have Buy Me A Coffee up soon, since some of you prefer not to use PayPal (quite rightly).
Elizabeth Nickson was trained as a reporter at the London bureau of Time Magazine. She became European Bureau Chief of LIFE magazine in its last years of monthly publication, and during that time, acquired the rights to Nelson Mandela’s memoir before he was released from Robben Island. She went on to write for Harper’s Magazine, the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent, the Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Times Magazine, the Telegraph, the Globe and Mail and the National Post. Her first book The Monkey Puzzle Tree was an investigation of the CIA MKULTRA mind control program and was published by Bloomsbury and Knopf Canada. Her next book, Eco-Fascists, How Radical Environmentalists Are Destroying Our Natural Heritage, was a look at how environmentalism, badly practiced, is destroying the rural economy and rural culture in the U.S. and all over the world. It was published by Adam Bellow at Harper Collins US. She is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Center for Public Policy, fcpp.org. You can read in depth policy papers about various elements of the environmental junta here: https://independent.academia.edu/ElizabethNickson
