The Glossy Paper Tiger

Wise or not, I mucked about in the sewers of online gossip days after the Harvard Kennedy School’s own Thomas E. Patterson, Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press, spoke to journalists’ pressing modern challenge: raising the average reporter’s “intellectual and professional standards.”Patterson recognized over a decade ago that increased “soft” news coverage played a causal role in shrinking newspaper readership. But that’s not the whole story. Recent developments in soft news coverage foreshadow what could be an ominous future of censored reporting in which journalists must choose between keeping their sources and investigating well-connected elites.

Consider the long simmering battle between the actress Gwyneth Paltrow and the glossy magazine Vanity Fair. The affair in sum: Vanity Fair vows to run a feature exposé on Paltrow; Paltrow allegedly instructs her friends and followers to boycott the magazine, refusing to provide quotes, tips, photos, or interviews; Vanity Fair gives in, and holds the feature back from publication pending a softening of its negative tone. TKO—Gwyneth wins!

Maybe your reaction is: good for Paltrow, fighting the haters. Maybe you’re one of those haters, wondering what kind of dark and dirty Hollywood secret’s been sealed in the Disney vault.

For my part, I’m disappointed. Not because I believed for a second that Vanity Fair found evidence of a secret of earthshaking importance, global in scope, and nefarious in its criminal intent. Nor because I hate Paltrow; I don’t like her (if you watch her 2008 PBS special “Spain…On the Road Again,” I think almost anyone would agree). My disappointment concerns this simple fact: in America today, powerful public figures—if rich enough, connected enough, famous enough—have the power to manipulate the media, the power to kill stories detrimental to their personal and pecuniary interests.

Now, let me rephrase I don’t naïvely believe this is the first story killed by a big-shot, a moneyed-interest, a beloved/loathed actress. Nothing’s unusual about the powerful being—in a word—powerful.

But, in the days of Steffens and Tarbell, periodicals and gazetteers mobilized public opinion, melting the waxy wings of the Icarian class, exposing corruption and muckraking; Woodward ad Bernstein followed leads that transformed hearsay and gossip into impeachment and redress of wrongs against the public good. In other words, a free, independent, and adversarial press developed.

Ideally the press is free under the auspices of legislation that include the First Amendment to the US Constitution and the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The press is independent under private ownership, uncensored and unbeholden to state support in the marketplace of ideas.The press is adversarial when there are many newspapers or cable channels in competition, rivaling each other in pursuit of headlines, subscribing to a variety political orientations or the view from nowhere.

Yet, the adversarial side is under threat: more newspapers cease publication or are revived by billionaires' largess, potentially limiting the scope of their coverage. How will journalists cover the economy and politics under a system more reminiscent of royal patronage than market capitalism? How could we trust newspapers to cover hard news when Vanity Fair can’t even critique an actress’ personal life?

The Vanity Fair–Paltrow spat becomes an egregious example of journalistic decline with its high exposure. Most powerful people prefer not to do their own dirty work; fewer, to do it in public view. Unless Vanity Fair returns in a future issue with a full explanation of the “take-down” story, it will stand as part of the public record that an entire magazine of journalists was defeated by Paltrow'sexhortation to her industry contacts. Vanity Fair emerges from the scandal either disgraced by inventing, but declining to publish, a hit piece with no factual basis or damaged by the appearance of capitulation to an industry's information embargo.

Yet, I also wonder if the entire spat is manufactured: Vanity Fair gets to look like it has serious, critical journalistic bona fides without even having written anything; Paltrow gets publicity and sympathy from her supporters; both reconcile in restoration of the status quo.

I think that Professor Patterson is right to point out the need to raise the educational niveau of journalism in practice. In his book, Patterson outlines his strategy to move the field of journalism towards “knowledge-based reporting,” meaning journalists will study to gain expertise in a field they seek to write about instead of studying only the techniques of writing and the ethics of journalistic practice, in many ways mirroring the Harvard University Nieman Fellowship.

Patterson believes such change must be implemented because “official sources are becoming less trustworthy. There’s a lot more political spin.” If anything thing caused Vanity Fair to cave in to Paltrow’s demands, I believe it would likely have been the silencing of sources the magazine relies on to cover the entertainment industry. Journalists depend upon their sources, but the unreliability of sources compounds when the reporter does not have the background knowledge necessary to fact check or contextualize factual data in the most relevant way.

Patterson’s thesis resembles the advice given to creative writers: “write what you know.” It’s simple; it’s a solid platform upon which to build a modern, independent journalism able to challenge the public’s future Gwyneths and Goliaths.

Michael Thorbjørn Feehly’14 is a History and Scandinavian studies concentrator in Mather House. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.