Enough of David Simon, Give Me David Broder

[Dave Kindred]

David Simon is brilliant. He demands and is due attention. But I've had more than enough of the vitriol he spews on newspapers. What he thinks newspapers were, and what he thinks they ought to be, is unrealistic. Newspapers never were the all-powerful engines of social good that he so desperately conjures from the fog of the '70s and '80s; whatever good came of newspapers' work then was no different from the good they did in generations before. He suffers from the narcissist's idea that his generation was The First With a Social Conscience, a journalistic version of Halberstam's failed "best and brightest." Newspapers, even enfeebled by today's economic crises, are better journalistically than they were 30 years ago. Go to reference and look at a 1978 front page. Read the feature section, metro, sports. Everywhere, today is better.

Few people love newspapers more than I do and few believe more in the ideals of journalism. But I am a realist. Newspapers are not literature. They are not art. They are not social engineers. They are journals reporting the news as they find it. They can not give a David Simon a year to do a change-the-world project. Newspapers come out daily, the cycle remorseless, the best metaphor that written by Ray Ring in "Arizona Kiss." He said being a newspaperman is like running in front of a giant threshing machine. Slow down, the steel blades chew you up. Your only hope is to throw stories into the maw, to slow the monster down a day or two. But then it starts up again, the blades coming to mangle your ass.

David Simon's talent is breathtaking. But if we're talking newspapers, give me David Broder. In his 1979 speech accepting a Pulitzer prize for commentary, the Washington Post's man said that instead of the bogus promise, "All the News That's Fit to Print," he would rather have newspapers say:

"The newspaper that drops on your doorstep is a partial, hasty, incomplete, inevitably somewhat flawed and inaccurate rendering of some of the things we have heard about in the past 24 hours -- distorted, despite our best efforts to eliminate gross bias, by the very process of compression that makes it possible for you to lift it from the doorstep and read it in about an hour. If we labeled the product accurately, then we could immediately add: But it's the best we could do under the circumstances, and we will be back tomorrow with a corrected and updated version."

 

[Fenian_Bastard]

Dave --
Broderella passed his sell-by date when he contributed to the loathsome Sally Quinn's piece on the Clinton's with the memorable "They came in and trashed the place and it's not their place" line. He's spent the succeeding seven years eating quail on the porch with the execrable Karl Rove and wringing his hands over the fact that the country has not yet seen the wisdom of handing the government over to the hacks who still return his phone calls.
I don't know anything about Simon, but Broder's been an enabler of the worst things in government for nearly 15 years.

 

[Dave Kindred]

I don't know anything about Simon, but Broder's been an enabler of the worst things in government for nearly 15 years.

Not talking politics, Fens, talking journalism. And quoting the man from the height of his powers, 30 yrs ago.

 

[Michael_ Gee]

Dave, I have no idea why Simon is so mad at newspapers. He was out making a bundle with his talents in other ways long before the disasters of the last 10 years.
I know where he's coming from, but I tend to agree with Chris Rock. The more rich and famous you are, the less I want to hear you complain.

 

[Simon_Cowbell]

Dave, I have no idea why Simon is so mad at newspapers. He was out making a bundle with his talents in other ways long before the disasters of the last 10 years.
I know where he's coming from, but I tend to agree with Chris Rock. The more rich and famous you are, the less I want to hear you complain.

Is he mad at newspapers, or two guys?

 

[Fenian_Bastard]

I think when you do journalism badly -- or worse, sycophantically -- you do the profession much more damage than the complaints of David Simon ever will.

 

[Dave Kindred]

I think when you do journalism badly -- or worse, sycophantically -- you do the profession much more damage than the complaints of David Simon ever will.

I'm not arguing Broder's journalistic performance.
My argument is that Broder's view of newspapers, as represented in his Pulitzer speech, is more realistic than Simon's of today and more likely to produce good newspapers.

 

[STLIrish]

Everything I've ever read or watched of David Simon's is pretty much brilliant.

But, yeah, if I read one more big long breakdown of the spat between him and Carroll/Marimow, essentially over the question of whether we should do great work to win Pulitzers or to expose the deep, complex ills of society (and why can't we do both?), well, it'll have been one too many.

That said, his essay in the upcoming Esquire is pretty beautiful.
http://www.esquire.com/print-this/essay/david-simon-0308

 

[SockPuppet]

I think most of SportsJournalists.com nation have an idea what good journalism is and what good newspapers should be. And those in the daily newspaper biz understand _ and appreciate_ the daily feed-the-beast grind.
The problem, folks, is the people who own/manage papers ain't got Clue One. We can debate all the other stuff but until that changes we're just wasting air and posts.

 

[STLIrish]

"The newspaper that drops on your doorstep is a partial, hasty, incomplete, inevitably somewhat flawed and inaccurate rendering of some of the things we have heard about in the past 24 hours -- distorted, despite our best efforts to eliminate gross bias, by the very process of compression that makes it possible for you to lift it from the doorstep and read it in about an hour. If we labeled the product accurately, then we could immediately add: But it's the best we could do under the circumstances, and we will be back tomorrow with a corrected and updated version."

And isn't that what we should be struggling against? Against that haste, incompletion and distortion in favor of trying to tell the real stories out there?

This gets at what someone on here (or somewhere) wrote about The Wire recently, that it's kind of about a struggle between those who see the world as it is (Burrell & Rawls, the top editors at the Post, other bureaucratic interests) and those who want to change the way the world is (McNulty, the city editor, Bunny Colvin). Of course, Simon, being a world-changer, is almost pathologically sympathetic to the second camp. Which leads to shallow portraits of people in the first camp. Broder would likely fall into the "world the way it is" category.

 

[Frank_Ridgeway]

I completely disagree, Dave, and the guy you reference, Ray Ring, is a great example of why.

In the 1980s, Ring's midsized newspaper in Tucson allowed him the resources to spend months chasing great stories. With the permission of state prison officials, Ring went undercover as a prisoner (another reporter went undercover at a different prison as a guard) and got the holy **** beaten out of him. (Today they'd probably want him to do podcasts from his cell.) The 40-page, no-advertising special section contained the F-word, I believe more than once.

The other huge difference is that true non-conformists like Ring had their place in many newsrooms. Today what passes for "edginess" is the safe kind, personalities acquired off sitcoms. Anyone who is truly different is too threatening to the generally less courageous editors of today.

Ring still works, by the way, and still wins some pretty good journalism awards. Except he's not at a mainstream paper. For quite a while, he's been on the staff of the High Country News. Here's his latest:

http://www.hcn.org/servlets/hcn.Article?article_id=17451

Also, Ring's metaphor said that you can slow the thresher by throwing it a story too massive to eat whole. He got to do such huge stories. Not many people have that opportunity 25 years later.

 

[Dave Kindred]

I completely disagree, Dave, and the guy you reference, Ray Ring, is a great example of why.

In the 1980s, Ring's midsized newspaper in Tucson allowed him the resources to spend months chasing great stories. With the permission of state prison officials, Ring went undercover as a prisoner (another reporter went undercover at a different prison as a guard) and got the holy **** beaten out of him. (Today they'd probably want him to do podcasts from his cell.) The 40-page, no-advertising special section contained the F-word, I believe more than once.

The other huge difference is that true non-conformists like Ring had their place in many newsrooms. Today what passes for "edginess" is the safe kind, personalities acquired off sitcoms. Anyone who is truly different is too threatening to the generally less courageous editors of today.

Ring still works, by the way, and still wins some pretty good journalism awards. Except he's not at a mainstream paper. For quite a while, he's been on the staff of the High Country News. Here's his latest:

http://www.hcn.org/servlets/hcn.Article?article_id=17451

Also, Ring's metaphor said that you can slow the thresher by throwing it a story too massive to eat whole. He got to do such huge stories. Not many people have that opportunity 25 years later.

Frank, good stuff....I read Ring in the High Country News as recently as this morning...but answer me this: wasn't he the exception then even as he is now? Somehow, we've come to believe that newspapers 30 years ago were filled with super talent doing super work when the truth is the super talent doing super work was as rare then as it is now....Newspapers are lucky when that super talent shows up, luckier when it stays on the job rather than chase the fame and money the talent deserves...so it has always been with newspapers, or else Ben Hecht would have stayed, and Hemingway, and Talese, and, good God, Gabriel Garcia Marquez....to argue otherwise is to argue against the economic reality that has shaped newspapering for 125 years....you think Kornheiser would have chased ESPN if the Post paid him $3 million a year?....

 

[Frank_Ridgeway]

Ring talks about going undercover as a prisoner and as a copper miner here (second item):

http://www.umt.edu/journalism/news_pages/archives/December/Dec-Jan00/archive.dec.htm

His point is that long investigations take money and not many papers are willing to devote those resources to such work.

Now I was very young then, 16 when I started working on newspapers in 1976. But I remember it as a time when newspapers gave a **** and editors tended to be crusty, truth-telling people instead of the slick, superficial, managementspeak-spewing douchebags who lead so many newsrooms today. It wasn't nirvana, but it was much, much better.

 

[dooley_womack1]

Webs have narrowed and pages have been cut back for most papers over the past decade. I would say papers were better 10 years ago than they were 30 years ago, but not better now than 10 years ago (unless you count the Web site as part of the "paper."

 

[Dave Kindred]

Ring talks about going undercover as a prisoner and as a copper miner here (second item):

http://www.umt.edu/journalism/news_pages/archives/December/Dec-Jan00/archive.dec.htm

His point is that long investigations take money and not many papers are willing to devote those resources to such work.

Maybe there were more papers willing to do those stories then, but not many, just as there weren't many Ray Rings then capable of producing the goods and aren't many now.

 

[Frank_Ridgeway]

Sorry, Dave, there's no empirical way for either of us to prove we're right. But my feeling is that then newspapers were on offense and today they're on defense. And they're much duller today. Back then I could buy an armload of newspapers from various cities and see real differences. Today they all copy each other's gimmicks and many of them even look the same in terms of design. Most of them put me to sleep. They're generic.

 

[Terence Mann]

I'd just like to say this is a great discussion, and it will probably become even more compelling. I hope the trolls stay away and keep it from becoming another locked SportsJournalists.com thread. Good stuff, all. Keep it coming.

 

[Dave Kindred]

Sorry, Dave, there's no empirical way for either of us to prove we're right. But my feeling is that then newspapers were on offense and today they're on defense. And they're much duller today. Back then I could buy an armload of newspapers from various cities and see real differences. Today they all copy each other's gimmicks and many of them even look the same in terms of design. Most of them put me to sleep. They're generic.

Frank, I'd argue it was always so.
In "City Editor," written in 1934, the legendary Stanley Walker pines for times gone by:
"The job of city editor is a little less piratical and adventurous than in the old days. The machinery is faster. The staffs are larger, the organization more orderly. Crusading has died down, partly because readers suspect the motives of a paper which beats its breast, as they suspect a yammering bogus evangelist. Competition between newspapers...is not outwardly the blazing vendetta that it used to be. An exclusive story...remains exclusive only a little while, and soon means little either in circulation or prestige...."

By book's end, Walker, not unlike us today, is imagining what a real newspaper might be:
"Is there any sense in the idea that a respectable, high-class, sophisticated newspaper of tabloid size, morning or evening, could find a place in New York? Since the war (Kindred Note: That would be The War to End All Wars, number I), little groups of newspaper men, and ex-newspapermen, have discussed this dream, but nobody ever does anything about it....Some wealthy man, tired of losing money in Wall Street, in keeping up yachts or racing stables, may attempt this venture some day. He can lose lots of money and have a great deal of fun proving his point."

All I'm sure of, Frank, is that in my youth at the Daily Pantagraph, Bloomington, Illinois, a hundred years ago, I heard old-timers bitching about how their bosses didn't know **** from Shinola. (Shinola!?! Proof that it was 100 yrs ago!)

 

[Fenian_Bastard]

How many newspapers were there in Bloomington then, Dave. if there was more than one, then times have pretty much changed permanently and for the worse.
I think Frank has the right of it when he talks about playing offense or playing defense.That said, I think the newspaper story-arc on The Wire has been pretty average. Bunch of guys yelling about ad lineage.

 

[Dave Kindred]

How many newspapers were there in Bloomington then, Dave. if there was more than one, then times have pretty much changed permanently and for the worse.
I think Frank has the right of it when he talks about playing offense or playing defense.That said, I think the newspaper story-arc on The Wire has been pretty average. Bunch of guys yelling about ad lineage.

One newspaper, Fens....though papers were dying left and right, even in the '60s....just as schools were dying and communities wept over consolidation robbing them of their hearts....