Laurie Garrett's "Take This Job and Shove It" Letter to her long time employer, Newsaday.
To: EDITORIAL ALL USERS Newsday
Subject: FROM LAURIE GARRETT
Dear Newsday Friends and Colleagues,
On March 8th - International Women's Day -- my leave of
absence from Newsday ends. I will not be returning to
the paper, largely because my work at the Council on
Foreign Relations has proven to be the most exciting
challenge of my life. But you have been through so much
pain and difficulty over the last year, all of which I
monitored closely and with considerable concern, that I
don't want to disappear from the Newsday scene without
saying a few words. Indulge me.
Ever since the Chandler Family plucked Mark Willes from
General Foods, placing him at the helm of Times Mirror
with a mandate to destroy the institutions in ways that
would boost dividends, journalism has suffered at
Newsday. The pain of the last year actually began a
decade ago: the sad arc of greed has finally hit
bottom. The leaders of Times Mirror and Tribune have
proven to be mirrors of a general trend in the media
world: They serve their stockholders first, Wall St.
second and somewhere far down the list comes service to
newspaper readerships. In 1996 I personally confronted
Willes on that point, and he publicly confirmed that
the new regime was one in which even the number of
newspapers sold was irrelevant, so long as stock
returns continued to rise.
The deterioration we experienced at Newsday was hardly
unique. All across America news organizations have been
devoured by massive corporations, and allegiance to
stockholders, the drive for higher share prices, and
push for larger dividend returns trumps everything that
the grunts in the newsrooms consider their missions.
Long gone are the days of fast-talking, whiskey-
swilling Murray Kempton peers eloquently filling
columns with daily dish on government scandals,
mobsters and police corruption. The sort of in-your-
face challenge that the Fourth Estate once posed for
politicians has been replaced by mud-slinging, lies
and, where it ought not be, timidity. When I started
out in journalism the newsrooms were still full of old
guys with blue collar backgrounds who got genuinely
indignant when the Governor lied or somebody turned off
the heat on a poor person's apartment in mid-January.
They cussed and yelled their ways through the day, took
an occasional sly snort from a bottle in the bottom
drawer of their desk and bit into news stories like
packs of wild dogs, never letting go until they'd found
and told the truth.
If they hadn't been reporters most
of those guys would have been cops or firefighters. It
was just that way.
Now the blue collar has been fully replaced by white
ones in America's newsrooms, everybody has college
degrees. [like Laurie] The "His Girl Friday" romance of the newshound
is gone. All too many journalists seem to mistake
scandal mongering for tenacious investigation, and far
too many aspire to make themselves the story. When I
think back to the old fellows who were retiring when I
first arrived at Newsday ? guys (almost all of them
were guys) who had cop brothers and fathers working
union jobs ? I suspect most of them would be disgusted
by what passes today for journalism. Theirs was not a
perfect world --- too white, too male, seen through a
haze of cigarette smoke and Scotch ? but it was an
honest one rooted in mid-20th Century American working
class values.
Honesty and tenacity (and for that matter, the working
class) seem to have taken backseats to the sort of
"snappy news", sensationalism, scandal-for-the-sake of
scandal crap that sells. This is not a uniquely Tribune
or even newspaper industry problem: this is true from
the Atlanta mixing rooms of CNN to Sulzberger's offices
in Times Square. Profits: that's what it's all about
now. But you just can't realize annual profit returns
of more than 30 percent by methodically laying out the
truth in a dignified, accessible manner. And it's
damned tough to find that truth every day with a mere
skeleton crew of reporters and editors.
This is terrible for democracy. I have been in 47
states of the USA since 9/11, and I can attest to the
horrible impact the deterioration of journalism has had
on the national psyche. I have found America a place of
great and confused fearfulness, in which cynically
placed bits of misinformation (e.g. Cheney's, "If John
Kerry had been President during the Cold War we would
have had thermonuclear war.") fall on ears that absorb
all, without filtration or fact-checking. Leading
journalists have tried to defend their mission,
pointing to the paucity of accurate, edited coverage
found in blogs, internet sites, Fox-TV and talk radio.
They argue that good old-fashioned newspaper editing is
the key to providing America with credible information,
forming the basis for wise voting and enlightened
governance. But their claims have been undermined by
Jayson Blair's blatant fabrications, Judy Miller's
bogus weapons of mass destruction coverage, the media's
inaccurate and inappropriate convictions of Wen Ho Lee,
Richard Jewell and Steven Hatfill, CBS' failure to
smell a con job regarding Bush's Texas Air Guard career
and, sadly, so on.
What does it mean when even journalists consider
comedian John -- "This is a fake news show, People!" --
Stewart one of the most reliable sources of "news"?
It would be easy to descend into despair, not only
about the state of journalism, but the future of
American democracy. But giving up is not an option.
There is too much at stake.
I would remind my Newsday colleagues that during the
bleak period that commenced with the appointment of
Willes, and persists today, some great journalism has
been done at the paper. A tiny, dedicated team of
foreign correspondents has literally risked their lives
to bring readers fresh, often ground-breaking news from
the battlefields of Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle
East. Newsday readers are on top of details about the
sorry state of fiscal governance in Nassau County,
scandals in Suffolk County, Bloomberg's plans for the
west side of Manhattan, and the sad state of politics
in Albany. We still have some of the best film and
performing arts criticism in the country, an aggressive
photo department, tough sports columnists, under-
utilized specialty and investigative reporters and a
savvy business section.
So what is to be done?
I have no idea what Tribune corporate leaders in
Chicago have up their sleeves for Newsday, the LA
Times, Baltimore Sun, Chicago Tribune and the other
media outlets under their control. Despite rumors that
are rife in the newsrooms, you are also in the dark.
And you should remember that. During times of hardship
as extreme as those we have experienced at Newsday it
is easy to become paralyzed by rumors, unable to think
clearly about the work at hand. After all, people have
lost their jobs, and some were removed from the
building by armed guards, with only moments' notice.
Every Newsday employee is justified in his or her
concern about just how lean Chicago plans to make the
newspaper machine.
But rumors only feed fear, and personal fear is rarely
stimulus for good journalism. Now is the time to think
in imaginative ways. Salon and Slate have both gone
into the black; in nations like Ukraine and South
Africa courageous new forms of journalism are arising;
some of the blogs that clog the internet are actually
quite good and manage to keep politicians on their
toes. Opportunities for quality journalism are still
there, though you may need to scratch new surfaces,
open locked doors and nudge a few reticent editors to
find them. On a fundamental level, your readers
desperately need for you to try, over and over again,
to tell the stories, dig the dirt and bring them the
news.
Les Payne has often correctly pointed out that
Newsday's problems have never been rooted in the
institution's journalism: Rather, they have been
business issues. We have never been accused of
fostering a Jayson Blair, a bozo who accepted $250,000
from the Bush Administration to write flattering
stories, an investigative reporting team that relied on
a single source for a series that smeared the life of
an innocent man, acted as a conduit for the Department
of Defense for weapons of mass destruction
disinformation, or any of the other ghastly violations
of the public trust that have recently transpired.
Newsday's honor has, by its own accounts, been
besmirched by a series of lies committed on the
business/advertising/circulation side of the company.
(And few news organizations have covered on its pages
their own shortcomings as closely as has Newsday.) All
of us have been forced to pay a price for those
grievous actions. But nobody has charged that Newsday's
journalistic enterprise has failed to abide by the
highest ethical standards.
Newsday has always had more talent than it knew how to
use. So go ahead, Talent: Show them your stuff. I'll be
reading. (March 8th may be my last day as a Newsday
employee, but it won't mark the end of my readership.)
I thank each and every one of you who have been my
friends and colleagues since I joined Newsday in 1988.
I hope that we will stay in touch over coming years.
Make me regret leaving, Guys: Turn Newsday into a kick
ass paper that I will be begging to return to.
Bye for now, Laurie Garrett
http://www.c-span.org/journal/lauriegarrett.doc
