The New, New Journalism
In the 1960s and the 1970s, a new approach to print journalism was taking hold. Not content with the “institutional” or “corporate” voice of traditional mainstream journalism, writers like Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote and Gay Talese spearheaded a movement that melded the traditions of journalism with fiction writing techniques. “The New Journalism” was born.
“Instead of employing traditional journalistic story structures and an institutional voice, [the proponents of The New Journalism] constructed well-developed characters, sustained dialogue, vivid scenes, and strong plotlines marked with dramatic tension. They also wrote in voices that were distinctly their own,” notes Britannica.com.
The proponents of this writing style called their stories the Non-Fiction Novel.
Many credit The New Journalism with injecting new life into journalism, much of which had become rote and boring. It also helped bring in new (mainly younger) readers. It is the direct ancestor of blogging, which I argue would not have been possible without The New Journalism.
According to Margaret Sullivan, writing in The Washington Post in 2020, “…[T]he role of journalism in democratic society: to dig out and present the information that helps citizens hold their elected officials accountable.”
This may seem like a quaint and old-fashioned notion, but it is one that is at the core of journalism – or at least it should be.
It seems that many of today’s journalists have forgotten (or never learned) this lesson.
Take, for example, the recent announcement by newly-minted Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La), that he was proposing $14.3 billion in military aid for Israel, though at the expense of Ukraine and, apparently the Internal Revenue Service (I.R.S.).
Johnson claimed the $14.3 billion in funding for Israel would be completely offset by a cut of $14.3 billion from the I.R.S.’s budget. No problem. Nice and neat.
Except there is a problem. The proposal will never pass the Senate. And cutting $14.3 billion from the I.R.S. will only lead to rich people cheating on their taxes. Even more so than they do now.
The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act included $80 billion in funding for the I.R.S., spread out over 10 years. The additional funding is intended to pay for audits of millionaires, which declined by more than 80 percent between 2010 and 2018 because of a lack of I.R.S. resources.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that over the 10 years of the funding, the $80 billion investment would return $203 billion in revenues, mainly by cracking down on wealthy tax cheats.
Then there’s the little problem of the CBO noting that cutting $14.3 billion in I.R.S. funding would increase the deficit by $26.7 billion. But when did Republicans ever care about the deficit anyway?
The House GOP touted their plan on October 30 with a press release headlined “House Republicans Are Supporting Our Great Ally Israel With An Emergency Supplemental Package That Is Fully Offset.”
Which is total bullshit. But, naturally, the “New Journalists” salivated all over the press release and ran with it, not questioning a single thing on the page.
Punchbowl News’s Congressional reporter Jake Sherman ran with the press release in a tweet on X the same day. He dutifully reported that the funding would be offset by I.R.S. cuts. He also noted that the plan would never pass.
Sherman, formerly of Politico, co-founded the online daily news site Punchbowl News in 2021. He covered President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, so he knows what cutting additional funding for the I.R.S. would do for the budget.
So why would Sherman publish something he knows is disingenuous? Because it’s all about access to sources and the fear of losing that access.
“Publications like Punchbowl seek to provide intelligence about Congress to an audience of corporate lobbyists and other influential people. In order to provide that intelligence, Punchbowl reporters need access to the people in charge, which now includes [Speaker] Johnson. One way to get access is to be a useful megaphone for a politician's preferred message on a particular topic,” notes Judd Legum on his Popular Information web site.
In other words, it’s useful for reporters to be stenographers and not question the powerful in Washington (and elsewhere) because it guarantees them continued access to the newsmakers and the people who know what’s going on.
But that’s not journalism.
Over at Semafor, another of the New, New Journalism startups, founded by BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith in October 2022, they fell victim to the same stenography bug. The lede on the story went like this, “Washington is headed for a showdown over foreign military aid after House Republicans unveiled a bill that would pay for $14.3 billion in assistance to Israel by slashing funding from the IRS.”
Further down in the story, they quote Utah Senator Mitt Romney as saying he doesn’t think cutting money from the I.R.S. budget is the best way to pay for foreign aid. At least they acknowledge that not everyone thinks this particular “offset” is a good idea. Yet they still ran with the GOP’s fiction about paying for the aid at the top of the piece without question.
In the famous quote by the Irish bartender Mr. Dooley, a character in a column written by Chicago Evening Post journalist and humorist Finley Peter Dunne on October 7, 1893, “The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”
Today, that’s more appropriate than ever. Quoting verbatim what someone in Washington says without questioning them or doing some research is the exact opposite of journalism. It’s public relations.
And it’s not just the new upstart publications that fall victim to the stenography bug. Bloomberg, The Guardian, CBS News, Reuters, The Washington Post and CNN, to name just a few, ran with the line that the Israel funding would be completely offset by I.R.S. cuts as if it was a fact set in stone.
It’s one thing to report verbatim what someone says. It’s another to write a story using their words and not providing context. Today’s “journalists” have lost all their skepticism, their instinct to “question authority.”
The New Journalism practiced by Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese and others was a fundamental change in writing style. Some could argue that’s a bad thing. But many people consider it an evolution.
The New, New journalists are practicing a fundamental change in the basics of journalism. That’s not evolution, that’s de-evolution. And that’s not a good thing.