March/April 1995 | Contents

A Generation of Vipers

For a funny, grabby, irreverent, deconstruction of a politician, "The Boy in the Bubble," Michael Lewis's New Republic cover story on Dan Quayle of a few years back, was hard to beat. Tracking Quayle on the 1992 campaign trail, the sharp-eyed Lewis hunted for examples that portrayed the vice-president as phony and empty. He found plenty: one vignette sketched Quayle at the door of his airplane pointing to a nonexistent booster on the ground -- a stunt performed for the television cameras trained on him. "This is meant to convey the idea of a dynamic young leader bonding with a prized supporter," Lewis wrote. "And it does, unless you see him do it five times in two days, often as not to the backside of a member of the Secret Service."

Lewis certainly managed to avoid the trap of a journalist becoming too cozy with the subject. But as he admits without apology, the casual disdain is rooted in a deep and abiding cynicism, a reflexive suspicion of face-value explanations, an inclination to ascribe ignoble motives. Not once does the piece suggest that Quayle might have a serious idea in his head. And that's a problem: the cynicism constricts the coverage. This is a problem that affects more than reporters and editors. Critics are beginning to fear that cynical press coverage is helping to create a nation of cynics. "News that incessantly and unjustifiably labels political leaders as insincere and inept fosters mistrust on the part of the public, and makes it harder for those in authority to provide the leadership that is required if government is to work effectively," Thomas E. Patterson, a Syracuse University political scientist, declares in Out of Order, his recent book on press coverage of the political system.

Journalists are thinking about press cynicism too. Some of them acknowledge being cynical, but say they don't think it much affects their coverage. Others, including Lewis, extol cynicism as an outlook that produces good journalism. But in dozens of interviews, mostly around Washington, press cynicism's ground zero, many reporters and editors echo Patterson's concern. "One of the reasons that people are cynical about the process" and widely believe that government doesn't work, says Steve Berg, a national correspondent for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, is that "we tell them that every day."

Cynicism can mean different things to different people. Perhaps the most useful way to think about it is in terms of points on a spectrum. On one extreme is credulousness -- a ready willingness to take things at face value even if the evidence is slim. In the middle is skepticism -- a disinclination to take things at face value, but not a prejudice against the face-value explanation. On the other extreme is cynicism -- a prejudice against the face-value explanation bordering on disbelief, accompanied by a ready willingness to ascribe base motives.

Cynicism can lead to a variety of journalistic sins, including sins of omission. Consider, for example, pre-election coverage of Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America." Mainstream Washington news outlets largely treated the contract as a partisan stunt aimed at putting Democrats on the spot. Even though Republicans, on the day the contract was announced, made available to the press a five-pound package of materials that included copies of the proposed legislation itself, there was scant explanation in the press of what was actually in the contract. "We were being cynical," says Karen Hosler, a veteran congressional correspondent, of the thin coverage of her own paper, the Baltimore Sun. "We just thought it was a campaign trick, a gambit."

The Sun had plenty of company. The Los Angeles Times, for instance, weighed in on September 28, the day after the contract's unveiling, with a story by Washington reporter William J. Eaton. In the second paragraph, Eaton listed three of the ten items in the contract; the next seven paragraphs discussed the tactical dimensions of the move and the Democratic denunciation of the pact, followed by two paragraphs listing a few other key provisions; the final seven paragraphs returned to the political-gamesmanship theme.

There was, of course, a political-tactic dimension to the story -- but that wasn't the only one, or even the most important. This was dense, unsexy stuff, but the Republicans were proposing a radical overhaul of the government, and citizens needed first to hear about it without prejudgment of its prospects or the motives of its crafters. (Plenty of time for that later.) Cynicism isn't the only explanation for the sketchy coverage of the contract, but it certainly looks like a prime factor. Cynicism in this instance didn't serve a useful role of protecting reporters -- and thus the public -- from being fooled by press manipulators; it kept the reporters from doing their jobs more diligently.

If you are a cynic, certain kinds of information -- such as the first reports of Hillary Clinton's commodity trades, which some interpreted as evidence of hypocrisy and which produced a White House press frenzy -- are likely to be more salient than are other kinds, say, for example, Bill Clinton's bill to establish a National Services program. Newsweek reporter Steven Waldman, who followed that legislation and wrote a book about it, The Bill, concluded that cynicism, "not liberalism, is the dominant ideology of the Washington press corps." Over the course of the year that the president spent advancing what he viewed as a major effort, Waldman writes, Clinton wasn't asked a single question about national service at a press conference. Reporters "truly believe that the politicians will trumpet the good news, so it is up to the journalists to find the bad. By that logic, anything the president pushes, the press should duly ignore." Waldman writes that White House reporters "live in desperate fear of being labeled 'in the tank' -- blindly pro-Clinton . . . . Many feared that writing seriously about something as nakedly idealistic as national service would make them seem naive."

Cynicism can also produce sins of commission -- wrongful statements that feed unjustifiably negative impressions of government. Consider the knee-jerk media assumption that presidents and other politicians do not keep their promises. "It happens every election year," CBS anchor Dan Rather said in a typical post-election statement on his broadcast. "Politicians promise the voters change, real change, but before long, it's business as usual." Yet Clinton, for example, has kept a great many of his promises, Syracuse's Patterson points out, including those to raise taxes on the wealthy, pass a family-leave bill, end the ban on abortion counseling in family-planning programs, and enact the North American Free Trade Agreement. And although they are encountering plenty of obstacles, even from within their own ranks, House Republican leaders are moving aggressively on their Contract with America. The assumption that all political rhetoric is empty is just plain wrong.

Cynicism sometimes yields coverage, such
 as Lewis's Quayle piece, that can be great fun
 to read and selectively true, yet indulges in
 blithe contempt for the political scene. Take
 the withering ouvre of Maureen Dowd, the veteran Washington-based New York Times reporter recently named to replace Anna Quindlen as
 a Times op-ed columnist. The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus, a White House reporter,
 calls Dowd "the best-known practitioner
 of a whole school of cynicism" that flavors
 the Style feature section of the Post and such publications as Vanity Fair. The school has
 "produced some really good journalism,"
 Marcus says, but "there certainly is a high
 cynicism quotient."

 

Consider the now-famous lead, so delicious, yet so dismissive and reductive, of Dowd's front-pager last June on a trip by President Clinton to Oxford University: "President Clinton returned today for a sentimental journey to the university where he didn't inhale, didn't get drafted, and didn't get a degree." In a recent New Yorker essay by critic Adam Gopnik, the lead was cited as an example of a "malicious manner" that now permeates reporting by jaded, cynical reporters. Dowd's sharp wit, of course, is a wonderful asset for any writer. Her Oxford lead was certainly more grabby and entertaining than the straightforward, gentle dispatch of White House reporter Ann Devroy of The Washington Post: "President Clinton ended his D-Day anniversary tour of Europe today with a nostalgic stop at Oxford University, defying the ghosts of his youth to revisit the campus where he struggled to avoid military service in Vietnam." Still, the Dowd formula can get pretty old. Her eye locks onto telltale marks of hypocrisy that are certainly not missing from the Washington scene, but are only one aspect of it.

The embodiment of a kind of hip jadedness
 on Washington is The New Republic, widely read by journalists for, among other charms, its frequent, witty put-downs of the political class. Senior editor Lewis proudly calls the publication "probably the most cynical magazine" among "respectable" publications. "It treats its subjects more harshly," he says. "The difference between the way people present themselves [in public
 life] and the way they're presented [in the press] is probably the greatest in The New Republic."
 In a cover story two years ago, Lewis wrote, tongue only a bit in cheek, "in praise of
 cynicism." He said: "The cynic sees the world
 as a vast comic tableau. The distance he
 puts between himself and others saves him
 time, money, anxiety, and a great deal of moral indignation." Lewis says he was sent a highly complimentary note on the piece by New York magazine's editor-in-chief, Kurt Andersen, a Spy magazine founder and pooh-bah of smart-ass American journalism.

 

Cynical attitudes on the part of Washington reporters are certainly not a new thing. In 1882, twenty-seven-year-old Frank G. Carpenter was assigned to cover the capital by his paper, the Cleveland Leader; ten years later he told his readers, "A few members of Congress are really great men, but these I can count on my fingers. A few more are noble and upright, and now and then you will find one who casts his vote for the country's good, and not just because it will benefit himself. Most of the others swell about and pose as great men. I suppose they feel great, except at election time when they drink, truckle, and bootlick to maintain their greatness. Congressional greatness -- faugh!"

"The press has always been cynical," says Deborah Howell, Washington bureau chief of Newhouse News Services. "I'm the daughter of a newspaperman and grew up in a newspaper household. There's nothing new here." Although she disapproves of it, she cites the "old line" in press circles: "The only way to look at a politician is down."

But cynical attitudes have arguably become more intense in recent years as part of a migration by journalists away from honest skepticism. In any event, yesterday's reporters mostly confined their cynical comments to the barrooms; today's stick them in their copy.

In a Newsweek column last year, Meg Greenfield, the longtime editorial-page editor of The Washington Post, defended cynical attitudes on the part of both the press and the public as "the only sane and prudent response to the world around them." Citing Vietnam, Watergate, and the savings-and-loan scandal, Greenfield said that cynicism "is essentially a function of cumulative experience."

There's plenty to be said for that explanation. But it is not sufficient. Talk to enough journalists, and you will discover that there are a variety of pathways that wind up at press cynicism. Here are a few of them:

Cabin Cynicism

Newsrooms and press packs can be breeders of cynicism. Many journalists describe a kind of chemical reaction that takes place when they cluster in groups -- a catalytic conversion that gets reporters thinking cynically, or more cynically, about their subjects. Although reporters are not children, the powerful peer pressures that many children experience also exert a tug in press groups. It "goes back to junior high," the Sun's Hosler says. "You don't really want to say that you liked your civics class, because everyone would laugh you out of homeroom. That's not cool." In journalism, "You don't want to sound like you're naive -- like, 'Oh my, you bought that story? You dope. You really think that Gingrich cares about people?' "

Before joining U.S News & World Report in the mid-1980s, David Whitman wrote public-policy case studies for the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He enjoyed the intellectual give and take of discussion about policy issues, and recalls some early warning signals during his transition to journalism. Shortly after he arrived in Washington, he attended a Senate hearing on the confirmation of a Reagan administration Justice Department nominee whose conservative views on affirmative action were under attack by liberals in Congress. The debate interested Whitman, but he didn't detect much curiosity on the part of his fellow reporters. "There were a lot of snide jokes about the committee members and Strom Thurmond," the former Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, he recalls. "It was clearly an environment that encouraged you to scoff at what was going on . . . . It certainly wasn't an environment in which I felt encouraged to volunteer potentially wide-eyed statements." These days, Whitman considers himself a skeptic, not a cynic, and notes he hasn't spent much time over the years hanging around with other reporters. "I wasn't very good at becoming one of the guys," he says.

The White House press corps, commonly cited by Washington journalists as the most cynical press corps in the cynical city of Washington, also operates in the most cabin-like conditions. At the White House, reporters are confined to warrens in the West Wing. On presidential trips, the groups pile together on planes and buses for long hours at a time. "Have you ever been on a White House press plane?" asks the Washington Post's Marcus. "It is like junior high school. I have never met a group of people who complain more about what they are doing. It's an ethos of disgruntlement -- of which cynicism is a part. And in the group ethos, na•vete is just the hugest sin of all. Nothing could make you look more stupid than saying, 'I think, gee, they're doing this because they're right.' There's almost a bidding war of cynicism. It's good to be more cynical."

Cabin culture isn't limited to Washington. New York Newsday columnist Gail Collins, who writes frequently about New York state and local politics and began her career covering the Connecticut statehouse in Hartford, says a cynical atmosphere often pervades groups of state capital and city hall reporters. "You really look like a fool if you take the issues seriously," Collins says. And, "Anytime you write something that is really, really positive about a politician, unless he's dead -- everyone in the community of journalism says, 'God, did you see how they're sucking up to that person?' "

In fact, The New Republic runs a "Clinton Suck-Up Watch" and a "Gingrich Suck-Up Watch" that lists crimes of exuberance committed by reporters and others who write or speak favorably of the president or the House speaker. What reporter wants to find his name on this honor roll?

Waterfront Cynicism

Waterfront cynicism is the tug exerted by long years of hanging around the political world's equivalent of the docks. The dynamic works this way: a reporter starts a career with the sort of skepticism -- honest doubt -- that is widely touted by role-model professionals as the ideal for the craft. The reporter isn't particularly disposed toward grand illusions about human nature and isn't particularly interested in the pursuit of journalism as a way to expose its dark side either. Nevertheless, after the usual exposure to folly and misdeed, to crooks and charlatans, the reporter feels the pull of cynicism. It's worth noting that, in several dozen interviews, no journalist reported becoming less cynical over a lifetime of reporting.

"Over the course of the years -- the fifteen years that I've been in Washington -- I've become more cynical about the political process," says Pamela Fessler, a national desk editor for National Public Radio who started her career in the mid-1970s. She also believes that the political system has become more corrupt over that time. Marcus of The Washington Post, who has worked in journalism since 1979 and at the Post since 1984, says, "I find myself rarely believing that people are doing things just because they are the right thing to do. I don't know whether that's cynicism or experience." Similarly, Berg of the Star Tribune says of congressional coverage, "I think there is a tendency to assume the worst about people's motives. A lot of it comes from evidence that people in Congress have bad motives."

Washington journalists, after all, are frequently given cynical explanations of the behavior
 of public officials by their trusted insider sources in public officialdom. "You can hardly immerse yourself in this kind of stuff without being bathed in a cynical, realpolitik analysis," says Dennis Farney, a Kansas-City based Wall Street Journal reporter who spent many years in Washing-
 ton covering the White House and Congress. "I'm not sure we're as cynical as the people
 we cover."

 

In both those institutions, say journalists who cover them, lying to reporters is common, and there are unceasing and often heavy-handed attempts to persuade the press of a particular point of view, which can have the perverse effect of tempting resentful reporters not to look at the substance. At the Supreme Court, which doesn't have an aggressive press-spin strategy and which has been largely free of scandal in its history, reporters aren't particularly cynical, according to a journalist who covers the institution.

Because the working conditions of congressional and White House reporters also powerfully nurture Cabin Cynicism, it is tough to separate the pull of the Waterfront and Cabin varieties. Probably the two influences complement each other. "I think the group has become cynical for a reason, but group cynicism does reinforce itself," Marcus of The Washington Post says.

The Devil's Cynicism

In The Devil's Dictionary, first published in 1906 as The Cynic's Word Book, the journalist, short-story writer, and critic Ambrose Bierce defined a cynic as "a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eye to improve his vision."

Lewis of The New Republic offers himself and his work as an embodiment of this type of cynicism. Thirty-four years old, he grew up in New Orleans, a community of "sweet-natured cynics" who have a live-and-let-live attitude toward their fellow creatures that contains no great expectations and few illusions. "I was raised by a cynic, a very persuasive one," Lewis says, "my father," and a cynic is "what I strive to be." He adds: "Do I believe that a lot of people's motives are base? Yes. If you dig, you usually can find a selfish motive. I must say, a lot of my cynicism has been borne out. You start with a suspicion and ask lots of questions." Lewis says that beneficial creations of mankind such as capitalism are premised "on a very cynical view of human nature" and thus "it amazes me that cynicism has such a bad name." And "if a cynic is bitter it is because he is disillusioned. And he can only be disillusioned if he has illusions. That's a cheap cynic."

The Romantic's Cynicism

Farney of The Wall Street Journal suggests that journalism has always attracted a certain temperamental type to its ranks: "an idealist, or romantic idealist." And why not? Who would want journalists (or anyone else) not to have a capacity for ideals and indignation?

But although plenty of young journalists
 survive encounters with the world with
 their ideals intact and sense of purpose health-
 ily tempered, the collision sometimes produces for romantics a quickly-arrived-at and, often enough, quite bitter kind of cynicism, a variant, perhaps, of the waterfront genus. The tell-
 tale mark is disillusionment. Over time, romantics can come to believe that they have maintained a purity of purpose, while the world around is corrupt. They may lose perspective
 by becoming preoccupied with the rooting out
 of petty evils.

 

Watergate may well have been a magnet
 that attracted a bumper crop of romantics to
 journalism and particularly investigative journalism. Consider Richard Blow. After graduating from Yale University in 1986, he went to work
 in Washington as an investigative reporter.
 "I came out of Yale fairly idealistic" about
 the political system, he recalls. A talented reporter, he published articles in The New Republic and Mother Jones, the San Francisco-based magazine that specializes in muckraking. But his exposure to Washington soon produced disenchantment. "I was disillusioned by seeing the process by which people learn to compromise their values because they want to be liked,"
 Blow explains. These days, Blow is the editor
 of Regardie's, a bimonthly Washington-
 based magazine. "I'm the most cynical person
 in the world," he says. "All the news in this
 town is manufactured and nobody believes any of it. There's no such thing as idealistic journalism in Washington. I'm cynical about Washington because the definition of success
 in Washington has nothing to do with accomplishments that in any forum outside the Belt-
 way would be valued." And look, he says, "at
 the incredibly mediocre caliber of the politicians on the Hill. Up close and personal, they are revealed to be profoundly uninteresting
 and unthoughtful people whose greatest concern is the retaining of their job. That breeds a
 certain cynicism."

 

The romantic's cynicism can produce highly indignant pieces in the best tradition of exposŽ journalism. However, those imbued with this cynicism may be responsible for some of the scolding that elected officials get from reporters. "Any ordinary television viewer who has watched presidential news conferences over the last couple of administrations can't have failed to pick up a tone of high-minded moral indignation in the reporters' questions, which seem designed not so much to get at a particular fact or elicit a particular view as to dramatize the gulf in moral stature between the reporters and the president," The New Yorker's Gopnik wrote in his piece on the national news media. He characterized this attitude as sanctimony and added: "The sanctimony is frequently hard to tell from the cynicism, of course; they sometimes sound like different names for the same thing."

Marketplace Cynicism

Early in her career as a statehouse reporter, Newsday columnist Collins discovered to her chagrin that her earnest reports on the public-policy issues of the day were not being devoured by her readers. Thus began a drift toward giving her coverage a funny edge that often mocked the process of government. And, "anytime you develop an edge, and make things amusing, you sound more cynical," she says. "Gentle irony does not work real well in this world."

In some cases, cynical coverage may reflect not a cynical attitude on the part of the journalist toward the government but a response to what are perceived to be marketplace imperatives. The credo of Marketplace Cynicism is, "Tell Them What They Want to Hear."

Some reporters say that cynicism sells in the marketplace of ideas in the newsroom. "If there's a choice between a story with a pure motive and a story with a cynical motive, they [the editors] are going to choose the cynical motive," says a Washington reporter for a major national newspaper. "It's more interesting. It's juicy. It's just a fact of journalistic life."

If a "Tell Them What They Want to Hear" attitude stems from the top of a news organization, it is easy to see how it could make rank-and-file reporters cynical about their jobs. Publisher John R. MacArthur of Harper's, who has also worked as an investigative reporter, attributes the cynicism of reporters principally to the attitudes and principles of the owners and publishers of the news media. "A media company, newspaper, or TV network with an idealistic, uncynical, and principled owner does not have cynical reporters," MacArthur says. "The principles get inculcated in the organization."

Off the Waterfront

It is tempting to view press cynicism as
 at worse a benign occupational hazard
 and at best a protective device that has long served the profession well by keeping reporters from becoming the house pets of government officials and other press manipulators. Moreover, reasoning along diabolically cynical lines can help a reporter form a hypothesis that bears investigative fruit. Given the choice between a credulous, wide-eyed journalist and a leathery, cynical one, anyone would take the cynical model. Meanwhile, press bashing has become trendy; accusations of press cynicism are sometimes leveled by cynical politicians who view an unpopular press as a handy foil. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, for example, has a long history of both flogging the press as
 cynical and manipulating it to accomplish
 his agenda.

 

Nevertheless, press cynicism is clearly a real problem -- certainly a problem in Washington, the primary focus of this exploration. Even though it is understandable, a migration from skepticism to cynicism has not served the cause of journalism well. Cynicism can be a lazy substitute for curiosity, and in its most corrosive form, it can produce journalists who have a diminished view of their profession and of themselves. Worse, it can damage readers and viewers and thus, democracy.

The different pathways to cynicism themselves suggest some palliatives. The best cure for the Romantic's Cynicism is probably time (or maybe therapy). If the problem is Cabin Cynicism or Waterfront Cynicism (and often it may be both), then the obvious solution is to spend less time in the cabin and less time hanging around the waterfront. Berg of the Minneapolis Star Tribune says reporters shouldn't concentrate so heavily on coverage of the Machiavellian maneuvers of political insiders in Washington. He's practicing this advice himself, in fact. He recently journeyed
 through the South to interview ordinary
 citizens about the ideas they have about government. "I want to sort of let them talk," he says. Tom Hamburger, the Washington
 bureau chief of the Star Tribune, says his paper is considering major changes of coverage of national policy issues to focus on proposed solutions to the problems. For example, the paper may have its reporters look at how other countries have dealt with flaws in the health-care system and with other problems that currently afflict the United States. The goal is to get away from what Hamburger calls "the operating norms" of Washington journalists.

 

Cynicism seems generally to ripen and intensify over the course of a Washington
 tour of duty, as journalistic "outsiders"
 become entrenched "insiders" and take on
 the colorations of a fairly cynical environ-
 ment. So although exile from Washington probably won't arrest cynicism in journalists whose cynicism has deepened to the point of being a handicap, it might make room for fresher, less cynical replacements. At the least, editors could follow the example of Howell, the Newhouse News Service bureau chief, who says she doesn't tolerate cynical attitudes in her reporters. She says she alerts her troops to attitude problems, and "if I had a reporter who was a total cynic, I wouldn't have him or her around."

 

But is cynicism curable? The most negative analysis is that the cynicism of contemporary journalism is simply one facet of an increasingly cynical culture. A vicious circle may be at work: cynical coverage tailored to a cynical public, which makes the public more cynical and begets more cynical coverage. Future journalists absorb cynical values through the trashy pop culture of Hollywood and Madison Avenue -- these days cynicism abounds even in comic books -- and thus have a tendency toward cynicism before they ever enter the cabin or the waterfront.

 In his posthumously published book, Revolt of the Elites, the cultural historian Christopher Lasch argues that a cognitive elite of journalists -- along with university professors, novelists, screenwriters, and other values-shapers -- has lost its faith. Tenured Radicals, a 1990 book by New Criterion managing editor Roger Kimball, attacks the modern humanities curriculum at many universities on virtually the identical terms in which journalism is now often assaulted. Kimball writes that the analysis of cultural trends by professors has become "a species of cynicism for which nothing is properly understood until it is exposed as corrupt, duplicitous, or hypocritical." In the new Greater Expectations, Brown University's William Damon says that an "unwholesome environment for young people" at home and at school is producing "a cynical attitude towards moral values and goals . . . in a phrase, a failure of spirit."

The antidote for a failure of spirit would seem to be belief, an attachment to cosmic values. The cynic, to whom almost nothing is sacred, has difficulty reconciling a contemptuous distrust of mankind with belief in a high meaning to human existence.

Today's generation of cynics, in journ-
 alism and elsewhere, seems afraid to believe. Perhaps after the Kennedy assassinations, Vietnam, Watergate, they built up a defen-
 sive wall, like disappointed lovers who vow never to fall in love again. Cynicism beckons as a seductive retreat from belief, but it is also a barren spot, one that

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