State of the Media

In September, a high-ranking Manhattan editor who worked on Scott McClellan’s bestselling takedown of the Bush administration told me she was inundated with book pitches from Texas journalists eager to write about Rick Perry, the presidential candidate. Around the same time, Politico quoted Texas Tribune editor Evan Smith saying, “I have dropped to my knees before bed every night and prayed that this man would run for president.”

Journalists soon realized that Perry’s run for the White House wasn’t going to make for great political journalism. Of course, 2012 uncorked with Perry still stumbling, and Texas Monthly’s Paul Burka saying, “The best thing he can do for Texas in the time left to him is to resign.”

On Jan. 19, Perry suspended his presidential campaign. Did his national foray mean a damned thing for journalism in Texas? One Austin insider suggests an intriguing possibility: The national media’s fascination with Perry’s decade-long environmental record might actually lead to a renewed reportorial emphasis on the environment in Texas.

The last few months have seen hard-hitting environmental pieces about Texas in The New Republic and Mother Jones, and by former Observer managing editor Chris Tomlinson, now with the Associated Press in Austin. The big mainstream Texas papers have done their bit, too, publishing stories about Perry’s abysmal environmental record (though too often settling for he-said-she-said coverage of the governor’s squabbles with the Environmental Protection Agency).

It was encouraging to see some attention paid to what may be the state’s single most egregiously under-reported issue. But, that said, don’t look for Texas venues to reintroduce the kind of day-in-day-out reporting the state’s best environmental journalists used to do in the glory days of newspapers.

Jim Schermbeck, among the state’s most courageous environmental advocates, told the Dallas-area Pegasus News that readers “certainly can’t rely on more mainstream resources anymore. … If people really want to know what’s happening with public health and environmental issues in [the Dallas-Fort Worth area], they need to plug into the myriad of citizen and group blogs and websites that are out there breaking news every day.”

He’s right. It’s too much to hope that big outlets will ever recreate dedicated environmental beats. But it’s clear there is no shortage of stories to pursue. To cite just one example: San Antonio residents deserve a full investigation of pollution on the outskirts of the old Kelly Air Force Base, which is located in a predominantly Latino community. An investigation should examine whether the contamination is part of a national pattern near U.S. military installations.

Perhaps, if the trend toward hyper-local news continues, news outlets will pay more attention to such “in-my-backyard” environmental hazards. Last year, citizen journalists in North Texas explored how mineral rights and fracking controversies evolved in increasingly urban areas. As affluent white Texans flock to East Austin and Oak Cliff in Dallas, there might even be an upsurge in accountability reporting on neighborhoods, long victimized by abject environmental racism.

While we can wish that hard-hitting environmental journalism inspired by Perry’s presidential campaign will continue in Texas, readers might better focus on the consistently excellent work done by The Texas Observer’s Forrest Wilder and the swelling ranks of online grassroots investigators and bloggers around the state. There’s Schermbeck’s Downwinders At Risk site. Sharon Wilson’s Bluedaze website has examined the environmental record of the former editor of The Oak Cliff Tribune, former Dallas City Council member, and gas industry advocate Mark Housewright, and scrutinized a Texas Tribune event last year that provided a forum for T. Boone Pickens and other natural gas heavyweights.

Bottom line: There is at least a bit more awareness. You know things have changed when The Dallas Morning News named Port Arthur environmental hero Hilton Kelley a finalist for its 2011 Texan of The Year. (Just a few years earlier, the paper named Karl Rove Texan of the Year, with political reporter Wayne Slater describing Rove as “someone of uncommon character who demonstrated both leadership and vision.”)

Maybe, just maybe, Perry’s failed presidential run exposed a bit more of Texas’ toxic underbelly, reinvigorating mainstream media coverage of the environment while empowering a hell of a lot more citizen journalists.

The big term bandied about in media circles these days is impact journalism. Cause-and-effect journalism. The kind of journalism that gets people talking, uncorks indictments, passes bills, frees the unjustly incarcerated, and might convince people to pay for their news.

At the same time, more and more news veterans are worrying about the thousands of new reporters being spit out of journalism schools who could care less about game-changing journalism. They want to be Anthony “No Reservations” Bourdain. They wish their lives were as interesting as David Sedaris’, so they could write a memoir and have critics declare them the voice of a new generation. They don’t want to be I. F. “Izzy” Stone or Sy Hersh, in their thick eyeglasses, hip deep in the deadly dull but ultimately damning reporting that renders government malfeasance transparent and cleaves a lot closer to what John Henry Faulk said were our “guaranteed liberties and freedoms.”

These are the things I think about as the presidential race kicks into high gear this new year. The stakes seem higher than ever. With the economy ground to a raw nub, college graduates carrying record debt, and journalism students less certain than ever that there will be any kind of paying job in the news game, you may wonder if there are any young journalists at all willing to take on the hard, droning work of the modern muckraker.

Thankfully, there are. From the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) to Southern Methodist University, students are signing up to become muckrakers.

Don’t tell Rick Perry as he continues his fevered quest to ferret out research on Texas campuses, but student journalists are researching him and other profoundly important issues in Texas and elsewhere. They are committing to a career in investigative work, and diving into it without much faith that there will be jobs with 401(k)s waiting for them when they graduate.

They are doing it as a calling, “swooping down” on government bureaucracies like a “guerilla warrior,” as Izzy Stone once put it.

At UTEP, the extraordinary “Mexodus” project is a sweeping investigative narrative, driven by student journalists, that shines a light on middle-class families fleeing Mexico because of drug-related violence. The ongoing “Light of Day” project, spearheaded by the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas, teaches students from universities across the state how to use public records to create investigative stories. The project has led student journalists to take long, hard looks at whether Texas schools are fully disclosing their public records.

In my investigative journalism class at the University of Texas at Austin, students spend several months looking into these issues: the breakdown in a federal system meant to protect parents against international child abductions; whether public universities are violating federal labor laws; why Texas immigration judges have the highest denial rates for asylum seekers; what happens to women in Texas when lawmakers slash health care funding; the lives of poverty-stricken college students; how U.S. policies for assimilating refugees cause further suffering for newcomers to this country.

As the new year unfolds, and you worry whether the media’s clucking prophecies (“You’ll miss the news when it’s gone”) are about to come true, take solace in the fact that there are fresh legions of young journalistic foot soldiers who are clearly not averse to investigative news.

I knew a Dallas reporter who was nicknamed, behind his back, The Reverse Nostradamus. He wrote a column that often featured excerpts from stories that had appeared decades earlier. People said he was good at predicting the past. I’m taking a crack at predicting the future:

Journalism will survive in 2012 and the years to come. The hard stories will be covered, and covered well, by young Texas reporters who are doing it because it is a calling. With no reservations.

The sad news out of San Antonio this fall is that Cary Clack, one of the stalwarts of that city’s journalism community— hell, one of the gems of modern Texas media—has left the San Antonio Express-News. The former columnist is now a senior adviser and campaign spokesperson for state Rep. Joaquin Castro’s congressional campaign.

Since the mid-1990s, Clack almost single-handedly directed news coverage to the chronically underreported black community in one of the 10 largest cities in the nation. Clack knew things—that San Antonio’s Percy Sutton served as Malcolm X’s lawyer and was the owner of the Apollo Theater in Harlem; that St. Philip’s College, one of the state’s important institutions of higher learning, battled to stay afloat.

His departure is one of 10 by African-American columnists across the nation this year. In the last few years some of the highest-profile minority journalists in this state—Linda Jones and Ira Hadnot of The Dallas Morning News, Carlos Sanchez at the Waco Herald-Tribune—left their venues.

National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) president Kathy Times said, “it’s heartbreaking to think that one-third of the black journalists in newsrooms in 2001 are not there anymore.” A study by the American Society of News Editors, released in April, shows that the percentage of minorities in newspaper newsrooms slipped for the third straight year, to 12.79 percent. With the departed went cultural reference points, institutional memories, and the righteous pressure they put on other news outlets. The Observer has struggled for years to have a staff that reflects the diversity in the state. Former editor Lou Dubose says: “During the 11 years I was there, the staff was all white, mostly male. We tried.”

Staffing is one matter, content another: Susan Currie Sivek, who did her graduate work at the University of Texas School of Journalism, wrote in a 2008 analysis of Texas Monthly that its coverage of minorities was “especially problematic.”

Sivek documented that Hispanics were on 1.8 percent of the magazine’s covers; blacks were on 3.6 percent of the covers. Hispanics were the topic of a feature story 5.6 percent of the time; blacks were the topic 4 percent of the time.

An NABJ study of 74 of the largest TV stations in America, released in September, found that staffing doesn’t match city demographics. Although they compose 35 percent of the U.S. population, people of color filled only 12 percent of broadcast newsroom management positions at the stations surveyed. In a nod to one of the bright lights, the NABJ study noted that Dallas-based Belo Corporation (which owns several TV stations, as well as The Dallas Morning News) was “closest to matching the diversity of the nation with 10 percent of its managers being of color.” Still, “its station in Charlotte has no diversity, and there is only one person of color in management at its station in New Orleans.”

The solutions? As always: Hire more minority journalists, overhaul the news menu, support the creation of minority news sites.

Clack says, “There’s a reason why minority groups will always need their own news sites. Mainstream media don’t have the knowledge or interest to cover those communities as thoroughly as they should.”

And, Clack adds: “I believe we will see more minority news websites such as The Root and theGrio.”

And now, some journalists of color have complained about the lack of minority representation at online news/social media sites. Citing a Pew Center study showing that blacks and Hispanics are more than twice as likely to use Twitter as whites, some journalists say new media sites are succumbing to old media habits.

Former Fort Worth Star-Telegram assistant managing editor Jean Marie Brown addresses the gulf in an excellent article for the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard called “Familiar Patterns of Minority Exclusion Follow Mainstream Media Online.” Her thesis: Don’t get lulled into believing that the democratic tendencies of new media will result in instant diversity.

“Mainstream online media are caught in the same loop that ensnared legacy outlets,” Brown writes. “Their view of minorities is limited… Rather than fostering understanding that might help us find common ground, mainstream online media maintain the divisive ‘us vs. them’ mentality that is evident in many of our contemporary conversations about race.”

In September, two Texas editors announced they were stepping down—Fred Zipp at the Austin American-Statesman and Robert Rivard at the San Antonio Express-News. Rumors began to fly: They were tired of corporate types telling them what stories to run; they quit before they were forced out; they were “ink-stained” leftovers in a digital world; they refused to lay off more reporters.

“I have felt my passion for the job wane and decided to leave so that others can pick up the fight,” said Zipp in a story in the American-Statesman.

Rivard’s email to staff read: “I look forward to pursuing new opportunities in a new field.”

I asked both if they wanted to expand on how Texas editors who had guided their papers through tough storms and stories had moved on. I also asked each how he sees journalism in Texas, and what advice they have for young folks entering the field.

Zipp, who became managing editor in 2000 and editor in 2008, replied: “Thanks for the generous offer. I’m reluctant to adopt the role of wistful crank just yet, though, so I will pass. I’m confident whatever you are thinking is on target.”

Rivard, who became editor in 1997, simply said: “Ask me on or about Jan. 2.”

Whether you liked them or their newspapers, the two newspaper veterans were tasked with keeping their wounded publications on life support. And I would argue that you have to view their departures through the prism of the weird, often awful, history of journalism in Texas—and its future.

In the 1970s and part of the 1980s, the San Antonio Express-News was a laughingstock among seasoned journalists, molded by the absolute worst instincts of Rupert Murdoch. Under Murdoch’s ownership, the newspaper regularly featured pictures of local women in bikinis. There were bizarre contests, including one that involved readers delivering the tails of dead rats to the newspaper. There were aggressively insensitive stories, headlines and story promotions, including “Aliens In Desert Battle Over Urine,” about immigrants dying of thirst in the Texas-Mexico borderlands.

The newspaper barely covered the Latino and black communities on the east, west and south sides of the city. Emphasis skewed toward the “white north,” just as it did in Dallas, where The Dallas Morning News spent decades refusing to devote substantial coverage to the communities of color in South and West Dallas.

The American-Statesman never stooped as low as the Express-News when it came to lunatic sensationalism, but for good chunks of the 1970s and 1980s, it was an unambitious outpost for investigative news, and tone deaf to the grinding realities of black and Latino life. Like Texas Monthly on the statewide level, the American-Statesman sometimes wrote about its city in a self-congratulatory vein—more celebration, and fewer indictments of people in power.

Without question, the American-Statesman and the Express-News ultimately improved. Rivard, Zipp and others broadened coverage and enacted some technological advancements. And they continued moving their papers away from the temptations (celebration versus investigation) of the not-too-distant days of daily newspapering in Texas.

That said, there will always be debate about whether any modern editors in Texas ever went far enough. And there will always be debate about what readers really expected from their daily newspaper.

In the end, deciding what constitutes progressive coverage in an age of diminished resources and increased corporate intrusion is subjective. When I first subscribed to Rolling Stone, then an “underground” publication, it introduced a column called “Dope Notes,” a guide to what drugs were safe to buy on the streets of America. The Village Voice used to run articles that, to the crowd I ran with at Columbia University, were excellent blueprints for student revolution.

The real, lasting legacy of the two departing Texas editors might be defined by the revelation of any advertiser-friendly pressures they felt over the years from corporate bigwigs at Hearst and Cox Communications, which own the Express-News and American-Statesman, respectively.

What’s already certain is that with these departures, Texas is zooming away from a newspaper culture run by people with more ink than bytes in their veins. The resignations mark a paradigm shift. Journalists who were born in the digital age and are attuned to social media’s influence on the news will soon run Texas newsrooms.

That’s the real revolution at Texas newspapers, and the big question is whether the new editors will use their new tools to improve local journalism.

Until that’s determined, look for other top-level resignations to come in Fort Worth, Dallas and Houston.

Somewhere, Molly Ivins is laughing at this season’s contradictory political coverage. News stories say one thing about Texas Gov. Rick Perry; blogs such as the conservative RedState often say the opposite. What’s a concerned citizen to do? Who and what should you believe when no one can agree on the facts?

I like to think of Ivins as a proto-blogger. Like today’s bloggers, she riffed off the news, adding extra takes and insights. But she did it with the reporting chops to nail down the facts. Ivins’ work was informed by fastidious research—her own and the work of her staffers (full disclosure, I hired her best researcher to work for me on several book projects.)

Ivins believed in what she called “informed subjectivity,” which was based on something called “reporting.” But she didn’t pander to a rigid journalistic notion of balance and objectivity. Ivins wouldn’t waste her time reporting lies—from the left or the right. Why give equal weight to the phonies and con artists?

Her reporting on Perry and Texas politics wasn’t disconnected from the facts; it was driven by the facts.

Today, “disconnected” is a big buzzword at places where the future of journalism gets parsed. Are readers disconnected from politics because they don’t know which version of the facts to believe? Are young people cynically disconnecting from the political process after seeing contradictory stories on partisan blogs and in biased mainstream media coverage?

The contradictions are showing themselves right now in the coverage of Perry’s presidential campaign. Thinly reported partisan blogs offer one version, thinly reported traditional media outlets offer another. The versions are often so disparate that they appear to be written about different people.

The Observer’s Forrest Wilder expertly pondered how he could see and hear one thing at a Houston religious rally convened by Perry in August while other reporters saw something else.

Scan the articles and commentary about Perry on Reason magazine’s “Hit and Run” blog. After reading the libertarian/conservative site, you might be convinced that Perry’s track record has been far less conservative than his rhetoric, which he’s softening by the day.

Check out RedState, where some bloggers say Perry is Conservative Lite and not as Tea Party-ish as he purports. They say Perry believes in raising taxes through the roof and supports Big Government intrusion into citizens’ private affairs—kind of like those Democratic Party demons.

Of course, the editorial divide isn’t always driven by old-fashioned partisan agendas, by liberal or conservative bias in the media. It’s driven by what readers want. The same people researching how “disconnected” readers are from the news are also studying how millions of Americans seek out news sites that reaffirm their existing worldviews.

They want their biases shored up. So say you have a feeling that the public art around Rockefeller Center is really a secret ode to communism—a mind-control plot to insert pinko ideology in public places. You can get your suspicion affirmed by listening to Glenn Beck.

In our age of information overload, with multiple websites and blogs claiming to offer “news,” rumors substitute for facts, and facts are subject to debate. We can’t have an informed citizenry—or a healthy democracy—if bloggers and mainstreamers don’t acknowledge or make a full-faith effort to report the facts. Left or right, their work should be grounded in the hard-to-achieve “informed subjectivity.”