Journalism in the Age of Trump

I came of age professionally at the dawn of the Watergate era. While studying for a master’s degree in newspaper journalism, my Syracuse University classmates and I met with Jeb Magruder, president Richard Nixon’s re-election committee head in early 1972, just months before the Watergate break-in, two years before Magruder would plead guilty to conspiracy to obstruct justice, to defraud the United States, and to illegally eavesdrop on the Democratic Party national headquarters in the Watergate Hotel.

During our first summer of matrimony, in 1973, Gilda spent most of her days watching the Senate Watergate hearings. Lowell Weicker Jr. of Connecticut gained national prominence during the hearings as a Republican critic of Nixon. I interviewed Weicker at his Greenwich home on the Friday of Labor Day weekend. We made national news when I quoted him asserting he would not try to capitalize on his new-found prominence by running for president in 1976, though he did try to mount a presidential bid in 1980.

In the years following Watergate and the bravura reporting of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, not to mention their celluloid alter-egos Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford, it seemed every young person graduating college wanted to be an investigative reporter, someone who toppled the high and mighty. It didn’t matter if their chosen targets presided in Washington or Podunk, Indiana. What mattered was the press had to show that it was supreme.

For the most part the nation benefitted from such zeal, though excesses did occur, such as the intrusive, destructive coverage of Gary Hart and his non affair with Donna Rice, which submarined his presidential hopes in 1988.

Relations between the press and presidents (and would-be presidents) are rarely absent of acrimony. Reporters are a skeptical, cynical lot, always looking for the real story behind any presidential action. They bristle at any attempt to corral their activity. Administrations, on the other hand, are the ultimate public relations practitioners. Media access is to be restricted and managed.

Which brings us to media coverage in the age of Trump. The Internet has vastly expanded the number of bodies able to disseminate news, real and fake. The biggest body of all belongs to Donald J. Trump and his peripatetic fingers.

The twit-in-chief has upended traditional news distribution routes. His team has hinted of changes to the daily briefings in the White House press room. Indeed, the very room itself may become extinct.

It is a strategy to bypass traditional media that Trump believes is biased against him. He may be right about the bias claim, but he is fooling himself if he seriously believes upsetting the press room applecart will stifle critical reporting and analysis of his administration. If anything, it will galvanize real reporters to probe deeper.

The contretemps over Buzzfeed’s publishing the contents of a questionably accurate dossier of behavior by Trump while in Russia several years ago is the latest example of the press pushing the limits of journalistic decorum.

Yet, it is the height of chutzpah for a president-elect who uses Twitter bullying tactics, the retweeting of falsehoods and innuendo and near total disregard for the truth to complain about his coverage and portrayal in the media.

I suspect Trump is not very well read, but he probably knows the saying, “Those who live by the sword, die by the sword.”

He might also be acquainted with another proverb journalists embrace: “The pen is mightier than the sword.”

Screw It: My Sister Tried to Get Me a Date and a Job

It's not uncommon for friends and relatives to help out when you're looking for a job. Or someone to love. It's also not uncommon for their best laid plans to backfire.

My sister Lee twice misfired when it came to helping me.

Before I started dating Gilda I was not seeing anyone. Always the considerate older sister, Lee thought she had stumbled across the perfect person for me to call, a girl whom I had gone out with in summer camp when we were both all of 13.

Our conversation was short, awkward and embarrassing, at least on my end when I called her. When I asked what she was up to these days, she said she was to be married in a few weeks. A quick mazel tov ended the conversation, followed by another call to my sister remonstrating her that the next time she thinks to set me up with a girl it might be wise to first check the young lady's ring finger.

Not content to try to improve my love life, Lee next tried to help me find a journalism job. In the early 1970s, she was a social worker at New York City’s Bureau of Child Welfare in lower Manhattan. With two co-workers she went to lunch one day. Seated next to their table were two men in their  30s. They started talking. She remembered one had long hair. He said he was a publisher of a magazine. 

Saying her brother recently graduated with a masters degree in journalism, she wondered if he might have a job for me. Maybe, he answered. She asked him the name of his magazine. He gave her his business card—Al Goldstein, publisher of Screw. Lee had no idea what Screw was. I did. “ARE YOUR CRAZY? I'm not going to work for a f-ing pornographic magazine,” I screamed at her when she excitedly told me about her referral.

Al Goldstein died Thursday in Brooklyn. He was 77. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/20/nyregion/al-goldstein-pioneering-pornographer-dies-at-77.html?_r=0

Murdoch Most Vile

Let’s put my biases out front right away—I’m not a fan of Rupert Murdoch. If the investigations of Hacker-gate on both sides of the Atlantic bring down his media empire, I would not shed a tear.

My antipathy toward Murdoch is both professional and personal. It precedes his creation of the vile news outlet known as Fox News (can we really call it a legitimate news outlet?). It began with his 1976 purchase of the NY Post.

I grew up reading The Post. In the 1950s and 1960s, The Post was an afternoon tabloid, liberal and progressive in editorial slant, yet a sensational police- and fire-chasing paper. My parents would buy The Post on their way home from their factory in Manhattan, usually stopping at a newsstand on the southbound side of Flatbush Avenue just before Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn.

At first I’d devour the comics—Nancy, Mutt & Jeff, Dennis the Menace. As I grew older I matriculated to the sports pages where Maury Allen, Vic Ziegel, Milton Gross, Paul Zimmerman and Leonard Schecter romanced my interests in baseball, football and the occasional boxing story centered around Floyd Patterson or Sugar Ray Robinson. Next I delved into the social columnists: Leonard Lyons, Earl Wilson, Sidney Skolsky. Finally, with more maturity, I absorbed the political mavens: James Wechsler, Max Lerner, Mary McGrory, Art Buchwald, William Buckley, Drew Pearson, Jack Anderson, Murray Kempton, and a newcomer, Pete Hamill, hired to counter Jimmy Breslin’s man-of-the-street prose in The Daily News. It was a column by Wechsler, a review of a revival of the play The Front Page, that triggered my interest in being a reporter.

When Dorothy Schiff sold The Post to Murdoch, I was crushed by the changes he wrought. I stopped reading as the paper became more sensational in its reportage and more conservative in its editorial leaning. Even after Dave Banks became my best friend back in 1979, I continued to boycott The Post. Dave, you see, was one of Murdoch’s British imports. He succeeded in helping spice up The Post, but then Murdoch dealt me and Gilda, who had befriended Dave’s wife, Gemma, a fateful blow.

Casually asking Dave if he missed his family back in England, Murdoch became wary he’d lose him to a rival back home when Dave replied in the affirmative. So he shipped the Bankses back to merry ol’ England, Dave to work on The Sun, leaving Gilda and me far from merry. He later sent Dave, Gemma and their children Tasha and Tim, to Australia for seven years, giving Dave the ability to say he worked for Murdoch on three continents and making him one of the most sought after commentators in Britain on the trials and tribulations of the News Corp. publishing empire, its chief executive, Rupert Murdoch, and the assorted so-called journalists who have befouled the pact that should exist between news organizations and the public. Indeed, during our recent vacation together in Israel, though he’s semi-retired, Dave’s Blackberry beeped continually with requests for interviews, a few of which he granted to BBC Radio.

Naturally we talked about Hacker-gate. No one loves a scoop more than Dave, or an article that tweaks the high and mighty, be they politicos, royals, or celebrities. But violating a person’s privacy, when not in the national interest, as seems to have repeatedly happened at Murdoch’s News of the World and possibly other properties under his domain, was activity beyond the pale, Dave asserted.

For several days in Israel the four of us discussed the similarities between Watergate and Hacker-gate, Gilda noting both scandals came to light with seemingly small incidents, a sort of rabbit hole that widened into an elaborate warren of nefarious and illegal activity.

Follow the money.

Just as Deep Throat exhorted Bob Woodward and his colleague Carl Bernstein to pursue the money trail in their Watergate investigation nearly 40 years ago, money is a key, in my mind.

Reporters and editors of the News of the World tapped into the cell phones of thousands of public and private individuals in a frantic chase for scoops in the cutthroat media circus of Great Britain. The News of the World reportedly paid a private investigator as much as 100,000 pounds sterling a year to hack phones. The editor of the paper during part of that time, Rebekah Brooks, claims she did not know about the hacking.

My question is, who approved the expense accounts authorizing payments for the hacking? When the first bill was submitted, didn’t anyone question what it was for? Assuming a lower level editor signed off on it, didn’t senior management, including Brooks and the paper’s controller and auditor, question how and why £100,000 was spent? What, they might have asked, did we get for our £100,000?

It is inconceivable they did not know. It is intolerable they condoned this breach of journalistic ethics. Brooks has resigned as head of Murdoch’s publishing interests; she was arrested today.

As is so often the case in today’s media world, a scoop of cash is the only way to get a scoop of news. But, as Dave pointed out to us, his reporting background instilled in him an understanding of journalism principles lacking in many of today’s media elite. Too often, he believes, chief editors of British papers have been named whose only pedigree has been experience on the entertainment beat. These young editors cared more about packaging than content, about splashy headlines than accuracy, about beating the competition than integrity.

Several of the principal characters in the Hacker-gate scandal are entertainment and public relations firm alumni, including Brooks, current British prime minister David Cameron and his former press aide, Andrew Coulson. Coulson. Sounds a lot like Charles “Chuck” Colson, the convicted Watergate conspirator who counseled Richard Nixon. Let’s not forget that among Nixon’s key advisors were chief of staff H.R. Haldeman and press secretary Ron Ziegler, both former advertising executives. Ah, the Watergate links abound.

I haven’t even touched on Fox News as a reason to put a lid on the poison Murdoch has spread throughout journalism and politics in America and Great Britain. Let’s save that for another day.

My Night at Elaine's

Did you see the nostalgic article on Elaine’s in last Sunday’s Style section of the NY Times? (OK, so I’m a little behind in my reading. Besides, I’ve had other topics to write about in the interim.) Here’s the link in case you missed it: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/fashion/12elaines.html?_r=1&scp=5&sq=elaine%20kaufman&st=cse

I’ll admit to a certain envy of those journalistic brothers who frequented the power den restaurant and watering hole on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. But as a commuter and family man, I wasn’t going to abandon Gilda, Dan and Ellie for associations of questionable benefit. Besides, I never was a heavy drinker, and from all I’ve heard and read about the gang that hung out at Elaine’s, that was a strong prerequisite for membership.

It wasn’t until about five years ago that I finally swung through the doors of Elaine’s with Gilda in the company of our English friends Dave and Gemma Banks. Dave, you may recall from an earlier blog (http://nosocksneededanymore.blogspot.com/2009/12/larger-than-life-journalist_06.html) has been a force in British journalism for some 40 years. After Rupert Murdoch bought the NY Post, he imported several Brits to spice up the tabloid, of which Dave was a key player. We accompanied Dave as he met up with his successors at the Post, editor Col Allan and company (Dave also edited the NY Daily News; the day before we met with the then editor Martin Dunn at his downtown loft apartment prior to dining with him at Tribeca Grill).

Elaine herself came over to our table. Of course, she would, given the provenance of Col Allan. Though she didn’t know Gilda or me, Ms. Kaufman could not have been more welcoming. She had no airs. She showed more interest in our new faces than those of her regulars. In short (and she was short in physical stature), she was a perfect host, making us feel comfortable and important.

I’ve often wondered how my career might have been different had I been more of a drinker and schmoozer and not such a homebody. While a reporter in Connecticut, I didn’t hang out in bars with politicians, the police or firemen, filling up on beer and background stories. When I became a business to business editor, I rarely socialized with the captains of commerce my magazine covered. I still managed to have a successful career, but the question still lingers in my mind—what if....?