The September/October 2019 issue of Foreign Affairs includes a review essay by Jacob Weisberg, discussing On Press: The Liberal Values That Shaped the News along with recent books by former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson (Merchants of Truth) and former editor-in-chief of The Guardian Alan Rusbridger (Breaking News).
Weisberg, who was formerly editor-in-chief of Slate, writes of On Press:
In On Press, the journalism historian Matthew Pressman examines The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times between 1960 and 1980. During this seeming golden age, the leading news organizations adjusted their fundamental relationship to government, shifting from a kind of elevated stenography to the critical journalism that has become the norm. This was the era of the Vietnam War, the Pentagon Papers, and All the President’s Men, when the image of the reporter as a truth-seeking hero took hold and investigative reporting units proliferated at local newspapers and TV stations all over the country.
Pressman argues that American journalism reached this zenith in reaction to its fundamental failure during the Red Scare of the 1950s. During that time, conventions of objectivity led newspapers to amplify Senator Joseph McCarthy’s accusations and smears, lest they be seen as editorializing. The self-examination that followed McCarthy’s downfall—combined with the new competitive threat from television, the medium that had done the most to expose McCarthy—pushed newspapers away from just-the-facts recitations and toward providing more context, explanation, and interpretation. Still, well into the 1960s, Pressman shows, news coverage tended to be bland and deferential to government. It was the U.S. government’s lies about Vietnam, as well as personal opposition to the war on the part of many journalists, that bred the adversarial style of contemporary political journalism. As Pressman writes, Vietnam “established a baseline level of antagonism between the press and the government.”
But journalistic distrust of authority boomeranged: the press soon found itself on the receiving end, losing the almost automatic trust it had enjoyed when its stance had been less challenging. The right criticized the mainstream press for adopting an oppositional relationship to established institutions. The left criticized the press because it had become an establishment institution. Vice President Spiro Agnew’s attack on the media’s left-wing bias presaged Trump’s. In terms that now seem rather mild, Agnew accused the press of departing from its obligation to simply report the facts and said that by doing so it was taking sides in political conflicts and exercising undue influence. Those who produced the nightly news that Americans relied on, Agnew charged in a speech in 1969, were “a tiny, enclosed fraternity of privileged men elected by no one” who “bask in their own provincialism, their own parochialism.”