Halberstam decries 'tabloidization' of the news

David Halberstam

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author David Halberstam told a Duke audience in March that news coverage had hit an all-time low during the coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal.

"The truth is it's my 44^th year as a journalist and it is the single worst year I have ever spent in my profession," said the former New York Times reporter, as he delivered the James D. Ewing Lecture on Ethics in Journalism at the Sanford Institute. "I think we're at a historic juncture... Something very important has been happening for some thirty years or so, and its been coming, and it's finally here."

Halberstam said that traditional standards for ethical and professional news coverage have eroded due to several factors: the impact of television and more recently 24-hour cable news and Internet-based news; the trend toward sensational stories and coverage of celebrities, and the de-emphasis on substantive domestic and foreign policy issues; and corporate ownership of the media that puts more emphasis on increasing shareholders' profits than on keeping the public adequately informed.

"The result is the tabloidization of the media," he said. " A rising mixture of sex, scandal, violence, and a diminution of a more serious agenda.... We have taken the trivial and made it seem important. And we've taken the important and made it seem trivial.."

He was particularly critical of how the news media handled the Clinton-Lewinsky saga, especially the stories that were based on second- or third- hand information from anonymous sources.

"If you're a reporter, the easiest thing in the world is to get a story," he said. "The hardest thing is to verify....The old sins were about getting something wrong, that was a cardinal sin.The new sin is to be boring."

Despite his concerns, Halberstam said it was still possible to be good journalist. "There is a great deal of difference between information and knowledge," he said. "If you're a good journalist, you can take information and turn it into knowledge. You can understand what's important and what's real, what's blather and what's spin, and you can help take your readers or your viewers through the mind field. You can inform them. It's a terribly important thing."

A Harvard graduate who covered the civil rights movement for the Nashville Tennessean and the war in Vietnam for The New York Times, Halberstam is the author of many books, including The Best and the Brightest (about the Kennedy administration and Vietnam), The Powers That Be (about the powerful forces behind the news media) and Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made.

The annual James D. Ewing Lecture is sponsored by the DeWitt Wallace Center for Communications and Journalism and named in honor of the publisher emeritus of the Keene (New Hampshire) Sentinel.