Newspaper Cuts Threaten Journalists' Abilities to "Bear Witness"

This is the transcript of Los Angeles Times reporter Henry Weinstein's acceptance speech at the 2006 John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism Ceremony. The award is presented annually by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Weinstein received the award on November 14, 2006.

Thank you very much for those very generous introductions, and thank you very much for this extraordinary honor.

This award is particularly meaningful to me because John Chancellor had a significant impact on my life before his name became indelibly stamped on my brain when he uttered those memorable words after he had been arrested at the 1964 Republican Convention: “This is John Chancellor, somewhere in custody.”

In September, 1957, as a 13-year-old 8th grader who was just beginning to become politically aware, I was living with my mother Rose and my father Harry in a modest tract home in Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley. My parents were first generation Americans and New Deal Democrats. They followed the news avidly. That month the big news was coming from Little Rock.

The unprincipled governor of Arkansas and a mob of angry white people mounted a fierce campaign to prevent nine brave black teenagers from breaking the color line at Central High School three years after the U.S. Supreme Court had unanimously declared school segregation unconstitutional in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education.

As many of you may know, John Chancellor was the first network correspondent on the scene and provided the best coverage. His cameraman captured stunning scenes of cowardly whites launching vitriol and worse as the African American students approached the campus. As David Halberstam wrote in his book, The 50's, “What John Chancellor might as well have been doing was letting the film roll and repeating again and again, ‘This is a sin...this is a sin...this is a sin.’”

We watched that coverage in our den. I vividly remember my parents saying that President Eisenhower had done the right thing by sending in Federal troops to pave the way for the black students to attend classes because it was the only way to uphold the rule of law rather than succumbing to mob rule.

Coverage of the Little Rock crisis played a profound role in the development of my social conscience and led me into the civil rights movement in college and ultimately into journalism. I hoped to make the world better and at the very least give a voice to the voiceless.

In 1977, on the 20th anniversary of the battle at Central High School, I was working for the San Francisco Examiner. It was my privilege to do a feature story on one of those students, Melba Beals. In a lengthy interview, she described how she had been called a nigger, spat on and even had acid fired at her from a squirt gun.

“We were more afraid than we had ever been in our lives,” Melba recalled, emphasizing that at the time it was a misdemeanor, yes a misdemeanor, to lynch a black person in Arkansas.

One of the critical lessons Melba gained from the experience was the importance of reporters bearing witness. “If it hadn’t been for them, I wouldn't be here now,” she told me. “Their telling the world what was going on was my protection.” She became a television journalist.

I am honored to be in the presence of many great journalists in this room who have borne witness, among them David Halberstam in Vietnam; Jack Nelson exposing conditions at mental hospitals in Georgia; Ron Ostrow unearthing corruption in the Teamsters Union; John Kifner shredding the official story of what happened at Kent State; and my wife, Laurie Becklund, who skillfully and courageously penetrated the Salvadoran death squads.

Today, there are thousands of other places where reporters are needed to bear witness, be it in Baghdad or Darfur, or a public school lacking books, a dysfunctional public hospital in South Los Angeles, a courtroom in Texas where the lawyer for a defendant in a death penalty case is sleeping through the trial or the exploitation of poor people in some little town that has yet to come onto our radar screens. We aren't always able to protect people like Melba Beals, but if we don't bear witness, we surely won't.

When newspapers cut back on coverage they break faith with readers and keeping faith with readers is our first obligation. Regrettably, this has been happening all over the country. But as the Wall Street Journal pointed out last Friday, the sea change taking place at American newspapers has become a particularly high stakes drama at the newspaper where I work, the Los Angeles Times.

Seven years ago, the Times was confronted with a major scandal when some of its executives got in bed with an advertiser in a deal where the two companies would have shared the proceeds of revenues from a special issue celebrating the opening of a new sports arena in Los Angeles. They violated elementary rules of journalistic ethics. The staff rebelled, compelled the editor to let a staff reporter write our own expose of what happened, and internal ethics policies were strengthened.

A few months later, the paper was sold to the Tribune Company of Chicago. We loved the change which got rid of the cereal killer and brought us a great editor and a terrific publisher. Cutbacks due to technological changes already had begun under Times-Mirror and I think we knew more cuts would come after the paper was purchased by Tribune. But the marketing budget was slashed, circulation dropped significantly, some jobs on the business side were out-sourced, and the editorial staff was cut by 260 in an attempt to reduce costs and raise profits. Advertising revenues anticipated because of the synergy between the Times and a Tribune-owned television station in Los Angeles failed to materialize. Wall Street concluded that the company was under-performing, and the price of Tribune stock dropped precipitously.

We were told that such measures were necessary to increase the value of the company to shareholders. Rarely mentioned was the fact that LA Times staff members were among the hardest-hit shareholders. The value of our 401Ks plummeted. People on the staff worked harder, and during the same five period the paper won 13 Pulitzer Prizes.

So, you may ask, why all the turmoil at the LA Times? Are we just Luddites who think they can turn back the clock? Disgruntled employees concerned only about our jobs?

What may be hard to see -- perhaps hardest of all for other journalists working at papers that also have undergone cutbacks -- is that we feel we are in a struggle for the core values journalists care about.

It is important to remember that both publishers and editors who the Tribune brought to the Times have told company executives in Chicago that a new strategy is needed and that further cuts are not the way to go. In the past two years, two editors and two publishers have resigned or been forced out because they decided it was time to draw a line in the sand.

The last to go, on Friday, the night before I flew to New York, was our editor, Dean Baquet. Some say he should have agreed to further cuts, but he resisted and in the process raised an important question for all of us. Where do you stop? In a farewell front page the staff produced for Dean, sports columnist Bill Plaschke pointedly suggested that in baseball terms Baquet was being asked to jettison his shortstop, his right fielder and his first baseman.

While Dean's forced resignation was a body blow to our staff, it has broader ramifications. Dean was not fired because he had failed to perform well. Nor was he shown the door for any ethical breach. Dean was forced out because he took a firm stand against cutbacks he believed would harm the newspaper's ability to serve the community. That is cause for alarm, not just for our paper, but for the entire enterprise of journalism in this country.

Consequently, this is a peculiar moment for me. It is truly an honor to have been selected for this award by a group of journalists I so admire and to be lauded at this great university among family, friends and colleagues. But the joy, regrettably, is tempered by the loss of my editor and publisher and the storm clouds hovering over my newspaper and the broader world of journalism. Just a few days ago, when I was chatting with Jonnet Abeles, the wonderful administrator of this program, she acknowledged that I was the first winner of this award faced with the prospect of losing his or her job because of structural changes in journalism, or perhaps for speaking too freely.

I will admit to being a bit nervous about some of what I have said, but speaking the truth often involves risks. I am reminded of a moment during the Staples crisis in 1999, when I was called by Felicity Barringer, then the media reporter for The New York Times. She asked me for my thoughts. I told her, “The leaders of this newspaper have crossed an ethical Rubicon and we have to bring them back to the other side of the river.” In a friendly, cautionary gesture she asked me if I wanted to say that on the record with attribution. I told her if I wasn't willing to do that, I ought to be in another line of work.

Later that day, I told two of my bosses in a public meeting that they needed to understand the difference between dissent and disloyalty, and I reminded them that dissent is often the highest form of loyalty. I hope my current bosses understand that. I was cheered to receive messages from our new publisher, David Hiller, and our new editor, Jim O’Shea, congratulating me on the Chancellor Award and expressing regrets that they could not be here. Despite our staff’s anger at Dean’s departure, I am confident we’ll continue to push to make the Times a better newspaper.

We all realize that newspapers have to make money to prosper, and indeed the Los Angeles Times certainly has been doing that. Our paper turned about a 20% profit last year and generated more than 20% of the revenues made by the entire Tribune Company.

My colleagues and I want the company to prosper. But if the demand for ever-increasing profit overwhelms the rest of what we do, who will bear witness? As the prophet Hillel said, “If I am not for myself who will be for me, but if I am for myself alone, of what good am I?”

Permit me to give you a real-time description of my workplace. At the moment, there is a bidding war over the Tribune Company, which has owned the Los Angeles Times since 2000. This is kind of a surreal experience. In between doing interviews and writing stories, people in the newsroom chat about whether they would prefer to be owned by a venerable Chicago-based newspaper company, the huge chain Gannett, an East Coast investment firm or one of three Los Angeles billionaires who have said they want to buy the company. All three have occasionally been the subject of critical coverage in our paper.

I am not taking a position on who ought to win the bidding war. But I will certainly take a position on the kind of owner we desire. We want an owner who will invest in the paper and engage in real efforts to make it grow and prosper. When I was a labor writer in the 1980's, I wrote about disinvestment, and I learned something from that experience: disinvestment does not provide the road to success for a corporation, its employees or its shareholders.

I do not have a blueprint to offer tonight on how to rapidly increase circulation or generate higher profits. But I can say with confidence that delivering less to readers, which is an inexorable consequence of the kind of cuts many newspapers are now making, is hardly a long-term solution to the problems we are confronting.

I readily acknowledge that we face huge challenges in a dramatically changing media environment. A task force of reporters and editors at the Times has launched an initiative to grapple with tough questions about technology, distribution and changing reader tastes. Some of us have come to the realization that journalists may have to create their own research & development unit rather than waiting for solutions from the business side of the paper. Clearly, there are all sorts of risks in such an endeavor and what is going on at paper is very much a work in progress.

There seems little doubt that we have to change some of our processes, but in making those changes we have to avoid compromising our fundamental values of independence and integrity.

We also have to do a better job of educating everyone in our industry about what's at stake and sometimes even the basics of what we do. I was in one meeting earlier this year with high-ranking executives who urged us to concentrate on local news because people can get “foreign news” so many other places. When we asked one executive just where he thought people were getting foreign news he responded, on “Yahoo and Google.” My colleagues and I had to shake our heads and wonder if he thought those stories were being produced by elves who worked for Google or Yahoo. Guess what? There are no elves mysteriously churning out copy. They are foreign correspondents like my colleagues Alyssa Rubin in Bosnia, Paul Watson in Afghanistan, Borzou Daragahi in Baghdad, and Tracy Wilkinson in war after war after war. They are doing great work under incredibly adverse and dangerous conditions. There is a fundamental difference between being the originator of news and an aggregator of news.

And pardon me for stating the obvious, but if there are fewer people to originate news there will be considerably less news to aggregate. What is at stake here is not simply a matter of job preservation. This is a matter of information development and preservation. To the extent that newspapers reduce their capacity to report on these events, we are creating a dangerous news vacuum. We are failing to bear witness.

The reality is that great journalism does not always contribute to the bottom line, at least in the short term. A team of terrific reporters at our paper did a fabulous series in 2004 on the horrific conditions at the largest public hospital in south Los Angeles. The series led to reforms and won a Pulitzer Prize. It was the ultimate in local public service journalism but it hardly jacked up sales.

We, and by “we” I mean journalists, have to do a better job not only of informing our readers about local, national and world events but reminding them about the service we provide to the community.

For the most part, newspapers have done a poor job of explaining the good that they do, and I am proud to be associated with an organization like the Committee of Concerned Journalists, led by my friends Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach, that has started to address some of the fundamental problems facing this industry.

These issues have been percolating for me for a long time. My father started out to be a journalist. When he was a student at NYU in 1928, he got a job on the Brooklyn Standard Union as copy boy and soon became a reporter. One day, he ascended in a blimp and using some earlier day technology, he talked to people on the ground. In those days that was a story. Then he took the first commercial flight from New York to Boston and filed a story. When he came to the office the next day, his boss said, “Harry, I'm making you the aviation editor.” My father told me that he cautioned his boss that he did not know nearly enough about aviation to become the paper's editor on the subject. His boss responded, “Well you know more about it than the schmucks who read this newspaper.” A few months later, the stock market crashed. My father lost his job and never got back into journalism, but he remained an avid newspaper reader.

I heard that story for the first time when I took my first and only journalism class as an 8th grader. My dad told me that I should never adopt the sort of cynical attitude his boss had. Rather, he quoted Stanley Walker's book City Editor. Walker, a legendary editor at the New York Herald Tribune, wrote that he wanted reporters who when they were given an assignment responded “gee whiz” not “aw nuts.” I suppose you could interpret that statement many ways. As I understood it, it didn't mean you were supposed to leap into something without thinking. Rather, the idea was that whether the assignment was large or small, you should pursue it with enthusiasm and intelligence.

That point stuck with me, and it has been reinforced many times. Let me give you just one example of a little story that turned out to be a big deal in the lives of hundreds of people. A few months after I started my first full-time newspaper job with the Wall Street Journal in 1969, I was assigned to cover the annual stockholders meeting of Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company, a large public utility. When I arrived at the building where the meeting was being held, I came upon a group of elderly people carrying homemade picket signs declaring “PT&T pays peanuts to pensioners.”

They told me in detail how the company was planning to cut their benefits. I wrote a short story. It could not have been much more than 400 words. A few days later, a lawyer representing the workers called and told me the mere revelation of the company's demands had caused such embarrassment that they had backed off their plan to make the cuts.

Simple lessons: you had to be there. You had to get the facts right. You had to make it clear. If Yahoo or Google had existed at the time, they would have had nothing to aggregate without me. They would just have had a press release from the company about its earnings report.

Modern technology has given journalists tools -- including laptops, blackberries, digital cameras, satellite phones -- which help us work more efficiently and hopefully with greater precision and sophistication. So far, however, newspapers are still grappling with how to increase the amount of money they make from the Web, which is only a fraction of what they make from advertising in print editions. Web revenues are growing but not fast enough to satisfy Wall Street. I hope that newspaper owners will have the foresight to recognize that this transformation will take a while and that they do not eviscerate the goose before it has the opportunity to lay the next golden egg.

The challenges we face now are much more complicated than those presented by the Staples scandal, which was solved essentially by concerted moral outrage. The current challenges will require more than moral outrage. We need a sophisticated response and there likely will be some complicated solutions. I also recognize that the problems facing our newspaper and many other papers transcend who their current owners are.

Despite the current travails at our paper, I will tell you flat out that I am a very lucky guy. I have had many moments of satisfaction as a reporter. I have helped to save people's homes, put a vicious slumlord in prison, aided migrant workers to get the elementary benefit of just having potable drinking water in the fields. I hope I have educated people about civil liberties and a myriad of problems in the criminal justice system.

My job has given me the opportunity to see most of the country and to meet many wonderful people. It is thrilling for me to have in this room tonight colleagues, friends, relatives and valued sources who came from New York, New Haven, Philadelphia, Washington, Boston, St. Louis, Durham, San Francisco, Berkeley, Glendale and Los Angeles. This includes a few pals who shelled out for a tux for the first time since their high school proms.

There is a friend in the room who gave me the tip on my first big story; there is another friend who loaned me $500 to pursue a story when I was a freelancer and couldn't even tell him what the story was.

There are some of the best attorneys and law professors in the country who help me work through complicated problems involving Constitutional law, the death penalty, workers' rights, election law and legal ethics. There are too many thanks to go around and not nearly enough time. Nonetheless, I am going to thank some people by name.

First is Ira Lipman. By endowing this award and a scholarship for a student at the journalism school here you are maintaining the legacy of a great journalist and helping to educate future John Chancellors. I hope other successful business people will follow your lead and see the benefits that flow to our country from quality journalism.

Thanks to the judges who finally got me to the Low Library, which as Nick Lemann noted I had hoped to do many years ago.

I am gratified that Dean Banquet, as one of his last official acts as our editor, made the videotape shown earlier and that my long-time friend and editor Janet Clayton came to speak on my behalf. I am grateful to my very dear colleague Jim Newton, author of a terrific new book on Earl Warren, for his key role in my entry for the Chancellor Award.

I even have my very own in-house First Amendment lawyer Karlene Goller, who works just floors above our newsroom and is always available to guide us and protect us.

I have been blessed by my friendship with Jeff Brand for more than 50 years and for his eloquence and humor this evening. To Jeff's wife, Sue, I say thanks for sharing him.

I am especially proud that Tom Goldstein took time off from his efforts to build a new life. His will to keep body and soul together while teaching himself the intricacies of habeas corpus law in a prison library during 24 years of unjust incarceration is a true tribute to the human spirit. To the extent that my work played a role in securing his freedom, I can only say I wished I had learned about his case earlier.

In absentia, I salute my ever supportive mother-in-law, Elizabeth Larsen, my first true mentor, Wally Turner of The New York Times, and my first editor at the Los Angeles Times, Mark Murphy, who hired me at a time when the publisher of the San Francisco Examiner would have loved to fire me.

I have always believed that supporting my colleagues is very important, in some instances as important as the stories I am writing. So I am thrilled that three former colleagues from the San Francisco Examiner are here tonight.

Thirty years ago, Raul Ramirez became the target of a spurious libel suit. When it became clear that the paper was not going to provide a vigorous defense, Larry Kramer and I launched a fundraising campaign to hire independent attorneys for Raul and his co-defendant, Lowell Bergman. It became a long battle, dubbed “the Dutch treat libel suit,” by the Columbia Journalism Review. Fortunately, Raul, who is now the director of the public radio station KQED in San Francisco, and Lowell, now of The New York Times, eventually won the case in the California Supreme Court. Gerry Adams, a beautiful writer, was my partner on an investigative series at the time and a source of considerable support for many months when the publisher would have loved to fire Kramer, who now works for CBS, and me for standing up for a colleague.

Thanks to Jonnet Abeles, Maida Tahir, and the other people who made this such a wonderful event, and to Colby Kelly and Karen Salerno, who organized a number of interviews that enabled me to talk about the Chancellor Award on radio shows all over the country.

Last, but most certainly not least, I would like to thank the two people to whom I am closest, my wife, Laurie Becklund, and my daughter, Elizabeth Weinstein. Elizabeth is a junior in college on a writing scholarship, and I look forward to all the great things she will do in the coming years. As an 11th grader, volunteering in the Los Angeles public defender's office, she played a key role in saving the life of a man who is bipolar in a murder case. My wife, Laurie, who is a far better writer than I am, has been my biggest fan and my best critic for more than 26 years. Her work is known to many of you in this room, but one thing I want to emphasize. She has never received adequate recognition for the ground-breaking stories she did on the Salvadoran death squads in the early ‘80s. Her life was at risk for many months. I salute her courage and her moral acuity. Laurie is the co-author of several excellent books, including Between Two Worlds, a harrowing close-up look at life under Saddam Hussein, available at a bookstore near you.

I would like to conclude by going back to John Chancellor, who in addition to all his insights on world affairs gave me many hours of pleasure as I listened to him narrating my favorite television documentary, Ken Burns’s series on baseball in America.

Just a few months before he died in 1996, a reporter asked Chancellor about his political leanings. His response resonated deeply with me. “I'm an activist,” he said, “and I'll tell you why. If every citizen had to go through what we went through as reporters, going out and covering poor people, black people, murders, strikes, all that Dickensian underside of American life, they would become biased toward activism.”

I beam with both pride and humility that the Chancellor Award has been described as one based on sustained excellence and integrity. Some have described this as a lifetime achievement award. Let me assure you that I view this extraordinary honor as a milestone, not a culmination. I will endeavor to keep doing the kind of work and taking the kind of stands that brought me here this evening.

Again, many thanks to all of you.

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