What’s a journalist anyway?

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/02/2015 (4067 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The seismic events in the media business this week prompt many questions, not the least of which is the one nobody’s asking: What is a journalist anyway?

“Real” journalist Brian Williams, the $10-million man who anchored the top-rated NBC Nightly News for a decade — was unceremoniously suspended for six months, without that hefty pay, for telling tall tales about some of his adventures while covering the war in Iraq (and possibly other nose-stretchers). And the day Williams was suspended, The Daily Show host Jon Stewart, the so-called “fake” newsman, announced he’d be stepping down from his post, after 17 culture-shifting years.

The two events are tectonic for the self-obsessed media industry: unthinkable moves as recently as a week or so before they happened, and freighted with more meaning and implications than a Christopher Hitchens’ essay. Those lucky hacks charged with actually covering the media couldn’t contain themselves. TV panel of “experts” conducted autopsies of the still-warm bodies and careers of the two stars. True, many were conflicted, even sad, about the departure of the hosts, who are apparently well-liked and admired (if not envied) in the media elite circles of New York and D.C., but the raw meat — especially in the Williams affair — was just too tantalizing.

There was talk about “credibility” and the importance of it to NBC’s news brand, and that the company had to act swiftly and harshly to protect the brand. On the surface this seems understandable, but the truth is that television news, especially in the U.S., doesn’t have a whole lot of credibility to begin with.

Fittingly, Jon Stewart nailed it earlier in the week, essentially asking where the media were when George W. Bush led the U.S. into Iraq a decade ago. Mainstream media, and especially network news, only too readily, blindly and patriotically, accepted Bush’s justification. But suddenly, now, it’s doing yeoman investigative work to determine whether an anchorman has been telling self-aggrandizing fibs. The irony, on so many levels, is astonishing.

Everyone knows the world has changed, and the news business has certainly been affected as much as or more than any other. Newspapers are struggling to slim down, re-invent and survive, and television news is in serious decline — both in audience and importance. It has long been dominated by consultants whose main credentials would appear not to be in the disciplines of writing and reporting but in hair, teeth and wardrobe.

Brian Williams is a creature of that culture, a handsome devil with a smooth delivery and a knack for performance. He’s central casting’s idea of an old-school anchorman with a huge nod to the realities of our telegenic times. Not to suggest he’s Ron Burgundy, but Williams’s well-received appearances as a raconteur on the David Letterman show, “slow-jamming” the news with Jimmy Fallon, and hosting Saturday Night Live demonstrate prodigious gifts as an entertainer. David Brinkley he ain’t.

Williams’s extra-curricular activities also clearly contributed to his success as the face of NBC News; its nightly newscast has been No. 1 for years, generating $200 million in annual ad revenue, which is the real priority in a for-profit media business, not telling the truth or acting as a watchdog of government and industry.

It’s worth noting Williams’s popularity and antics, encouraged and celebrated by NBC in the name of “marketing,” are now largely responsible for his, and the network’s, troubles. They turned Williams into a celebrity and a funny, engaging storyteller on the talk-show circuit, and he got carried away in the telling of some of those stories. And now, it’s come back to bite them in the proverbial ass.

Jon Stewart, on the other hand, turned the lampooning of the news and newsmakers, and the media, into actual news for a new generation. Several studies in the past decade showed conclusively that young people were getting more of their information about politics and current events from The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and Bill Maher than from so-called “real” news programs, or even newspapers. Stewart became the go-to guy (and, make no mistake, it is still overwhelmingly a boys’ club) for what was really going on in the world. Stewart was funny as hell, but he also cut through the garbage that most of the old guard was still buying — and selling. Hence the declining, aging audience for the networks’ evening news programs, propped up by, as the savvy New York Times media reporter David Carr put it, “incontinence and cholesterol ads.”

And so we return to the question nobody seems to be asking in the wake of the Williams scandal and the Stewart “retirement”: what is a journalist anyway? Not sure anyone can answer that definitively, especially today, other than to employ that old line about pornography — I know it when I see it. But consider the following: Jon Stewart, hosting a comedy show on a comedy network, informed many people about many things over 17 years, held many powerful people and institutions, including the media, to account, and indisputably changed the meaning and perception of what it is to deliver and parse the news. NBC anchor Brian Williams reportedly threw his hat into the ring for Jay Leno’s job when the network decided it was time for a new Tonight Show host.

Journalist? Entertainer? In the TV racket, what’s the difference?

A final note: as this column was being written, news of Bob Simon’s sudden death broke. The great CBS news correspondent was killed in a car crash in Manhattan. Bob Simon was a journalist.

 

Stephen Warden is a former Winnipegger and writer and broadcaster who is the creator/executive producer of the television series “Spectacle: Elvis Costello with…”