Anyone who wonders why the Chicago Tribune is so awful need only look at a recent book, News Values (University of Chicago Press, 1996), by the paper's publisher, Jack Fuller. Fuller used to be a mediocre journalist; today he's a corporate executive breezily handing down commandants from up high about what the "true" news is.
In between psuedo-intellectual references to Plato, Aristotle, and Hume, Fuller's book is full of brainless homilies such as, "Pursuit of truth is not a license to be a jerk." Fuller faces such all-important questions as, "Does one call a married woman Ms. if she prefers it that way, or does the newspaper have a general style on married names?" Needless to say, the sexist double standard of inquiring only about a woman's martial status doesn't enter the equation, only the dilemma of dealing with a "feminist" wife who violates your newspaper's style.
But the focus of Fuller's book is a "back to the basics" message about "accuracy." Fuller has a mindless obsession with the most simplistic kind of accuracy. His journalists can publish the most distorted, bnniased, dead-wrong reports (as long as they don't offend the Tribune's corporate superiors or advertisers), but let them misspell a name and it's the end of the world.
Fuller urges newspapers to use "quantified performance measures and begin rigorously counting up their accuracy score. Goals should be established. Incentives should be provided to reward improvement." But turning journalists into glorified fact-checkers with "accuracy scores" is precisely the source of the problems with today's mainstream journalism. The worst inaccuracies in the Tribune have nothing to do with typos and missed names. Accuracy in a deeper, more qualitative sense of telling the truth is far more important, and it is here that Fuller (recently promoted to vice president of the entire Tribune Company) and his newspaper are so deeply flawed.
News Values is a fundamentally dishonest book. Fuller claims, "Good newspapers try not to shade the facts, even when the facts are detrimental to their interests." But former
Tribune editor James Squires, in his far superior book, Read All About It (Times Books, 1993), notes how corporate executives at the Tribune dictated the content of editorials, including ordering him to reverse the paper's editorial position and support legislation that would benefit the Tribune. Squires observes, "The corporate journalism ethic has become so strong and pervasive that it works automatically." Not quite automatically: Fuller's guiding hand is still a powerful force.
Ignoring the pro-business slant of his own paper, Fuller claims that environmental reporting is an area where left-wing bias dominates news reporting: "Once journalists became persuaded that powerful interests were causing danger and using their strength to cover it up, the tilt set in." But the bias here, as elsewhere, is Fuller's.
Fuller doesn't even try to disguise his submission to wealthy and powerful friends. He mocks the old saying that "Journalism should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." Fuller writes, "Should journalists always afflict the comfortable, even when the comfortable are doing no harm? Should they afflict them simply because of their comfort?"
According to Fuller, "The cause of knowledge is also better served by journalists who accept a duty to tell the truth rather than to take an adversarial posture toward those in authority." Submission to authority is a common theme of News Values. Fuller criticizes reporters who, during the Gulf War, displayed a lack of "civility" by asking questions about information which "would help the enemy if released." The massive government control and censorship during the war, by contrast, doesn't even merit a single word.
Fuller, like so many others, has played the government/journalism circuit. A lawyer, he served as a special assistant to U.S. Attorney General Edward Levi, and Fuller recalls his anger at a newspaper whose reporters refused to testify for the Justice Department while the paper editorialized that the Justice Department was doing nothing to pursue the case; Fuller's recommendation to issue subpoenas against the paper was rejected, but his hatred toward real journalists has persisted. Fuller attacks "the ambush interview in which some pathetic, small-time crook gets trapped by an imitator of Mike Wallace." Of course, the Tribune ignores small and large crooks alike (except when they happen to be a disliked alderman). "Eventually undercover investigation...went out of fashion altogether," Fuller writes, apparently without any regret at its loss or any hope of reviving it.
Fuller expresses some youthful guilt about being a Chicago reporter who impersonated Detective O'Malley or Deputy Coroner O'Malley in order to get information out of the families of people who died. These little lies pale beside the big lies printed every day in the Tribune, yet Fuller seems to feel no guilt at being a business executive impersonating a journalist.
The final line of the book is a monument to the corporate status quo: "If we keep our News Valuesstraight, we can continue to make a profit helping society remain open and strong." Nothing here about improving society, nothing about serving the public -- the god is profit, and News Valuesare to be kept "straight" at Jack Fuller's altar in the Tribune Tower.