A podcast in which I’d been interviewed was finally published last weekend. Hearing it for the first time, I was surprised by what I said about the coronavirus back on Feb. 27, three days after President Trump announced: "The coronavirus is very much under control in the USA.”
“The issue is facts,” I said on the podcast. “One of the facts you’ve been hearing in the last couple of days is that we really need facts to be able to deal with [the virus] because if you aren’t out there with the facts, the medical community, the schools, government and anybody who is involved is not going to be able to handle things well. So maybe we have a little call-to-truth coming.”
It wasn’t because I was prescient that Covid-19 would strike us hard, though I had just returned from Europe where already airport workers were doing temperature screenings. My focus on facts stemmed from having recently edited a book written by fellow members of my Columbia University Journalism School Class of 1969.
The idea behind the project – Inside the Upheaval of Journalism: Reporters Look Back on 50 Years of Covering the News – was just that. To relate, through our experiences as well as data, how new coverage had changed over a half-century.
Running through the book like a strong current through the river of history was the way the revelation of facts had changed our society, whether in politics, medicine, criminal justice, or such social issues as economic, racial and gender inequality.
Once facts are published, they can no longer be ignored. Sooner or later they result in change.
For instance, in 1975, Richard Knox, medical writer for the Boston Globe, broke a story about a surprising cluster of heart surgery deaths at two Boston area hospitals, both served by the same cardiac surgery team. That certain surgical teams routinely had poor outcomes was “a hidden national problem,” Knox wrote in his chapter in Inside the Upheaval. Soon after, states, including Pennsylvania, began requiring public reporting of cardiac surgery deaths, a practice that has resulted in more informed choices for patients and the likelihood of better outcomes.
Or look at the impact that the Kerner Commission report had on minority hiring in the media. Marquita Pool-Eckert was a newbie minority journalist in 1968 when the report was published after race riots shocked and devastated many US cities.
“Diversity in newsrooms was virtually non-existent back then,” Pool-Eckert, wrote. With African Americans accounting for fewer than five percent of editorial staff at the mainstream press, according to the Kerner findings, it had failed to cover conditions in poor communities, contributing to the riots that killed 200 people and wounded 10,000.
Prodded by the report and its prize-winning black reporter Acel Moore, The Inquirer, among other media organizations, accelerated minority hiring and set up training programs. The Acel Moore Journalism Workshop, in its 36th year, has taught journalism skills to hundreds of Philadelphia high school students.
Not all revelations lead to quick results. In 1976, Mary Bralove, the third woman to be hired by the Wall St. Journal, wrote a landmark story with the headline: “A Cold Shoulder: Career Women Decry Sexual Harassment By Bosses and Clients.” The next day, calls poured in from secretaries thanking her for the exposé.
Bralove is dismayed that it took nearly 40 years for the #metoo movement to hold accountable the likes of Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein.
Facts have also contributed to the widening chasm between politicians and the press, a distancing that began with the Watergate scandal and later press reports of presidential aspirant Gary Hart’s alleged extramarital affair. (I say "alleged" because a death-bed confession says it may have all been set up to embarrass him).
Alan Ehrenhalt, former editor of Governing magazine, over his long career covering politics experienced the change in political coverage. “On Capitol Hill in the old days, a quiet bargain existed between members of Congress and the reporters representing the major newspapers: The bargain was that the members talked freely to the press in the secure belief that nothing negative about them would appear in print.”
With that bargain broken, politicians “have learned to use social media to communicate directly with voters, bypassing the reporters and editors” and their fact-checking function.
In a world of tweets and posts and distrust of the media, we have yet to see how the facts about Covid-19 play out. But inevitably they will.
