From the WSJ Opinion Archives
CITIZEN OF THE WORLD
Hooray for the Lowbrow Media
Why do journalists congratulate themselves for their indifference to Chandra Levy?
The promise made daily by the New York Times, that it will furnish a reader with "All the news that's fit to print" for a consideration of 75 cents, is a curse that hangs heavily over the American media. That smug slogan serves as a leitmotif not merely for the Times, but also, by a process of osmosis and emulation, for most other general interest papers in the country, as well as for much of the broadcast media.
As anyone who has worked in the press knows, and as anyone who has ever read a newspaper must guess, news is rarely self-evident. Mostly--often--it is a matter of selection and revelation by editors, who evaluate its "fitness" for general dissemination on a grid of subjective taste and judgment, and by testing it against the newspaper's (or network's) institutional morality. The Chandra Levy story, that of an intern who disappears after an affair with a married congressman, is a classic example of a set of events that have been evaluated in this way.
The results are fascinating, and tell us much about the culture of our newsrooms. The case tells us also that, in the American media at least, the high-minded players are seldom the guarantors of a free flow of information. In effect, they can often be the foes of the reading (or TV-watching) public.
The other cable news outlets followed suit, as did those parts of the media that had hoped, at first, to transcend the affair. (First prize for Olympian detachment--or should one just say atrocious news judgment?--goes to "CBS Evening News," which did not deem Ms. Levy's disappearance worthy of mention until late last week.) Of course, the loftier reaches of the media chose to cover the story by analyzing, with a showy disinterestedness, how the lower decks were covering the story. Stoical postures were struck, along with utterances of "O tempora! O mores!" The media's priestly class was in no doubt that the national tone had been lowered.
All in all, much by way of flapdoodle--a word beloved of H.L. Mencken, who would have relished the tale--has been written and spoken on Ms. Levy and Gary Condit. Yet there has scarcely been a word acknowledging the role played by the popular media, a role that has not been confined to an irrepressible supply of information on the story, but that includes, also, a more important contribution, that of shaming the police into action.
The Levy story has brought into relief the greatest flaw of American journalism, which is its arbitrary cleft between news that is "lowbrow" and news that is "fit to print." Last week on CNN, Jeff Greenfield, the host of "Greenfield at Large," appeared to apologize for bringing dirt from the Levy story into our living rooms. Introducing the show, in which stem cell research was the other subject, he said: "Two stories out of Washington, two stories that could not be more different, competed for our attention today. The tailor-made-for-the-tabloids story of a vanished young woman, linked to a congressman under fire. Second, a life-and-death controversy at the crossroads where science, morality and politics meet: the debate over stem cell research."
Note the awestruck language he deploys on behalf of stem cells; note, also, his metaphorical wearing of rubber gloves to handle the Levy tale.
The Post has fewer qualms. If there's a "story"--broadly defined as a source of narrative that will make people want to buy a copy at the newsstand--only a monumental degree of intrusiveness will render it unfit to print. This approach may have its problems (and some observers I admire, such as Andrew Sullivan, believe that the Post has overreached itself even in its coverage of the Levy story).
But the Times' reticence is not without adverse consequences for the readers, and can lead to an abdication of responsibility: Witness its extreme unwillingness to report on the personal life of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, whose recently disclosed extramarital affair was tangled with questions of financial impropriety. The Times has hardly written about this, in contrast with the Post.
The lesson of the Levy affair (which is, as yet, unresolved) is that we err in our taxonomy of news, in our division between those stories that edify and those that, in the view of critics, merely titillate. One of the strengths of the British press (which, for sure, has major problems of its own) is that the boundaries between the tabloids and the broadsheets are not, on the whole, drawn on the basis of subject matter. The differences lie in the contrasting manner in which the same material is handled by the highbrow and the lowbrow. In America, as the Levy story shows, the highbrow is invariably high-handed--and often insufferably so.
Mr. Varadarajan is deputy editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Tuesdays.
