While Vermont Press Bureau reporter Darren Allen typically takes long breaks from his media blog before providing several rapid-fire posts, the reason for his most recent absence turns out to be a career change. From Hall Monitor::
Allen, who started this blog two legislative sessions ago as this paper’s first venture into the blogosphere, has decided to leave his post as chief of the Vermont Press Bureau to become the communications director for the Agency of Natural Resources.
He will start his new job — where he will be responsible for letting the public (and us) in on what the more than 600 people in ANR are doing — on Feb. 5.
Allen joins fellow (former) reporter Anson Tebbets in signing on with the Douglas administration in recent weeks. Although I’m sure several former Scudder Parker campaign staffers are sending “I knew it all along!” emails back and forth by now, the move does bring up some meaningful questions (including the question of just how crappy reporting must pay in Vermont to make jumping ship so attractive, given that most people hardly get rich on the State payroll…)
As a discreet discrete incident, it does come as a bit of a surprise. With his graduation from reporter to reporter-slash-columnist (a problematic combination at best), followed by his recent first person narratives of now-US Rep. Peter Welch’s federal transition (including jaunts to DC that suggest his employer had no idea a departure was in the offing), Allen was clearly trying to fashion himself into a media personality rather than a “mere” chronicler (despite what seemed to be a surprisingly thin skin).
But the big question it raises of course, concerns more than one guy’s career change; specifically, just how cozy are some of these reporters with the subjects they are reporting on? It is the same question raised by Chris Graff’s post-AP-expulsion soft landing with National Life, and former Rutland Herald reporter Brendan McKenna’s poor career move to the Communications position for Republican US House candidate Martha Rainville.
We on the left are perhaps a bit too quick to ascribe diabolical intentions to right wing administrations, politicians, and corporate entities (I’m speaking theoretically here… I honestly don’t feel like we’re too quick to do that, but I’m trying to have an open mind…). As such, we assume that if a reporter is truly doing his or her job in ferreting out the truth, they wouldn’t possibly be welcome being employed by such an entity. Neither would they themselves feel comfortable working there. As such, when we see this sort of casual crossover (which seems to be becoming routine, looking at the rapidly diminishing Vermont press corps), we get our hackles up. When it’s just one person, we become dubious of that particular person and feel retroactiviely validated after scrutinizing their biases. When it seems to be a trend, it looks for all the world like proof of institutional collusion between the fourth estate and the power structures they are supposed to be investigating, and thereby (to some extent) protecting us from.
But even if Republican administrations and Insurance Companies aren’t as diabolical as we tend to shorthand them to be, it still seems to me that a reporter doing their job is going to be an annoyance, as the act of journalistic investigation must almost inevitably become annoying to the subject at some point – at least insofar as those subjects are governmental or corporate entities that deal in secrects and message-control. Even if the reporter turns up nothing but butterflies and puppies in their digging, the subject can hardly be expected to be comfortable with them, let alone chummy enough to provide for such a routine back-and-forth on the career train.
But the unfortunate truth is more often that chumminess leads to access, and access leads to stories. Stories lead to attention, readers, raises and job security – which ultimately makes the reporter somewhat dependent on that chumminess to stay on the front page. And who beats up on their chums? If you do, the chum slams the door in your face. No more access. No more story. My latest favorite radio show is NPR’s On the Media which last weekend had a terrific segment on this very subject:
(Host) BOB GARFIELD: Can you cite some examples of times when reporters too immersed in those institutions were unable to cover their beats properly?
(Journalism Professor) EDWARD WASSERMAN: Well, I think that most reporters who have covered beats will tell you that over time, they create a store, repository of stories that they can’t tell. I mean, what do you do when you’re the White House reporter and you know that the president falls asleep during cabinet meetings? Well, you know, that’s a terrific story. The American public would like to know that. And you also realize that your longevity as a White House reporter is going to be severely shortened once you’ve written that story.
And the next thing you know, no matter how supportive your editors are and no matter how pleased you are that you’ve broken that story, over the next few weeks, when all of your rivals are getting the leaks and the interesting plants and stories and are beating your pants off on that beat, they’re going to start to think about moving you off the beat.
Fighting this dynamic depends on an honor system, but it’s a nebulous honor system at times- one that seemingly must bend to the realities of building contacts. Wasserman argues for a serious re-assessment of the very concept of “beat” reporting, noting that some of the biggest stories of the last century (such as Watergate) were broken by reporters coming in from the outside, rather than being beat reporters for the topical sphere from which the story was broken.
It’s hard to imagine the system ever being perfect, but it’s hard not to look at this dynamic (and the revolving door between reporter-and-reported which seems to be spinning wildly in Vermont) and not see a real need for improvement.
You’d think traditional media institutions themselves would be first in line demanding real paradigm shifts in order to maintain their integrity and credibility – especially given their declining reader/viewership and the onslaught of the “new media” and citizen journalism. Unfortunately, traditional media practitioners are a notoriously insular lot who are generally loathe to engage in any meaningful self-critique. From On the Media again, this time a segment by Marketplace correspondent Dan Grech:
ERIC NEWTON: Newsroom cultures are one of the most defensive cultures there are.
DAN GRECH: Eric Newton is the vice-president at the Knight Foundation, a grant-giving nonprofit that outlived its namesake corporation, the Knight Ridder newspaper chain.
ERIC NEWTON: You’ve got hospital emergency rooms, you’ve got the military, you’ve got nuclear power plants and you’ve got newsrooms. Three of those are life-and-death operations and one of them just thinks it is.
If the email exchange I’ve had with one of the local editors recently (as well as the previously linked exchange with Allen) is any indication, this dynamic is alive and well among the Vermont media corps, unfortnately.
This is not only a shame, but a fairly suicidal shame at that. From the same segment, here’s Grech again:
Newspapers themselves face a life-and-death situation. The scariest end game is what’s called the “death spiral.” Newspapers continue to lose readers, which drives away advertisers, which cuts into revenue. That forces job cuts, which erodes the quality of the paper, which chases away more readers and advertisers – on and on until the paper collapses. As reporters recognize the dire situation, their defensiveness has given way to fear.
In the fluid world of today’s media, all traditional venues (not just newspapers) would do well to look at the deteriorating public impression of their industry that is only fed by the appearence of a revolving door between the reporter and the reported-on. After all, the “new media” alternatives are not going away anytime soon.
But with everything in motion, traditional media venues that can examine their own practices and paradigms with a critical eye can find opportunity. Here’s the Knight Foundation’s Eric Newton:
Fifty years from now we’ll look back on this as the Wild West period and the crazy pioneering era in which nobody knew what was going to happen and everything seemed possible, and opportunity flowed from every street corner. It is a wildly exciting time, as long as you’re not pining for what was.
I would argue that this doesn’t just mean looking at the nature of the media themselves, as Newton was suggesting, but the very nature of journalism as Wasserman suggested.
Consider: ethics reform in political circles has included restrictions on how long a US Congressperson must wait after leaving office before they are legally entitled to work as a lobbyist. The point is to increase public trust and enhance the integrity of the process by avoiding the appearence of a revolving door between the Legislature and the powerful monied interests who work the Capitol Halls to influence legislation. Perhaps professional media venues would be well-served by a similar code that established a comparable waiting period before a reporter could accept a job for the very interests he or she has been tasked to report on.
It’s something to kick around, at any rate.
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