This year’s Pulitzer Prizes were announced on Monday afternoon, and several of the journalistic prizes caught my attention. I mention four of them.
For “Breaking News Reporting,” the New York Times received the Prize for its reporting of then-Governor Eliot Spitzer’s dalliance with a prostitute, a dalliance that forced him from office.
For “Local Reporting,” the Detroit Free Press received the award for uncovering a sexual liaison between then-Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and a female staffer. Both were jailed for perjury.
In other words, intense press attention on the private sexual lives of public officials, however ill-advised—attention that led to the tremendous turmoil that inevitably accompanies expulsion from office in mid-term—such attention was rewarded with the highest form of recognition a journalist or a newspaper can receive.
Where have I seen this before?
Oh yes, when a former US President, engaged in a similarly ill-advised dalliance with a female staffer, was subject to impeachment proceedings for perjury. Said President, while consumed with this trial and his own defense, was rendered incapable of engaging North Korea at a time when it first began the new round of nuclear mischief in which it is still engaged today. I recall the publication of Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s Report in the New York Times, a report notable most for its own voyeuristic perversion, with singular embarrassment and disgust today.
Do such things really deserve such rewards?
Compare these awards to two others also announced on Monday.
For “Public Service Reporting,” the Las Vegas Sun received the award for its reporting of large numbers of construction-related deaths in the city, deaths directly or indirectly tied to budget cuts and lax regulation.
And for “Investigative Reporting,” David Barstow of the New York Times won the award for unmasking the latest innovation in the old Eisenhower-era “military-industrial complex”: namely, retired generals who were put to use by the Pentagon to sell its Iraq policy before and during the war.
The decline of print media has been much in the news of late. Many newspapers are closing their doors, unable to compete with the new electronic media and the rapid pace of electronic news. Those newspapers that can survive, mostly through consolidation, are also cutting back. And one of the lowest returns is in investigative journalism, the kind of reporting that takes enormous amounts of time and patience. One invests in the future and uncertain returns. So when a newspaper is forced to cut back, foreign desks and investigative reporting are among the first things to go.
In such a time, sex sells, both in the paper and at headquarters. Now, it even buys a Pulitzer Prize. Sex scandals are easy to report, because we hold them to such a low level of journalistic scrutiny. How many times must I listen to a nightly newscaster tell me in hushed tones that “this shocking story”—of teen sex parties, or prostitution, or sexual slavery—will be seen later tonight?… if I will dutifully watch the commercials and stay up until the last segment of the news. Sex sells.
A free society needs a free press, of that the Founders were certain. Investigative reporting is the true fifth column, a crucial further “check and balance” on the relentless consolidation of power in the electronic age. But with increasingly scarce resources, isn’t it important that investigative reporters are working to save lives, both at home and abroad, rather than titillate us with more news of sexual scandal, stories which are always two parts gossip to every one part fact?
To be sure, we get the stories we want, the stories we will pay for, the stories we buy, the stories we deserve. And perhaps there is truth to the old chestnut that there is a curious Puritan schizophrenia lingering in the cultural basement of North America.
The way it plays out is elegant and simple: we saturathrough the media with sex, sex, sex. And then we tell ourselves that we should be ashamed. The real commodity produced by such an industry is guilt.
Perhaps. And perhaps all newspapers must participate in that schizophrenia precisely because they are a part of this culture and this society. But we do not need to reward such stories. A sense of quiet dismay should suffice.
Tags: bill clinton, elliot spitzer, investigative reporting, new york times, pulitzer prize
I'd really have to say that in this case, it's got to be more "gossip" than actual "news." I was immediately perplexed and even dumbfounded to learn yesterday which journalistic pieces were awarded. This article only reinforces what was my own initial reaction.
It's a cheap truth: Sex sell. We are a culture obsessed with sex. It reminds me of an interesting piece I heard on NPR yesterday about the way in which media has moved now from sex to violence, as a way to keep that "excitement" element alive, to keep our all-too-short attention spans fixed. My biggest question for the Pulitzer judges is: what's really being awarded here??
I’d like to draw on Max Weber not to disagree with Ruprecht but to emphasize other aspects of what he’s criticizing.
In “Religious Rejections of the World and their Directions,” Weber talks about not simply religious rejections of the world but of the differentiation of “value spheres”: kinship; economic; political; aesthetic; erotic; and, intellectual.
He points to increasing conflict among these spheres and argues the key factor leading to the modern world is the “tensions between religion and the world” and that the ethic of universal brotherliness has no place in the modern world.
He begins his discussion of “the erotic sphere” stating: “The brotherly ethic of salvation religion is in profound tension with the greatest irrational force: sexual love.” Under the conditions of modern disenchantment, Weber wrote,
"the erotic relation [Here, Weber is talking about extra-marital sexual love.] seems to offer the unsurpassable peak of the fulfillment of the request for love in the direct fusion of the souls of one to the other. The boundless giving of oneself is as radical in its opposition to all functionality, rationality, and generality.... It is so overpowering that it is treated ‘symbolically’: as a sacrament. The lover realizes himself [or herself] to be rooted in the kernel of the truly living, which is eternally inaccessible to any rational endeavor. He [or she] knows himself [or herself] to be freed from the cold skeleton hands of rational orders, just as completely as from the banality of everyday routine."
This helps to explain why the media is gripped by the extramarital affairs of public figures. It’s not just that sex sells.
Weber also notes how the Calvinist “consciousness of divine grace … was accompanied by an attitude toward the sin of one’s neighbor, not of sympathetic understanding based on consciousness of one’s own weakness, but of hatred and contempt for him [or her] as an enemy bearing the signs of eternal damnation” (e.g., poverty, sexual impropriety).
Kenneth Starr appears to represent this particular strain of Calvinism.
Ruprecht says the media is driven by economic imperatives to pay more attention to stories about the extra-marital affairs of political leaders than to cultivating the exemplary journalism he cites. I agree but there are other points to consider.
I’m also dismayed by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s demise, and the larger trends it represents, and fear what they mean for daily newspapers. I live in a small college town where I feel lucky we still have locally owned, family run daily newspaper. You don’t have to be ideologically aligned with a particular daily to be sad to see such a long-running enterprise forced to shut down.
The new Internet version of the P-I may be the future, but it won’t have the reporting strength of its former newsroom and therefore won’t be able to fulfill a newspaper’s watchdog function, which makes the online version little more than a newsletter.
While the Internet may be technologically awesome, it is not now a source of trustworthy, original journalism — nor have any new models emerged to finance such journalism, as Boston Globe editor Martin Baron recently pointed out in a recent talk at the University of Oregon.
Newspapers are embracing a multimedia approach but the Internet – with few exceptions such as Religion Dispatches – is not yet capable of producing a written product that is thoughtful, edited, balanced and written in English with the clarity and focus that old-fashioned disciplines such as grammar, syntax and style can bring to the page — or screen.
The guilt I feel is not about sex but about money and power driving the news and its content, which, I take it, is Ruprecht’s point.
I would definitely agree that erotic desire disturbs the surface of what-could-be-otherwise universal compassionate loving--though I think that Weber passage seems to describe something beyond erotic, it definitely stays within the realm of a feeling of personal with-and-beyond physical love... They aren't exploiting something so sacred because their interest in its enticing mechanics--their doing so to enhance the Calvinistic value system you brought up.
If this was examined on a larger scale, it seems like what also should be considered is how many public forms of media are now latching onto what was previously only in the private sphere of life (ie-the surge in reality television, cop shows, etc)--and what kind of psychological power that holds over culture; It's 2009--audiences give ratings, keep on the air, networks who can pull the most drama on the screen--the Pulitzer prize award committee had to be cool, with the times (note sarcasm).
The newspapers can't honestly show a glamorous side to violence that occurs the way the other forms of media does--it may've been inevitable that sex would fuel it eventually-- obviously by the fact that the written newspapers are collapsing, they're hard up on money. More readers=more money= its the publics fault for buying into ill-focused articles written for shock value rather than true newsworthiness=the main point being, WE the people are controlling what is considered quality or not, and while there may be a time and place for everything, its despairing that we're buying into the rewarding of personal lives violated by public eyes, especially when there are better things out there, things that could improve our knowledge/understanding, events that truly shouldn't go unnoticed by people who would never otherwise know about them, and their getting overshadowed by Sex, which seems when one is too brash to be fueled by (but not), our or their money and power.
I would like to comment from the perspective of a professional journalist of 36 years' standing, who has been involved in both print and Internet publishing for the past 21 years. I'm not exaggerating that last credential; in the late 1980s my husband and I were among the first volunteer moderators on PCLink, a forerunner of AOL.com
Mr. Ruprecht's commentary is on the mark. I just received the latest Newsweek, whose cover story is on the re-emergence of Eliot Spitzer, the philandering former governor of New York. The subhead on the story is "How could I?" to which I mentally replied: "Who cares?" As any old newshound knows, inability to answer the "who cares?" question means there is no news story there.
Second, Durkheim7's assertion that the Internet is not now a source of trustworthy, original journalism is accurate, but there have been more exceptions than he knows. The problem is that many of these excellent Internet sites are small independent pubs without sufficient financial backing. My colleagues and I produced two such pubs, similar to Religion Dispatches, until December 2008, when we had to shut them down for lack of revenue.
Finally, many longtime print journalists are now migrating to the Internet out of necessity, trying to learn how to function in this strange new world of Web 2.0. Even with my two decades of experience, I have yet to find a way to sufficiently monetize digital publishing to make a living at it. It isn't just translating investigative journalism to digital publication, it's learning how to use the connectivity of Web 2.0 to get people's attention. The noise of the Internet is deafening, and shouting louder is no help. Searching for an effective business model takes away from the time necessary to produce quality content.
The collapse of newspapering seems inevitable at this point, but nothing is emerging to take its place. The Internet isn't it, because digital publishing will languish as well because there's nobody to pay for the bandwidth. Then what will we do?
Is it any wonder under these conditions that publications go for what sells? As has been said many times before, one has the ethics and values that one can afford and still survive.
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