How a Caged Bird Learns to Sing

Or, my life at the New York Times, CBS and other pillars of the

media establishment

by JOHN LEONARD

The Nation June 26, 2000

Like a tribal warrior in the Ramayana, throwing dice, juiced on

soma, I want to tell some stories and brood out loud. But it's

tricky. My favorite stories are all about what they did to me.

What I've done to myself, I am inclined to repress, sublimate or

rationalize. Once upon a time, I was a Wunderkind. Now I'm an Old

Fart. In between I've done time at National Review, Pacifica

Radio and The Nation; the New York Times and Condé Nast; New York

magazine during and after Rupert Murdoch; National Public Radio

and the Columbia Broadcasting System. I was a columnist for

Esquire, whenever Dwight Macdonald failed to turn in his

"Politics" essay; at the old weekly Life before it died for

People's sins; at Newsweek before the Times made me stop

contributing to a wholly owned subsidiary of its principal

competitor; at Ms. during its Australian walkabout interim; and

at New York Newsday before it was so rudely "disappeared" by a

Times-Mirror CEO fresh to journalism from the Hobbesian

underworlds of microwave popcorn and breakfast-cereal

sugar-bombs. And I have written for anyone who ever asked me at

newspapers like the Washington Post, the LA Times and the Boston

Globe, at magazines like Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, Vogue

and Playboy, and at dot-coms like Salon. I like to think of

myself as having published in the New York Review, The New

Statesman, the Yale Review and Tikkun. But there was also TV

Guide.

This sounds less careerist than sluttish. It is, however, a

sluttishness probably to be expected of someone who had to make a

living after he discovered that the novels he reviewed were a lot

better than the novels he wrote. We may belong to what the poet

Paul Valéry called "the delirious professions"--by which Valéry

meant "all those trades whose main tool is one's opinion of one's

self, and whose raw material is the opinion others have of

you"--but reporters, critics and "cultural journalists," no less

than publicists, are caged birds in a corporate canary-cage.

Looking back, I see what I required of my employers was that they

cherish my every word and leave me alone. If I understand what

Warren Beatty was trying to tell us in the movie Reds, it is that

John Reed only soured on the Russian Revolution after they fucked

with his copy.

On the other hand, as Walter Benjamin once explained:

The great majority of intellectuals--particularly in

the arts--are in a desperate plight. The fault lies,

however, not with their character, pride, or

inaccessibility. Journalists, novelists, and literati

are for the most part ready for every compromise. It's

just that they do not realize it. And this is the

reason for their failures. Because they do not know, or

want to know, that they are venal, they do not

understand that they should separate out those aspects

of their opinions, experiences, and modes of behavior

that might be of interest to the market. Instead, they

make it a point of honor to be wholly themselves on

every issue. Because they want to be sold, so to speak,

only "in one piece," they are as unsalable as a calf

that the butcher will sell to the housewife only as an

undivided whole.

I throw in Walter Benjamin, who killed himself a step ahead of

Hitler, to muss the hair of the academics among you. Having been

to too many conferences where working reporters and media

theorists reach an angry adjournment of minds before the first

coffee break, I seek to ingratiate myself. If it'll help to wear

a Heidegger safari jacket, Foucault platform heels, Lacan

epaulets and a Walter Benjamin boutonniere, I'm willing to bring

the Frankfurtives and the Frenchifieds. Indeed, the production

process of every major news-gathering organization can be thought

of--in Foucault's terms--as an allegory of endless domination,

like hangmen torturing murderers or doctors locking up deviants.

And whether they know it consciously or not, these organizations

are in the "corrective technologies" business of beating down

individuals to "neutralize" their "dangerous states"--to create

"docile bodies and obedient souls." How we escape their "numbing

codes of discipline," if we ever do, is more problematic.

Somehow, art, dreams, drugs, madness, "erotic transgression,"

"secret self-ravishment" and going postal seldom add up to an

"insurrection of unsubjugated knowledges." I like to think of

myself as Patsy Cline. I sang the same sad country songs before I

ever got to the Grand Ole Opry. After the Grand Ole Opry, I can

always go back to the honky-tonks.

Another paradigm is sociobiological. Everything is hard-wired,

from the behavior of ants, beetles, Egyptian fruit bats and

adhesive-padded geckos to the role of women, the caste system in

India, the IQ test scores of black schoolchildren and the

hierarchy of the newsroom. If the people on top of this Chain of

Being are mostly male and mostly pale, in the missionary

position, talk to Darwin about it. They've been Naturally

Selected. Moreover, inside such a white-noise system, there is a

positive feedback loop between nature and nurture, thousands of

teensy units of obedience training called "culturgens," dictating

what societies can and can't do, obsessing in favor of patriarchy

and "objectivity," deploring socialism and "bad taste." Having

ceded ultimate authority, on the one hand, to the credentialed

nitwits of the mini-sciences, and, on the other, to the chirpy

gauchos of the media pampas, we may thus find it difficult, ever

again, to think through dilemmas of personal conscience, which

look a lot like bad career moves.

Molly Ivins, who was fired from the New York Times for saying

"chickenplucker" in its pages, has admitted that if she ever

dies, what it will say on her tombstone is she finally made a

shrewd career move. Molly also claims that she's actually played,

on a jukebox somewhere, a country-western song called "I'm Going

Back to Dallas to See if There Could Be Anything Worse Than

Losing You."

A third paradigm is novelistic. It's amazing to me how much the

controlled environments of both CBS and the New York Times

resemble Tsau, the utopian community on a Botswana sand dune in

Norman Rush's Mating, with windmills, boomslangs, dung carts,

abacus lessons, militant nostalgia, ceramic death masks,

"Anti-Imperialist Lamentations," a Mother Committee and an

ostrich farm. And how similar the plantations of Murdoch and

Newhouse are to Orwell's Animal Farm and Kafka's Penal Colony.

Whereas Pacifica Radio and The Nation bring to mind Voltaire's

Candide. On these margins, where everyone is paid so poorly that

office politics are ideologized into matters of first principle,

a little more self-censorship might actually be a good idea. I am

reminded of what Amos Oz said in The Slopes of Lebanon about the

Israeli left:

The term Phalangist is derived from the Greek word

"phalanx." The phalanx, in the Greek and Roman armies,

was a unique battle formation. The soldiers were

arranged in a closed-square formation, their backs to

one another and their faces turned toward an enemy who

could neither outflank nor surprise them, because in

this formation the men gave full cover to one another

in every direction. The lances and spears pointed

outward, of course, in all four directions.

The moderate, dovish Israeli left sometimes resembles a reverse

phalanx: a square of brave fighters, their backs to the whole

world and their faces and their sharpened, unsheathed pens turned

on one another.

But, wherever, they always fuck with your copy.

* * *

So much for the Big Pixel. And now for the prurient details. And,

stuck as I am on my periphery of books, movies and television

programs, I can't tell you for sure whether Tom Friedman, when he

covered the State Department for the Times, should have played

tennis with the Secretary of State. Or if Brit Hume, when he

covered the White House for ABC, should have played tennis with

President Bush. Or if Rita Beamish of the Associated Press

should've jogged with George. Or if it was appropriate for George

and Barbara to stop by and be videotaped at a media dinner party

in the home of Albert Hunt, the Washington bureau chief of the

Wall Street Journal, and his wife, Judy Woodruff, then of the

MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and now of CNN. Or if one reason Andrea

Mitchell, who covered Congress for NBC, showed up so often in the

presidential box at the Kennedy Center was that she just happened

to be living with Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the Federal

Reserve Board. Nor can I be absolutely positive that there's

something deeply compromised about George Will's still

ghostwriting speeches for Jesse Helms during his trial period as

a columnist for the Washington Post, and prepping Ronald Reagan

for one of his debates with Jimmy Carter, and then reviewing

Reagan's performance the next day, and later on writing speeches

for him. Or about Morton Kondracke and Robert Novak's collecting

thousands of dollars from the Republican Party for advice to a

gathering of governors. Or John McLaughlin's settling one

sexual-harassment suit out of court, facing the prospect of at

least two more--and nevertheless permitting himself to savage

Anita Hill on his McLaughlin Group. Or, perhaps most egregious,

Henry Kissinger on ABC and in his syndicated newspaper column,

defending Deng Xiaoping's behavior during the Tiananmen Square

massacre--without telling us that Henry and his private

consulting firm had a substantial financial stake in the Chinese

status quo.

* * *

For that matter, who knows deep down in our heart of hearts

whether the nuclear-power industry will ever get the critical

coverage it deserves from NBC, which happens to be owned by

General Electric, which happens to manufacture nuclear-reactor

turbines? Or if TV Guide, while it was owned by Rupert Murdoch,

was ever likely to savage a series on the Fox network, also owned

by Rupert Murdoch, who was meanwhile busy canceling any

HarperCollins books that might annoy the Chinese, with whom he

dickered for a satellite-television deal? Or whether ABC, owned

by Disney, will ever report anything embarrassing to Michael

Eisner, the Mikado of Mousedom? It wasn't the fault of

journalists at ABC's 20/20 that Cap Cities settled the Philip

Morris suit before selling out to Disney. But nobody quit, did

they? Nor was it the fault of journalists at 60 Minutes that CBS

killed another antismoking segment, to be immortalized later in

Michael Mann's movie The Insider; it was the fault instead of the

CBS legal department, on behalf of a Larry Tisch who actually

owned a tobacco company of his own, on the eve of the big-bucks

sale of the network to Westinghouse. But nobody quit there

either, did they? Not even aggrieved producer Lowell Bergman,

till two years later. Nor have any of the Beltway bubbleheaded

blisterpacks on the all-Monica-all-the-time cable yakshows quit

in embarrassment and humiliation, renouncing lucrative lecture

fees, after being totally wrong in public about almost everything

important ever since the 1989 collapse of the nonprofit police

states of Eastern Europe.

Stop me before I go on about the petroleum industry and public

television's shamefully inadequate coverage of the Exxon Valdez

oil spill, not to mention Shell Oil's ravening of Nigeria. Or say

something I'll regret about the $5-11 million a year that the

NewsHour With Jim Lehrer gets from Archer Daniels Midland, the

agribiz octopus whose fixing of prices and bribing of pols got so

much attention in 1995 everywhere except on the NewsHour. How

suspicious is it that so many Random House books were excerpted

in The New Yorker back when Harry Evans ran the publishing house,

his wife, Tina Brown, ran the magazine and all of them were

wholly owned subsidiaries of Si Newhouse? Is anybody keeping tabs

on what Time, People and Entertainment Weekly have to say about

Warner Brothers movies? What else should we expect in a

brand-named, theme-parked country where the whole visual culture

is a stick in the eye, one big sell of booze, gizmos,

insouciance, "lifestyles" and combustible emotions? Where the

big-screen re-release of George Lucas's Star Wars trilogy is

brought to you by Doritos and the associated sale of stuffed

Yodas, Muppet minotaurs, trading cards, video games and a

six-foot-tall Fiberglas Storm Trooper for $5,000? Where the

newest James Bond is less a movie than a music-video marketing

campaign for luxury cars, imported beers, mobile phones and gold

credit cards? Where Coke and Pepsi duke it out in grammar schools

and Burger King shows up on the sides of the yellow buses that

cart our kids to those schools, in whose classrooms they will be

handed curriculum kits sprinkled with the names of sneaker

companies and breakfast cereals? Where there is a logo, a patent,

a copyright or a trademark on everything from our pro athletes

and childhood fairy tales to the human genome, and Oprah is sued

for $12 million by a Texas beef lobby for "disparaging" blood on

a bun during a talk-show segment on bovine spongiform

encephalopathy and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease?

And where, I might add, all of us "delirious professionals" sign

away, in perpetuity, our intellectual-property rights, our

firstborn children and our double-helix to synergizing media

monopolies that will downsize our asses before the pension plan

kicks in. Marx made a mini-comeback on the 150th birthday of his

Communist Manifesto. But years before he wrote the Manifesto he

was overheard to say: "Since money, as the existing and active

concept of value, confounds and exchanges everything, it is the

universal confusion and transposition of all things, the inverted

world, the confusion and transposition of all natural and human

qualities." In other words, if money's the only way we keep

score, every other human relation is corrupted.

* * *

There's a great line in one of Grace Paley's books: "Then, as

often happens in stories, it was several years later." Let me now

get up close and personal.

Not long after I took charge of the Times Book Review, in the

early seventies, I had a surprise visitor. Lester Markel, the

editor who had invented the Sunday Times with all its many

sections, the eighth-floor Charlemagne who was rumored like Idi

Amin to have stocked his fridge with the severed heads of his

many enemies, liked to stop in and sit a while, like a bound

galley or an urgent memo. This was because, after his forced

retirement, he wasn't welcome in anyone else's office. Alone

among the editors of the various Sunday sections, I had never

worked for or been wounded by him. I was, besides, a fresh ear.

It was rather like chewing the early-morning fat with El Cid

himself, propped up on a horse but secretly dead.

It turned out that Markel was writing his memoirs. And he was

having trouble finding a publisher. I made some suggestions and

some calls. Never mind the propriety of the editor of the Times

Book Review lobbying a publisher on behalf of an author with a

manuscript for sale. We achieved a contract. And I didn't see

Markel for months. Until, of course, galleys of his book came in.

And so did he, with suggestions for reviewers. And I had to

acquaint him with the etiquette of disinterested criticism. After

which he fixed me with the blood-freezing basilisk's eye. And I

still had the problem of finding a reviewer who would pay Markel

his due as a giant of yore, while not at the same time neglecting

to mention his memoir's tendency toward stupefaction--a reviewer

who would not only be fair, but who would be perceived as fair by

everybody else. I had already been burned by my predecessor, who

left me for my very first issue a review of the memoirs of

another retired Times executive, Turner Catledge, by one of his

best friends at the University of Mississippi.

* * *

Let me digress for a moment to observe that a Times executive who

wrote a book could always count on generous review attention so

long as he was retired. As Wilfrid Sheed reminded us in Max

Jamison, his novel about criticism: "They were soft, affable

people who wouldn't hurt you because they couldn't bear to be

hurt themselves. Paternal organizations were built on great piles

of spiritual blubber." But the same has not until recently been

true lower down the totem pole, for the serfs. And these serfs

write a lot of books. When Christopher Lehmann-Haupt and I

alternated as daily critics we looked at these books the same as

we'd look at any other. If we liked it or it seemed at least

symptomatic of something compelling in the larger culture that we

wanted to sermonize about, we'd review it. If not, we didn't.

Pretty simple. You'll have noticed that in recent years books by

Times employees are farmed out to freelancers. They are never

reviewed by in-house critics. This, we are told, is to avoid the

appearance of conflict of interest. Sounds good. Never mind just

how often these outside reviews are actually negative. (I recall

two in ten years.) But have you also noticed that this new policy

means that all books by Times writers are always reviewed in the

daily paper? Minus Saturdays and Sundays, there are 261 book

reviews published in the daily New York Times every year. There

are 65,000 new books published in the United States every year.

Some of these books are more equal than others in the paper of

record.

Back to Lester Markel, and the paragon I needed to review him.

That paragon, clearly, was Ben Bagdikian--a hugely respected,

eminently fair-minded, award-winning reporter, and also a gent,

who had gone to academe. And he agreed to do the review. And then

just when the days before publication of Markel's memoir dwindled

down to a precious few, Bagdikian called in a pickle. He had been

hired by the Washington Post. And the Washington Post had a

policy that prohibited any of its employees from writing for the

New York Times. (The New York Times, in fact, had the same policy

in reverse, which is why they told me to stop writing a TV column

for Newsweek, which is owned by the Washington Post.) Anyway, Ben

was stuck. Well, I needed to know, was he still willing to do the

review if I could get the Post to make an exception in this one

instance, to which of course we had entered into an agreement

before he sold his soul to the company store? Yes, he said; he'd

already done the work.

So I called Bill McPherson, the editor of the Washington Post

Book World, whom I knew from literary cocktail parties,

explaining my Markel problem and beseeching him to intercede on

my behalf with Post pooh-bah Ben Bradlee, whom I had met once at

a Harvard Crimson alumni softball game and another time, I'm

sorry to say, in the Hamptons. A long week passed. Finally

McPherson called. Bradlee would relent on Bagdikian, on one

condition. And what was that condition? It was that I,

personally, agree to review a book of Bradlee's choice for the

Post. Done, I said, figuring I'd square it somehow with the

Times. Which book? Well, Bradlee hadn't made up his mind. OK, so

I got my Bagdikian review, which was as scrupulous as I'd hoped,

and published it, which stung Markel to furious rebuttal in a

letter to the editor, which received from Bagdikian a mildly

puzzled response, which correspondence dragged on intolerably

until I called it off, after which I never saw Lester Markel in

my office again.

But that's not the point of this story. A year later the phone

rang, and it was McPherson, and he said: "Bradlee's calling in

his chit." Which book, I asked? Well--and McPherson was

embarrassed--Sally Quinn is about to publish a book on her year

at CBS. That's the one. Many of you are too young to remember

that there was a Ben Bradlee before Jason Robards played him in

the film version of All the President's Men, and that this Ben

Bradlee left his wife for Sally Quinn, a reporter for the

Washington Post "Style" section, and that this Sally Quinn then

left the Post, very briefly, for a CBS morning show about which

most TV critics had been savage, although at least one of us, me,

had been lukewarm in Life.

Nor is the point of this story that I refused to write that book

review. The point is that Lester Markel had no business in my

office, that I had no business trying to find him a publisher or

to arrange for a judicious review--and that Bradlee's way is how

the big boys play the game. While making sure your girlfriend

gets a talked-about review, at the same time sticking it to your

principal competitor. Only Bagdikian emerges with honor. Which,

some years later, is exactly what I told a class Bagdikian taught

in "The Ethics of Journalism" at Berkeley. These students,

including my own son, were amused at an anecdote starring their

professor, but didn't get the ethics of it. It seemed sort of

locker-room to them, as it seemed to grad students from the

Columbia Journalism School in a seminar I later taught myself.

They were all children of the triumph of a glossier idea of

journalism that postures in front of experience, rather than

engaging it; that looks in its cynical opportunism for an angle,

or a spin, or a take, instead of consulting compass points of

principle; that strikes attitudes like matches, the better to

admire its wiseguy profile in the mirror of the slicks.

* * *

I am aware that my own regard for books is overly worshipful--one

part Hegel, two parts Tinkerbell, with garnishes of Sacred Text,

Pure Thought and Counter-Geography--at a time when most of the

dead trees in the chain stores have titles like How I Lost

Weight, Found God, Smart-Bombed Ragheads, and Changed My Sexual

Preference in the Bermuda Triangle. But I also know it's just as

hard to write a bad book as a good one, and a lot easier to

review one than achieve one, and if book critics in mainstream

newspapers and magazines seem to have appointed themselves the

hall monitors of an unruly schoolboy culture--this one gets a

pass to go to the lavatory; that one must sit in the corner

wearing a dunce cap--then it is a condescension and a contempt

passed down and internalized from bosses like Bradlee, for whom

the whole process is a whimsical scam. I've yet to meet a media

heavy who didn't think all of the books by all of his friends

deserve fawning reviews. Nor have I met a media heavy who thought

I should ever employ as a reviewer anybody who has ever

criticized him or his friends. Max Frankel, who accuses me in his

autobiography of trying to turn the Times Book Review into a

combination of The Village Voice and The New York Review of

Books, once called me on the carpet for using Timothy Crouse as a

reviewer, because Crouse had made fun of his Washington press

corps friends in The Boys on the Bus. Abe Rosenthal not only

called me on the carpet for saying nice things on the daily book

page about I.F. Stone and Nat Hentoff, but suspended me from the

job entirely after I panned a book, The Second Stage, by his

friend Betty Friedan. The next thing I knew, they'd killed a

sports column I wrote, during the pro football strike, pointing

out that the head of the Players Union, Ed Garvey, used to spook

for the CIA. This of course goes beyond the butthole politics of

the buddy-bond. It's over in another office, where foreign editor

Jimmy Greenfield killed a "Private Lives" column I wrote about

the Philippines, back when the Frog Prince Ferdinand and his

Dragon Lady were still in charge, and playwrights like Ben

Cervantes were still in prison, and Greenfield in New York knew

more about it than I did in Manila, where a goon in a blue

jumpsuit followed me out of the Palace of Culture, all over the

landfill in the Bay, unto a lurid jeepney.

* * *

This sounds like whining. It is whining. A primary characteristic

of any news organization are subcultures of the crybaby and the

gripe. (As if we ever had it harder than a schoolteacher, a

factory worker, a farmer or a cop; as if we'd ever been

threatened with redundancy, much less a firing squad; as if our

slippery slide weren't down into a wad of cotton candy.) And so I

could go on about what happened to Richard Eder as the drama

critic, and to Ray Bonner at El Mozote, and the class-action suit

by the women of the Times, for which I was deposed, and Roger

Wilkins, who quit the paper to write his own book (which I so

incautiously reviewed), and Jerzy Kosinski, and Neil Sheehan, and

Attica, and AIDS. I could even tell you about having to write my

review of the first volume of Henry Kissinger's memoirs two days

early, so that it could go all the way to the top to be vetted,

after which I was permitted to suggest that some of us, on

hearing from Henry that his only sleepless night in public

service had been on the eve of his first mixer with the Red

Chinese debutantes--well, some us thought maybe he should have

tossed and turned more often. And I still don't know who cut the

last two paragraphs of a review I wrote in 1970 about a couple of

JFK assassination books. Those two paragraphs, asking perplexed

questions about the sloppiness of the Warren Commission Report,

simply vanished between the first edition and the last--an

incriminating fact on microfilm periodically rediscovered by

assistant professors of conspiracy theory, who write me paranoid

letters that I dutifully forward to Abe.

No wonder that when Ed Diamond, while researching his book on the

Times, mentioned my name to John Rothman, Keeper of the Archives,

Rothman sniffed: "Some people just aren't good Timesmen." And

then just as promptly edited himself: "Some people aren't good

organizational men." I could live happily with that, had I quit

on any one of a dozen fraught occasions. But I allowed myself to

be promoted instead, and stuck around for sixteen years. And when

I did finally leave, it wasn't about a matter of principle. Those

of us who go over the wall--who leave the Catholic Church or the

Communist Party or the New York Times--usually decide at last to

jump because of something small. You have swallowed a whole

history of whoppers, but there is a fatigue about your faith.

Without any warning, the elastic snaps, and you are hurled out of

the closed system into empty space, and your renunciation,

arrived at by so many increments, looks almost capricious. In my

case, I decided to believe that the brand-new Vanity Fair would

be a serious magazine, as did many of my friends. And so we

entered the halls of Condé Nast like the children who followed

Stephen of Vendôme south to Marseille in 1212, expecting the Club

Med to part like a Red Sea, allowing us to pass over to the

Promised Land. We were sold instead into slavery in Egypt. Well,

it wasn't that bad. Actually, I was in Jerusalem writing a story

on Peace Now when they called the King David to tell me to come

home, that they'd fired the editor who had hired me and it wasn't

going to be a Peace Now kind of magazine anymore. But when we

leap over the wall, we always imagine that they, whoever they

are, will love us more in the outside world. They will love us

just as much, or as little, as we serve their interest.

* * *

But to finish with the Times: When I told them I was quitting,

first they said I had promised I never would. Well, never say

never. Then they explained, "The Times is a centrist institution,

and you are not a centrist." Fair enough, although the center

sure had moved since they hired me directly out of the antiwar

movement. Finally, they screamed at me: "We made you! You'd be

nothing without the Times!" This surprised. It had never before

occurred to me that they'd published what I wrote, two or three

times a week, out of the kindness of their hearts--that we hadn't

been somehow even every day. For years after, I thought of this

departing as Freudian-dysfunctional. Maybe they wanted to be our

fathers. Maybe we wanted them to be our fathers. Oedipus! Peter

Pan! Then I began to wonder whether there wasn't about our

servitude elements of an abusive marriage--tantrums, fists and

fear; excuses, apologies and denials; dependency and

self-loathing--battered wives and battered writers. Now,

contemplating all the ghosts in this denial machine, I'm inclined

to remember the theater tickets, and the stock options, and all

the cocktail parties I got invited to as if I were important.

Paul Krassner, the Yippie editor of The Realist, once explained

to a conference on "Media and the Environment" how to tell the

difference between "news" and "dreaming." When you see something

you don't believe, you should flap your arms like wings. If you

seem then to be flying, it's a dream. In this dreamtime, I am

overdue at CBS, where I've spent the last twelve years.

Before I was hired at Sunday Morning, I asked for a free hand in

choosing which television programs I reviewed, regardless of

network. My own credibility was at stake. I was assured of a

hands-off policy. That was three presidents of CBS News ago.

In fact, for the first seven or so years, I was, if not ignored,

then rather negligently embraced as a sort of punctuation mark, a

change of rhythm or a passionate parenthesis, in one of the

vanishingly few network news programs to embody and cherish

old-fashioned journalistic standards. When Sunday Morning wasn't

thinking about culture, its splendid idea of news was to notice

that, hey, here's a social problem; here are some people trying

to do something about it; why don't we spend eight whole minutes

seeing if what they're doing actually works? Those of you who

only recall Charles Kuralt as a kind of Johnny Appleseed of

avuncular anecdotes and homespun decencies need reminding that

he'd been a fine reporter in Southeast Asia and Latin America;

that he went to China at the time of Tiananmen, where his take

was very different from Dr. Kissinger's; that he expressed his

doubts, over the air, about the Gulf War. It's not just that he

listened better than most people talk; he was an exacerbated

conscience of his profession. He even refused to appear on the

Murphy Brown sitcom: "I don't know where the line is," he told

me, "but that's crossing it." With his passing, we were

diminished in heart and jumping beans.

* * *

The world of television journalism has been changing, not since

O.J. or Monica or the Internet, but ever since they discovered

that news can be a "profit center." I should have got an inkling

my first year on air, when I reviewed a public-TV documentary on

Edward R. Murrow, whose valor and grace made him our very own

tragic hero. Emerging on CBS television from the radio and the

war, he grasped the new medium's power to modify the way a nation

thought about itself, then watched helplessly as the medium

pawned that power to the ad agencies, and smoked himself to

death. He even looked like Camus, the Shadow Man of the French

Resistance--Bogart with a microphone. We were reminded in the

documentary that he'd been stunned when they opened the gates of

Buchenwald. That he cared so much about words, he often forgot to

look at the camera. That he made up See It Now as he went along,

forever over budget. That after his famous demolition job on Joe

McCarthy, Alcoa dropped its sponsorship of See It Now and William

Paley, the Big Eye in the Black Rock Sky, turned against his

best-known reporter, bumping the program from the prime-time

schedule. That in his last years at CBS before he resigned in

1961 there were many more Person to Person chats with the likes

of Marilyn Monroe than there had ever been exposés like Harvest

of Shame, on the plight of the migrant farmworkers. What I should

have noticed at the time was the allegorical nature of the Murrow

story. In every institution of our society, but especially in the

media, there have always been brilliant young men (and men almost

all of them have always been) who find surrogate fathers as

Murrow found Paley. For a while in this relationship of

privilege, patronage and protection, these young men imagine they

can go on being brilliant, on their own terms, forever, immune to

the bottom-line logic of a corporate culture that, for its own

reasons, has surrounded and preserved them in aspic. But we are

not fathers and sons at all; we are landlords and tenants; owners

and pets. It shouldn't surprise the brilliant young men, and yet

it always surprises the brilliant young men, when the party's

over and the pets are put to sleep.

* * *

I am once again peripheral to the larger story. But when CBS lost

pro football, and then a bunch of affiliate stations, to Rupert

Murdoch's Fox, everybody freaked. One Thursday, I went in as

usual to submit a script for TelePrompTing, record the voiceover

for my tape package and go home again to watch more television.

Later that afternoon, the executive producer called. The

then-president of CBS News--he's gone now, Eric Ober, or how

likely is it that I'd be telling you this?--had seen that I was

reviewing a TV movie forthcoming on Fox, a feature-length reprise

of the old Alien Nation sci-fi series, and he'd hit the roof. He

had to go to an affiliates' meeting next Monday morning. They

would chew his ears off after hearing their own network promote a

program on the evil empire's competing schedule. I said I had

been specifically promised that this would never happen; that,

anyway--and never mind my poor powers to cloud anybody's mind,

including A.C. Nielsen's--it couldn't really be my problem if the

stock of the corporation went up or down, or if the president of

CBS News had to go to an affiliates' meeting or a therapist. I

was told they'd get back to me, and late that night they did. The

president was adamant. Then, I said, I guess I'll have to quit.

Don't be silly and overreactive, I was told. And then the

executive producer handled me. A month before, I had proposed a

piece about Doris Lessing, on the occasion of her 75th birthday

and the publication of the first volume of her autobiography.

Nobody, then, had been interested. But now, if I wanted to sit

down immediately and write it up, they'd run it on Sunday in

place of Alien Nation. Quid pro quo, Q.E.D., ad nauseam and beat

vigorously.

It occurs to me that thirty years ago Life rejected one of my

"Cyclops" columns, about Richard Nixon as a jack-in-the-box

television President: Surprise! Look what Daddy brought home from

the cold war! A secret bombing of Cambodia! Then, too, I vented

at length to a sympathetic but helpless editor. The next day,

Life sent me a brand-new color TV set--my very first. All night

long, with my children, I shopped for friendship in the gorgeous

beer commercials. So Doris Lessing is a sort of color television

set.

What followed Doris Lessing--since, if I couldn't review the

network competition, I refused to review CBS, although cable and

public television were still fair game--was some strong

encouragement for me to branch out more, into movies and books.

This made rationalizing easy. More books is always better. Free

movies spice it up, even while you quickly realize that TV is

more various and interesting. They still, amazingly, let me say

exactly what I want to about abortion and capital punishment,

racism and homophobia, misogyny and war. (We are hired for our

stylistic bag of tricks, our jetstream vapor trails, not our

politics. Had my politics been right-wing rather than left,

somebody else would have overpaid for this vapor.) And there's a

new president of CBS News. If I combine network shows in a

thematic clump, one from column A, two from column B, I'm back in

the consumer-guide business. What's more, this wandering in the

wilderness has led me to realize that we end up, in the

cultural-journalism business, reviewing the buzz more often than

the artifact itself. That the more money spent on promotion, the

more attention we have to pay, no matter what our opinion. If it

is heavily hyped, it automatically becomes newsworthy. So long as

we are talking about what everybody else is talking about, we

will sound smart. Never mind the little foreign movie with the

distracting subtitles--nobody else will review it, either. So I'm

smarter now. Flap your arms if you think you're dreaming.

The sad thing is that, since now at last I am old enough to be

too old, almost, for network television--a demographic

undesirable to the ad agencies--my very senior citizenship means

that my children are out of college, I own the roof over my head,

and I ought to be immune to the terrors of authenticity. I need

not be beholden to those who choose to leak on me, nor belong to

any hard-wired paradigm that imagines itself a fourth branch of

the government, even a separate country, with its own pomp,

protocols, dress codes, foreign policy and official secrets,

lacking only its own anthem and maybe a helicopter beanie. And

yet the Times paid for that house, CBS bought me a new kitchen,

and in the last decade I have vacationed in China, Egypt, India

and Zimbabwe. I've actually stayed in hotels like the Danieli in

Venice, the Peninsula in Hong Kong and the Oriental in Bangkok,

in spite of the fact that I know I don't belong there--that you

can take the boy out of his class, but not that class out of the

boy.

This is the deepest censorship of the self, an upward mobility

and a downward trajectory. Once upon a time way back in high

school, we thought of reporters as private eyes. We thought of

journalism as a craft instead of a club of professional perkies

who worried about summer homes, Tuscan vacations, Jungian

analysis, engraved invitations to Truman Capote parties and

private schools for our sensitive children. We scratched down an

idea on a scrap of yellow paper, typed it up on an Underwood

portable, took it below to the print shop, set it on a Linotype

machine, read that type upside down, ran off a proof on a flatbed

press and seemed somehow to connect brain and word, muscle and

idea, blood and ink, hot lead and cool thought. But that was long

before we got into the information-commodities racket, where we

have more in common with Henry Kravis and Henry Kissinger than we

do with paper-makers, deliverymen and Philip Marlowe, or those

ABC technicians who were so recently so alone, on strike, on

Columbus Avenue. After which our real story is ourselves, at the

Century Club or Elaine's or a masked ball charity scam--Oscar de

la Renta, Alex Solzhenitsyn and Leona Helmsley invite you to Feel

Bad About the Boat People at the Museum of Modern Art--with

plenty of downtime left, after we have crossed a picket line by

e-mailing our copy to the computer, to mosey over to Yankee

Stadium, where Boss Steinbrenner will lift us up by our epaulets

to his skybox to consort with such presbyters of the Big Fix as

Roy Cohn and Donald Trump, and you can't tell the pearls from the

swine.

E-mail this story to a friend.

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John Leonard is a contributing editor of The Nation. This article

is adapted from a lecture that was part of a series on

self-censorship in the media given at New York University. The

lecture series is being published this month in The Business of

Journalism (New Press).

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