bad headline

By: Nat Hentoff Criticism not only goes with our territory, it's endemic to it. Polls indicate that many Americans wouldn't buy a used car from us. And in the most recent "State of the First Amendment" survey by the First Amendment Center, 71% of those responding say that it's important for the government to hold the media in check.

Some of that call for restraint has to do with TV's far-too-premature announcing of the presidential-election results last year. But the figures, as the First Amendment Center notes, are "certainly not a source of comfort" for either newspapers or broadcasters.

There are times when we fuel this mistrust. My least favorite mantra is when an editor automatically answers an indignant reader by intoning, "We stand by our story" -- because there are stories without any legs in the first place.

Nonetheless, what I find most infuriating is the circulation over the years of this 1998 accusation by The New Yorker's longtime staff writer, Janet Malcolm, which surfaced yet again July 1 in David Ignatius' column in The Washington Post: "Janet Malcolm ... who has lured many a subject into her own journalistic web, once wrote memorably in The New Yorker: 'Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.'"

As a grace note, Ignatius went on to say, "Joan Didion put it more succinctly: 'Writers are always selling somebody out.'" Ignatius' fellow Post columnist Richard Cohen also has cited the Malcolm quotation.

Over some 50 years on the job, I've known scores -- probably hundreds -- of reporters, in all parts of the country. And, sure, I've run across some who could double as bunco artists or three-card-monte manipulators. But the repeated citing of Malcolm's stereotyping of reporters has finally made me blow my top, as it were. I was on The New Yorker staff, as a writer of long pieces, for more than 25 years -- and one of the mandates of its longtime editor, William Shawn, was to strenuously avoid generalizations.

Every reader of E&P can supply a list of journalists who do not, in any way, belong in the noxious cesspool to which Malcolm and Didion have consigned us. My own list would take up an entire issue of the magazine, beginning with George Seldes. Was his exposure of Stalin, long before the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact, morally indefensible? Next would be another mentor of mine, Murray Kempton. Who the hell did he ever sell out? At The New Yorker itself, there was A.J. Liebling, a master reporter and a memorable critic of journalists.

More recently, Bill Moushey in 1998 wrote an exhaustively researched 10-part series for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "Win at all costs: Government misconduct in the name of expedient justice." His detailed indictment of how prosecutors and other law-enforcement agents and agencies routinely and cavalierly abuse the Bill of Rights should have earned Moushey a special Pulitzer Prize. He already had earned the enmity of the feds' alleged Department of Justice, among other collaborators in winning cases at whatever costs.

In July, Bob Port of the New York Daily News went deep in writing a four-part investigative series on the city's sweatshops. Naming names and places, he illuminated brutal working conditions in garment shops, along with a largely ineffective union. Lincoln Steffens would have been proud of Port, who, along with other present-day reporters, restores the term "muckraking" to its honored place in journalism.

After reading Port's series, Catherine Nolan, chairwoman of the New York State Assembly's Labor Committee, introduced a bill -- passed quickly by a 140-0 vote -- that directs the state labor commissioner, as the Daily News reported, "to publish the names of sweatshops and their owners on the Internet. It would also empower labor inspectors to shut down a clothing factory if they spot fire-code violations." The state Senate is likely to make the bill even stronger.

Earlier, in April, Jane Fritsch and David Rohde of The New York Times researched and wrote three long articles on "Two-tier justice in New York City." In revealing the lack of city and state supervision enabling pervasive violations of the constitutional right to effective assistance of counsel for the poor, they reported, "The Times analyzed all 137 New York City homicide cases completed by appointed lawyers in 2000. In 42 of the cases -- nearly a third -- the lawyers did less than a week of preparation." Who was morally indefensible? And who was selling out the Bill of Rights?

As a kid, I'd wait at the door in the evening for my father to bring home the Boston daily papers. I knew what I wanted to be, and I've never had any regrets.