Woodward denounces elevation of immediacy over quality p.

By: M.L. Stein

NEWS ORGANIZATIONS' "obsession" with their own reputation and image often puts immediacy and quantity ahead of quality in reporting, Bob Woodward of the Washington Post told a Stanford University audience.
"The felony in journalism these days is to be behind on a story or miss a story," said Woodward, who included the Post among the culprits. "An editor gets an idea for a story and we have to get out and tell what we know rather than understand it."
Woodward, now an assistant managing editor for investigations, who rose to fame for his Watergate series with Carl Bernstein, cited "enormous competitive pressure" as causing a large part of the problem.
He examined the recent rigging by NBC News of a crash test involving fuel tanks on General Motors trucks as an example of misdirected reporting.
The media jumped on NBC's fake test and its confession of it but the real story was generally missed, Woodward said.
"The underlying issue is, Are these trucks safe?" he continued. The need for speed to beat the competition also has produced "one-line, score-keeping journalism that passes for news," the editor and author stated.
"Is so-and-so up or down? What are the latest poll results? It's much easier for the media to work this way rather than wrestling with the complex, underlying story."
A key characteristic of good reporting is that it takes time ? weeks, months and perhaps even longer, Woodward maintained ? adding, "The story should always be from the point of view of understanding."
The press's main problem since Watergate and Vietnam is not that its independence is threatened by government, the courts, legislatures or advertisers, Woodward said.
These threats still surface from time to time but generally are not a problem, he went on, contending that "The independence of the American media is the norm.
"For the media today, the enemy is within," he asserted. "There is an ethic too often built around speed, simplicity and brevity ? a dumbing down of the definition of news to the point where news becomes the accumulated, collective, lowest common denominator."
The Woody Allen-Mia Farrow squabble is a case in point, Woodward observed. The media, he said, find it easier to treat their feud as news rather than deal with the issue of child abuse and its spiritual and psychological costs.
Woodward used the recently concluded Rodney King beating trial in Los Angeles as another example. He charged the media with having been fixated on the trial itself while ducking "the real story."
"The real story is whether there is justice in the American courts" for blacks, women, retired people and other segments of the population, Woodward said. He urged the press to talk to individuals who have been exposed to the criminal justice system and civil courts for their views.
Woodward lamented that since his book on the U.S. Supreme Court was published 14 years ago, the media "have done virtually nothing to examine an institution that is truly the black hole of American justice. There are secrecy agreements [within the court] that people will not talk about and this is accepted by the media."
In deciding what to cover or investigate, journalists and their editors face a "moral problem" of whether to take risks and work against conventional wisdom, Woodward said.
Contending that risks are worth taking, Woodward recalled that one of the things he learned from Watergate was to "follow the money as the first, second and third axioms of journalism."
Two-thirds of the federal budget is allotted to mandatory entitlements but if 1,000 people were asked about such programs as Medicare and Social Security, not 20 would know what they are all about, he argued.
The media should tell their audiences how these programs work and are administered, what was the intent of the laws that created them, and how have they been interpreted by the courts, Woodward suggested.
"These programs may spell financial doom for this country some day if they are not straightened out," he went on. Other issues crying for understanding are the connection between money and politics, "which has never been solved; the deterioration of American business; health care; and the war on drugs," Woodward said.
"Journalists have high expectations of their profession but journalism, like the law, must be a living and evolving thing, defining the expectations of the populace, redefining them or finding new truths," he commented.
Woodward spoke at a one-day symposium on print media trends sponsored by the Stanford Daily in observance of the 20th anniversary of its independence from the university.