The Perils of Pack Reporting

Alicia Mundy, writing in MediaWeek, compared reporters engaged in pack reporting to "seagulls [jumping] on a french fry and pecking it to death." Though at first the comparison seems strange, since frying kills even the hardiest potatoes, it still rings quite true. Like birds pecking at junk food, the journalistic pack feasts on the greasy mass of an often manufactured story, unconcerned that the scraps aren't worth the effort and contain little substance. All that matters is keeping up with the feeding frenzy of the moment.

The pack mentality among news gatherers persists despite frequent, eloquent criticism. No one likes pack journalism, and few would admit to practicing it. Pack journalism leaves the news-hungry public misinformed or poorly informed about important developments in their communities and around the world, since "the news of the day is concerned with trivia."

The mammoth resources of media empires concentrate on whether former President Clinton had an extra-marital affair, or worry that a telegenic 6-year-old Cuban boy in the country illegally could be sent home to his father. While these stories deserve coverage, it's hard to see how the public is served by providing up-to-the-second minutiae on subjects of little consequence to most viewers while ignoring big-picture issues that affect everyone's lives.

One somewhat valid argument holds that it's not the public being served by commercial media - it's the media owners, who count on readers and viewers drawn by these broadly appealing, titillating stories to boost profits. While the practice works out well for them, the problem of pack journalism goes deeper. The very structure of American-style "objective" journalism leaves the press open to pack tendencies. Furthermore, these tendencies are easily exploited by special interests, meaning that the public can not only be misinformed, but misinformed in line with a certain agenda.

The evidence, and obvious peril, of this conformist reporting has been evident for some time. Well-received books like Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail 1972 and The Boys on the Bus documented the hazards of conglomerate reporting - yet, despite the revelations, and the obvious harm to the public and the press, little has been done. It bears repeating, then, exactly how herd journalism happens, and how it disserves public discourse.

News organizations often follow the lead of others, and it's getting worse as the number of media outlets increase. "Ironically ... increased competition and the instantaneous nature of television have served to exacerbate the pack-journalism phenomenon," one critique states. "In their attempt to capture the latest and most conclusive information, reporters often put their own spin on what other publications and broadcasts have deemed newsworthy. When reporters rely on previous accounts of an event, misinformation and inaccuracies abound." This is how the Oklahoma City bombing came to be prematurely, and wrongly, blamed on Middle Eastern terrorists. Richard Jewell can relate - the media pack convicted the security guard of placing a bomb at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics after the Atlanta Journal-Constitution went to press with a story naming him a suspect.

Other examples are less sensational, but no less alarming. The journalistic treatment of Hmong refugees who came to the United States after the Vietnam War showed a more subtle pack movement. "Journalists seized excitedly on a label that is still trotted out at regular intervals: 'the most primitive refugee group in America,'" writes Anne Fadiman, who spent several years studying and interacting with the Hmong. "Typical phrases from newspaper and magazine stories in the late seventies and eighties included 'low-caste hill tribe,' 'Stone Age,' 'emerging from the mists of time,' 'like Alice falling down a rabbit hole.'" In fact, Fadiman writes, the Hmong have a very sophisticated, intricately woven culture that journalists apparently were too busy to investigate.

By following the lead of their Hmong-bashing peers, including the New York Times, instead of independently pursuing an accurate story, these reports mischaracterized the Hmong, contributed to misunderstandings and even violence between Americans and refugees, and failed journalism's basic mission - to inform, accurately.

Hunter S. Thompson chronicled a similar debacle in Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga, which illuminates how the national media can turn into a monolithic pack when a juicy story comes along. In 1965, the state of California released a report on the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang. While based on shaky numbers and heavily biased sources, the report also made "a clanging good item for the national press," Thompson wrote. "There was plenty of mad action, senseless destruction, orgies, brawls, perversions and a strange parade of innocent victims that, even on paper and in careful police language, was enough to tax the credulity of the dullest police reporter."

It was so out of bounds that Angels members "shuddered with perverse laughter at the swill that had been written about them." Even so, the national press had a field day. It started with a "lengthy and lurid" New York Times recap of the report, followed by prominent pieces by Time and Newsweek. "And by the time the dust had settled, the national news media had a guaranteed grabber on their hands," Thompson said. "It was sex, violence, crime, craziness and filth - all in one package." The media then devoted a lot of time and ink to promoting the Hell's Angels as public enemy No. 1, whipping towns everywhere into a paranoid frenzy at the thought of an approaching motorcycle entourage. An objective examination of the incidents in the report and the gang members themselves, however, "makes the Angels look like a bunch of petty jack-rollers." The media looked like idiots, or tabloid opportunists.

Pack reporting can spread misinformation even when reporters write about mainstream issues, as was the case during the early 1990s debate on health care reform. One proposal, managed competition, came to dominate the debate, even though health care professionals had widely divergent opinions on how best to improve access to health insurance and medical care. "Thanks in part to the editorial pages of The New York Times, managed competition has been elevated from a theory hatched by insurance executives, physicians and academics ... to the leading blueprint for health care reform," lamented Trudy Lieberman in Columbia Journalism Review.

This happened largely because of "competitive pressures" that force reporters "to succumb to the bane of Washington journalism - mimicking the coverage in The New York Times and The Washington Post." When one of these papers published a scoop on the health care debate, often something leaked to see how a certain proposal might fare politically, it "put enormous pressure on other reporters to write similar stories," Lieberman wrote.

The health care debate showed how these pack tendencies can be made to serve a certain agenda. Since then-President Clinton had promised a health care plan within 100 days, and the panel met in secret, reporters went crazy trying to tell the story of an imploding policy initiative:

"The secrecy, the 100-day deadline, the on-again-off-again decision making of the task force, and the sense that a big plan was about to explode, sent the press on a frantic search for leaks, scoops, and front-page headlines. Those same ingredients worked to manipulate reporters. The task force resorted to an age-old Washington trick - releasing trial balloons to favored journalists as a way of gauging how this proposal or that would fly with movers and shakers in health care. ... '[New York Times reporter] Robert Pear got leaks, got documents, got scoops, and the Times set the agenda for the next day's coverage,' says one reporter."

The public, however, did not receive as wide a range of information as it should have. The story became one of health care legislation, not health care, and an important policy initiative fell by the wayside.

The manipulation happens because media organizations, instead of pursuing independent lines of inquiry, "stumble over each other to cover the perceived story of the moment. ... From the 1900s to the 1990s, most members of the print and electronic media have decided to follow rather than lead. It's safer that way." This tendency has been well documented in the coverage of presidential campaigns, when news organizations seemingly go all out to make sure they have the same story as everyone else.

In The Boys on the Bus, for example, Timothy Crouse chronicles a typical day on the 1972 George McGovern campaign and how reporters swallowed the day's "easy" story - a new poll showing McGovern ahead of his primary opponent, Hubert Humphrey, by 20 points. Despite spending months with the candidate, he writes, "the reporters had gained no fresh insights into George McGovern; they had not gone of their way to look for any." They did not ask questions about the large sums of cash pouring into his campaign, or whether political realities were tempting him to abandon some of his cherished stances. Crouse quotes one reporter's lament: "I'd be willing to bet that on the night he got the nomination we hadn't told anybody in the United States who the hell we were talking about, what kind of man he was."

Reporters were equally negligent when covering Richard Nixon that year. Nixon effectively stage-managed his campaign, speaking only to screened television audiences while feeding the traveling press bits and pieces designed to meet their daily needs without actually opening the candidate to questioning. Though reporters protested at times, they did not want to play into the "liberal bias" stereotype Nixon and his vice president, Spiro Agnew, had successfully planted in the public mind. Instead, the reporters wrote stories about subjects like "the new Agnew":

"Convenience was the order of the week. Agnew gave the press that treasured gift, the easy hook. In his meetings with reporters he was sufficiently cool and low key that they could go off and happily file portraits on the New Agnew. It was an obvious, inevitable and comfortable story, and nearly everybody on board was pleased to write it."

Meanwhile, Nixon made "demonstrably false" statements about McGovern's programs that went unchallenged in the press, with the exception of a CBS news report by Cassie Makin - and she caught a lot of heat from Nixon's campaign and her fellow reporters for challenging Nixon in that way. The problem, Crouse said, is that "political journalists ... often work as a herd when they should act as individuals, and they claim their right to perform as individuals when they should close ranks and act as a group." When Nixon limited access, for example, they should have demanded, en masse, regular contact with the president; and when the campaign disseminated information to all, each reporter would do more good by striking out in an independent direction instead of following the lead of Nixon staffers, the national press and the wire services.

Pack tendencies also can be manipulated by journalists with an axe to grind. Columnist Robert Novak launched an offensive in 1995 against Sheila Burke, the chief of staff for then-Sen. Robert Dole. Though she'd worked for Dole for nearly 20 years, through other, losing presidential campaigns, when Dole became the GOP front-runner for the 1996 elections "conservative critics ... decided that Burke [was] leading her boss down the slippery slope of moderation." (Prior to joining the senator's office, she'd been a nurse and a liberal Democrat.) Mundy of MediaWeek continued her account:

"Novak's column listed several charges, including allegations by an anonymous senator that 'she has offended just about everybody in the religious right.' He also suggested there was a groundswell among conservatives nationally against Burke. This is a routine ploy, but Novak has the clout to pull it off beautifully. There was no anti-Burke groundswell."

Novak didn't want Dole to succeed, Mundy said, so he started a campaign against a veteran staffer the candidate needed. Another columnist didn't like the way Burke limited his access to Dole, so he jumped on the bandwagon. Novak's column provoked a whisper campaign against her, critical Wall Street Journal editorials and stories, and negative accounts in The Washington Post, Time, and the Associated Press. Other reporters felt compelled to follow the lead of the "heavyweight" news organizations - indeed, Mundy wrote, Novak could not have pulled off his stunt without "the media, that obedient pack":

"The anti-Burke groundswell didn't exist until Novak said it did. Reporters were mandated to find such a groundswell by their editors (once they'd stopped asking, 'Sheila who?'). GOP pols and pundits then steered reporters to predetermined sources who parroted the 'groundswell' argument, which then became its own news. It's a tried-and-true Washington routine: You start the riot, then you cover it."

It's alarming to note how easily the media can be sent after someone, if a tidbit is juicy enough. Several commentaries on press behavior note that special interests and politicians often know more about how the press will react than reporters do. One doesn't even have to make McCarthy-esque accusations of an opponent to get the pack's attention. All it takes are a few well-placed, sort-of-plausible rumors that the media would like to be true, and it becomes damaging news when the subject of the rumors is forced to deny them. For example, "Michael Dukakis suffered under coverage of a nonexistent psychiatric problem, and the press circulated unsubstantiated allegations of Richard Nixon's and George Bush's extramarital affairs." Thompson offered a particularly sinister anecdote - perhaps apocryphal - about an early Texas campaign by Lyndon Johnson, a notoriously nasty politician. It shows exactly how the media's role in destruction-by-rumor can work:

"The race was close and Johnson was getting worried. Finally he told his campaign manager to start a massive rumor campaign about his opponent's life-long habit of enjoying carnal knowledge of his own barnyard sows. 'Christ, we can't get away with calling him a pig-fucker,' the campaign manager protested. 'Nobody's going to believe a thing like that.' 'I know,' Johnson replied. 'But let's make the sonofabitch deny it.'"

Given this rumor-mongering, and the documented missteps of the mainstream national press, it's amazing that anyone would want to follow its lead. Still, any controversial development finds followers. Recently, for example, reporters took to using the word "quagmire" to describe U.S. military action in Afghanistan and trotted out endless - and speculatively premature - comparisons to Vietnam, columnist John Leo noted mockingly. It started with an Associated Press article and spread to The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Miami Herald and other large papers. "At press conferences, reporters asked quagmire questions of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf. When they did, of course, they got answers keeping the word quagmire in play," Leo said. Then, quoting a Slate.com columnist, he continued: "The reason that criticisms and skepticism about the war bubble around D.C. 'is that reporters raise and repeat them in a self-escalating cycle.' Some quagmires are still known to occur in the real world. But others are created and sustained in the newsroom." Such wild-goose chases damage press credibility at a time when trust is more important than ever.

Rolling Stone also has harshly lampooned the press. For instance, in 2000 the magazine sent novelist David Foster Wallace to follow John McCain's presidential campaign for a week. In an introductory section, he explains "Twelve Monkeys," campaign bus slang for the heavy hitting journalists along for the ride:

"The 12M are a dozen marquee journalists and political-analysis guys from the really important papers and weeklies and news services, and tend to be so totally identical in dress and demeanor as to be almost surreal - twelve immaculate and wrinkle-free navy-blue blazers, half-Windsored ties, pleated chinos, oxford-cloth shirts that even when the jackets come off stay 100% buttoned at the collar and sleeves, Cole Haan loafers, and tortoiseshell specs they love to take off and nibble the arm of, plus always a uniform self-seriousness that reminds you of every overachieving dweeb you ever wanted to kick the ass of in school. The Twelve Monkeys never smoke or drink, and always move in a pack ..."

Later, Wallace delights in recounting the "vapid and obvious" questioning of McCain and aide Mike Murphy by members of the Twelve Monkey clan.

"MONKEY: If, say, you win here in South Carolina, what do you do then?
MURPHY: Fly to Michigan that night.
... MONKEY: I mean can you explain why specifically Michigan?
MURPHY: It's the next primary.
MONKEY: I think what we're trying to get you to elaborate on, Mike, is: what will your goal be in Michigan?
MURPHY: To get a whole lot of votes. It's part of our secret strategy for winning the nomination."

Why the cream of the national media would need to spend days and weeks cooped up on a bus, riding with a candidate at great expense to their employers and their health, for such inane interviews is hard to fathom. Yet every four years they pile on buses and planes to do just that, even though the horserace coverage that often emerges does little to inform public debate while reinforcing pack tendencies.

Thomas Patterson explores the results of that coverage in his comprehensive tome, Out of Order. While much press criticism makes the media out to be stupid, lazy or liberally biased, Patterson's thoughtful examination probes more deeply. He concludes that pack reporting problems result from the structure of the newsgathering process. Citing another study, Patterson holds that "if the news confers advantage or disadvantage on any candidate, it does so primarily because of the inherent biases of [journalism] as a distinctive form of discourse."

This bias is based on the journalistic preoccupation with "objectivity" and the perception that campaigns, and legislative issues in general, are about political advantage and getting elected, not ideas. "...[T]he press has an antipolitics bias, which contributes to news that is harshly critical of those who seek the presidency," Patterson writes. This "deep skepticism" exists within the framework of a "story-driven news process" - that is, reporters portray the campaign or legislation as part of a narrative, either "leading, or trailing, or gaining ground, or losing ground." He continues: "As the situation changes, so does the story line, and with it the news image in which to press envelops a candidate. What is said of the candidate must fit the plot."

For example, Presidents Bush and Carter, when seeking re-election in 1992 and 1980, respectively, faced the hurdle of being incumbent presidents when the economy had soured. "The prevailing story line was an incumbent president whose re-election bid was in trouble. This news theme was unfavorable, and so, therefore, were the 'facts' that reporters used to support it," Patterson writes. These facts were culled from economic indicator reports, foreign policy developments, the success or failure of the incumbent's legislative agenda - all objective measures that reporters could use to assess how well the candidate was playing the game of getting elected. Patterson concludes that this approach is inadequate, however, because it results in wildly fluctuating portraits of the candidates, many of whom end up being portrayed as bumbling nincompoops at one point and thoughtful statesmen at another, depending on their standing in the polls. "If journalists were describing candidates 'as they really are,' their portrayals would not swing abruptly when the candidates' fortunes change," Patterson states. As with the Hmong, an inaccurate portrayal equals a failure of journalism's basic mission.

Pack journalism not only spreads these varying portrayals as reporters react similarly to developments, it also reinforces whatever this prevailing view happens to be. "When reporters speak with one voice their judgments may seem accurate, but are no more true because of it," Patterson writes. The problems with pack reporting raised by Patterson go beyond repeating misinformation or being manipulated to further an agenda. In his view, these tendencies skew the reality perceived by the public. There was a time when political party loyalties or other community ties provided a balance to the media's image-making power, but with the erosion of those institutions in modern times, the press' power has "become sufficiently pronounced to case major concern." He continues:

"Journalistic bias would be a minor concern if the press' stories were inconsequential. They could be dismissed as interesting diversions in a melodrama that is much too long anyway. But these stories sometimes have substantial effects ... we have no alternative version of reality to compare or replace it with, so dependent are we on the press for our mental pictures of what is going on in the campaign, and so authoritative is the press in its pronouncements."

Washington Post columnist Joel Achenbach noted this "media image" phenomenon in his time spent covering the 2000 elections. "You discover what the candidates say, and what the news media say the candidates are saying, is not what the ordinary people believe the candidates are saying. What survives the process of repeated translations is the general vibe of a campaign, the spirit. People think one guy's a straight shooter, one guy's a weenie." Many, he says, base their votes - and, by extension, their opinions on public policy matters - on this "vibe," not information.

Crouse also notes the connection between traditional, objective journalism and pack reporting, and in one section of The Boys on the Bus lets journalist Brit Hume make his point for him:

"[Reporters] shouldn't try to be objective, they should try to be honest. Their so-called objectivity is just a guise for superficiality. ... They never get around to finding out if the guy is telling the truth. They just pass the speeches along without trying to confirm the substance of what the candidates are saying. What they pass off as objectivity is just a mindless kind of neutrality."

The critique contains a suggestion for fixing the problem - stop slaving away at being "objective." Break the formulas that call for stories to make one neat point based on a specific, often staged event, a point that has to fit into the imposed news narrative. It's a call for reporters to take on more freedom and responsibility - freedom to report events as they see them, with the added responsibility of ferreting out whole pieces of information instead of chronicling sound bites, accusations and denials. This is a tall and risky order; Crouse noted that the reporters who tried to break molds were isolated by the campaign handlers and vilified by their peers. The pressure to go along with the system, as well as fatigue from bucking it and getting nowhere, works against change, he says. Any reforms must be planned and implemented en masse, yet from his account, the odds of that happening are next to nothing. This is one case of reporters acting as individuals when they should move as a group, either by boycotting worthless press conferences, not writing about the manufactured news hooks, or refusing to spread unsubstantiated but damaging gossip, no matter how titillating.

News organizations could be more thoughtful about how news is defined, and remain consistent about following that definition. What's "new" is not always "news," but in the effort to attract viewers and readers, media organizations engage in an endless search for tidbits that can be reported breathlessly. "[Political scientist Larry Sabato] and other media critics worry that significant, systematic scandals sometimes go unreported while the pack devotes ruthless energy to some more fashionable story of the moment," writer Susan Crabtree noted. What if political reportage involved fanning out across the country to evaluate ideas and programs instead of tagging along to every campaign event? What if news organizations wrote about important issues because they are important, not because someone introduced a piece of legislation or called a press conference? "It's time to come up with a new definition of what news is and throw away the old stereotypes," writes Joe Saltzman. "Breaking news stories always will get good coverage. It is the rest of the news that needs redefining. Perhaps the police-blotter, man-bites-dog type of story should be put on the back burner, and those that genuinely influence the consumer's life be given primary concern."

Patterson urges an even more radical overhaul of the system, at least as far as political coverage goes. He says the press cannot play the candidate-winnowing role that has been thrust upon it; the duty must be returned to the political party.

"No reform of the press can equip it for this mediating role. This is not to say that the press cannot improve its campaign coverage. It should recognize more fully how some of its tendencies distort the campaign. Must the candidates' small mistakes be among the major news stories of the campaign? Must the first primary or caucus be inflated beyond all reason? Must bad news so completely overwhelm good?"

He also suggests shortening the campaign, which could force reporters away from the horse-race approach and toward the more thoughtful, in-depth, issues-oriented stories that are neglected.

The picture of the press that emerged from this review is not pretty. While hard working and conscientious about their work, reporters form a herd too easily. The goal of objectivity mostly reduces journalists to the role of stenographer, chronicling what this person or that person said. Evaluating those statements is not allowed, even though that's what is most sorely needed. Media organizations also follow one another instead of striking out in independent directions, making it even easier for manipulation to take place. Though risky, news organizations would serve their craft and the public better by going their own way to pursue topics, not people; the big picture, not news hooks and sound bites. It's a harder, more labor-intensive road rooted not in live remote broadcasts and hourly Internet updates but in research, expertise and common sense. If taken, the media could be transformed from a hard-charging pack or a docile herd into a group of individuals speaking for the good of democracy.

SOURCES

Achenbach, Joel. It Looks Like a President, Only Smaller: Trailing Campaign 2000. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001.

Crabtree, Susan. "Pack Journalism Produces Political Tales of Woe." Insight on the News, Feb. 26, 1996, pg. 12.

Crouse, Timothy. The Boys on the Bus. New York: Random House, 1973.

Fadiman, Anne. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997.

Leo, John. "Quagmire, Schmagmire." U.S. News and World Report, Nov. 26, 2001, pg. 52.

Lieberman, Trudy. "Covering Health Care Reform, Round One: How One Paper Stole the Debate." Columbia Journalism Review, Sept.-Oct. 1993, pg. 33.

Mundy, Alicia. "Time Out at the Times." Media Week, April 24, 2000.

Mundy, Alicia. "The Recent Attack on Dole's Chief of Staff Exemplifies What's Wrong with Washington Media." Media Week, July 31, 1995, pg. 15.

Patterson, Thomas. Out of Order. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1993.

Saltzman, Joe. "News Must Be More Than Sex and Violence." USA Today Magazine, March 1993, pg. 83.

Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72. New York: Warner Books Inc., 1983.

Thompson, Hunter S. Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga. New York: Ballantine Books, 1967.

Wallace, David Foster. "The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys and the Shrub: Seven Days in the Life of the Late, Great John McCain." Rolling Stone, April 13, 2000, pg. 53.