Whatever Happened to the Washington Reporters, 1978-2012

What Will Follow

xix What Will FolloW IN 1978 I surveyed 450 journalists who were in Washington to cover national government for american commercial news organizations: half completed an elaborate sixteen-page questionnaire; half were interviewed by telephone. the findings identified the press corps by sex, race, education, types of media, and experience and (through the telephone interviews) revealed a good deal about the reporters’ views on such matters as political bias and disagreements with their home office. that was considerably more information than had ever been gathered before. twenty-seven years later, when i became a professor at George Washington University, i recruited my students and my interns at Brookings to help me search for the 450. We tracked them down in France, England, italy, australia, and nineteen U.S. states in addition to the Washington, D.C., area. in the end we located 90 percent of the original subjects and interviewed 283 of them (interviewers are identified in the endnotes). Eighty-seven of the original subjects had died before we found them, and we relied on their obituaries for information. this is not a “Class of ’78” in the sense of identifying a group of individuals entering college together. our respondents had an age spread of more than a half-century: Richard Strout became a Washington reporter when Warren G. harding was president and retired when the president was Ronald Reagan; Charlotte Moulton became a Washington reporter when the president was Franklin D. Roosevelt and retired when Jimmy Carter was president; others were still working journalists when we closed the book in 2012, during the presidency of Barack obama. xx What Will Follow What they have in common is that at a certain moment in time they all were working in Washington. By the next day, they may have returned to the home office in omaha or been reassigned to Jerusalem—or left journalism. actually, eighty-one of our subjects remained journalists after leaving Washington, suggesting that our findings may help explain career patterns beyond the capital. our group includes some prominent journalists. From television there were ted Koppel, Sam Donaldson, Brit hume, Marvin Kalb, and Judy Woodruff; among print journalists, there were Bill Keller, Jack Fuller, John Curley, tom Fiedler, and Karen Elliott house, who would go from Washington to become editor or publisher of the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, USA Today, the Miami Herald , and the Wall Street Journal respectively. Most, however, would never be known beyond their circle of colleagues or specialized audiences. While there is rich scholarship on the basic characteristics of U.S. journalists, there is no major study of career patterns in journalism and, as we shall see, a great deal of misinformation. Whatever happened to . . . ? We now have enough information to answer that question. how many of these 450 men and women stayed in journalism? Did they rise in their organizations? Change jobs? Move from reporter to editor? Jump from one type of medium to another—for example, print to tV? Did they remain in Washington or go somewhere else? Did they leave journalism? Why? Where did they go? THIS BOOK IS designed as a series of discrete essays, relatively selfcontained , each concentrating on some characteristic, such as age, sex, race, or place of employment, while the concluding chapter classifies career patterns. 1. “the Greatest Generation” these veteran Washington journalists were fifty years old or older in 1978. Most of them grew up in the 1930s during the Great Depression, went off to defend the country in World War ii, and returned home to complete their education, start a family, and figure out how to earn a living. they constituted 16 percent of the press corps; 90 percent were men, 1 percent nonwhite. they were entering the business of What Will Follow xxi journalism—whether print or electronic—during a period in which it took incompetence for an organization not to be profitable. Nearly 40 percent of them worked for newspapers, 10 percent for television networks . their career patterns were remarkably alike and very different from those of the journalists who came after them. 2. “the Boomers” Ranging from twenty-one to thirty-two years of age, members of the huge baby boom generation already made up a third of the Washington press corps by 1978. With their careers in journalism, or elsewhere, still largely in front of them, they would break with the dominant career patterns set by the...