Nixon's nemeses - the relationship among former President Richard Nixon, journalists and a study by newspaper editors and journalism academics called 'Ways with Words' to evaluate the problem of declining readership - Column

National Review, May 10, 1993 by Andrew Ferguson

FOR ALL its blessings, affluence carries a curse: the creation of entire classes of people who don't, as a technical matter, have any reason for being here. The golf pro, the anti-smoking activist, the gestalt therapist--each forgoes productive employment to surf on the lagniappe of an economy that creates more wealth than it can properly dispose of. Some of these people are harmless or amusing; some are pests and parasites. Some are professors of journalism.

Cruising the quad, lost in labyrinthine and pointless thought, J-school profs lead a professional life of astounding implausibility. Their object of study is not the mystery of the material universe or the enduring ideas of a faraway epoch but the fishwrap and birdcage-liner of the day before yesterday. Yet this irrelevance seems only to expand their capacity for mischief. Eager youngsters seek them out for professional training, while the news industry showers them with subsidies, underwriting the production of pamphlets, studies, surveys, and monographs--all the grim paraphernalia that flatters newspaper editors into believing their daily grind really is worthy of scholarly attention, even if they have to pay for it themselves.

It is an incestuous marriage, this coupling of editors with the academics who study them. I came upon one of their offspring the other day, a study called Ways with Words, produced under the auspices of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and presented at this year's ASNE convention. ASNE conventions are, by tradition, devoted exclusively and in equal measure to six topics: how to hire more blacks in the newsroom, more Latinos in the newsroom, more women in the newsroom, more Aleuts in the newsroom, more gays in the newsroom, and how to reverse the decline in newspaper readership by appealing to more blacks, Latinos, women, Aleuts, and gays.

Ways with Words is addressed to this last concern, though it downplays matters of race, sex, and tribal affiliation. Worries about declining readership have obsessed the newspaper industry since--well, since journalism professors were hired to study declining readership. Now a note of panic is creeping in. The study's authors conjure up a desperate premise: newspapers today are too darned smart for their own good. "Our journalism," they write, "seems to be just beyond the grasp of far too many Americans." The study thus suggests ways to dumb down newspaper writing, in hopes of finding the perfect coincidence between the stupidity of the people who consume newspapers and the cynicism of the people who produce them.

To aid in the effort, the authors enlisted the St. Petersburg Times, a paragon of the modern American newspaper. Staffed exclusively with J-school grads, the Times is graphically sumptuous, festooned with Pulitzers, and unreadable. The paper was used for this experiment: Each day, for four days, a news event was written up in four different styles; each story was placed in a different edition, and readers of each edition were then polled to discover their reactions.

The academics and newsfolk, in other words, went to a great deal of trouble, and you won't be surprised to learn that it wasn't worth it. Ways with Words reproduces the four versions of the four stories, and reading through them--I want to be candid--I fell asleep not once but twice. The stories had to do with subjects as various as suffering pets and shoreline development and each version was uninteresting in its own way. I suspect the academics who assembled the study nodded off, too. They dutifully concocted some "statistically based path analysis" charts, to show "cause-and-effect relationships among factors," but this summation speaks, I think, for us all: "We learned there are no easy answers; neither are there alternatives to finding the tough ones."

YOU CAN almost see the gentlemen (and women) of the ASNE pat their tummies and shout: "Hear, hear!" The newspaper industry has become a timid, inbred enterprise--notwithstanding its long-overdue outreach to the Aleut community--and Ways with Words proves the point. Asking journalism professors to help improve newspaper writing is like asking the arsonist to put out the fire. Newspapers, through grants and subsidies and closed hiring practices, created America's journalism schools; and now J-schools, through their graduates, have re-created America's newspapers. The result has been the steep decline in newspaper quality, which in turn has resulted in the decline in newspaper readership, which newspapers then hire journalism professors to study. Talk about cause-and-effect relationships among factors.

Still, the blame for America's unreadable newspapers must lie with the professional newsfolk, not the profs who feed off them. Several years ago, at an ASNE convention in Washington, I heard the harshest, and truest, assessment of the industry from an expert in the field--Richard Nixon. At one plenary session, Nixon delivered, without notes, a talk breathtaking in its knowledge and originality. The editors gave him a standing ovation. As he left the ballroom I told him I never thought I'd see a roomful of newspaper editors give anyone a standing ovation, much less Richard Nixon. Nixon looked over his shoulder at the crowd. "Yeah, well," he said, shrugging. "They're still a bunch of s---s."