A Newsroom Hero - journalist Bill Kovach

Washington Monthly, May, 2000 by Tracy Thompson

Bill Kovach has never backed down from a fight

WHEN BILL KOVACH LEFT Washington in 1986, he was by anybody's definition a true media insider: head of The New York Times Washington bureau and on the short list of people who might one day achieve the Holy Grail of journalism and become the paper's executive editor. When the Times passed him over, the news that Kovach was leaving town to run The Atlanta Journal-Constitution created a sensation in the hermetically sealed orbit inside the Beltway. The day of the announcement, Kovach pulled a bottle of Scotch from his desk for a bittersweet late-afternoon celebration with his staff. They were disconsolate; he was jaunty. "I'm going to fly it into the mountain," he told them, "or I'm going to make it work."

History will record that the plane did indeed fly into the mountain: after a stormy two-year tenure in Atlanta, when the paper won two Pulitzers but Kovach ran afoul of his profit-minded corporate bosses, he left Atlanta to become curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. This summer he's returning to Washington to write books and op-ed pieces--moving back into the same house in Chevy Chase where he and his wife, Lynne, and their four children lived when he was the Time? bureau chief. But while the address hasn't changed, everything else has. Reporters don't keep bottles of Scotch in their desks these days unless they want a referral to the Employee Assistance Program, and Kovach is no longer a newsroom bigfoot. He's a press critic--a role that, depending on prevailing opinion, makes him either a priggish elitist or a self-exiled member of an unruly and irresponsible tribe. His complaints are forceful and particular: The rise of the 24-hour news cycle is tempting journalists to abdicate their obligation to sort out gossip from facts, he says, and turning them into mere conduits for a slurry of fact, innuendo, rumor, and opinion. Reporters are forgetting why they got in the business--presumably, it was to expose vice and give voice to the powerless--in their quests for blockbuster stories and the chance to make big bucks as TV pundits. Media mergers threaten to obliterate the line between editorial and advertising. Things have gotten so bad that even The New York Times used anonymous sources in roughly a third of its coverage of the Monica Lewinsky story, and The Washington Post used them twice as often as that. In other words, we're not just going to hell--you can actually see hell from here.

Hawk-nosed and white-haired at 67, Kovach speaks with a Southern accent that betrays East Tennessee hill country, but the accent is somewhat misleading: In fact, he's the son of Albanian immigrants who settled in Morristown, Tenn. in the 1920s after his father, John, won the lease to the town's Busy Bee Cafe in a poker game. Albanian culture is, according to ethnic stereotype, argumentative and prone to nurse grudges; in Kovach's case, reality fully conforms to the image. Lynne Kovach recalls that in the early years of their marriage, Bill's fights with his brother Joe would sometimes get so violent she was afraid they would kill each other. After his father died when he was 13, Kovach grew up on the streets "as what you'd call a juvenile delinquent, except for a few teachers in school who kept me in line," he says. He joined the Navy in 1951 straight out of high school and learned to swim and dive during his military service, returning to Johnson City, Tenn. after four years to go to college on the G.I. Bill. His intention was to become a marine biologist, but a summer job at The Johnson City Press Chronicle between college and graduate school changed that forever. After only three weeks, he had discovered, he said, "what I was born to do."

The newsroom culture Kovach encountered in the late `50s and early `60s at that job and, later, at the Nashville Tennessean could not be more different from newsrooms today, and goes a long way toward explaining Kovach's world view. In those years, the Tennessean was a rare example of a Southern newspaper that actually sent reporters to cover civil rights marches. (The much richer and bigger Atlanta Constitution, in contrast, didn't--it earned its liberal reputation solely on the basis of Ralph McGill's editorial columns.) At the Tennessean, there was a sense in the air that politics mattered on some visceral level, that journalists had a front-row seat at one of the great moral dramas of the century. When Kovach's friend and future New York Times colleague Wendell L. Rawls joined the Tennessean in 1967, Kovach was already the paper's top political reporter and owned a coveted piece of real estate in the back row of newsroom desks.

With the exception of David Halberstam, a Harvard graduate who had come South to learn the journalism trade, the staff was made up mostly of Southern boys from lower-middle-class backgrounds who saw their mission in life as (a) changing the world and (b) beating The Nashville Banner by any means possible, even if it meant trying to distract the competition by calling them with phony news tips. After the last deadline, around 1 a.m., reporters would adjourn to a small room in back, someone would pull out a bottle, and a poker game would start. "People didn't want to leave," Rawls said. "I've seen poker games break up to cover a story, and we didn't even have an edition left--just to be there. The news was everything. The fun was a close second."