Sentinel Under Siege: The Triumphs and Troubles of America's Free Press. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Oct, 1997 by Marvin Kalb

My favorite story from this thoroughly absorbing book concerns the eminent 19th-century transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. One day Thoreau was approached by a reporter with the breathless news that a new technology called the telegraph had just been tested successfully. "The president of the United States," the reporter announced, "sent a message to the mayor of Baltimore in a matter of minutes." Thoreau considered the news carefully and then asked, "What did the president say?"

Stanley E. Flink, the author of Sentinel Under Siege, and a former journalist who is now an adjunct associate professor at New York University, uses the story to underscore the continuing importance of words in journalism and history. We may all be absorbed with flickering images on televisions, but words, he stresses, are "the voices of memory." They convey the essence of history.

Flink has produced a valuable, well-written, and magnificently researched book. The subtitle suggests its scope -- a tour of the triumphs and troubles, the bumpy contours of American journalism, from its protected origins in the Bill of Rights to the bustling uncertainties of the current world of mega-mergers, collapsing professional ethics, ferocious competition, and the World Wide Web. "The free press," Flink writes, "is facing a time of crisis."

Indeed it is, and one reason appears to be the rise of television as "the preponderant news source" for the overwhelming majority of Americans. Flink, who has worked for Life, CBS, and NBC, is clearly of the view that television hurts rather than helps the process of informing the public. At one point, he quotes the elder statesman George Kennan as saying in 1993 that television is only capable of "fleeting, disjointed visual glimpses of reality, flickering on and off the screen, here today and gone tomorrow" At another point, he quotes the late president of the University of Chicago, Robert Maynard Hutchins, as describing in 1951 a gloomy future in which there would be "nobody speaking and nobody reading" Hutchins explained sardonically:

Astronomers ... have detected

something that looks like moss

growing on Mars. I am convinced

that Mars was once inhabited by

rational human beings like

ourselves, who had the misfortune,

some thousands of years ago, to

invent television.

Still, like many others enraptured more by the concept of a free press than by its recent performance, Flink expresses the hope that the press has the wit and courage to do its assigned job -- namely to provide fair, accountable, and responsible coverage of the public arena so informed citizens can make intelligent decisions about the policies of their government. As one way of turning the press away from hype and sensationalism and toward a more balanced, nuanced, and reflective style of reporting, Flink presents a set of proposals designed to help the press make a mid-course correction before the government, egged on by a dissatisfied populace, takes steps to constrain its everyday activities.

Flink's proposals focus primarily on the need for more and better education -- for journalists to be given time and resources to go back to school to learn more about public policy. The press should make every effort to be more accountable to the public; ombudsmen should have vastly increased clout within their organizations. Higher ethical standards should be emphasized, fairness and evenhandedness in copy stressed. Journalists should be urged "to inform, not merely entertain." Echoing the argument advanced decades ago by Walter Lippmann, Flink cites the continuing need for the highest quality journalism, even if it is only for the comparative few who still demand it.

Such goals may sound elitist, even unrealistic, in today's stormy seas. For example, which news organizations are prepared to bankroll these reforms? When "media" has superseded "news" -- in the parlance of modern-day journalism -- who will set the new standards for ethics, King or Koppel?

Throughout the book, Flink finds himself grappling with one of the most contentious issues in journalism: Should the news provide people with what they ought to know or what they want to know? The author, unsurprisingly, comes down on the side of "ought to know" Flink is not one for "lite news." In this sense, he is riding against the tide of powerful forces in contemporary American journalism, for whom the bottom line is the bottom line. That is why be sees the "sentinel under siege" but undoubtedly prays that it can still find a way to "triumph" over its current "troubles"

Marvin Kalb is director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University.