Insideritis and other maladies of specialized journalism

Washington Monthly, July-August, 1985 by Stephen Hess

James Q. Wilson, the political scientist, once noted that organizations come to resemble the organizations they are in conflict with. The burgeoning bureaucracy of the legislature, for example, has begun to look like the bloated bureaucracy of the executive branch. It is rather like a football team adopting the formations of the opposition.

The theory fits the press and the government: two institutions in conflict, increasingly resembling each other. The most obvious resemblance is in personnel. The denizens of government executive suites and the Washington bureaus of the major news organizations are becoming interchangeable. In socioeconomic terms--schools attended, income, their neighborhoods--they increasingly look alike; in personal terms, some of them are the same people. At least 11 journalists have served in both The New York times's bureau and in some recent presidential administration. The most fascinating--and commendted upon--case in the Golb-Burt exchange.

Leslie Gelb left the Times at the beginning of that Carter administration in 1977 to become director of Politico-Military Affairs at the Department of State, staying until 1979; Richard Burt left the Washington bureau of the Times for the same job at the beginning of the Reagan presidency in 1981. Gelb returned to the Times in 1981 as its national security correspondent; Burt is presently the Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs. While once reporters took jobs in government primarily as press secretaries or spokesmen, the Gelb and Burt examples illustrate that ex-reporters are now moving into policy positions.

The coming together of national journalists and those they report about is the by-product of a forced march to professionalism and specialization in both trades. Journalists, in their search for professional standing since the turn of the century, have created training schools (University of Missouri, 1908); honorary societies (Sigma Delta Chi, 1910); awards of excellence (Pulitzer Prizes, 1917); professional organizations (American Society of Newspaper Editors, 1922); professional journals (Columbia journalism Review, 1961); and, at the pinnacle of respectability, Ph.D. programs in mass communications (University of Minnesota, 1950).

The best predictor of emerging professional status is educational attainment. Today, almost every Washington reporter had been to college, almost half have gone to graduate school, and a third have advanced degrees. Specialized education is particularly common on certain beats. Among Washington legal affairs reporters, for example, 64 percent have graduate degrees, primarily from law schools. Forty-six percent of the economics reporters have had graduate training.

Forty percent of Washington reporters consider themselves 'specialists,' although the definition of specialization in journalism is somewhat looser than in other professions. A tax lawyer, for example, would not consider an experienced reporter covering the Internal Revenue Service (perhaps with an M.A. in economics) to be a specialist in his field. Still, it is remarkable that almost half of the city's economics reporters have specialized training.

Historically, journalism has been the last refuge of the generalist. Furthermore, many journalists predict that specialization will become increasingly common.

Specialist journalists work differently from more traditional generalists. Specialists demand more autonomy, which means that control of the product will gradually shift from editors to newsgatherers. Specialists are also more satisfied with their work, which means that they will stay in journalism longer--and longer on the same beat. This could make the news business less lucrative for owners since personnel costs rise with seniority. As specialists remain in place, there will be less room for the entering journalist. The journalism business has thrived on an unstable personnel system--reporters drifting into other lines of work keep costs dowm and make room for younger aspirants. Thus, while specialists will provide more sophisticated coverage in many instances, they will also create new problems for Washington journalism. Here are a few others to consider:

Small conversations

One of the results of increased specialization in any profession is that it carries with it its own language. David M. Ricci, a political scientist, has written that his academic colleagues tend to hold "small conversations," in which "members of a scholarly community speak mainly to one another in language so specialized and full of jargon that it is largely unintelligible to the public."

Given the purpose of the mass media, a press corps of jargonists would be a disaster. In early June 1982, President Reagan went to Europe to attend an economic summit conference at Versailles, escorted by a 747 filled with White House, diplomatic, and economics reporters. "The blending of three press corps was fascinating," recalls Lou Cannon, senior White House correspondent for the Washington Post. "Each asked questions in its own jargon. For example, questions about 'confidence-building mechanisms' always came from State Department reporters."