In Conversation with Glenn Frankel: Principles, Ethics, and the Practice of Journalism
On February 5th, 2007, Lisa Nowak, a NASA astronaut, was arrested on the charge of attempted kidnapping. Nowak had driven 900 miles, from Houston to Orlando, to confront and kidnap her ex-boyfriend’s new love interest. Three days later, when I met Mr. Frankel for the interview, the story was still hogging a substantial amount of real estate on most news channels. The news channels were not only reporting ‘breaking’ details about the saga, they were also hosting panel discussions with experts, from psychologists to ex-astronauts, to ‘help the American public understand’ why Nowak might have snapped.
It is partly to understand why stories of allegedly diaper-wearing astronauts become ‘news events’ that I met with Mr. Frankel.
Mr. Frankel is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and former editor of the Washington Post Sunday Magazine. He worked for over 27 years at the Post in varying capacities, including as a foreign correspondent covering South Africa, Israel, and the United Kingdom. In 2006, Mr. Frankel joined the Stanford faculty as a Visiting Hearst Professional in Residence in the Department of Communication, where he now teaches journalism students.
Mr. Frankel is perceptive, articulate, and intelligent. He thinks about journalism, the role of journalism in society, and the factors influencing what gets reported, and how it gets reported. In three hour-long conversations with Mr. Frankel, he has maintained a dogged and unwavering stance about the key elements and importance of what he thinks are the principles of good journalism. He believes that you have to be fair to be accurate and that you have to report about everything—the events, the characters, and the context.
We began by discussing episodic coverage in the news. Episodic framing refers to a style of reporting in which events are reported independently of the larger context. ‘Episodic’ framing is in contrast to thematic framing, which refers to a style of reporting in which some attempt is made to provide background context or ‘theme.’ (Shanto Iyengar introduced this typology of news.) In ‘Is Anyone Responsible’, Iyengar notes, “Episodic framing depicts concrete events that illustrate issues, while thematic framing presents collective or general evidence.”
Iyengar finds that television news routinely uses episodic framing. He also finds that people who are shown episodic reports are less likely to consider larger societal elements responsible for a particular problem, be it crime or poverty, than people exposed to thematic coverage.
The larger unstated point is about the medium. Each medium not only has its own constituency, its monetization methods, and the constraints imposed on it because of that, its audience, its limits on what it can present and not present, but also its temptations, and the ease with which certain things can be done, and not done. The importance of “strong” visuals in television, and the “need to be the first,” has meant the ascendancy of adrenaline-pumping, helicopters with searchlights, a kind of “live breaking event” episodic reporting on television. “You sort of defined the most important part of how television functions— it is constantly looking for the visual, sort of the simple narrative; it is looking for the visceral impact story. It has no particular interest in themes. It is only interested in grabbing you at what you see,” adds Mr. Frankel.
The other threat of episodic coverage, and dominance of visuals, according to Mr. Frankel, is that it is so much easier to manipulate television. “The feeling is that if you came up with the visuals, if you came up with the sound byte, and you came up with the stage, you are going to be on the Evening News.”
Mr. Frankel almost always makes it a point to present an escape hatch from the negative attributes that emerge from traits of a medium or something else. The escape hatch is almost always found in following the principles of good journalism. “Medium does affect the message, and it is naive to think that there is no spillover, but yes, the important thing is a good journalistic approach, and it doesn’t matter what the platform is,” Mr. Frankel argues. “All platforms have their pitfalls. Some stories lend themselves better on one platform than the other, but nonetheless, it’s not a question of the platform. It is a question of sensibility, of commitment to content.”
Talking about the Internet, Mr. Frankel notes, “The web is an enormous potential resource. It has all kinds of contextual material and all kinds of ways of filling in, and newspapers are slowly finding out what links can do for you and are beginning to use them to offer some background, interpretation, and things. And that’s enormously promising. Technology gives you an enormous opportunity. But, Technology is just that—it’s a means to an end. If it’s not used by people to understand the value of providing people a larger context, it won’t be used for that. It won’t happen. I guess what I am saying is that the same basic sensibility that dictated how to provide information to readers in 1972 is still there – you still have to have that if you really want to get readers the information they really want and help the public get more informed. It is the same process you have to go to and the same understanding that you have to have. If you don’t have that, you will have the sort of episodic quick hit phenomenon and the stories about the jealous astronaut in the diaper going to kill her boyfriend’s lover. It still takes the sensibility to understand what you need to provide.”
“And that’s, for what it is worth, we try to teach here. We give people training across different platforms, but what we are really offering people is a solid grounding in what journalism ought to be.”
The principles of good journalism, the ‘sensibility’, according to him, transcend medium and time. “You know, journalism in some ways is still the same. I was a foreign correspondent in the 80s, and then I went back in 2002 for one more round. I was at the London Bureau, and I did that for three or four years. The platforms are changing rapidly, but you know the fundamental thing that I did every day in 2005 was very close to what I did in 1983. Now that’s only 22 years, and that is only one slovenly journalist, but what I am saying is that the fundamental thing that I was doing then I think is the same fundamental thing a journalist was doing in 1945 or 1925; he is trying to give important information, trying to find out what they don’t want you to know.”
The biggest disservice that the episodic format has done is that it doesn’t allow people to see relationships and see the linkages that exist across time and across events. Journalists—du jour is French for day—across the board sometimes seem preoccupied with assiduously cataloging reports about the daily events. Mr. Frankel, after acknowledging the truism, brings the discussion back to that escape hatch and how good journalists should approach reporting. “What good journalists are supposed to do is see the relations within events. Yes to report out the event but – to use the analogy of building a wall – there is one brick and there’s another brick – as you are analyzing and sort of putting the bricks in place you gradually see the wall and you see a social phenomenon and you need to describe that well and you need to write about it.”
The beauty of the good journalistic method is that it is ground up, and it takes specific events and slowly constructs a theme, a theory, a phenomenon, and a trend, according to Mr. Frankel. Narrating his experience of covering South Africa in 1985, he illustrates how a functioning ‘ground up’ method looks in reality. “Covering South Africa in 1985 and going to say one township where kids are battling with police and police are shooting, and going to another, and seeing things replicating themselves, and gradually making connections and seeing that actually there was an uprising with a capital U, and to understand where that uprising may go. As I went from place to place, I could see that there was an important new phenomenon taking place and that I needed to understand it, I needed to analyze it for my readers, and I had to be very knowledgeable about it – I saw it at many, many places, talked to many, many people about it including academics, and got raw information and pulled out whatever analysis I could from people whose job it was to understand these things. That’s what good journalism is about, and there are a lot of bad journalists and not just on TV.”
Surprisingly, he ended by pointing out, “So the episodic is the easy fallback option,” perhaps seeing it from the perspective of the journalist and his expectation of what a journalist should be doing. And indeed, episodic reporting is virtually painless for the journalist except when it involves standing in gale-force winds to present a report on hurricanes. Research takes time, and it requires you to talk to ‘many, many’ people. And that work you put into understanding an issue and the work you then put into passing on that understanding to people is the essence of good journalism.
The news is framed in many different ways. We covered episodic/thematic, but another important one remains. It matters if the journalist focuses on the individual rather than the sociological and the environmental. It matters whether we spend more time analyzing and understanding the people, rather than the system.
Mr. Frankel bristles at the suggestion that covering individuals somehow makes reporting too subjective. Chaste, a contributor here, argues that morality doesn’t exist in tired half-explanations of flawed men in important positions but in the analysis of how they have caused harm. Hence, when we report ‘personal profiles’, we introduce subjectivity into morality and into the broader themes. We simultaneously make it harder for people to find and assign blame correctly. We make the system less accountable.
Mr. Frankel only half agrees with what I say, if that. He argues that good journalists can do both—they can cover the individual and the context. In fact, he believes that good journalists should do both, that one is not quite complete without the other. “If we dwell on the people, we run the risk of missing certain important things, and of being critical about certain things. Good journalists do both. Good journalists bring you fully formed human beings that you can visualize in front of you and understand, and they are extremely critical of the phenomenon they have put in place. You take the example of The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright, which is about the making of Al-Qaeda. He gives you a pretty good sense of who some of these guys were, their family lives, but you know you don’t fall in love with them. But you do get a much better understanding of who they were. Events are driven by people. Wright even explains the social movements of political Islam mostly through telling the stories of the individuals and how they interact with politics. It affected them and they affected it – I think it is a great narrative technique – it is not the only one.” The narrative technique that Mr. Frankel rightly observes in Wright’s book is known as the ‘Coleman boat’ in Sociology. The technique refers to the macro affecting micro affecting macro progression.
“When you are humanizing people, when you are writing about the Bush administration, when you are describing their family life, what’s the purpose of that? And how effective is that in concealing more than what you are revealing? What are wonderful narrative writers doing, e.g., occasional small things as Post reporter [name not clear] did about Bill Frist’s family or John Negroponte and his five adopted Honduran kids, that gives you an insight into his mind and into his thinking, into his values, and what he does? And even though it tends to be a piece that’s fairly sympathetic to John Negroponte, it is still a very valuable piece. Doing that piece doesn’t take away from what we wrote about Abu Ghraib and whatever John Negroponte and all of his predecessors were up to. I think we have to learn about everything.”
It is naive to hope to learn about everything, more so to teach everything. The audience not only has little interest, but also limited time and limited cognitive capacity. By focusing on the individual and some leader’s dog, one runs into the danger to confusing people, especially the majority who pay scant attention to politics. They need to know how each of the different stories needs to be weighed to produce a reasonably good understanding of what is going on. And if a journalist feels obliged to run that personal portrait, cues should be left for the reader so that they can peg the story accurately in a broader understanding of the topic. Mr. Frankel grapples with it a little tangentially. Conversation is always an exercise in parallel narratives. “That’s a good point. You know where it came was the run-up to the Iraq War because we had lots of stories and we had some critical stories but it was such a huge flow of stories that we weren’t giving the readers any roadmaps to what was really important and what they really needed to know and keep an eye on or worry about. You know the defense of many editors after the Iraq War—we had that story. We ran it on that X date, but it just didn’t get any traction. Probably, we didn’t get any traction because we didn’t put it out on the front page, make it a big deal, and keep at it in the same way, deciding that this was the most important thing that we needed to keep writing about. It got lost in the flow of stuff. And you are right. If we give the reader all this material and don’t give them signposts and sort of emphasize what we think is really important, then how is a reader supposed to sort it out?”
From exhorting about the principles of good journalism, Mr. Frankel quickly moves on to being a realist defending infotainment when we switch topics and start discussing the increasing prominence of ‘soft news’ items, especially on the web. While he was critical of the preponderance of entertainment on web portals, he argued that some entertainment was essential.
“All journalism is a compromise, and especially American journalism. Mainstream American journalism is an effort to entertain as well as inform because it perceives that you cannot do one without the other. If you are a publication like New York Review of Books with a circulation of 150,000, that is one thing, whereas if you have a publication that has 1.7 million customers, you have to cater to a very broad church of interests, ambition, and demographics. That’s the great joy of writing for a place like the Washington Post—you are writing for a really large audience.”
“The Washington Post more or less invented the modern Style section back in the 60s with Watergate and all that. They sort of added this section with gossip and celebrities. The Washington Post front page was seen as the deadliest front page in American journalism. And then we had ‘Style.’ We had the beauty and the beast. That’s the balancing act. And I think both are important.”
“When I was working as a Deputy National News Editor at the Washington Post, it was during the time of O.J. Simpson, and many of my colleagues didn’t think that the O.J. Simpson story needed to be out there on the front page. It was sleazy. I disagreed. I felt that the themes would emerge – this was the story that America was focused on – and that we didn’t have to be National Inquirer to want to put that story on the front page. And actually, serious themes did emerge about women, about race, celebrity, DNA evidence- many, many American themes. It was actually a struggle to tell that story on the front page. A lot of my colleagues were never comfortable with that story because they thought it was frivolous and pandering to the audience.”
I am unsure where the ‘compromise’ ends, being a compromise, and instead becomes a Faustian bargain. I am sure Mr. Frankel is concerned about it too, for he frets over what he sees as these ‘get to know a celebrity’ blurbs that now find space on the Washington Post digital homepage. He is also concerned whether good, serious journalism will be able to sustain itself in this era of rapidly multiplying options, and drastically different monetization. He says that “Another thing that we have at Washington Post- and it may be a theory that might be proven wrong shortly – If we do really good journalism as a brand for good journalism, if we provide good journalism, tie together things and give you a perspective on how the world is changing and if we are able to do that – we will prosper and survive. That’s a theory I have always believed in and I am really having some doubts about it. That in spite of what we hear about the crisis about dead-tree journalism – that if someone does good enterprising journalism and reveals important surprising facts about how the world works that the journalist would survive and that somebody would pay for it, people want that information and will reward those who provide it. My whole career has been based on the belief in the relationship between good journalism and financial success.”
Glenn Frankel writes – [Corrigendum]
Near the top you say I did three foreign assignments for the Post—actually it was four because I was London bureau chief on two separate occasions—1989-92, 2002-2005. Toward the bottom, you quote me as saying: “The Washington Post more or less invented the modern Style section back in the 60s with Watergate and all that…” I suspect what I really said was “along with Watergate and all that…” Watergate had nothing to do with the Style section. I was arguing here that while Watergate is the Post’s most recognized claim to fame, the invention of Style was equally important as a ground-breaking journalistic innovation that gave the Post a unique identity. Also, Style was invented in the late 1960s, Watergate happened in 1972.