Re: How has journalism changed?

Description: Nobody ever thought there'd be a rich reporter, Trillin says.

Transcript: Not really. I definitely wasn’t the sensitive lad hanging off to the side composing things while the other boys frolicked. I don’t . . . I think I could have gone to law school or something. I knew that I wasn’t going to . . . I think most of the people my age who were in roughly journalism or whatever that is sort of backed in. I don’t think many of us . . . You have to remember that in those days, journalists, so called – except for one or two people in Washington like Walter Lippmann or somebody like that – were sort of a scruffy lot. I mean they were thought of as this guy with a kind of greasy suit and a bottle of bourbon in the lower right-hand drawer. And it wasn’t a very respectable profession, or trade, or whatever it is. And I think most of the people my age who ended up in it sort of backed in. I wrote about this not long ago when I wrote a piece about Johnny Apple – R.W. Apple, Jr. of the New York Times. I wrote a profile of him in The New Yorker. We had met in college. We were college . . . He was the editor of the paper at Princeton the year I was the editor at Yale. And he always knew he wanted to work for the New York Times since about the age of 12. I think it’s really rare of people my age. I think most of us couldn’t make up our minds about what to do, and happened to be working at a magazine or a paper when we realized we couldn’t make up our minds. Or we sort of backed into it, or the novel didn’t work out or something; but I don’t think there are many people . . . I didn’t think of it exactly as being a writer. I think I thought of it as being a reporter.

Question: How has journalism changed?

Transcript: Well for one thing people go into it on purpose. I think Watergate had a lot to do with that, or maybe the movie. Or I suppose it did. I think more educated people are going . . . have gone into journalism. Maybe not in the past couple of decades, but in the past probably three or four decades. I remember once when a friend of mine – who is now on the New York Times who was then working for another paper in Washington – who had gone to boarding school, and gone to Yale, and gone . . . gotten a masters at Berkeley in history or something . . . he was talking about coming back from a hearing and trying to find somebody’s secretary so she could lie to him about whether the guy was in. And then he was gonna have to call somebody else. And he looked around the newsroom at the paper and he saw other guys doing the same sort of thing. And he said, “I started to think, is this a job for a college graduate?” And the answer always was “no” really until recent decades. Not as recent as two, but recent decades. The answer was really no. So I think more people with education, and intelligence, and language ability and that sort of thing have gone into journalism compared to the people who . . . I don’t mean that when I went to The New Yorker it was a bunch of yahoos. I mean they were fairly sophisticated people. But I mean in general, particularly __________ out on the country, it wasn’t true. And I think . . . I think people also had different expectations of it. I mean some . . . Some reporters have gotten rich. Nobody ever thought there would be a rich reporter. And I mean not from journalism you see, but certainly the ones on television have gotten rich from journalism. And a lot of it’s become more bottom-line show business; particularly, of course, television which is . . . I mean when you think about the arguments about . . . or the analysis of who’s the anchor on a . . . on a show . . . And I don’t blame most people. Most of them are good people who have worked hard to get there. But when you think about, say, their salaries and what the set costs, or what the improvements to the set costs, and what the remodeling improvements . . . and you’re talking about an organization that has closed bureaus all over the world, so it’s getting . . . And the same is true of newspapers although they don’t have the anchor people. But the . . . So in some ways it’s journalism has more educated people in it, and it’s also shrinking. And one of the ways it’s changed is that if you go to Philadelphia, or you go to Baltimore, and you look at how many reporters are covering the city government, there . . . I don’t know. I recently read, I think it was in Philadelphia, it’s something like a quarter of what they used to be. So it’s . . . In some ways it’s not doing its job.

Question: What role should journalists play in the election?

Transcript: Well I think . . . You know it’s interesting. I read something the other day that made a very interesting point. I think it was in conjunction with the debate that was on YouTube where citizens . . . civilians, as we would call them, asked questions as opposed to reporters. And the debate was just as silly as the other debates. I mean there were nine people. It’s not really a debate. It was just sort of a nonsense sound bite thing. But the interesting thing was not the answers, but the questions. Reporters tend to ask questions about how the campaign is going, or how something’s gonna play compared to something else. The reporters are generally interested in the process, and that’s what’s so stupid about saying, “Oh, you know, 80% of ‘em vote Democratic.” I mean they don’t . . . In the first place they’re not ideologues. That’s just how they vote. And also they’re much more interesting in the game than they are in the ideology. And reporters in general are interested in politics and bored by government. So that’s why the minute the election’s over they start talking about the next election. And that’s why when you think about, about 80% – I just made up that figure – of the coverage of an American election is about who’s gonna win . . . something we’re all going to know on election night. Even if the reporters are all death rate, we’re still gonna know it. They’re gonna count the votes and we’re gonna know who won. So why do they keep telling us who’s going to win or lose – it’s not really the point – rather than tell us what that guy really believes or what he’s likely to do? I think that the other thing that reporters ought to try to do . . . And you know, I don’t mean that they don’t do some of this, but the actual issues of a campaign aren’t usually the issues that the president deals with. I mean if you voted on the issues, you would have voted for what’s discussed in the campaign. You would have voted in the Kennedy-Nixon election according to what your beliefs were on the future of the islands of Quemoy and Matsu. That became a big issue between Kennedy and Nixon – would we go to war to protect Quemoy and Matsu, two islands off Taiwan that were sometimes shelled by the mainland communist China. That’s not the difference between Kennedy and Nixon. And that’s not . . . And of course once the election was over, that was the end of Quemoy and Matsu. And nobody has heard of Quemoy and Matsu since. So I think that somehow the election coverage should really tell us, “What kind of person is that?” Because the decisions he’s gonna make are not the decisions that are talked about during the campaign. There are other decisions.

Recorded on: 9/5/07

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