Burying Stories


September 13, 2002


BOB GARFIELD: When you read a newspaper, there are certain things you take for granted. The stories in front, especially on the top of page one, are deemed by the editors to be the most important -- the stories buried deep in the paper, less so. The inside pieces are newsworthy but not urgent enough for the space and the display allotted to the pieces out front.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:But there is also sometimes another critical factor in story play, often unseen to the reader. That factor is competition. News organizations put a lot of stock in getting exclusive stories, and the resulting competitive dynamics can have a dramatic impact on the news you are getting -- and not getting.

BOB GARFIELD:Consider for instance the Washington Post story last month about a Pentagon briefing by an outside analyst who believes that Saudi Arabia, far from being a trusted ally, is an enemy of the United States. The story got page one play not because the analyst was a major player in the debate --actually he's an obscure researcher with a checkered resume; nor was the story played up because the briefing was given to the top guns at the Pentagon -- the group was an advisory panel composed mainly of ex-government officials. The story was big because the briefing put into play a fundamental question of geo-politics, a question that rattled Washington and Riyadh that day and for the next three weeks. But the next day in the New York Times --nada. Not a word; not a breath. Nor the next day; nor the next. At the time, Post reporter Thomas Rix [sp?] predicted that his story would find its way into the Times --eventually.

THOMAS RIX: They're my competition, and I respect them a lot. All I would note is that in previous circumstances that I have had, the Times tends to keep its powder dry and then come back a week later as if it invented the story itself.

BOB GARFIELD:Sure enough, one week later, the Times referred to the Post's scoop as part of a larger analysis of U.S./Saudi relations. It appeared on page 7.

MICHAEL ORESKES: We're very close readers of the Washington Post.

BOB GARFIELD: Michael is assistant managing editor of the New York Times.

MICHAEL ORESKES: We obviously did look at that story and made the judgment we made. Whether it was the right one or the wrong one I guess history will be the judge.

BOB GARFIELD:We needn't wait for history. The ensuing diplomatic frenzy clearly shows they made the wrong decision. But hardly an unusual one. News organizations are all the time downplaying or utterly ignoring stories broken elsewhere. Last month, for instance, USA Today had a page one story about disarray in the government's air marshals program. In the Washington Post the next day, nothing. In the Times the next day, nothing. The Times deemed it page one news last month when House majority leader Dick Armey questioned the Bush administration's sabre-rattling against Iraq. Meanwhile, the Post according to ombudsman Michael Getler, either missed the story or ignored it.

MICHAEL GETLER: New York Times had a story about it; the Post did not. That bothers me. The Post the next day caught up with it, but they put it way inside a-- another news story so that readers of the Washington Post would really have no real idea that the leading Republican in Congress has raised questions about it. Now is that vanity or is that just bad news judgment?

BOB GARFIELD: That's impossible to say. But it might have been vanity.

SCOTT DONATON:Journalism is a very ego-driven profession, and the truth is for a lot of journalists if they haven't broken the story, they would rather spend their time trying to break the next story than following up what one of their competitors has done.

BOB GARFIELD:Scott Donaton is the editor of Advertising Age, the trade magazine I work for. Ad Age goes head to head not only with competing trade publications but also with daily columns in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. When it inevitably gets scooped, it must balance its institutional ego against the absolute merits of the story. Scott Donatan.

SCOTT DONATON: You do have to fight the urge to devalue something that has broken in another media property first. And I think there was a time when we emphasized the exclusivity of news, and the thing there that you realize can be a mistake about that is there may be stories that really do have a much greater impact on your reader that you are giving them short shrift on.

BOB GARFIELD:Complicating the problem is the tendency of reporters themselves to dismiss the significance of the other guy's scoop, often by citing his or her own past reporting on the general topic, however long ago and however brief. The "we-had-that" syndrome they call it. But there is also the "why-didn't-we-have-this" syndrome in which an editor waves around the competing publication on a story that was brought up and shot down in his own news meeting the day before. That scenario itself is so familiar that journalists have been known to exploit it to spur their own organizations into action. The Times' Michael Oreskes.

MICHAEL ORESKES: This is an age old phenomenon. You know there's a famous story along these lines about the CBS correspondents in Vietnam who would call up their news desk and try to get stories on the air, and their desk back in New York would say "Well, I don't know how interested we are in that -- let's wait and see how it develops" -- so they would leak it to the New York Times correspondents in Saigon who would then put it in the newspaper -- it would be on the front page of the New York Times -- and immediately after the story had appeared in New York Times, the desk at CBS News back in New York would call back to Saigon and say "We've got to have this story right away."

BOB GARFIELD:Thus one paradox of journalistic competition -- while some scoops result in an unaccountable silence from other news organizations, others precipitate a feeding frenzy. Slate.com columnist Mickey Kaus recalls one such from the Jimmy Carter administration when the president's brother was revealed to have a lobbying contract with Libya. "Billygate" the nascent scandal was dubbed.

MICKEY KAUS: It was blown all out of proportion when the Washington Post was playing catch up to its crosstown rival the Washington Star. The Post went into full Watergate mode and zoomed up to almost nine stories a day; and then it turned out that it completely petered out. There was nothing there. Yet the public got the false impression that this scandal was a big deal.

BOB GARFIELD:Kaus says the same thing occurred in July when the Wall Street Journal broke a story about the impending departure from AOL Time Warner of AOL chief operating officer Bob Pittman [sp?]. The New York Times, he said, did what big papers often do when they get burned.

MICKEY KAUS: You throw dozens of reporters assigned to six or seven different stories at it and hope that you can make up in volume what you don't have in quality. That resulted in a three column head when an AOL executive quit, which is normally something that's reserved for small wars between nuclear powers.

BOB GARFIELD:Kaus, it bears mentioning, is a relentless critic of the New York Times. Michael Getler of the Post says it's wrong to assume that disproportionate coverage in one direction or the other is due to vanity. It may be due to how a story changes once it's been broken or simply a reflection of honest differences in editorial judgment.

MICHAEL GETLER: Newspapers -- they will re-report the story, and they may decide that the story was overplayed or overstated and do relatively little about it. What you have to hope for is that news organizations keep the reader and the public in mind and don't hold back because they were beaten.

BOB GARFIELD:Well, of course that's what you hope for, but sometimes you have to wonder. Back during the Monica Lewinsky scandal when ABC News broke the story about a certain blue dress and the whole journalistic world followed, the New York Times for six months stubbornly refused to acknowledge that anyone was even looking for such a dress.

MICHAEL ORESKES: Cause we could never confirm it.

BOB GARFIELD: One again, Michael Oreskes.

MICHAEL ORESKES: Well you know what? It turns out that our competitors were right and we were wrong about that dress. I am still proud of the fact that we never said anything about the dress, and some days it makes it look like my newspaper or some other newspaper is being petulant or vain or egomaniacal for not running a story, but in that case it wasn't that we were being vain about it; it was that we didn't have the reporting to publish the story. When you don't know something, keep your mouth shut.

BOB GARFIELD:So the New York Times' failure to report about the most critical piece of physical evidence in the impeachment of the president of the United States was not merely responsible but an example of heroic self-restraint. Or--about the weirdest rationalization for a gaping hole in coverage that you've ever heard.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Up next, 20 years of USA Today; what the FCC is up to and video games with a deeper meaning.

BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media from NPR.